September 12, 2020

From podcast: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/naveen-jain/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:01:41] Podcast Sponsors

[00:03:50] Guest Introduction

[00:06:28] Naveen's Observations Of Ben's Daily Life In Spokane, WA

[00:12:15] The Proper Role Of The Elderly In Society

[00:19:32] The Big Question That Propel The Quest For Knowledge

[00:31:26] Podcast Sponsors

[00:34:03] How The Gut Microbiome Affects The Chemical Signaling In Our Bodies

[00:44:43] The Foundation Of An Integrative Understanding Of The Gut

[00:56:16] A Method Of Testing That Is Truly Personalized To The Individual

[01:03:15] The “Flywheel” Concept

[01:20:40] Recommended Resources To Think Like A Billionaire

[01:32:05] The Most Remarkable Thing Naveen Has Done For His Health In The Past Year

[01:40:50] Closing the Podcast

[01:41:44] End of Podcast

Ben:  On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Naveen:  If you're going to live on the moon, how are you going to grow the food on the moon? That is how people ask, and I said, “That's a dumb question because the right question to ask is, why do we eat food?” The difference between the engineers and the people who are operator, forget how, just focus on, does this need to happen? Does this make sense?

Ben:  I always, for a long time, thought that kind of stuff was just like silly. Now I've realized that that's really what legacies are built on.

Ben:  Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Well, well, well, hello, hello. I'm talking like I'm a fud because I've been up since 4:00 a.m., hunting, not hunting wabbits, I've been hunting deer with my twin boys. I'm taking them out on their first deer hunt this year, and thus, I'm a little loopy. So, I apologize not only for being loopy but also for having just lost all of my plant-based audience, I apologize. Yes, we are hunting venison to eat this fall, make some amazing stews and steaks, and everything else.

And today's podcast episode is a fun one. It is with my friend Naveen Jain. And we had a wonderful discussion. He's been on a podcast before. He flew out to my house to record this one and we went into a whole bunch of little corners and rabbit holes, so to speak.

Now, before we jump into today's show, I wanted to tell you about a few, just a few, of our fantastic sponsors. One is actually related to the gut. And nature's first food for the gut when a mammal is born is called colostrum. It's a natural product. It's made by mammals to strengthen the immune system and the gut health of their young. So, it's this super nutrient-rich substance that has gut-nourishing vitamins, and minerals, and proteins, and enzymes that amp up your immune system, and also your microbiome, and has even been shown to do things like enhance athletic recovery.

So, it's cool stuff. It's called colostrum. Kion, my company, we have a wonderful, wonderful source of colostrum and it's a super popular product, flies off the shelves. People love it. I use it every day in my smoothie. And you can go to getkion.com, getK-I-O-N.com, and use code BEN10. I'll give you a little tip. You want to let this stuff sit in your mouth a little bit or get it in a smoothie that you swirl around in your mouth because that's what activates a lot of those growth factors in the colostrum. So, getkion.com, and your code is BEN10 to save you 10%.

And then, this podcast is also brought to you by my friends at Joovv, who allow you to bring all of the healing aspects of red and near-infrared and red light, all the nice infrared wavelengths that you would normally get from sunlight into the comfort of your own home. And I have one in front of me and one behind me that I stand naked in front of in the morning for skin rejuvenation and for sexual libido, helps with wound healing, not that I'm covered in gaping sores, but it does help. I have a recommendation to a lot of my clients who will get a surgery, for example, to heal up scars to use red light on that. The list goes on and on, but what Joovv is going to do is they're going to give a free copy of my brand new book “Boundless” to anybody who gets a Joovv. You go to J-O-O-V-V.com/ben and use code BEN to get a free copy of my book “Boundless.” So, joovv.com/ben. Get a light, get boundless. Let's go talk to Naveen.

Check, check, one, two, three, mic check, one, two, three.

Naveen:  Check, check, one, two, three, mic check, one, two, three.

Ben:  Oh, sound amazing, Naveen. You sound absolutely amazing. How can you not sound amazing? Should we just give the audience right now our whole audio check? We're just going to let you guys start listening in right now. So, if we do anything super embarrassing, this is the pre-show recording where we're checking our audio levels. Can you give me a check, check one more time, Naveen?

Naveen:  Well, the way it works is I just love talking. So, here's what's going to happen. You and I are going to–

Ben:  I'm just going to wind you up and let you go, baby.

Naveen:  No. We're going to have fun together. We're going to talk about our life and universe and everything else in between.

Ben:  That's right. Well, we just got done talking for like an hour about the–we just went on a long walk, you guys, and we talked about the nature of the universe, we talked about absolute versus relative morality, we talked about vaccinations, we talked about God, we talked about all of the things that–

Naveen:  We won't be talking about–

Ben:  We can't talk about the podcast because we live in an era of censorship, we have to be so careful now. But anyways, Naveen, you came out here to my house. You flew on your jet out here and landed at the airstrip that's like 10 minutes from my home, which of course is super convenient. And it's been like two years since I've interviewed you, and we have so many things to catch up on and talk about because–for those of you who didn't hear my initial interview with Naveen, this guy is just chock-full of an amazing amount of information and he's super, super knowledgeable. He is a billionaire. He's the author of the book Moon–is it Moonshots or Moonshot–

Naveen:  Shots.

Ben: –the name of your book? “Moonshots.” And as a matter of fact, I call him the moonshot man. So, everything we talk about today is going to be in the shownotes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/moonshotman. And you guys really, if you want to hear Naveen's whole backstory, go listen to my first episode with him, which is called “Age reversing via the gut, the ultimate anti-anxiety pill, customized probiotics, and more, with billionaire entrepreneur and founder of Viome, Naveen Jain.” So, you guys got to go back and hear that episode because I went to your home turf, Naveen. I went to Seattle and we recorded in a mansion on the lake out there, which is just beautiful.

But now that you've come out here to the Greenfield compound on the east side of the state, on the redneck side of the state, what kind of takeaways have you gotten so far from Spokane or from being here?

