December 31, 2022

From podcast: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/podcast/best-of-2022/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:01:53] Podcast Sponsors

[00:06:20] Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis

[00:20:54] Ben Patrick

[00:37:23] Dr. Thomas Cowan

[00:56:44] Podcast Sponsors

[00:58:36] Jeff Banman

[01:07:31] Dan Clark and Kevin Woods

[01:17:29] Lenore Skenazy

[01:29:05] End of Podcast

Ben:  Welcome to a very special episode of the Ben Greenfield Life show. I have collected the top of the top episodes, the top of the top takeaways if I can use that word enough, top, top of the top, top, top.

From 2022, I've got Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis revealing new anti-aging biohacks and breakthroughs in precision medicine, many of which you've never heard of before.

The next one is with Ben Patrick on how to manage knee pain, get rid of knee pain, old Chinese techniques to keep your knees young and a whole lot more.

I have an episode with Dr. Thomas Cowan on vegetables, on viruses, on new dietary protocols, very interesting using vegetable powders.

I have a podcast with Jeff Banman on how to make yourself physically and mentally more gritty, more resilient, and as Jeff says harder to kill.

I've got an episode with Dan Clark and Kevin Woods, the Director of Science and the CEO of Brain.fm, a special form of sound that shifts your state of consciousness from anxiety to relaxation and wakefulness or focus or sleep.

And finally, I have America's worst mom coming on to explain why we need more free-range parenting and less helicopter parenting and what it means to actually let your kids grow. 

So, as you can imagine, this one is a doozy. All of the shownotes, you can find at BenGreenfieldLife/Bestof2022. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2-0-2-2. And so, without further ado, we are simply going to dive in. Here we go.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

Let's talk about food for your brain. Now, if you want to be ultimately productive in 2023, then chugging sugary energy drinks or buying random ingredients to clear brain fog could potentially cause more harm than good. But, your brain does need food. And, becoming more productive and clearing brain fog can be a science.

So, there is one company that has really nailed a formula that literally feeds your brain. It's been a staple of my mental performance protocol for quite some times; vegan, it's non-GMO, it's basically got 28 research-backed ingredients in it to support brain health in one simple formula. So, it cuts through all the confusion when it comes to all the different nootropics and smart drugs and compounds out there. It's just the shotgun approach for brain food and it works. So, it's called Qualia Mind, Qualia Mind. And, to try Qualia Mind today, you can go to neurohacker.com/Ben. That will save you 15% off if you use code BGF when you're over there. So, it's all ready, right now, 50% off. Qualia Mind is then again knock an extra 15% off. So, that's kind of a no-brainer. Haha, pun intended. So, neurohacker.com/Ben, N-E-U-R-O-hacker.com/Ben and then use code BGF to get an extra 15% off of the Qualia Mind from Neurohacker Collective. So, check it out. This stuff's pretty amazing.

Alright, it's time for you to start hacking your sleep. And, a big part of that is choosing the right equipment for your desired outcomes. That's where this company called Essentia comes in. It's an organic mattress that's the only mattress to score best in class on eliminating all sleep-interrupting stimulants. They have a patented beyond-latex organic foam technology, so you get these deep and REM sleep cycles that are unparalleled allowing you to wake up being recharged and ready for anything life's going to throw at you. They make these things in certified organic factories, packed with technology that allows you to get performance sleep benefits unsurpassed by any other mattress. Tested by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. These mattresses are allergen-free. They've got these packed technologies that allow you to experience things like active cooling, EMF blocking, accelerated recovery, and really good deep sleep cycles. A lot of pro athletes are sleeping on these things now just because sleep is so important to pro athletes, but it should be important to anybody who's concerned about central nervous system repair and recovery.

Now, they've even tested through something called dark film microscopy, the fact that these Essentia mattresses reduce the amount of blood clotting that can occur in reaction to EMFs. So, they built in an EMF barrier foam that allows the blood cells to be in their natural free-flowing state and allows oxygen to flow throughout the body naturally, which improves your body's nighttime recovery cycles and massively improves your sleep quality. So, what Essentia is doing is they're going to give you a 100 bucks off your mattress purchase if you go to MyEssentia.com/BenGreenfield and use code BenVIP. That's MyEssentia.com/BenGreenfield and use code BenVIP.

One of my favorite ways these days to strengthen my immune system and optimize my recovery is by getting in my Clearlight Sauna. So, Clearlight Infrared Sauna helps you create heat shock proteins that stimulate cell repair and help to rebuild muscles faster and protect against degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And, most people aren't aware of the essential role that these heat shock proteins play an immune function too, which is really nice this time of year when their sickness is going around. It allows your immune system to react more quickly and efficiently to viruses and pathogens. It helps to inhibit viral replication and decrease levels of inflammatory cytokines while at the same time, the heat increases nitric oxide production in the body, which also has antiviral effects.

Now, what I have at my house is a Clearlight Sanctuary Sauna because I can get a whole bunch of my friends in there. We can sit around, we can chat, we can burn incense, and sprinkle essential oils like little hippies all over the place. But, we're also guilt free because all the Clearlight Sauna is unlike many of the saunas out there that basically microwave you while you're inside of them. These ones have EMF and ELF shielding, so you're not exposing your body to harmful dirty electricity and they come with a lifetime warranty, which is the ultimate guarantee of a quality product. And, these things are high quality. So, you get their complete line that you can check out at Clearlight Sauna's when you go to HealwithHeat.com, HealwithHeat.com. Mention code BEN for extra discount and free shipping. That's HealwithHeat.com. Mention my name BEN for a smoking hot deal and free shipping.

Alright, in this first clip are my guest Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. Their book “Life Force” is about precision medicine, regenerative medicine, anti-aging, longevity, and a whole lot more. We talk about Tony's debilitating snowboarding accident, biosplicing, stem cells, combinostics, counter-strain therapy, young blood transfers and plenty more. So, enjoy.

Alright. So, when I read this book, I kind of expected it to be another one of these longevity books. Maybe, eat your wild blueberries and your superfood smoothie, eat like the Okinawans or the people in the Mediterranean, and maybe if you got a little bit of extra cash in the wallet, buy some NAD or something, and call your doctor about stem cells. And, when I open up the book and began to read, I started to fold over page after page after page about ghost hearts and tissue regeneration, and stem cells, yeah, but different forms of stem cells and NAD but these upgraded forms I'd never heard of. And, holy cow, you guys really pulled together a pretty impressive body of knowledge in the realm of longevity and anti-aging here.

Tony:  Thank you very much. Well, we interviewed 150 of Nobel laureates, some top scientists, medical doctors. So, nothing in is our opinion. And, it started out really, I've been obsessed with finding answers to the quality of life for people throughout my life, but one of the triggers for doing this for me this time was I had this injury that they told me was going to end my career. And, I'm used to going out to a group of 10, 15, 20,000 people and going 12 hours a day for four days in a row doing insane things with my body. But, I had this experience where I was going down this mountainside chasing somebody much younger and almost near-professional snowboarder and he could do things I couldn't do. And, that became obvious when I felt like I just broke my neck. I mean, the pain was insane, I ended up just tearing my rotator cuff severely. I was on a 0 to 10 like 9.9 pain. And so, what I do, well, I found out about PEMF because I can only sleep an hour a night. And, as you know, there's about 3,000 studies on it, it can heal your bones in 50% of the time and help with your nerves. It reduces the pain to about–

Ben:  Yeah, yeah, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy for people listening in and not familiar. It's kind of like a Swiss army knife.

Tony:  Yeah, it's extraordinary. It's one of the best tools you can imagine. So, it helped me, but it couldn't heal everything, it was too severe. So, of course, I went to all these doctors and every single one, surgery, surgery, surgery, four in a row, but when I asked them, “Okay. Well, what's the prognosis? Will I be able to do everything?” “Well, you might not be able to lift your shoulder all the way up in the future. It could tear again.” “Well, what's the recovery time?” “Well, rehab is four to six months probably for you.” And, I was just like, I can't have one arm tied to me while I'm going to get 10,000 people doing this. But, the bottom line is the last doctor I talked to, I mean, this guy, he used my work and thanked me for all the great things I've done. I've never met him before. And then, he goes, “But now, I got to be your doctor.” He looks me in the eye and says, “Life as you know it is over.” I was like, “What?” He goes, “Let me show you your spine.” And, I have extreme spinal stenosis, I've had enormous pain for over 14 years, and he goes, “One, you cannot do what you're doing. No more jumping, no more running, no more snowboarding.” He goes, “Let me show you one hit here and you might not be able to walk again.” And, if somebody punches you in the gut, you're prepared for, it's one thing, but I got to tell you, I'm usually pretty prepared, I wasn't prepared for that.

Ben:  Yeah. Time to move into the basement and become a blogger.

Tony:  Well, I hadn't thought about that. Perhaps that would have been a good move. But, fortunately for me, my brain kicked back in in my heart and I was like, “Okay, there's always an answer.” And so, I called Peter because he was my dear friend, and he's a rocket scientist and an MD from Harvard. It's like, I've heard so much about stem cells, some people say, it's all BS, all these doctors told me it's worthless.

Ben:  Right.

Tony:  But, I've heard from other people, some of my athlete friends who are GOATs, greatest of all time, who went over to Germany and went to other places and swear by them. So, I said, “Who should I talk to?” And, he said, “Well, you should talk to Bob Hariri.” And, I didn't know at the time. I knew Bob was a neurosurgeon, I didn't know he was one of the earliest people to discover the impact of stem cells. And, at the time, it's like saying, “I want to learn about basketball, let me introduce you to my friend, Lebron James.”

So, I go see Bob and I'm so impressed by Bob. And, Bob says, “Listen Tony, at your stage of life,” I was 53, he said, “there's no way.” He said, “Your stem cells have dropped off the cliff. If you go do autologist, which means the stem cells from your own body, it's not going to work. You need allogenic.” Big word for cells from someone else. “But you need four-day-old stem cells with a force of life.” Life force in them. And, I said, “Well, I don't want fetal tissue.” And, he said, “No, you don't need to do that, we're talking about cord or placenta stem cells.” He said, “They've been thrown away by most people, but it's the force of life.” And, told me where to go. So, I listened to Bob–

Ben:  Cord or placenta, the reason you say that they would be thrown away is, and I don't know when this injury occurred but are you referring to the fact that people were favoring their own fat or their own bone marrow like these autologous procedures at the time?