Naveen:  So, first of all, I actually wanted to thank you. And I have obviously met you many, many times in different settings and obviously, just love your outlook on life. And I think to me, the biggest takeaway I would say would be the way you live with your family, and I think I'm just so impressed with your wife and your twin kids, I mean, just unbelievably well-behaved kids. What a loving family you have.

Ben:  Thanks, man.

Naveen:  And I wish you could–

Ben:  No, no. I thought you were going to say, me having you strip off all your clothes and stand sandwich in between two giant red light, these panels, or this morning with a laser light attached to your head while I made you sip cayenne, pepper, chaga, and cacao out of a mug.

Naveen:  Yeah. So, having said that, let's continue. The thing that to me was really just amazing, you as a dad. You obviously are a role model for millions of people out there, who see you just an absolute fit guy, knowledgeable, know all about fitness, right? And I see you as this amazing dad, playing the song for your kid before they went to sleep, and I wish–I mean, I did record that and I wish you would play that for the audience. And if we could do that, that would be–

Ben:  Did you record that?

Naveen:  I sure did.

Ben:  Where did you put it on, Instagram, or are you saving at your phone?

Naveen:  I would not.

Ben:  Oh, send it to me. I'll put it on the shownotes for people.

Naveen: I would love for people to see literally who you really are, a loving dad, a loving husband, and what you, essentially as a family, you have created, and your love for nature, and your love for God. I mean, to me, all the things I can tell you about how brilliant you are, and how great businessman you are, and how much you care about people getting fit and stuff. All that goes without saying, but the side of you that really surprised me here was that how caring family you have.

Ben:  Well, I'm neither brilliant nor a good businessman, but what I do know how to do is surround myself with amazing people who make me look good or help me out a lot. But I can tell you from a parenting standpoint, probably the biggest light bulb moment for me, or one of the big light bulb moments for me was when I realized that I'm not raising my children, I'm raising my grandchildren. Meaning that everything from playing music at night before we go to bed, to whether or not you have your cell phone out at the dinner table, or whether you're fully present and engaged in conversation to the structuring of the week so that the children have something to rely on and they know that Sundays are the special day where we go on a hike and we sing songs before dinner and Wednesdays are the night where we might have a little dance party before dinner.

All of these are traditions that will go on for generations to come. And you can either build good traditions in your home that make your children feel like they're in a trusting and safe environment. And that also give children because it's really important for kids to have tradition and something to rely upon consistently. That makes a child feel very safe and it gives them a very good childhood. But those are the same things that they're going to go on and do with their children, and their children's children will go on and do that with their children. And so, it's very interesting because every decision that you make when you're raising a child, or the way with which you spend time with your child, how present you are, how unpresent you are, what activities you choose to engage in, what kind of traditions you build in the home, these go on if you think about it potentially for thousands of years.

Naveen:  But here's the thing, Ben. I saw you three years ago. You were a different man. And I tell you in three years, you're not only that outlook on family had changed, but the fact is you're changing the tradition. You obviously couldn't have grown up like that because I didn't see you like that. So, you changed. So, you're starting a new tradition than what your grandfather or father did.

Ben:  Right, exactly. And I don't know about you, but I didn't even grow up with that much tradition in my home.

Naveen:  That's my point.

Ben:  Even Christmas, it was like, well–a week before Christmas, “What should we have for dinner on Christmas?” Whereas at our house, we just know. You have the Christmas turkey and all the staple foods. And the kids are doing the little chocolates for advent for 20 plus days leading into Christmas and there's all these. And that's thanks to my wife. My wife's family was very much based around tradition and this is the month that we go to the coast and get the little house on the coast. And this is what we do for Thanksgiving, and for Easter, and for Christmas. And I always, for a long time, thought that kind of stuff was just like silly and old school, and now I've realized that that's really what legacies are built on is tradition. And it's also something that children just find so meaningful.

Naveen:  So, Ben, so you're starting a new tradition for your family. So, going forward, you're going to be that grandfather who started these traditions, right?

Ben:  Mm-hmm.

Naveen:  So, they're going to go back and look at my great, great grandfather started this.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. And really, a big part of that–and I know that you and I today, we're going to talk a little bit about like the science of aging and longevity because you've got a real love for science, which I absolutely love. You're commenting on our long walk this morning how you're not a biologist, like that's not your formal training, right? You're at engineering and programming.

But what I really love, and we'll also tackle this, how you learn new things, but I love that you've really dug into the science and you've turned yourself into a real expert on things like biology, and anti-aging, and longevity. And one of the things we were talking about at the dinner table last night was this idea of our elders, and their role in society and how can we–it almost seems paradoxical and I realize we're going to flirt with the borders of controversy talking about this.

Naveen:  No, we're not.

Ben:  But it's so odd that we live in a society in which elders aren't given much of a matriarchal or a patriarchal role. They're not placed in a position where they are put on a pedestal of being the wise storytellers who we rely upon to advise the younger generations and to pass on the wisdom so that the younger generations don't make the same mistakes as their elders. And we instead relegate our elders to hospice and nursing home and put them in positions more of shame than of honor. Rarely do we have our parents or our grandparents come and live with us in their old age. We instead find a place to hide them away. And then, something like the COVID pandemic strikes, and we all of a sudden start saying, “Oh, we got to save the elders. Everyone, put your masks on and we don't want the old people to die.” But I find it almost a little bit hypocritical that we say that and yet in our actions outside of something like a pandemic, it seems as though we don't really respect our elders as much.

Naveen:  Well, that's not a controversial subject to me. I'm not going to talk about COVID for a second here, but to me, it is really important that the wisdom that we learn, the wisdom that our parents and grandparents have, if we can't give those wisdoms to our grandchildren or their grandchildren, then we have really lost so much wisdom. When you and I grow up, we don't lose everything we have learned. I mean, we dedicated our life to learning. I mean, we are intellectually curious human beings and we all–I mean, the last 10 years we learn. Think about the next 50 or 70 or 100 years how much we're going to learn.

And if all that gets simply put into some hospice or some nursing care without passing that on knowledge, the values, and the things that we care about how we should look at that world, to me, that's one thing that I find very fascinating is in eastern culture, you would be outcasted if someone knew that your parents are actually not living with you. You in fact have moved them out to a nursing care. The society will outcast you. They say, “We don't want you to be around my son. We don't want you to be around anyone.” Someone, “That guy left his parents in a nursing care. What kind of a son he is? We don't want that kind of influence in any family.” Right? That to me is really the society we should live in. We talk about taking care of each other. If we can't even take care of someone who dedicated their life to making you grow, to make you become who you are–and I don't care what kind of a childhood you had. Someone cleaned your poop, someone dedicated their life, someone had sleepless nights.

Ben:  That's what I think about. Like my parents changed my diaper for so long. I'm willing to give my parents a bath and change their diaper, and that's the way that it should be, and we now find that–we find that inconvenient and we find that to be something that because much of society doesn't do that anymore is strange or awkward and it shouldn't be. And I think my interview with her will possibly have come out prior to this interview, but I was speaking with Marisa Peer yesterday, who wrote the book “You Can Be Younger,” and it's about the biology of belief and thinking yourself into youth.

And we were talking about the grandmother hypothesis, and it's very interesting because in a post-menopausal state, women actually do begin to show signs of aging very quickly, and it's based on this evolutionary or ancestral concept that once you can't make babies anymore, maybe nature doesn't want you to stick around. And yet we see in these societies where mothers and grandmothers are given a role of being the caretakers and the storytellers, and the people who passed on with the future generations, you see that post-menopausal women live much longer than in societies where they aren't given this matriarchal role. And so, there is a little bit to be said for even the longevity and the anti-aging component of this is the quality of life and the purpose in life that the elder generation is given influences how long they're going to live, just as much as perhaps filling them chock-full of NAD, and sirtuins, and stem cell injections. Its purpose is a big part of it.

Naveen:  And we're going to talk about all the serpents and NAD and all the good stuff in a second here. But to me, it is not just about the grandmother and menopausal women, it is about giving the love. If you can give that love to your children, your family, and to fellow humans, my point is we get so caught up in our world that we forget we live in this ecosystem, in this bigger ecosystem we all are connected, as you were talking about. We are literally–I mean, we look like a solid person like human beings, but we are really just these waves. I mean, at the end of the day, we are made of atoms and you go down the things and you down to quarks. And basically, we are just waves, and everyone in this world is connected through these waves. We no longer are separate. What is happening to your body when I'm in proximity of you, it affects me, what affects me. So, my point is this love that we have to start to create, whether we are living in any place, we got to share that love. This is one of the things that's in abundance. It's not like if I give it to you, I don't have left for someone else.

Ben:  Right, right, exactly. Yeah, the love bucket is a never-ending bucket, and sometimes we do hold back too much on that. And there are so many places that we could go in terms of the things that I want to talk about, but one of the first questions is, as odd as this might seem because it just really stood out to me–I just realized too that I've actually interviewed you twice. I have not interviewed you once. In my introduction, I mentioned once, but I've actually interviewed Naveen twice. And so, we'll include my other interview because I recalled now that I interviewed you at the WeWork space out there in Seattle as well for a second interview, and we talked about–

Naveen:  And you saw my legs, you saw my legs there.

Ben:  Yeah. We talked about metabolites and some of these upcoming blood tests. Yeah, and you're wearing your shorts and it was a video podcast. I think we were concerned about the angle of the camera ensuring that your balls weren't showing up on the video. I think we were able to sort that.

But you talked about your method of gathering knowledge. And again, this is something that I respect about you is you've been able to turn yourself into an expert on topics that you really want to dive into. And you specifically, as a businessman, have been able to turn that expertise into some very successful business ventures. But you talked about how you'll follow certain people on Twitter when you want to learn about something like you'll create a Twitter feed full of all the leading experts in that field–

Naveen:  And signed journals.

Ben:  And then, the other thing–and you even talked about this a lot in my previous interviews with you. You'll also use science journals to just turn yourself into an expert on information. I want to get into just a couple of things regarding that. A, when it comes to Twitter, is there anybody you're following right now, or any particular feeds that you've aggregated that you're really just tuned into right now as far as people that you're finding really intriguing, or topics that are trending that you're just absolutely intrigued with right now?

Naveen:  So, you know what, to me at this point in life, I take these parts of my life and I dedicate to just a particular subject where I just get so deep into it. Today, if you ask me, I'm all over health. And the reason is I look at the stuff and saying, “If I'm going to dedicate 5, 10 years of my life to something, can I fundamentally change the trajectory of how humanity is going to live? Can we actually get rid of chronic diseases?” And you and I talked about that. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that we as humans should develop any chronic disease. We are not born with them. They are not genetic diseases. So, when people focus so much on genes, it to me really surprises me because your genes don't change. When you gain 200 pounds, your DNA is exactly the same that was before you gained 200 pounds, right?

Ben:  It depends how much access you have to your own home CRISPR kit, whether or not your genes are going to change.

Naveen:  Well, when it comes in a second–

Ben:  For the most part.

Naveen:  For the most part. And we'll come back to this CRISPR part just as well in a second here. But let's assume the same human beings, when they gain 200 pounds, they get diabetes, they get depression, they get autoimmune diseases, and pick any of these chronic diseases. Your genes don't change. That means fundamentally, your genes are not responsible for what really happens. It is the expression of those genes that causes you to–

Ben:  Right. You're starting basic epigenetics.

Naveen:  Yeah. Basic epigenetic. I mean, post-epigenetic, what things are expressed. And the way I could express to people is simply your thought is your genes, right? You can think all the bad thoughts you have. You haven't committed any crime unless you start to express those thoughts, right?

Ben:  Mm-hmm.

Naveen:  That means you may have all kinds of bad thoughts like bad genes, but if they're not being expressed and you can figure out a mechanism so that they don't express through lifestyle and changes. And I saw you. I mean, all the nutrients and the superfoods I ate for breakfast this morning, the tea that I drank, the smoothie that you made for me, all those things that I did, fundamentally, what are they doing? They're not changing my genes, they're fundamentally changing my gene expression.