Tony:  No. I'm just talking about pregnancies when babies are born. Most of the time–

Ben:  Okay, okay, I got you. I got you.

Tony:  Yeah, they throw them away. So, he told me a place to go to that was experts in this area. I went down. I spent three days. I got an IV once a day and I got a shot. And, the first day, I just felt sleepy and relaxed and it's fine. The second day, I woke up, I had a cytokine response. Unfortunately, I knew what it was, so I didn't overreact. Shaking, freezing for about 20 minutes, and then I went to sleep and I woke up for the first time in 14 years. Not only was my shoulder perfect, no pain in my spine the first time in 14 years. So, you can imagine, Ben, I became an evangelist. I want to know everything about stem cells. And then, I realized it's not just stem cells, we're in a revolution of precision medicine, regenerative medicine, and then Peter was going to the Vatican. Believe it or not, the Pope every two years puts on the largest stem cell and regenerative medicine conference in the world because it's not fetal tissue, he sees it as a gift to humanity. So, it brings people from all over the world the very best and he asked me to be–

Ben:  This is a thing at the Vatican?

Tony:  Yeah. And, they asked me to be the cleanup speaker. And, I was like, “Okay, I'll do that, but I want to come to the whole program.” And, I tend the whole thing and I met 11-year-old that was supposed to die that Bob had turned around. The kid was four years old and they saw no solution, and they got stem cells from his young sister and he's alive today. I met people that were sent home to die with various forms of cancer, and then people didn't give up and they went and got CAR t-cells, for example, and they're alive today, seven years later. I don't know if you saw, but Nature this last week said, “Ten years now, these CAR t-cells are still alive.” It's the first time I've seen anybody in that market talking about a cure, but for leukemia and liquid cancers. And then, I got to meet Jack Nicklaus who was the greatest golfer of all time, they were going to fuse his spine. He couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes without immense pain. And, spinal fusion does not work at least 50% of the time. Fortunately, he got stem cells. He's 82 now and he plays golf and plays tennis. Complete change of life.

I went to Simon & Schuster and said, “I want to do what I did with money.” I want to go to the greatest sources on Earth. I want to interview them. I want to synthesize, and simplify, and actionable things that people can do. And, I want to show people what they can do to have more energy, strength, and vitality. But, I also want to show them what's happening with longevity, and I also want to show them what to do with the big killers so that there's something else besides standard of care which often is not enough as you and I both know. So, that's when we started discovering these things obviously about gene therapy and what's happening with CRISPR where curing diseases never to have a cure. We're taking stem cells and getting people to walk again, use their arms again. There's a single injection that's made by a company right now that's in phase three trials, the final stage. They hope to be approved the end of the year beginning next year. Single injection triggers your wind pathway, the signaling pathway, makes you make up new tendons. So, if you have osteoarthritis within 11 months, you have all new tendons. And, because it's a clean epigenome they're pulling from, you end up with 16-year-old tendons even if you're 50 or 60 years old.

Ben:  Was that the Biosplice therapy that you're talking on the book or something? Okay, that was Biosplice. So, I'm glad that you brought that up because I'm going to slow things down here for just a second. Either of you guys, Peter or Tony, you can answer this question because you actually have–and, I think this is wonderful for illustrative purposes. You have two fascinating individuals in this book. So fascinating. In fact, I handed my twin 13-year-old sons the book with those two sections folded over and I said, “Read about these two inspiring individuals. They're doing amazing things.” And, I had my sons read that. And, the first person was Osman Kibar. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name properly. And, he's the guy who started up this whole Biosplice thing. So, I would love for one of you guys to explain a little bit more about what Biosplice is, but if you could give a little bit of a background of who this Osman guy is because he got some unicorns of this book who are just holy cow, they're doing some really cool stuff.

Tony:  I'll let Peter just because I've been talking so much. I apologize, I'm doing all day long by myself. I'll let Peter answer. But, I do want to mention one thing. Osman and, I don't know who the other one you're picking but there's so many to pick from.

Ben:  Martine.

Tony:  Yeah, of course, Martine Rothblatt. These are the people that if you look at them, almost all of the people that created these breakthroughs, Ben, they had one thing in common. They lost a mother, or a brother, or a sister, or a wife, or a child, or someone super close to them and it set them into a 10-, 20-year hunger and drive to say, “I won't settle for standard of care. I'm going to find the answer” even though there isn't one like Dr. June, for example. And, here we are, 10, 20 years later, and we're all going to get to benefit from it. But, Peter I've been talking, why don't you tell them about Biosplice.

Peter:  I'll jump in on Martine who I know so well for 40 years and then–

Ben:  You know Martine? Okay. So, Martine's the other person. Yeah, that's fine. Tell me about Martine because I know she did some different things.

Peter:  Martine is extraordinary. So, you have to understand Martine was the creator of Sirius and XM Radio. She was a regulatory lawyer for satellite industry. Her daughter, Genesis, comes down with a disease that pulmonary fibrosis, that the doctors say to Martine, “This is fatal. Your daughter is going to die in a couple years and there's no solution.” What did Martine do? The rock star that she is, she quits the board of her company, she cashes in, and she sets out on her very first moon. Actually, it's her second moonshot. Her first moonshot was satellite radio, which she made happen. Second moonshot was cure her daughter. What she starts with is a high school textbook, sits in the medical library, starts reading everything she can.

Ben:  Not knowing anything about anatomy and physiology, and she comes from a tech background.

Peter:  This is biology 101. This is like, this is a cell, and this is a nucleus, and this is the lung tissue and so forth. Long story short, she goes on this wild journey trying to get some grapple on some pharmaceutical that could deal with pulmonary fibrosis. And, she finds a single scientist at one of the large pharmas. Do you remember which one it was, Tony?

Tony:  I don't remember the name of it, but they had that drug that didn't work out for what they wanted but could help make the difference on the lung for his daughter.

Peter:  So, first of all, she's like, “Give me that medicine, let me try to my daughter.” And, that like, “No, we don't trust you with this medicine, we can't just give it to anybody, we could be sued,” et cetera. So, she gets this incredible panoply of advisors and physicians, and supporters. And, she finally gets access to the drug. And, what she gets a little packet of white dust, basically some crystallized of the particular molecule. And, she goes through a drug discovery process, creates this drug, starts the company United Therapeutics, effectively cures her daughter, and then builds what is today $9.5 billion company.

Ben:  And, this is a subtle nuance by the way, Peter, that I think folks should know. This was a worthless powder. This was totally abandoned. I don't know what they call them like orphan drugs that nobody's using–

Peter:  That's exactly right.

Ben:  She licensed it for–I'm sure the pharmaceutical company was kicking themselves afterwards.

Peter:  Well, they got a percentage of future revenue, so I'm sure they can fine for something that was taking up refrigerator space. But, at the end of the day, that wasn't enough for her. She was like, “Okay, this drug can postpone the onset of pulmonary fibrosis but what my daughter needs is a new set of lungs.” And so, she sets out on a mission of organogenesis, how can you build new organs. And, she sets out on three and four different approaches. One approach is, can you take organs that are harvested from someone who passes away? But, reperfusion, get them functional again and these, she designed and built machines that could reperfuse the lungs to get them back to a status that they were transplantable. She then set out on a mission with a gentleman by the name of Craig Venter who's sequenced the first genome with the notion turns out that pig organs are the same size as human organs. A pig heart, liver, lung, kidney looks very much that of a human.

Ben:  Right. The only people that knew that, by the way, are the carnivore diet enthusiasts listening in.

Peter:  Absolutely. But, the problem is if you took a pig lung or kidney and you transplanted it, your immune system would destroy it as a foreign body but also in the genome of pigs are these endogenous retroviruses, these viruses that pop out and then infect the rest of your body. So, they knocked out the retroviruses, they modify 10 genes in the pig genome to make it sort of a humanized pig. And, just recently Martine's company transplanted the first kidney and also the first heart into a human subject. So, this is the potential to have a near-infinite supply of organs and bacon at the same time. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary coming down the pike.

Ben:  Yeah. And, I mean not only is it crazy that she comes from a background in tech knowing nothing about this winds up taking an orphan drug and turning into an effective treatment for pulmonary fibrosis and saving her daughter, but then figures out how to make actual human-friendly organs from pigs.

Alright, our next clip is from my interview Ben Patrick aka the Knees Over Toes Guy. He is the go-to dude when it comes to knee pain and really a whole host of biomechanical and biomechanical longevity and performance issues. We get into how to fix your knee pain for good, how to improve your sports performance, get a bigger vertical jump, a whole bunch of things that Ben does with his athletes that definitely apply to the general population. And, of course, walking backwards and why you need to do it.

Ben Patrick:  Basically, the two things I can really look back and assuredly have done more than anyone in the world in the last decade are almost opposing qualities. One of which creates healing, the other which creates bulletproofing. So, if we look at what creates healing, how do we get natural healing of a knee joint but in a way that increases that shock absorption so that you don't have the wear-and-tear, right? So, you're running into cartilage stuff. So, that's your shock absorption in there. And so, you could be pain-free and pushing your body really hard and then all of a sudden wind up with pain because of that degeneration over time. If you think about the activities causing that, running would be one of them. There's over time. There's a lot of impact from running. It's been said that a marathon is the equivalent of squatting 500 pounds or something in terms of how much force it is playing sports, all the landings. So, think about you, look how much running have you done, look how much jumping you did when you were younger. There's so much impact. And, all that impact is coming forward into your knees.