To me, what really fascinated me, Ben, in this whole topic was, can we digitize the human body? And to me, the way I look at this stuff, I'm saying, “We at the end of the day, our body, our organs, our brain doesn't have eyes and ears. The only way it knows what is going on is through these chemicals signals that it gets. And those chemical signals we can control.” So, what if–and that's how I start. Notice the word I use, “what if.” I didn't say how yet. And that to me is the key when you start anything in life. You just don't worry about how. You start to focus. And what if that was possible? What if you could actually understand every biochemical activity in your body? Okay. I got that. Let's assume that is possible. Then, what other biochemical things you can add or delete through nutrition that would change the biochemical activities to be what you want and get rid of the things you don't want? And now at that level, everyone said, “If that could be done, that'll be pretty cool.” Right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  Now, the fact is this morning, we probably spent in last night hours talking about why are you putting the ashwagandha here? Why are you putting this? And you're explaining and said, “This is going to do this. This is going to do that.”

Ben:  Why we were able to have pizza and cheesecake last night for dinner, and actually, have the amazing superfood based pizza and cheesecake.

Naveen:  My part of cheesecake was not the cheesecake that people think of, right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  The cheesecake was not made from cheese.

Ben:  Right. It's this raw vegan cashew, macadamia nut, lemon, blueberry cheesecake, and the pizza that we had was Jessa's fermented sourdough with–what did we have? And we had tomatoes, and artichoke hearts, and the cashew cheese.

Naveen:  And the vegan cheese?

Ben:  Yeah. Well, we had to do everything. When you were on your way, I said, “Well do you [00:24:51] _____ have any dietary restrictions?” You said, “Nothing that moves or lives.” And so, yeah. Normally when I have guests over, we'll grill some ribeyes and have some chicken or something.

Naveen:  You and I are so unlike each other.

Ben:  Kale salad and it was wonderful. As a matter of fact, my sleep was really good last night, I was commenting this morning because I probably had about three to four times the number of carbohydrates I'd normally consume at night. And of course even though for me, metabolically long term, I think that I would probably have too much glucose fluctuation from that. Short term, I think I crushed like nine hours of sleep last night because I had so much serotonin from all these carbohydrates.

Naveen:  Even melatonin.

Ben:  Well, the serotonin gets converted into the melatonin. So, back to what you were getting at though, of course, we could have ordered Domino's Pizza and we could have had cheesecake factory cheesecake. And the protein expression that is derived from that based on the way that the genes that we are equipped from are actually being expressed into proteins in the body, it's going to change based on that meal. And so, what I had asked you earlier was what you're excited about or what topics that you're looking at. You start talking about health, and then this whole idea of genetic expression. So, when it comes to genetic expression, and specifically how it might relate to something like anti-aging or longevity, what is it exactly that you're getting at?

Naveen:  So, basically, what I was saying was that today, everything is fundamentally based on faith, or somebody did in a study for these 20 people and something happened and they said, “Oh, it worked.” You are Ben. You are not that person who they did the study on. Just because it worked on someone else doesn't mean it's going to work on you because your body is very different from the person that they tested on. And everything today we do, we actually take it on faith. We essentially, if I may say so, join the church of that nutrient, right? I joined the church that NAD is going to do the anti-aging. You have no idea. You could take NAD for 10 years.

Ben:  Well, I mean, but we're living in an era of self-qualification. Like I can do testing and actually know something–

Naveen:  Now, that's my point is most people don't. And to me, that was the key for me was when we do something, can we measure you absolutely digitally, right? So, what if we could measure your cellular senescence, we could measure your cellular health? What if we could not just measure your mitochondrial health, we can look at mitochondrial biogenesis, we can look at glycolysis pathways, you can look at pyruvates, you can look at electronic transport chain, you can look at your Krebs cycle? Now, you're literally looking down everything and you say, “Here are where your body is, and now I'm going to give these nutrients based on what we know today, and then we see what happens.”

And by the way, there is a good chance 60% of the things might just work because we knew, and other 40% we said, “Wow! That didn't work for Ben.” Now, guess what, we're going to tweak it and learn, and we're going to make it just work for you, not for John, but for Ben. And that was never ever possible because that personalization and precision would never be possible because now you were thinking about, “Now, I need a doctor hundreds of tens of thousands of dollars of tests, these pieces of nutrition,” and then measure, and then say, “Oh, that would have been out of reach.” And what is–

Ben:  That is something that a lot of people do, but it is not super scalable. But what you're describing, that's what I've personally done for like six years. I do my urine test, my blood test, my stool test, my saliva test.

Naveen:  But you also got a million-dollar worth of stuff sitting in the basement here. My point is not everyone can do that or afford it. And what I was trying to say was this is the first time in the human history where the technology is now becoming easily accessible and affordable to everyone. And that is what fascinated me. Before I started Viome, I kept thinking, “Why me and why now?” I mean, those are the two questions you have to ask anytime you start something. Why now? What is it that exists today that didn't exist five years ago? Right? That means what is this going to exist in five years that doesn't exist today that I want to take advantage of? So, that's why now. And when you start to see the confluence of now, the cost of digitizing the human body, which is cost of sequencing has come down significantly. So, you're not talking tens of thousands of dollars, you're talking about tens of dollars, right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  Cost of analyzing these petabytes of data, this massive data that's coming out of the sequencing. You require massive computing power. You couldn't use a supercomputer to do that. Now, you can fire thousand cores on [00:29:48] _____, boom, you can compute it. Artificial intelligence to be able to understand the meaning of all that, it's possible today, couldn't have been 10 years ago. So, you say, “Why now?” Right? And then, you say, “Why me?” And that is really interesting is that anytime you start a business, you have to ask yourself couple of questions. One of them is, “What is it that I believe that most people disagree?” And in other words, what question that I am asking that is different from what everyone else has been asking because as an entrepreneur, it's not my job necessarily to have the right answer. Am I asking the right question?