So, if we start from a place where they're having successful results with preventing cartilage degeneration, it's simply backward walking in China that's been passed on from generation to generation to generation. But for something like running, I don't think backward walking is enough, it's just an interesting thing that they figured that out thousands of years ago to prevent cartilage degeneration in the knees. So, they pass it on and they make their elderly walk backwards.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah. And, quick grab a hold of the backward walking thing in China I think it's crazy. And, I actually started doing this. Somebody gave me a hard time the other day at my 40th birthday party because they're like, “Every time I drive past Ben's house, I want to tell him he's going to die getting hit by a car because he's always walking backwards up and down the road behind his house,” which is true. And, I used to do it now and then, and now every day because I go on a walk every day. I do probably about one-tenth of the walk. And, I go on long walks walking backwards.

I wasn't aware, I think, until you told me that it was this old Chinese thing for keeping the knees healthy, but I would love to. And, I don't know if you plan on maybe explaining later on as you're explaining your technique about why that works, why the backward walking does the trick. But, be sure to come back to that if you don't plan on addressing it right now.

Ben Patrick:  Oh, yeah, we're going right into that right now. So, that technology exists there for their elderly essentially to keep maintaining the ability to walk forwards. When you walk backwards, you're now strengthening completely different muscles. And, if anyone listening to this is to stand up right now and then just take one step backward and stop and just hold that position, you would see that your knee is over your toes.

So, when you go backwards, you're actually doing knees-over-toes training, you're putting pressure on your knee. The pressure sends a signal to the body that you need to be stronger there. But unlike doing some heavyweight exercise or trying to bend too far into pain, if you find a pain-free level of backward, well, now you're able to put that pressure that you need to adapt and you're able to get a lot more blood flow. But, what did I do? Was not just backward walking, I've done hundreds of miles now backwards but against resistance which I actually think is safer and more effective in the sense that let's say you're hooked up to a sled, my second favorite after a sled on turf. So, you'll start seeing sleds on turf in a lot of gyms now. They don't usually have a belt setup. I have my own belt that I just finished designing that will be out on Amazon, way cheaper than any of the belts out there because it's not a common thing. So, I'm bringing a cheaper one. But, if you imagine dragging a sled backward on turf, it actually slows you down. So, it's almost less impact but more pressure. So, we need that pressure on the knees over the toes in order to cause the adaptation of that area. And, when you do this, I mean, you can really get with this leg. You can get a 10 out of 10 burn.

So, for 10 years now, I've been chasing that 10 out of 10 blood flow. It takes a lot of blood flow to get down to the tendon level and even more blood flow to get down to the ligament level. So, if anyone just understands this really quick, muscles, tendons, ligaments. You have an inverse thing going on here. The muscle is the weakest of the three, but the muscle is the most flexible of the three. So, the ligament is the least flexible but the strongest. The tendon is in the middle. So, the tendon is more flexible than a ligament, but not as strong as a ligament. It's stronger than a muscle but not as flexible as a muscle. And, in terms of blood flow, it's very easy to go get a bicep pump, much harder to get blood flow to your knee, the tendons in your knee. And then even hardest to get it into a ligament level and even wicked hard in terms of getting down to a cartilage level. But, I'm dead certain that you can actually create changes to the cartilage. These degrading kind of things, you can gradually reverse them out by finding a pain-free level and gradually resisting it to the point that you're getting 10 out of 10 blood pumps pain-free. So, what I have used is a sled on turf. there is a company called–

Ben Greenfield:  But, you're not pushing inside, you have a belt, you're dragging the sled and you're walking backwards?

Ben Patrick:  Great question. Backwards is mandatory. Let's say you had a 10 or 20-meter space, you could just go backward forward, backward forward, backward forward, but you would have to do as much backward as forward. You see what I'm saying? So, I'm actually a huge fan of forward on the sled for getting into leg strength and foot benefits because so much of what we do in the weight room, our foot is just flat, flat, flat, flat, leg presses, leg extensions, hamstring curls, what about our freaking feet? So, when you're even pushing a sled and if you want to know if you really understand the subject, see if you can teach it to a six-year-old.

And, I'm able to teach six-year-olds knees over toes. You know how? I put some weight on a sled and I ask them to push it, and their knee immediately gets way over their toes. This is getting a lot of pressure, but it's not that jarring impact. It's a more controlled pressure, so you get stronger, you get blood flow to heal and strengthen at the same time. Now, my ideal scene is I push-pull. So, every day, seven days a week, I push-pull on the sled. But, the backward would be the foundation and it's not always as easy as to have a sled setup that you can push and pull. Someone could go on Amazon, get just a cheap $50 sled, put some weight on it, go out to a park and start going backward every day. Then, the next sleds will have pushing poles and you could set up for backwards.

And, I was starting to say there's a company called Torque Fitness and they sell one for $1,600. I'm designing one and I don't care if someone hears this and beats me to the market. Go for it. I just want the tools out there. So, Torque Fitness has one. But, it's a bit bulkier than is needed. With a sled, you know how much weight is on it but with the Torque one, it has internal resistance but you don't actually know what you're accomplishing. So, it's very easy. I have one being designed right now that measures your distance and time. So, it's very simple. Okay, I went backward 100 meters in X amount of seconds at X resistance. So, those are $1,600 right now for Torque. I own them and buy them wherever I go because $1,600 is still cheaper than treadmill and a heck of a lot cheaper than knee surgery. So, that thing is amazing and you can push-pull with that thing.

Ben Greenfield:  This is a sled that actually has the wheels on it, right?

Ben Patrick:  Yeah. So, it has an internal resistance. So, you can put it right out of the garage. And, I mean within five minutes, you'll have, honestly, I think better than a PRP injection. That's just my honest opinion based on actually training people on this. The amount of people who have come to me, “My doctor says I have irreversible cartilage damage, I can never play my sport again, I will never regain full knee bend.” These are the exact kind of things I fix every single day.

So, with that sled concept, we have a fundamental difference between, let's think about a squat, okay. Let's think about a squat versus pushing and pulling a sled. The squat, you let the weight move you, then you move the weight. With the sled, the weight never moves you, only you move it. So, if you're going backwards, only you move the sled. If there's a thousand pounds, it just won't move. When you go forward, only you move the sled. If there's a thousand pounds, it just won't move.

So, think about my mom who's 67 and I've rehabilitated her ability to run 100% pain-free. She looks like she's in her 20s running and she does the sled every day. My program is sled plus at least two exercises, that's it. That's how important this sled is to us.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah. Well, you definitely got to let me know once that sled comes out. I have a sled, but the problem is my driveway. And look, because I live out in the sticks and my sled is not on wheels, it's just one of the cheapo sleds. And, I've got a belt and everything on it and I got it. You know Brian Johnson, The Liver King? Have you heard of this guy before?

Ben Patrick:  Of course, yeah.

Ben Greenfield:  He's big on TikTok right now, but he has this work called The Barbarian where he'll put ankle weights on, two kettlebells, sled, and backpack, and do a mile-long sled drag. Apparently, anyone who works for his ancestral supplements liver capsules company has to do this work out as proof that they can actually work for the company or something like that. But–

Ben Patrick:  I think that's awesome.

Ben Greenfield:  I bought that sled to do the workout because I tried to work out, it's pretty hard. I just did this farm road back behind my house. And, it definitely ripped me wide open, but the sled doesn't. It's a pain in the butt to drag it up and down at parkway.

Ben Patrick:  If you have an actual metal sled, you need turf.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah, it catches on stuff.

Ben Patrick:  Because again, what we're trying to create, we're trying to get the pressure but without the jarring effect. So, what would be the worst? So, if you look at someone's knee gets worse and worse, what becomes scariest to them would be landing. You see what I mean? The higher the landing, the more freaky it gets, right? So, it's not that the pressure inherently is bad, it's that this jarring pressure that you can't handle is bad. So, that's where the sled comes in that allows us to get significant pressure. I mean, your whole body gets stronger. You start sprouting people who thought they'd never have abs. It's like, “What the heck? How am I getting abs?” That's because you're getting–anyone who comes and experiences with me in person uniformly says it's the toughest workout they've ever done. But, the point is that you're able to get that pressure in a pain-free way, in a non-jarring way. So, we actually intentionally start slowly. So, if I'm doing 100 meters, I'm actually only going more intensely as I go. I'm taking very controlled smooth steps forward and backward gradually building up the blood flow. And then, as that blood flow is there more and more, it's this amazing feeling of being able to exert at a %100 without any pain.

You know what feeling I'm talking about? You've probably experienced that so many times in different ways. But, when you're giving everything you have but you're not in any actual joint or spine pain, do you know what I mean?

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah. And, that's another thing I was thinking about this so-called backwards walking which also if you guys look it up, you might find it listed as, what's it called, retro. I think they just call it retro walking.

Ben Patrick:  Retro walking, yeah.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing is, A, there's actual studies on. I think there was a four-week study, and I'll find it linked to it in the shownotes, and it looks specifically for chronic osteoarthritic patients and found a significant increase in functional mobility of the knees and decrease in pain from four weeks of this retro walking. Not even with a sled or anything. These people were just walking backwards like I do with my death which walks along the busy road behind my house. I like to do a slight uphill grade.

And sometimes, if it's super snowy and icy out like it is now, I'll just do it on the treadmill because if you put your treadmill on 2 or 3 miles an hour–

Ben Patrick:  Or, turn it off is what I do.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah. Mine almost has too much resistance off. But, if I put on a super low speed, it's decent. And, by leaning forward on the treadmill, you can kind of sort of simulate a sled push and then you can also go backwards on it. So, you can get a little bit of what you'd be getting from a sled on that. But then, the other interesting thing that I've noticed, maybe not just from the backwards walking but also from doing the other elements of your program because I think there's about eight different exercises you sent to me. It takes 15 minutes to go through them all. And so, I've started to do that just two to three times a week.

And, the other thing though that I've noticed is it seems to really help out with pelvic mobility and also lower back pain. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I'll have a little bit of lower back pain just from working all day. And, even though I have a standing desk, your hips kind of get tight. But, this backwards walking not only seems to be magic for the knees but also it seems to really help alleviate low back pain.

Ben Patrick:  Yeah. The studies on it are actually phenomenal including for the lower back and it sets a foundation that makes it easier to get into more hip exercises. I'm going to read you a message because the doctor sent it to me last night. His name is Brian Ziegler, he's a physical therapist. And he says, “Though I'm sure you're already aware, but the research in support of ROKP,” that's what I call it, reverse out knee pain, because it's a broad category of dragging a sled or this. So, we just call it reverse out knee pain, right? So, he says, “The research in support of ROKP and all the really cool things it does, it does make me wonder why it hasn't been a standard of care for all knee pain for decades. I have research going back to the '80s showing the superiority of ROKP for muscle recruitment force reduction and pain reduction almost seems to make any clinician that prescribe forward walking for knee pain negligent and yet, this was never mentioned once in PT school and not a single one of my 30 co-workers use it as a rehab tool.”

So, that's why I had to be knees over toes guys because the gross misunderstanding of this, it didn't work out, it didn't work out for me and it didn't work out for millions of other people. And, when you run from understanding a subject, that's how you create a long-term disaster. So, this one category of just getting stronger backwards, if all you did was do it for just the simple concept of like, okay, if you think about most workouts in most sports performance, I mean seven times as much money is spent studying acceleration as deceleration. So, we already have lives where we've all tried excessively to go forward. You know what I mean? Like playing volleyball and jumping forward, jumping forward, jumping forward, like basketball, running, it's not necessarily the human body was designed to go from a three-hour practice to this or that. There would be more of a balance.

If you think out in the wild, what are the odds you'd be doing three, four, 500 jumps a day? There's no way. You know what I mean? So, we've already excessively done it. So, if all you did was just for the same reason, if you had never in your life heard of training back muscles and all you had done was bench presses and push-ups and you wonder why you have terrible shoulder pain, you know what I mean, and someone came and said, “Well, let's strengthen the back muscles,” that would be pretty common sense. So, if all you did was just from a common-sense perspective, was work backwards, you'd be putting in a smart investment.

So, can backward walking work? I think well enough for maintaining the ability to walk. I think it could get good general blood flow, but I think when you add a sled to the matter on turf or one of these tank sleds that uses internal resistance so that you can do it on any surface, even if you had–if you had an incline, that could be pretty good. However, then you have the going down. So, you'd have to go extra slow down to make sure that you're not overdoing it and we covered with the treadmill at low speed or turned off completely and using your strength to go backwards. Those are all really good things, but the whole time for me, I've been using an actual sled or a tank sled. You know what I mean? So, I also can't say that, yeah, a hill is going to work as good as these other things when I'm dragging a couple 100 pounds, you know what I mean, for them.

So, if you think about the pressure with the knees of our toes of dragging a couple 100 pounds a 100 miles and now people think I'm [BLEEP] and I get messages that say, “Let's just be honest, you were dunking easily in high school.” And, I'm like, “You just gave me the best compliment ever.” For so many people, it's unbelievable how I've gone from being a [BLEEP] athlete with [BLEEP] knees to now having freakish knees and being able to jump so high, but I'm also the only person who's actually put that much pain-free pressure on that exact quality. You see what I'm saying? So, there's the foundation right there.

Now, everything we do though, there's going to be different reactions to it in the sense of that's one exercise that didn't take us through a full stretch, that didn't stretch our hips, that didn't work the front of the ankle, that didn't work the hamstring. You see what I mean? So, it's like, “Yes, that would be a great start, but it's also not like that's all I did.”

Ben:  Okay, this episode which was a little bit controversial. I interviewed my friend Dr. Thomas Cowan who's a well-known alternative medicine doctor who seems to be banned all over the place because of his talk about viruses and his controversial opinion about them. However, I know Dr. Thomas Cowan through his wonderful vegetable powders, his organic vegetable powders that are a staple in my diet. You should go listen to any of my episodes with Cowan, but in this one, we get into viruses, electromagnetic field communication, the so-called invisible rainbow and plenty more.

When we're looking at the alleged genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 that that's never actually been sequenced, but is instead a computer-based, a software mathematical model of what this theoretically looks like without it ever having been actually isolated.

Thomas:  Exactly right. And, by the way, here are Christian Drosten–I don't have the paper in front of me. He made the original PCR primers. That is the model for all the PCR tests that have been used since then. That was the first. In the original paper, he says, “This was a challenging,” again I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the paper in front of me, “This was a challenging adventure because we didn't actually have a copy of the virus, we only had an in silico, meaning in the computer sequence, which the computer-generated out of 56 million reads, and we actually had no idea where these reads as the little pieces.” And then, he said, “Oh, well, these sequences must be unique to the virus.” And then, we did a blast search and we found that those sequences are in 93 different parts of the human genome and 93 different microbes have that same sequence.

Now, let me just finish. So, why does somebody say we have 10 to the 40 millionth, or whatever, 46th power viruses in our “viral”? All of those are different genetic pieces and they are not particles called a virus. And so, they have redefined a particle as a piece of genetic material, which is only coming because when you're sick or not sick even, you break down, you make these little pieces and they call those viruses. They say, that's why you got sick with no evidence of any particle or that there's any relation to any sickness.

Ben:  So, if we can't, then we haven't sequenced viral genomes and we've just been puzzling them together using computational models. And, we haven't isolated these particles that we're saying are a virus, nor we found them in any form of infected tissue.

I guess, the question for me is like what is it that's causing the symptoms that people are running around with complaining about, the dry cough, and the damage to the lung tissue, and all the issues, what we've experienced the past couple years a seemingly problematic sickness, whatever's causing it?

Thomas:  So, let me say something about that because A, it's a good question, and B, it's also not a good question. The reason it's not a good question is in some ways, if I had to do over these last two years, in some ways, I might have stopped there where I said because all I can tell you for sure is there is no evidence that this virus exists. And, since there's no evidence it exists, it cannot possibly cause any disease. Therefore, there's no reason to mask or inject people with stuff, or social distance, or quarantine, or any of that stuff. Makes no sense.

Now, the next question, same with chickenpox. So, the question is, so why do people get sick? So, one thing I could say is I don't know, I mean all I know is it's not a virus. It turns out I do know or at least I think I have an idea of that. But, I would say the first and most important thing is you don't have to know the answer to know that it's not that. If somebody says the reason for rain is there's elephants pissing up there in the heavens and you look and you don't find any, you can say, I don't think that's right and I don't really know why there's rain. But, it turns out that if you look at a simpler illness like chickenpox, number one, we cannot find it in the vesicles. So, here's how I think about this. First of all, we have misinterpreted disease. We say that you're sick with chickenpox, when actually, what's happening is something happened to you, interestingly like a viral culture, and this is where your great work has come in. The reason you break down a viral culture is you starve and poison it. So, how do you make a child sick? You starve and poison it. How can you starve it? By not eating Ben Greenfield cookbook food. Then, you're starve it. Then, you break down. And then, you excrete toxins through your skin and through your snot, and you get fever to help break down your tissue. And, all of that which we call disease is simply a cleansing process.

Ben:  And, what I'm asking you and maybe you're getting to this is why that cleansing process seems to have been significantly amplified the past two and a half years or so.

Thomas:  Right. I'll get to that in a second.

Ben:  Okay.

Thomas:  So now, the next step is we know if somebody says, “Yeah, but it gets communicated from one person to another,” which to a certain extent may be true but it also may be an illusion. If you put rat poison out and then you see one rat dying after another, is that because they communicated something or they just got poisoned and started dying? For 100 years, they thought they saw sailors on ships, their teeth fell out, they went into heart failure and died and they said, let's quarantine them, they have some communicable disease, and then somebody ate a lemon or a lime and the whole thing went away because they had scurvy. Same thing with Pellegra and Beriberi. And, we've had a lot of experience of the–

Ben:  I don't know, man. It's possible there's an invisible particle on that chip circulating around that removed people's appetite and preference to eat citrus fruits. There's always that possibility.

Thomas:  Right, exactly. You can make up all kinds of things. And, even women communicate their menstrual cycle. You put 20-year-old girls or women–

Ben:  Yeah, I've heard that.

Thomas:  And so, isn't it possible since trees communicate, there's beetles here, you should protect yourself. Isn't it possible that children say, you know what, there's some problem here, there's some toxin in the environment or some universal thought that's making us sick? Let's all do chicken pox together. And so, there's some sort of electromagnetic field communication and that's how things look like they're passed from one to another.

Now, to get into your question, it's very simple. So, first thing, has there really been more disease? You look and there's a town in Germany, I don't remember the name of it, that keeps very careful statistics of how many people died. They did May. And, I don't have the exact numbers, but May 2019. So, before the pandemic, 7,490, I think. May 2020, height of the pandemic, 7,300 people died. May 21, after 70% of the people were injected, now we have 8,600 people died. So, this whole thing of, well, a lot of more people died, it doesn't look like it from that number. And, if there are people getting sick, it's the same reason as the chickenpox and the cell cultures, and measles, and HIV, just like you've said all along, you're being starved or poisoned, or I would say deluded is the third reason.

Ben:  Well, I got to ask you this because I think I've seen this particularly related to you pop up before that perhaps something else happened on the planet during that time that might have caused this to become less healthy like that book. I think it's called “The Electric Rainbow” that gets into how every time some big new electrical contraption like a whole bunch of cell phone towers, or 5g rollouts, or things like that have occurred that there seems to be a significant kind of dip in global human health. It's a very interesting and almost disturbing book if it's true. Is that the book, “The Electric Rainbow”?

Thomas:  It's called “The Invisible Rainbow.”

Ben:  “The Invisible Rainbow.” Yeah. So, do you think it could be something like that, like a global shift in the use of some type of technology or something like that that could have caused us to become less healthy in general?

Thomas:  Yes, that's possible. I would say, first of all, there's a lot in that book that's interesting and there's a lot that I actually don't agree with. But, the problem here, Ben, is everything I said about viruses, I can substantiate with literally scores of peer-reviewed published papers. But, when you get into, “So, why do people get chickenpox except viruses? Why do people get symptoms of dry cough and low oxygen?” Nobody studies it. So, there's almost no papers. Now, I do have paper showing that millimeter waves cause, A, a interference of the availability of oxygen in the air. They also poison your mitochondria which uses the oxygen of making you have a metabolic disease relating to hypoxia. So, I've seen that, and then you get breakdown in the tissues and even the production of little particles from breaking down your tissues that are confused with so-called coronaviruses.