Point is, what problem are you trying to solve, that's the main thing. Then you say, “How do you solve that?” But if you're asking the wrong question, that means if you're fundamentally solving the wrong problem, it doesn't matter who helps you solve it, you're still solving the wrong problem. And that is the key. So, when I started healthcare and saying what I believe in is what matters is going to be, what is going on inside the body, not what is your DNA, what organisms are in your gut, who is doing it because those are all the names that we as humans gave. It didn't matter. So, my thought process was what if we can understand the biochemical activities? What if we can understand everything that's going on? And what if you can take the food or supplements or nutrients as a way to modulate that? It took me about four or five years after that vision. I started Viome. And you and I have talked about the whole thing about the gut, so I'm not going to focus on that.

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Alright, let's go back to Naveen.

Naveen:  The reason for that was there is 40 trillion of these guys sitting in our body, generating these chemicals that we completely ignore because we are focused on the human DNA, and these 40 trillion organisms–

Ben:  What you're referring right now is specifically the–

Naveen:  Gut microbiome.

Ben: –the gut microbiome. And well, I mean, to a certain extent, obviously there's also the skin microbiome and the oral microbiome, but you're talking specifically about the metabolites being produced by, not the bacteria themselves, but what metabolites are those bacteria producing.

Naveen:  So, basically, it's called micropoops, right? So, the microbiomes are pooping in your place. And by the poops are actually signaling the human body what to do, right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  So, cells inside your gut lining, they don't know when to produce serotonin. So, 90% of all serotonin is produced in your gut. They don't know when to produce serotonin until they see the signal from the microbiome. So, microbiome releases the metabolites, signaling molecule that literally tells epithelial cells start producing serotonin. Right?

Ben:  Right. And so, to clarify, the serotonin is not produced by the bacteria. The serotonin is produced by your own epithelial cells, but they're waiting on the signaling from the bacteria that are present in your body. And if that signal is received correctly, then you produce serotonin, then that serotonin would act via what we know about the gut-brain access to affect mood, affect sleep, et cetera.

Naveen:  That's right. So, now imagine that. So, now, we were all used to focus on what organism is in my gut. It doesn't matter because that organism may not be sending the signal because you're not feeling that.

Ben:  So, the question is not, “What organism is in my gut?” it's, “What is the organism in my gut doing? What is it producing? What is the metabolite?”

Naveen:  [00:35:51] _____. And then, you go into the other side of the wall. Now all that happened, my next question was, how do we know what is changing inside the human body based on what just is happening in the gut? So, literally, if you look at your body, there is a tube going through it. There is a gateway to the gut. We call that the mouth. The mouth is amazing to me. This is another thing you and I never talked about. Here's my surprise. There are more species, more types of microorganisms in your mouth than in the gut. Nobody ever–I mean, I did not know.

Ben:  Really?

Naveen:  The more types of microorganisms in your mouth than in the gut. The quantity is 100. Less than 1% are in your mouth in terms of quantity, but the types–

Ben:  Okay. So, it's like the count in the mouth is lower, but the diversity is higher in the mouth.

Naveen:  Those are substantially high.

Ben:  Interesting.

Naveen:  But in terms of total, it's less than 1%, right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  But here is very interesting thing. You and I heard our moms tell us, “Chew, chew, chew. Chew your food.” What was going on? That is literally where the first time the food starts to get metabolized in your mouth.

Ben:  Right. Metabolized, exposed to amylase.

Naveen:  Yeah.

Ben:  Arguably also that that is giving a chance for cholecystokinin to be produced in the gut. So, you have better satiety. We know that when you chew a lot, you get more of the parasympathetic activation. Yeah, there's a variety of benefits, but yeah, that's where the digestion begins. And as a matter of fact, and I don't want to take you too far off track, but there was a reason this morning that I made your smoothie so thick that you ate it with a spoon because I've found that anytime I'm drinking a smoothie or a superfood mix, I'm less satiated and I feel the effects of that from an energetic standpoint less than if I savor every bite and it makes it super thick. You saw how long I had to run that blender for like three minutes. But then I spoon it with the spatula into the bowl, then I put all the superfoods on top of it, and you eat your smoothie with a spoon, and your mouth goes to work as you move that smoothie around through the mouth. The amylase is working. Your cholecystokinin is being produced.

Naveen:  And it's signaling. It starts to send signals to the gut what is about to come down. So, the whole body is prepared for that food. When you drink your stuff, body doesn't know. It's like, boom, it's there, right?

Ben:  Well, when you drink it, or if you have a super nutritious food or meal that you would normally chew, if you simply chew inadequately–and I think that the whole chewing issue goes far beyond that. I think it's related to jaw strength. I think it's related to tooth crowding like we know that lack of chewing and eating in a rush state, or drinking all of our foods, or even feeding our children super soft food for too long a period of time, there are just so many downstream issues from a symmetrical standpoint and from a metabolic standpoint.

Naveen:  Agreed. So, my point I was trying to make was that you have to look at what is going on in your mouth, right?

Ben:  Okay. So, oral biome. Oral biome, lower count, higher diversity, why is that important?

Naveen:  So, the couple of things interesting to happen. Those microbiome, just like we heard of the term leaky gut, imagine leaky gum. What happens is now when your gums get weak because the bacteria, these parasites are eating away that's got the gum lining, just like they eat away the gut lining, now they start to get to work because now they run out of blood. They can now start to look like causing whole bunch of havoc. So, now we have shown–some of the research is showing that even the things like Alzheimer may be actually caused by the periodontal disease that actually the bacteria leaking through the blood, making the blood-brain barrier permeable, and going up to the brain–

Ben:  Periodontal inflammation.

Naveen:  Periodontal inflammation. But here's what happened. Causing the brain inflammation. And then, our glial cells, which is like immune system, releasing the amyloid-beta, trying to corral and clean up these organisms from there. So, essentially, they react to the infection. And when the system cannot clean them up, then they start to get tangled up. So, now they're starting to believe that most of the neurodegenerative diseases are in fact infectious diseases. And there are two schools of thought, either they're coming from the gut microbiome through the epithelial cell or they're going through the oral microbiome going through the leaky gut.