Now, is that proof? No. But, my only point is because we already know that there is no SARS-CoV-2, that viruses are not pathogenic, that it's about time that somebody in our world actually looks into why we're getting sick. The interesting thing for me is, I mean, you've been pioneering this, like folks, you've got to keep yourself fit, you've got to eat good food, you write down exactly what good food is, and you even give people recipes, it was a brilliant book you wrote.

Ben:  I know. I should have called it in retrospect. Now, I'm talking to you, we should have called it the COVID cookbook. That would have made a splash.

Thomas:  Don't starve yourself and don't starve yourself of love, or spirituality, or have stupid thoughts, or suck up your cell phone under your pillow. Lots of things. These are common sense and it wouldn't hurt to actually study because when we do study, well, it turns out if you don't eat good food, you don't do as well. I mean, who would have thought.

Ben:  I know that if people's heads are spinning right now, they probably need a quick summary. And then, I've got a couple more questions for you. I don't even know if we're going to get to talk much about vegetables today. But, perhaps this is where God has brought us, these discussions, so we'll roll with it.

So basically, I want to walkthrough. You just interrupt me, and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this because I have to summarize it one more time for people just to make sure people really get this. So, basically, in order to prove that a virus exists, you got to isolate it or purify it, and then get a picture essentially and very simplistic terms.

Thomas: And, by the way, you better define what you mean by isolation because mixing it with a bad of stuff is not isolation.

Ben:  Right. And, I would agree with you on that point. I totally would. And so, what a virologist would do if they did want to like isolate and characterize and demonstrate the existence of a virus or a new thing like SARS-CoV-2, they would take a bunch of samples from infected people like blood, or sputum, or I don't know what else you might collect. Some type of bodily secretion from people who are demonstrating symptoms of what we suspect might be a virus, and those symptoms are unique and specific enough to where we can say, okay, all these people are showing signs of something that shows that they have something that we suspect might be something. And then, basically, what they then do is they take those samples, and ideally, they would not mix them with anything else that has any other genetic material, and then they would do what they do in the lab, filter it and macerate it and centrifuge it and purify this specimen. And, that would be a common virology technique that I understand the paralogists have done for quite some time to isolate bacteriophages and so-called viruses. And, if they did that, that would allow them to demonstrate with then typically an electron microscopy tool, a whole bunch of different particles that they would then be able to say are the isolated and purified virus. Then, they could go and check those with microscopic techniques to determine the purity and to further characterize the particle examining the structure, or the chemical composition, or what we call the morphology. And then, you'd have to extract the genetic material from that from these purified particles. And then, that would be done using a genetic sequencing technique. That's old technology, it's been around for decades. And then, you would analyze whether those particles are outside the cell, what we call exogenous. Meaning that they were something that originated from somewhere outside the human body. And, they weren't the normal breakdown products of dead or dying tissue in the body.

And, if you've done all of that, you would have fully isolated and characterize and genetically sequence this particle that you would then want to call a virus. And then, if you successfully did that, you'd then have to go out and show that it's actually causally related to a disease, so you'd have to expose a bunch of healthy subjects. Preferably these days, they would be cute little animals and you'd expose them to this isolated purified thing that you suspect is a virus in the manner in which you thought that virus might be transmitted, whatever, saliva, or cough, or I don't know, blood transfusion, or whatever. And then, if those animals got sick with the same disease as the original ones you were studying, if you were to confirm that with some type of clinical finding or autopsy finding, then you would have the bodies in the streets and you would say, okay, we've isolated something, we're going to call the virus that actually causes the disease. And, we've demonstrated infectivity and transmission in addition to the existence of such a virus. That's what you would ideally do, right?

Thomas:  That is not ideally. That's the only way to do this in any rational way. Ben, you got it exactly right. The only thing I would add is all of these things you're talking about as you said are standard virology techniques that go back to the '30s.

Ben:  Okay, okay.

Thomas:  If somebody says to you, “Oh, well, you can't find this purified virus”–in 1940, there's pictures of bacteriophages which are identical shape and morphology as viruses essentially and they easily found that. And, the only other thing I would say is when you do that, you should find the something that's millions of copies of identical particles, not like one is this size and one is that size.

Ben:  Right. You'd be looking for some type of uniformity.

Thomas:  Yes.

Ben:  Yeah.

Thomas:  Exactly. That's the virus.

Ben:  Okay, got it. And so, then to finish my thought here is what you're saying that instead, instead of what I've just described as being the ideal scenario that what virologists–

Thomas:  Not ideal. The only rational.

Ben:   Okay, yeah. The only rational. Yeah, really it's a scientific method. So, you're saying that instead what's going on is a virologist will take an unpurified sample from like an animal or a human model that's displaying these symptoms and then they would process that and take an unpurified sample, take tissue culture that contains a whole bunch of other material, much of that material potentially containing the identical genetic material as what they're thinking is the virus. And then, they starve it, they poison it, it disintegrates into all these different particles, some of which would contain genetic material. And then, once they have that brew that contains these fragments of genetic material from all these different sources, they then analyze that to create this computer simulation process that shows the suspected sequence of the suspected virus in what you called it an in silico. It's like the computer chip, I suppose, what comes to mind, like an in silico, like a computer-programmed genome. But, at no time is in that entire sequence, an actual isolated viral particle confirmed by electron microscopy, nor is it extracted and sequenced from an actual virus. This is all blue-sky theoretical science.

Thomas:  Correct, exactly.

Ben:  If you want to call it that. If you want to call it science. Huh.

Thomas:  It's not science, it's anti-science.

Ben:  I'm pretty stoked because this is now something I can do when I'm on the go and it's based on this idea that the human body being mostly water. But, what you probably don't know is everything else in your body is 50% amino acids. That means basically water and amino acids are two of the most important things that you can have in your body. And, some amino acids are essential. You have to get them from food, from breaking down steak and chicken and eggs and everything else. But, this stuff called Kion Aminos is a plant-based full essential amino acids profile backed by over 20 years of clinical research with the highest quality ingredients; no fillers, no junk, rigorous quality testing, taste amazing with all-natural flavors. I got on the amino acids bandwagon way back when I was racing Ironman triathlon. Started with branch chain amino acids, realized those were wasted time, switched over to essential amino acids and it has been a game changer ever since.

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Alright. Hopefully, you're enjoying this episode. All of the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2022, BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2022.

And, this interview is with Jeff Banman. Jeff is a leader in human performance and human behavior in high-stress environments. He's a firefighter, an Airborne Ranger, a CIA counter-terrorism operator, a business leader. He dissects human behavior at a micro level to enhance individual and team performance and some of the most intense moments imaginable. We talk about how to recover from COVID-related brain fog, Jeff's gold-standard recommended workout and nutrition programs and a lot more.

I've obviously treated breathwork pretty extensively on prior podcast kind of kicked that horse to death. But, you mentioned a few other things, like you said, anchoring in a specific moment, and then you said something after that. So, in addition to breathwork, what would you say are when someone is in a high-stress scenario, whether it's physical or emotional or mental stress, what are some of the other big wins that you found through that quantification process that just work like gangbusters for managing stress in those scenarios?

Jeff:  Yeah, man. I mean, most times what happens is when we experience, and I like to refer to as load on the system, less about stress–and it's very individualized across the board as well I found in all of these studies. But, when there's a load on the system and the system kind of starts moving into a state of arousal, and things start kind of working, I'm stressed, I'm feeling a certain way, there's some real distinct tactics to use because what begins to naturally happen in the untrained or undeveloped person is my system start to work in conflict. Meaning, my brain, my thought patterns are skewing off into more than likely a future-based outcome. Fear is just a projection of the future of what may or may not happen. So, my mind is getting ahead of myself. And, it's triggering things that haven't even happened yet, which my body is trying to move into alignment saying, “Hey, I may be under threat” or something is going on. There's a perception that something is going on and I need more right now in this minute.

So, central nervous systems kicking it into queue, you're getting all the chemical dump, you're doing all those things. Mind starts shaping forward into creating kind of worried out or whatever it might be conflicting back and sending disconnected messages back down to the central nervous system. So, I'm operating a conflict at that point. And, you said something interesting about the way you want your boys to grow up. And, I really like to when I'm teaching, I break down the difference between perception and discernment. I believe discernment is really a gateway to seeing what is actually happening, being very flat about it, versus a perception which is going to go through our filters which may go through our biases, which is more interpretive if you will.

So, utilizing the right breathwork, coming back to the present moment, anchoring into what's actually occurring, and dealing with the challenges at hand, kind of being very, very flat about it, used to call it. You'd see guys out of Seal Team 6 or Delta or whoever you know, guys have been in combat, we call it a thousand-yard stare, which just looks like they're burning a hole right through you. They have trained over time to be extremely discerning. They're just assessing factually what's happening.

So, when I can get to that place, that actually starts to bring brain, heart, central nervous system into alignment rather than this kind of disrupted space fighting against each other, compounding the effects. And now, I am actually more settled, and I'm allowing my body to do its natural course of action to give me the energy or the blood flow, or the breath, whatever it is I physically need to deal with it in that moment.

Ben:  Can that be trained? And, if so, how would you feel in something like that?

Jeff:  Oh, yeah. So, I mean, some of it is fairly easy. I mean, it's been crazy across the board. There's really no difference between a pro golfer, an operator, a guy on the stock exchange floor, a CEO running a public trading company. One, the breathwork is key. And, I know you've exhausted this, so I'll just do this quickly. Our technique is nasal breath in roughly about a four-count deep into the diaphragm, fully engagement. I find a lot of people have to actually learn to reengage their diaphragm because there are more shallow chest breathers than they are diaphragmatic breathers. So, there's the practice of that. So fundamentally, I'm taking control on the way in, I feel good about it, I'm controlling my breath. Deep into the diaphragm, full expansion, and then I just do an open mouth, relax jaw, allow the breath to leave the body at its own pace.