Ben:  Now, this begs the question because we know that a leaky gut can be brought on by everything from excess stress to glyphosate exposure to high consumption of things that might aggravate the gut, like a large intake of plant-based anti-nutrients, et cetera. When it comes to the gums, or the mouth, or periodontitis, or leaky mouth, leaky gums, do we know what might actually cause an issue like that?

Naveen:  So, same thing. So, it is the opportunistic bacteria, just like in the gut. So, ecosystem in general works well. Now, for example, what happens is when we are eating food and that food gets stuck between the gum line, now these bacteria are eating that food and they start to make [00:41:00] _____. So, the trick really is it is not about brushing that matters, it's about cleaning the mouth up. So, when you're eating the food–people used to in olden days would take the root and chew the root. Guess what it's doing, that was doing the flossing for you. Right?

Ben:  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I know that your ancestors are of Indian origin and I actually–

Naveen:  But my ancestors are the same as your ancestors.

Ben:  Yes. And most of my oral biome health practices are borrowed from Ayurveda. Meaning that when I wake, I do coconut oil pulling. And I actually make my own coconut oil pulling cubes. I didn't show you these in my refrigerator, but I use little molds. I'll melt down the coconut oil and I put peppermint and oregano, and sometimes some rosemary or some cinnamon essential oils in with the melted coconut oil. Then I pour that into a mold, just like the little chocolate molds that you normally make chocolates with. Put that in the freezer for about 20 minutes–

Naveen:  Not the mold of the organism mold.

Ben:  Right, but like an actual mold that will shape it. And then, I keep these in the refrigerator and pop one in my mouth when I wake up and I swish around my mouth about 20 minutes. I have a copper tongue scraper up in my bathroom and I scrape my tongue from back to front. And then, it's interesting because I have not adopted this practice, but the sticks or the twigs that come from trees like pear or apple–

Naveen:  Or neem tree.

Ben: –or neem, yes, these are used as almost like flossing tools. And I think that between brushing coconut oil pulling, tongue scraping, and the occasional flossing with a stick or whatever else, a lot of these are Ayurvedic practices.

Naveen:  Waterpik, dude, what does that mean? When you say coconut pulling, that's literally Waterpik, right?

Ben:  Yeah, it is. Some people actually are on the other side of the fence and they say, “Well, coconut is antibacterial. So is oregano, so is peppermint.” Therefore, you're just nuking your entire biome in your mouth, but it really–you're not going to kill off a bunch of good bacteria. Most of these plants and nutrients–

Naveen:  Opportunistic guys.

Ben:  Yeah. They're going to take out the opportunistic pathogenic bacteria. You're not going to have a sterile mouth. You're going to have a well-balanced mouth from a bacterial standpoint. And so, what you're saying is that this periodontitis is basically going to affect signaling to such an extent where you're going to have increased risk of chronic disease with poor oral hygiene.

Naveen:  In fact, the research that I sent you last night, I don't know if you've probably got a chance to read it or not, it literally shows when you have the inflammation in your mouth, not only these bacteria end up going to the gut themselves causing inflammation, but here what's surprising was the T cells, the Th17 cells themselves moved from the mouth all the way to the gut causing the inflammation.

Ben:  And that's significant because–well, we need Th17 cells as killer cells, as immune system soldiers, so to speak. They are going to call inflammation to any area in which they are concentrated. And so, what you're saying is that in an area in which you have poor oral microbiome, you get Th17 movement into the digestive tract.

Naveen:  That's right. And so, my point is now, we have the gut-brain axis, we have gut skin axis, we have gut liver access to all the things we talked about, how do you get the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And now, we have the mouth gut axis that is going through here. So, my point is our whole body really is interconnected and we have all been looking at these isolated parts. So, that was the whole idea was what if we can actually look at the integrative approach?

So, we say, “Okay. Rome wasn't built in a day. How do we start to understand what is going on and learn as we go along?” And to learn something, you have to create a foundation, and then you build on that foundation. Four years ago, you and I talked about I started this Gut Intelligence test to see what can we actually understand what is going on inside the gut, and it's great. Now, we got that right. I want to now go to the next part, which is, how does it impact the human body, the human cells, the mitochondria? And we're going to not talk about the anti-aging here because it's really, really interesting things I've been learning.

And so, we launched–and again, I'm not trying to talk about the promotion of anything. But to me, the fundamental difference was we started this thing called Health Intelligence, and the idea was, can we now understand how the human cells are changed or impacted by what is happening inside the gut? And can we actually look at them at a cellular level? So, everyone has been talking about, today, you do a blood test. Blood tests, what you're doing is really at a high level, you're looking at some of the minerals, you're looking at some of the vitamins, and you're looking at the things like LDL and HDL. And somehow, in a medical world, has made us believe that when you have high LDL and low HDL and the ratio is bad, somehow you can have heart disease. And that has never been proven, by the way. That has never been shown that if you synthetically–synthetically, not organically.

Ben:  They need to be present in order for something like cardiovascular risk disease to be a factor, but they're not sufficient in and of themselves with the other factors. However, those blood tests, to the defense of allopathic medicine, for example, I think the reason the blood tests are relied upon so heavily is that they are scalable. They are very scalable at this point and affordable to run a lipid panel on someone [00:46:40] _____.

Naveen:  And that's my point. So, now, what if you can do the same blood test and make it a similar price point someday to be able to look at them at a cellular level? I mean, that's my whole idea. Now, today, it may cost $100, but guess what, two years from now, it will be $50. Five years from now, it will be $10. And someday, it'll be $1. So, to me, these things eventually, just like a cell phone, this price will come down. So, even the fact it is $100 today, not $10,000, it's already affordable to many people, not all people. But when it comes down to $10, it becomes affordable to billion people. When it comes down to $1, it becomes affordable to five billion people, right?

But the point here is that was my whole idea was, can we do that? So, we literally decided that, can we do a finger prick blood? And can we actually analyze them at that level? And now, that is something we succeeded at. And I think you and I talked about–you're going to be doing a test, right, Ben? On Monday, you're going to get that kit and you're going to–

Ben:  Yeah. So, this one that you're talking about is called Health Intelligence. And what you're looking at then from a drop of blood are–what are you looking at?