Ben:  And, by the way, it's interesting. I should mention the open mouthpiece because a lot of people will tell me, why don't you breathe out through the nose the same way that you would breathe in through the nose? Because you breathe in and you get the nitric oxide and the filtering and some of the better oxygenation. But then, breathing out, it's interesting that there's a few different things that happen biomechanically, but one important one is you actually see a little bit more movement of the diaphragm when you breathe out through your mouth, it seems to somehow incorporate more of those diaphragmatic muscles and also allows for a little bit more control, meaning you've almost got this built-in meter, meaning your pursed lips, and how fortunate you exhale through those pursed lips of the length and the intensity of the exhale. It's more difficult unless you're reaching out and pinching your nostrils through a nasal exhale to be able to modulate the outflow as opposed to breathing out through the mouth. So, I'm typically 90% of the time doing breathwork unless it's getting into a real hefty pranayama.

Jeff:  Right, right.

Ben:  Usually going in through the nose out through the mouth.

Jeff:  Yeah. I mean, it's really, I call it the return to the original breath. You look at your kids, about age 5, 7, they're belly breathers. They don't care. They don't even think about it. Then they hit the playground, they got to start posturing. Shoulders rise, chest comes up. I move my breath up to the upper chest. And there, I am shallow breathing because it becomes more about posturing and demonstrating. So, return to the original breath.

And, the other thing that you're doing in that giving up control kind of I almost described like letting gravity pull the breath away. Let the breath leave the body. You're also triggering the vagal nerve and you're sending signals of safety of the brain. So, you're actually checking in with yourself going, “Hey, I'm safe.” And, this is another kind of core aspect of what we discovered.

I fundamentally believe now and I've said it several times, there's really only one question that matters to every being on the planet, and that is, am I safe? That's the constant check. Am I safe? Am I safe to say this, be this, do this? Am I safe physically? So–

Ben:  Right. Am I safe? What were the three things? Basically, security and control. Am I loved? Meaning, am I being seen and heard?

And, there's a third. Why am I blanking on the third? It's to be loved, it's to be in control, and it's to be–

Jeff:  Is that to be acknowledged or be–well, you said be seen. So, love the knowledge.

Ben:  Probably people are jumping through the podcast right now, screaming it at us so.

Jeff:  So fundamentally, here's what we're doing when we bring everything together. Safety is a matter of perception. Most of us don't have quality anchors of safety from growing up. It's skewed. Safety is not necessarily–we don't label it good or bad, it's a sensation in the body that were radically unfamiliar with. And so, when I align the breath with the cognitive tools with the anchoring in the present moment, I'm validating the sensation being experienced in the body. Right now, I'm sitting at my computer, I'm sitting at my desk, I get to look out at the beautiful backyard. We've got 8 inches of snow on the ground right now. It's snowing like a feen. It's wonderful.

And, I get to breath, sit in and anchor into this present moment going, “Oh, how cool is this?” I'm in the experience of the moment and it's registering down into my lower systems as I'm okay, I'm safe. I'm good. The more I develop that, the more comfortable I become being in uncomfortable situations. Right, the more willing I am to kind of extend myself into the unknown or the levels of discomfort because I'm developing kind of an internal power or confidence that I will be able to figure things out, that I will be able to deal with it, that I will be okay.

Ben:  Yeah. And, that reminds me when you said that that jogged my memory, it's control. So basically, you want to be safe and secure. You only loved, accepted, noticed, seen and heard, and then we desire control. Those are the three basic things: Safety, love, and control.

Alright, this podcast is interesting. It is with Dan Clark and Kevin Woods. These guys make an app that I really like. I actually use this app to play in the room while I'm asleep. My wife doesn't seem to complain and I like it. It's called Brain.fm.

Kevin is a doctor in auditory and neuroscience. He has a degree from Harvard. He's done work on how hearing in complex scenes is aided by attention and memory. The other guy on the show is Dan Clark who changed his whole life using sound therapy, and Brain.fm is a non-invasive neurotechnology that can shift you into an altered or elevated state of consciousness with no nootropics or smart drugs or plant medicines or any compounds in general aside from a simple phone app. So, you'll dig this one. And again, I'll link to everything we talk about at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2022.

Kevin:  People need to understand that the majority of music is made specifically to distract them. And, that's so important that I'm going to say it again. If you're a great music producer, your job is to distract people.

Dan:  Or, grab their attention is probably even a better way of saying it, right?

Kevin:  Those things are equivalent. Yeah, exactly. Thank you for the clarification. Grabbing someone's attention, distracting them, pulling them away from whatever they're doing so they sit up and listen to the radio and request that song again. That's your job if you're a good music producer. And, they use words like punchy, or make that drum hit harder, or whatever it is. It's all about grabbing people's attention, and more so in pop than other genres, but all music tries to do this.

So, at Brain.fm, the point is to flip the script on that. So, we look at all the tricks that producers use to make things pop out. And, we say, “Let's roll that back. Let's actually not do that. Let's do the opposite. Let's do something to make the music sit in the background more comfortably and not distract people.” So, if you were trying to go from Christina Aguilera to the best Focus music, you'd have a lot of undoing to do for a start.

Now, could we overlay heavy focus rate modulations on pop music and get it more focusy than it is right now? Probably. And, there there's all sorts of legal licensing issues and that kind of thing. But, at its core, you'd be fighting upstream if you started with something like pop music.

Ben:  Yeah.

Dan:  Yeah. The goal is really how can we make the best background music in the world? And, instead of repurposing music that currently exists, it's like, “Listen, you're not even supposed to listen to the music, you're supposed to listen to it, find a track that you like that you want to zone into.” What's nice about it, eventually after five minutes, you no longer really thinking about what you're listening to, you're in work mode, or you're already asleep, or you're in this great meditation where you've never been able to have before. And, the whole goal is for this to actually just mesh in the background and then all of your thoughts or the activity you're doing becomes more and more foreground.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.

Dan:  Does that make sense?

Ben:  Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

One thing that I certainly run into when I've got an app like this at my fingertips and I open it up and I've got access to dozens of different grooves, and forest, and electronic, and classical, and drone, and rain, do you guys have a way for people to kind of know what the best of the best would be? Or, is it just kind of a choose your own adventure?

Dan:  Yeah. So, this is actually the next. So, by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have that for everyone. So, we basically understand that depending on people's preferences and also neurodiversity, we can actually change the music and the intensity of those amplitude modulations. We call it the neural effect level. So, that's actually coming out. It's in our app right now, but it's coming out to all devices. And yeah, we want to be able to start creating a personalization system that is music that you want to listen to, but it's also music that affects you.

Ben:  Well, how do you know? Are you saying I could have a wearable and it would sync with my wearable to know which of the tracks are shifting into the state that I desire the best?

Dan:  Yeah. So, that's eventually where Brain.fm is heading. And, in the interest of moving towards that, what we do is we've tested this on thousands and thousands of individuals. We have a baseline where we can estimate based on actually just different kinds of questions in a questionnaire on where someone is most likely to be. And then, the next version of Brain.fm, which we're currently working on with wearables is able to look at different body markers and then adjust it in real-time to be able to change it for what you need.

Ben:  So, I could tie it into like Apple Health, for example?

Dan:  That's the path that we're moving towards. Correct.

Ben:  Wow. Cool, cool.

Well, obviously the application of this is through the roof and I would encourage my listeners to start to experiment with this stuff because it's super cool. And, by the way, I'm going to link to everything that we talk about if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/BrainFMshow, as in BrainFMS-H-O-W, the BrainFMshow. And, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/BrainFMshow, I'll link to some of the studies and some of the other things related to Brain.fm. As well as, I think you guys have some kind of a fat discount code for people because it's around, I think, 6, 7 bucks a month to access this, and then there's, I think, a 20 or 30% discount. But, is there anything else that you guys are up to that you wanted to touch on while I still have you on the call?

Dan:  Yeah. So, I think what's interesting, we talked about some of the papers we're doing. We have a paper actually in Review Nature right now, which is very exciting talking about the things that we're doing. We're actually using the same kind of technology in hospitals, which I think is interesting. And, the reason why I bring that up is because the effects that we're talking about that we can measure in labs can actually be seen in wearables. They can be seen because they affect us on a physiological level. We're redistributing blood flow in your brain and temperature changes in your body. And, one of the really interesting things that we're currently working on is actually helping someone relax before surgery, before anesthesia, but also wake up after anesthesia very quick and being able to move. So, we're actually doing a clinical study. We're starting next week as of this recording, and we're looking to increase patient experience but also the efficiency of hospitals to help more people. So, it's actually all the same patented technology that we're using in our consumer app that we're also using and helping people in hospitals. And now, it's just about how can we continually create a product that works even faster, even better, but more personalized to you as an individual.

Ben:  Yeah, which is super cool because I can roll out of bed now. I already have my Apollo wristbands scheduled to start on to its Focus vibratory mode typically around 5:45 am or so. And then, I can put on my light-producing glasses, the Re-Timer, or the in-ear human charger, slap Brain.fm on in Focus mode, and using kind of the similar concept of bringing a patient who's been under anesthetic out of anesthesia-induced stupor more readily. You can literally take yourself up from a sleep state and shift yourself into productivity and impact extremely quickly using, again, just sound vibration light as soon as you wake up. And, of course, you could do the opposite before you go to sleep. You could use magnetic or haptic technology to shift yourself into sleep state, put the Brain.fm into meditative or sleep mode, perhaps use blue light-blocking glasses or some type of red-light glasses to induce your body into thinking that it's dark outside or that you're looking at torchlight or firelight. I mean, sometimes people throw around the word “biohacking” I think a bit too much. But, I mean this is a perfect example like stacking a bunch of stuff to biohack. And, I just love the idea of throwing sound in there to shift the state even more readily.

Dan:  Yeah. And, it's something that's accessible. So, personally, for me, I wake up and I actually throw on the headphones on the specific ones, the Aftershokz that are waterproof. And, I actually just put Brain.fm on and take a shower with them. I get ready for the day. I sit down in front with a coffee. And, by then, I'm already in the zone and ready to kick ass and conquer the day.

Ben:  Yeah. And, those headphones, by the way, those are the ones that transmit sound through the bones in your face. Someone's like underwater, they make the underwater FINIS, the underwater swimming headphones. And, you could do the same thing. Again, you could be playing Brain.fm, still have your ears not have earbuds in them, still potentially be listening to or focus on something else but the sound is literally transmitted through the bones, which is super cool.

Dan:  Yeah, right. So, just like you were saying, it's about stacking things. And, what's really cool about it is that everyone already has headphones or everyone already has phones. So, this is a great place to start. Or, if you're already doing this stuff, it's a great place to add. So, it's really approachable. So, our vision and mission why Brain.fm exists is how can we make everyone the best version of themselves, but it doesn't matter what language you speak, it doesn't matter where you are on the diversity spectrum, it's that we're all human and we're starting to figure out through really bleeding-edge science, the things that help us, and get to the next level. And, we're on the ride to help people do that in combination with all the other fun things that we can apply to our bodies in our minds.

Ben:  Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode. This next one is fun. It's with America's worst mom. At least that's what she's called because she had a controversial episode in which she let her nine-year-old ride the subway alone, which she gets into about why she did that. But, her name is Lenore Skenazy. She founded Free-Range Kids, which is a website that fights the belief our children are in constant danger from creeps, and kidnapping, and germs, and grades, and frustration and failure, and flashers, and baby snatchers and more. And, she trains overprotective parents to give their children more independence and confidence, how to get away from helicopter parenting, how to make more creative resilient and tough children who are healthy. So, you'll like this one. And again, all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2022.

You may have seen Lenore on The Today Show, on the Daily Show, on her own reality show, the World's Worst Mom. And, she's lectured all over the place since that original article came out and also founded something called Free-Range Kids. So, I would actually love to hear this story from your mouth, Lenore. Why were you dubbed as America's Worst Mom? What actually happened, this whole subway story?

Lenore:  Years ago, and I have to say the 9-year-old subway writer is now 23. So, it's been quite some time. But, he was our younger son, still is, thank God, and he started asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before here in New York City where we live and let him find his own way home by subways, one of those subway kids. I'm sure in the suburbs there's scooter kids, or fire truck kids, or whatever. He just loved the subway. And so, we talked about it, my husband and I, and we decided, yeah, he's ready, we're on the subways all the time, so we get around. He speaks the language. He can read a map. Let's do it.

So, one sunny Sunday I took Izzy, our son, to Bloomingdale's fancy-schmancy department store in a fancy-schmancy neighborhood, and I left him there. And, sure enough, the reason is it happens to be that the subway is right underneath, there's a subway stop right underneath Bloomingdale's. And, he found his way down there, and he took the train a couple of stops, and then he took a bus across town and he came into our apartment levitating because he had done something on his own that he knew he was ready for and we trusted him. That's also a key thing; parents trusting their kids. And, I'm a newspaper columnist by trade, so literally a couple months later because I didn't think it was such a big deal, but a couple months later when I had nothing to write about, I said, how about I write about this subway ride that my son took by himself? And, my editor said sure, sounds like a nice local story. And so, that was the story why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone. And, two days later, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. And, that was just the beginning of me getting to the Ben Greenfield Show. So, it's just been this wild ride.

People were so sort of divided. A lot of people remembered that the childhoods they had with a lot of independence and freedom. And, if they were in New York, they remembered their subway ride. If they were in the suburbs, they remembered being on their bikes. Everybody remembers staying out until the street lights came on. And, nobody was allowing their own kids to do that. And, it's been my life's work to figure out why not considering that most parents today do remember that. Not only fondly, they think of it as the formative experience of their childhood was that free time that they had with their friends. And, that's the one thing that most kids don't get anymore.

Ben:  What was going through your head when you are Bloomingdale's and you have the subway station underneath? Obviously, your son has ridden the subway before. Was this intentional for you? Were you kind of familiar with the tradition of rites of passage and the idea of a young person doing a hard thing is emergence into adolescence? Or, is this just like, “Hey, let's see how he does”?

Lenore:  Well, I'm as familiar as anyone, I guess, with the idea of rites of passage. You take anthropology at some point. And, I'm Jewish and we have a rite of passage at age 13, which is the bar mitzvah when a child becomes a man or a woman and they have to do some tough stuff, they have to learn some Hebrew, and they have to be in front of a big crowd and give a speech. And so, I love the idea of rites of passage, and I'm happy they don't involve tattoos or flaying of the skin in our culture. But, I hadn't thought of this as a rite of passage when I was letting Izzy do it. It just struck me as sort of maybe a New York thing, but not that everybody has to do something at age 9 that proves that they're ready for the world. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Ben:  So, for you when you did that, were you at the time engaged with education? I know that you have this website now called Free-Range Kids. Was this an interest of yours? Or, was more the controversy that that created for you as a journalist to kind of pivot and begin to really focus on this idea of creative free play and what you call Free-Range Kids?

Lenore:  At that time, I was a newspaper person. And so, I was writing about something different every day. But, years later when I went back and looked at earlier columns of mine, I found a couple that seemed like, “Oh, my god, these are the breadcrumbs leading, I guess, to the evil witch.” Maybe we'll forget that metaphor. The point is that I had written a column when my sons were, I don't know, 5 and 7 about yes, I let them go to the bathroom by themselves when we're at a play. They're boys, I'm girl, so I just stand outside and I don't think that was terrible. A lot of people dragged the kids in with them to the ladies' room. And then, I found a column of mine from a few years later that said, yes, I let my kids go downstairs and play in the courtyard. We lived in a skyscraper basically with a big courtyard down below where there were no cars. And, I was like, “Don't arrest me just because I trust my kids outside.”

So, I did see a thread of this idea that our kids are safer and smarter than our culture gives them credit for. And, I did see that culture had changed obviously since I was a kid walking to school and today. But, I started Free-Range Kids, that blog, the weekend after I'd been slammed on all of those television shows for letting my 9-year-old ride the subway because most of the time and subsequently, I mean, years and years of interviews, there'd be a little bit of banter. And then, at some point, the interviewer would go for the kill and say, “Okay, it sounds great. Your son looks happy, but how would you have felt if he didn't come home?” And, it was a response to that, the idea that I didn't care about safety. I do, and so the Free-Range Kids blog. And, Free-Range Kids has since become a non-profit called Let Grow. And, that's what I'm head of now, Let Grow. But, the whole idea was that I love safety. Free-Range Kids and Let Grow believe in safety, believe in helmets, and car seats and seat belts would be stupid to drive without a seat belt. They're right there. They don't change your experience. We just don't believe that kids need a security detail every time they leave the house.

And so, what I've been writing about and thinking about for many years is, how did we get so afraid for our kids considering crime rise? I realize we're in a little bit of a weird moment now since COVID. But, since the '90s, crime had been going down. And so, parents who weren't letting their kids play outside in the '90s, or the 2000s, or the 2010s were actually those kids were safer than we were growing up in the '70s and '80s. And so, it wasn't that crime was so dangerous or so off the charts, it's that our fear had grown. And, that interests me because there was a sort of mismatch between our perception of what our kids could handle and our memories of what we could handle ourselves as children.

Ben:  Where'd that idea come from that emerged as you alluded to in the '90s and beyond that our kids are not safe, that they're going to be in constant danger from kidnappers, and germs, and bullies, and baby snatchers, and you should never let them go to our sleepover, and God forbid that you not be able to see every last bite of food that goes into your mouth? Where'd that actually come from?

Lenore:  Well, there's a lot of reasons as you might guess. The easiest one to understand, and I'm sure everybody sees this and agrees, is that the media really didn't focus on predators and child kidnapping until the '80s. And, I don't know what age you are, but you might have grown up with Milk Carton Kids.

There were two really high-profile kidnappings in the late '70s, early '80s, Etan Patz here in New York City and Adam Walsh in Florida. And, after a mini-series was made about Etan's disappearance and murder, which is the worst horriblest thing you can imagine, I think in a move to try to help the world, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children started putting pictures of missing children on the milk cartons. I'd say that was sort of a good idea, but sort of a bad idea because they neglected to mention that most of those children were not snatched by a stranger off their bikes or off the street, they were generally runaways or taken in a custodial dispute between divorced parents. But, the impression we got or you got eating the cereal or your parents did was that all these children were being snatched right and left by kidnappers. And, in fact there was testimony in front of Congress that was absolutely wrong that said that 50,000 children are stolen every year. It's not the case. Thank, God. It's about 100, which is still horrible. But really, we got the magnitude wrong and it sank into the fibers of our bones because we're parents and we want our kids to be safe.

And then, the TV having made this mini-series and broken all ratings records about Adam Walsh's disappearance said, “Let's make more of these, these are great.” TV exists to make money. And, the more eyeballs you can get, the same with the internet now, the more money you can get for whatever for your station. And so, was the birth of “Law and Order,” which we see is just coming back again. I mean, 20 years of every night, some horrible murder and then they got “Law and Order SVU,” some worse murder of a child or disabled adult and just the scariest most enraging saddest stories. And, your brain works like Google. And, if you ask your brain, “Name some cereals,” it will come up with the Cheerios, and Frosted Flakes, and eventually, it gets to the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. But, they're relevant answers to your question. But, if you ask your brain, “Is my kid safe waiting at the bus stop?” Up comes the picture of Etan Patz, up comes the picture of Jaycee Dugard because the horrible stories are the easiest for us to remember. You can't remember stories of the millions of kids who waited at the bus stop and were just bored and got on the bus.

So, your brain also thinks that if something is easy to retrieve, if a result appears on the first page of your search results in your brain, it thinks it's relevant. And so, by having these stories so easily reached by our brain and so vivid, and we all share them, it started to feel as if children were in constant danger even though if children were always being snatched, it wouldn't be a story, we wouldn't be able to remember them. So, it's sort of like the most weird sad story comes up easiest for us even though it is a story because it is so weird and sad and unusual.