Naveen:  So, we're basically looking at every single gene expression in your blood.

Ben:  Okay. So, you're returning back to what we were discussing earlier, the actual metabolites, or the actual proteins–

Naveen:  Being produced–all the pathways about–no, no.

Ben:  So, it's a proteomics test?

Naveen:  No, no, no. It is an RNA test. RNA means a gene expression. But here's what happens. DNA gets converted into RNA. RNA, now looking at what gene expression in the pathways are actually overexpressed or under expressed, now you can see what amino acids, what peptides, and polypeptides, and literally these amino acids then go make the protein, right? But if you can look at them before they make protein, you know all the enzymes now that are being produced. So, based on that, now you can say, “Hey, am I going to be actually inducing AMPK?” That AMPK is going to–what it's going to do? It's going to significantly increase the production of PGC-1 alpha. What is PGC-1 alpha is going to do? That's the master regulator for mitochondrial biogenesis. Now, a lot of people take the stuff that induces the PGC-1 alpha over. And people are thinking, “Oh, you know what's a great PGC-1 alpha inducer is?” Energy.

Ben:  I was going to say the hour and a half long fasted walk we went on this morning is a pretty good PGC-1 alpha.

Naveen:  But exercise. Oh, it is. Exercising is one of the great ones. Exercising basically induces AMPK that literally goes to PGC-1 alpha that actually does mitochondrial biogenesis. The point is–

Ben:  And to an [00:49:28] _____ fasted exercise because ketone bodies are generated [00:49:32] _____ PGC-1 alpha.

Naveen:  So, that's a slightly different part that's called cellular stress. So, when you fast, you put your cells under stress. And when there is cellular stress, it induces the PGC-1 alpha to say, “Hey, things are not going well. Start producing more of that.” So, what happens is it starts to produce more ATP. So, mitochondria–

Ben:  Right. Which is why we also see a lot of these xenohormetic compounds from everything like French Roux, which is now more largely known as the pharmaceutical metformin, or when we look at berberine, or many of these other plant-based compounds they are inducing as xenohormetic stress, which–this sounds like a trendy catch-all term, but it is true. These are almost like exercise in a bottle. You're literally consuming things that via PGC-1 alpha pathways actually activate mitochondrial biogenesis. And I would in no way argue that you can chew on some berberine and get what you'd get out of a hard bike ride, but yet introducing a lot of these variables that would increase PGC-1 alpha is a generally smart strategy. And what you're saying is in a case like this blood test, you're measuring the RNA that is indicating whether or not DNA is being expressed into proteins that would cause this PGC-1 alpha activation.

Naveen:  But that's only one part of it. Then you need to decide, is that actually good or bad? So, for example, you're taking NMN, the NAD+ precursor. Most people think it's anti-aging, but it actually would harm you if you have inflammation.

Ben:  That's what a lot of people don't realize about–well, NAD, NR, NMN.

Naveen:  All of them.

Ben:  Any of them in a state of present cellular inflammation.

Naveen:  Senescence. And cellular senescence.

Ben:  Yes.

Naveen:  So, my point is this is literally, I think now you are getting the same thing.

Ben:  Yeah, but close the loop on that because this is important for people to know. I don't want to gloss over this. Cellular senescence is this state in which smaller number of senescent cells, especially in youth, they can assist with anabolism, their pro-growth, et cetera.

Naveen:  SASP.

Ben:  But these so-called zombie cells, these senescent cells, as they accumulate with age, can result in excess aging or increased risk of chronic disease.

Naveen:  And inflammation, massive inflammation.

Ben:  And inflammation. And arguably, sometimes the chicken comes before the egg, and inflammation causes cellular senescence, and cellular senses causes inflammation. But regardless, if you have inflammation present or a high amount of cellular senescence, consumption of NAD, NR, NMN can aggravate that cellular senescence. And so, if you are consuming vegetable oils, if you're overtraining, if you're under sleeping, if you're on airplanes all the time and not mitigating exposure to non-native EMF, et cetera, and all you're doing is NAD, NR, or NMN, you're actually increasing your risk of inflammation or cellular senescence. And this is actually why. And I think I was telling you this, Naveen. Some of the smarter docs I know now, who administer NAD or use that in their practice, they're also recommending or utilizing anti-senescent cell compounds along with that, particularly things like quercetin, which is very, very good when combined with NAD, and oleuropein.

Naveen:  But it's quercetin. But you do not want that if you have high hydrogen sulfide production in your gut because it binds to sulfide. And then, you don't want to take that anyway with vitamin C. So, my point I'm trying to make is that all these complications, most people somehow want simple life. “Just tell me to take NAD and my life will be good.” Unfortunately, the human body is a lot more complex, and that's the reason–

Ben:  Right. You don't open the hood of a Ferrari and see two red buttons, one that says, “Go,” and one that says, “Stop.” Right?

Naveen:  It probably does, but what do I know?

Ben:  You got cylinders, you got valves, you got injectors. Now with Teslas, you have an entire series of chips like a motherboard. And so, what you're saying then is that by testing multiple pathways and predicting multiple expressions of proteins, you would then be able to make more educated decisions about not only which supplements or nutrients or diets to consume, but also the amount or the quantity of said nutrients–

Naveen:  Yeah. For example, it goes back to quercetin. If you're taking a quercetin and you also end up taking glutathione, what's happening is quercetin produces tile, and you take the Glucoten, now you can have a tile toxicity. So, point we're trying to do is to look at things like cellular senescence. We look at all the things that are causing inflammatory activity, and you have to know what is causing these cytokines or these immune system cells. I'm assuming everyone listening to this probably understand cytokine. Cytokines are really the immune system cells. Some of them are anti-inflammatory, some of them are pro-inflammatory, and you have to look at them all these cytokines, what they are doing. And then, you need to know what pathways are activating the inflammation.

So, for example, I mean you and I intuitively know the inflammation may come because we have some infection, right? It may come from histamine pathway. And what's a histamine pathway? When you have some type of allergies, so food allergies or environmental allergies. So, now you need to know is it coming from histamine pathway inflammation or the inflammation is coming from cellular stress, xenotoxic stress? So, once you understand, not just you have inflammation, what pathways are activated to cause that inflammation, now you can be much more precise to say, “Okay. You can still take NAD+ because the inflammation there is high. It's because of histamine pathways, but take that with antihistamine.”