Ben:  Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you really like me taking some of the top of the top snippets from popular episodes and putting them together like this for you in case you missed a few or you want to revisit a few, visit the shownotes where I have comprehensive resources for you and where you can also leave your questions, your comments, your feedback, and your thumbs up if you like this type of review episode. All of that will be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Bestof2022. Happy 2023, by the way. So, I'm Ben Greenfield. Have an amazing week, signing out.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh entertaining, well-informed, and often outside-the-box approach to discovering the health, and happiness, and hope that we all crave. So, I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And, if you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel wherever that might be and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. It means a lot.

 

 

2022 was a huge year of growth for podcasting.

As of November 2022, there were 383.7 million podcast listeners globally. 160 million Americans have listened to podcasts at lease once. And 22% of people listen to podcasts while driving.

Those statistics speak *volumes* about the future of podcasting.

While I hadn't taken a close look at those figures until recently, I'm not at all surprised. What makes podcasts so appealing is the freedom to choose what type of content you’d like to consume, with no limits on how much, or how little, you can listen to, from the comfort and convenience of your own home. Technology has also made it easier than ever before to distribute a show on a wide platform without much effort.

I've been podcasting twice a week now for many years. The result is several hundred episodes of content that, taken together, are a virtual library of in-depth information on topics ranging from those as specific as the best mattresses to as vast as spirituality.

As we are now only hours away from 2023, I'm looking back on the past year of podcasting with fondness. The scientists, CEOs, doctors, and many others who appeared on the show this year have taught me way more than I ever could have anticipated. When my team and I decided to do this final episode of 2022, featuring what we've decided to call the top podcasts of the year, I could not pick favorites. The episodes here, instead, are those that you listened to most. We've taken them down in length so that you can hear the highlights of each episode over the course of a single episode that is around an hour and a half long. Then, of course, if you want more, we've linked to the original podcast so you can listen to the entire episode.

Thank you, sincerely, for your support of my podcast this past year. I can't wait for you to hear what's in store for 2023, with even more high-quality discussion, educational content, personal stories, and even music and entertainment.

Happy New Year!

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The Top Podcasts Of 2022

Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis…06:42

Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis & Ben Greenfield Reveal New Anti-Aging Biohacks & Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine You’ve Never Heard Of Before.

• Life Force – how many good tips are in it for longevity and anti-aging
• Tony's rotator cuff injury from snowboarding and how using PEMF helped, but not completely
• Doctor told Tony he had to stop being active to avoid injury and maybe not being able to walk again
• Called Peter for help and to learn about stem cell therapy, referred him to Bob Hariri
• Told by Bob that he needed 4-day-old stem cells – cord/placenta stem cells; Proteostatic stem cell therapy
• After two days, his rotator cuff pain was gone, and first time in 14 years no back pain
• Tony attends the largest Stem Cell and Regenerative conference in the world, put on by the Pope, every two years at the Vatican
• Tony underwent a phase 3 trial of a single injection that triggers your wind pathway and causes you to make new tendons
• If you have osteoarthritis, within 11 months you’ll have all new tendons
• Ben brings up two fascinating individuals in the book that he had his sons read about: Osman Kibar and Martine Rothblatt
• Peter talks about how extraordinary Martine is: founder of SiriusXM Radio
• Martine started United Therapeutics and developed a drug to cure her daughter's pulmonary fibrosis
• Martine set out on a mission to learn about organogenesis – how to build human organs from pig organs

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Ben Patrick, The Knees Over Toes Guy…20:54

How To Get Rid Of Knee Pain Forever, The Best Knee Rehab Exercises, The Ancient Chinese Technique To Keep Your Knees Young & More With Ben Patrick, The “Knees Over Toes Guy.”

• Two things that Ben Patrick claims to have done more than anyone in the world regarding knee health:
  • Create healing
  • Create bulletproofing
• Activities that cause degradation of the knees over time, such as running
• Knees always take the impact from sports, jumping, running, squatting, etc.
• Backward walking prevents cartilage degeneration
• Backward walking involves completely different muscles and causes your knees to be over your toes
• Backward walking with resistance is even better than backward walking
  • Improving pelvic motion and alleviating back pain
• Training sled he’s developing for both backward and forward training
• The sled allows pressure and resistance without any jarring
• Ben Patrick's mom’s full rehabilitation and at age 67, she looks like she’s 20 when she’s out running
• Retro walking and this four-week study
• ROKP (Reverse out of Knee Pain) – superiority of ROKP for muscle recruitment force reduction and pain reduction
• Knees Over Toes Guy

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Dr. Thomas Cowan…37:23

Ben’s New Dietary Protocol, Vegetables Vs. Viruses, Whether Viruses Really Exist & Much More With Dr. Thomas Cowan.

• The alleged gene sequence of SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t actually been sequenced or isolated
• Fabricated viral genetic strands to prove the existence of viruses; not found in real-world conditions
• Christian Drosten – German virologist's race for swine flu test
• When you're sick, you make these little pieces and they call those viruses (but they are not viruses)
• Disease is a “cleansing process” that has been misinterpreted
• Dr. Cowan uses the examples of scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi to show that disease isn’t communicable
• The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg
  • A shift in technology may have caused us to become less healthy in general
• Dr. Cowan talks about millimeter waves that interfere with the availability of oxygen in the air.
  • Also poisons the mitochondria
• Don't starve yourself and don't starve yourself of love, or spirituality, or have stupid thoughts, or put your cell phone under your pillow when you sleep
• Techniques that date back to the '30s
• Uniformity – finding something that's millions of copies of identical particles, not like one is this size and one is that size
• Impure “scientific” processes that are used now to isolate a virus

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Jeff Banman of Brute Force…58:46

How To Make Yourself Physically & Mentally More Gritty, More Resilient, & Harder To Kill With Jeff Banman Of Brute Force.

• Big wins in high-stress scenarios found through the quantification process
  • When stressed, our system starts working in conflict
  • Difference between perception and discernment
• Breathwork is key
  • Shallow breathers need to re-engage their diaphragm
• Breathing out through the mouth engages the diaphragmatic muscles more
• Return to the original breath
  • Small kids are belly breathers
• Safety is a matter of perception
• Triggering the vagal nerve and sending signals of safety to the brain
• Aligning the breath with cognitive tools and anchoring in the present moment
  • Developing internal power of confidence
• Three basic things you need – safety, love, control

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Dan Clark and Dr. Kevin Woods of brain.fm…1:07:31

How To Instantly Shift Your State Of Consciousness From Anxiety To Relaxation, Wakefulness To Sleep, Or Brain Fogginess to Focus With Brain.fm.

• Majority of music is made to distract or grab attention
• How to make the best background music in the world
  • The goal is to make your thoughts and activities more foreground
• Changing the music depending on preferences and neurodiversity
• Aftershokz
• FINIS underwater music player
• Personalization system:
  • Questionnaire to estimate a baseline
  • Adjust by looking at different body markers
  • Connecting to other apps
• Using the same technology in hospitals
  • Helping people relax before anesthesia and wake up from anesthesia
• Shifting yourself quickly from sleep state into focused and productive state
  • Use of various biohacking products
• brain.fm

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Lenore Skenazy of Free Range Kids…1:17:29

“America’s Worst Mom” Explains Why We Need More Free-Range Parenting & Less Helicopter Parenting: Let Them Grow With Lenore Skenazy.

• Her subway story – Lenore’s 9-old-son coming home by subway completely alone
  • Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone
  • Receiving divided feedback
• Kids today are not allowed to experience independence and freedom that were normal for their parents
• Rite of Passage
• A path that led to the idea of Free Range Kids blog and Let Grow non-profit
  • Caring about safety but also trusting your kids
• Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy
• Crime has decreased, but our fears have increased
• What are the roots of the fear for our kids' safety that led to overprotection?
  • Media covering of missing children
  • Pictures of missing children on the milk cartons
  • Misinformation about the number of missing children
  • TV series Law and Order – 20 years of every night, some horrible murder
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Parents are led to believe that kids are in constant danger

Upcoming Events:

• Six Senses Retreat: February 27, 2023 – March 3, 2023

Join me for my “Boundless Retreat” at Six Senses from February 27th, 2023 to March 3rd, 2023, where you get to improve your functional fitness, nutrition, longevity, and the delicate balance between productivity and wellness. Complete with a healthy farmhouse breakfast, yoga spa sessions, and sound healing, you learn how to live a boundless life just like me, and I'd love to see you there. Learn more here.

• Keep up on Ben's LIVE appearances by following bengreenfieldfitness.com/calendar!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

– Featured Podcasts:

• Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis & Ben Greenfield Reveal New Anti-Aging Biohacks & Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine You’ve Never Heard Of Before.
• How To Get Rid Of Knee Pain Forever, The Best Knee Rehab Exercises, The Ancient Chinese Technique To Keep Your Knees Young & More With Ben Patrick, The “Knees Over Toes Guy.
• Ben’s New Dietary Protocol, Vegetables Vs. Viruses, Whether Viruses Really Exist & Much More With Dr. Thomas Cowan.
• How To Make Yourself Physically & Mentally More Gritty, More Resilient, & Harder To Kill With Jeff Banman Of Brute Force.
• How To Instantly Shift Your State Of Consciousness From Anxiety To Relaxation, Wakefulness To Sleep, Or Brain Fogginess to Focus With Brain.fm.
• “America’s Worst Mom” Explains Why We Need More Free-Range Parenting & Less Helicopter Parenting: Let Them Grow With Lenore Skenazy.

– Other Resources:

• Life Force
• PEMF
• United Therapeutics
• Training Sled
• Knees Over Toes Guy
• The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg
• Cowan's Garden  (use code BEN to save 15%)
• Brute Force Training
• Aftershokz
• FINIS Underwater Music Player
• brain.fm (use code ben20 to save 20%)
• Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy
• Free Range Kids Blog
• Let Grow

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Kion Aminos: Aminos are building blocks for muscle recovery, reduced cravings, better cognition, immunity, and more. Go to getkion.com/ben to receive 20% off on monthly deliveries and 10% on one-time purchases.