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  So, my point is, otherwise, you would never know. And that to me is really the key to the human body is understanding everything. So, we now look at immune activation. So, your immune system health, your mitochondrial health, your cellular health, cellular senescence. We are also looking at stress response, which is oxidative stress, xenotoxic stress, and every environmental stress to see what is actually going on. And based on that, now we can say you need to take resveratrol, but don't take berberine.

Ben:  And this is primarily via blood analysis, but would you then want to pair that with something like oral biome or gut biome? Because you're still missing out on some of the picture.

Naveen:  We pair them. So, the Health Intelligence does two things right now, your gut microbiome test and the blood test, combines them together. And the next thing coming up is called whole-body intelligence that does saliva, stool, and the blood. So, we literally go from the top of the tube, bottom of the tube, other side of the tube, and we combine all the things together. And that's whole-body intelligence. That's not launched yet. So, we started with Gut Intelligence, health intelligence, whole-body intelligence. And that is the whole idea is, can you do that? In that case, the world becomes not just personalized because personalized has been a term that you and I know. It has been so misused, right?

People say, “Oh, I'm doing a personalization.” Based on what? Well, you're a man, you're a woman. Well, you're 50 plus, I'm 50. You're black, you're white. I mean, all type, those are categorizations, they're not personalization. Personalization is when I actually look at the molecular level. And that to me, the reason we change that term is we call them precision. So, it's called precision supplements, precision nutrients, precision what? We precisely look at what's going on. And now, here was the next part, and this is still in the vision state we have not launched yet. What if you can make those nutrients made to order for each individual after you analyze? I mean, you have to agree. Despite any business or not, that would be awesome something you would want, wouldn't you?

Ben:  Right. Well, you're talking about like custom delivery of the nutrients or the supplements based on the actual bloodwork.

Naveen:  Based on the actual molecular platform, if you can make those capsules on demand. And that people said, “You can't scale that. It's going to be very expensive.” And what we figured out is what if we can use robotics? What if you can actually use AI and robotics to actually deliver that? Because there's no reason the cost of making custom should be any more than making a cost of making categorized things, right? And that to me was a brilliance of what I think how we look at life is. There's no reason that if you can buy that capsule for 10 cents, maybe it will cost 11 cents, but can't go further than that because at the end of the day, robotics is a one-time capital expense.

So, what if you have, let's assume 500 ingredients sitting in my–bins, 500 bins? Computer says, “You need 11 milligrams of lycopene, you need 12 milligrams of butene, you need 13 milligrams of that,” and literally, the powder gets weighed and comes down, and it starts to go down into powder, gets shaken up, and it starts to get put in the capsules, and they put them in a sachet and deliver to you on that day. Why should that cost any more than somebody doing the same thing but making millions of the same thing?

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.

Naveen:  So, the point is, and that's really where I think the world is headed is that our medicines, whether we take statin or any–whether it's nutrients or it's medicine, it's going to be made personalized for each individual.

Ben:  What are your thoughts on supplementation versus whole food? Meaning, lycopene, for example, from a tomato. So, the reason I ask this is–and again, this will flirt with the borders of controversy, but one thing that people get concerned about with Bill Gates, for example, who of course is a very controversial subject right now because people are concerned that–whatever. He's trying to profit from his investment WHO and vaccinate. All of that aside, I was having a conversation with somebody the other day and they're like, “Well, yeah, Bill just looks at everybody as basically like a computer.” And how can you program a computer as zeros and ones?

And just basically, if you can treat people like a computer, they're obviously fixable, they're hackable. And then, you have the people who will instead say, “No. You can't just treat a person like a computer and fill them full of zeros and ones and get a predictable logical response.” And so, for you when you're looking at, “Okay, we're going to design these 50 supplements at these exact milligram amounts based on this little drop of blood and the saliva in the stool that you gave and just like fix everything and eliminate chronic disease.” How do you think of whole foods versus supplementation with that regards? Why wouldn't you say just like, “Change your diet, go out in the sunshine, get outside barefoot, have dinner with your family, that type of thing?”

Naveen:  In answer is I didn't say that. I'm simply saying that by definition, they call supplement. What's the meaning of supplement? They supplement. They are not alternative to food. That means you have to still eat the good natural food. In fact, in the Health Intelligence, we tell you what foods you should eat and why, what foods you should avoid and why. And then, we say, “Here are the additional nutrients and here's very interesting thing you're going to find.” For example, strawberry may be on your complete avoid list, and we may still take the extract that is useful, the flavonoid.

Ben:  Like fisetin, yeah.

Naveen:  Fisetin. And we can actually give you the fisetin. The reason is because strawberry also has a lot of histamine producing stuff.

Ben:  That's a good point. You can come out from the other direction and say, “Yeah. The whole food is good.” But also, if you go with the whole food version, you're consuming something that your body technically is able to handle. So, let's hack this. Let's take just the extract from that whole food that you might be able to actually handle and put that–that's an interesting perspective.

Naveen:  So, my point is sometimes we would say, “Eat the food.” And when we say, “Look, this food has a great compound, but it also for you is going to be also producing histamine. So, let's just take a fisetin and give it to you and make the food on the avoid list.” And sometimes the superfoods, the blueberry, may also be on your supplement side. So, remember, supplements are always supplement. Ideally, what I would love for people to do would be eat the right food, avoid the bad food, and take the supplements to essentially–because with the foods, you have to eat 20 pounds of blueberries to get the same thing that you can get in 12 milligrams in that.

Ben:  Yeah.

Naveen:  It's concentrated. So, my point is sometimes you supplement the nutrients on top of the food, but it's not, what I would say, alternative to the food.

Ben:  Right, right. Well, that's an interesting idea. I'm curious to see how it goes with the full rollout. When did you guys actually start doing this since the last time I talked to you?

Naveen:  So, here's very interesting. We launched this product month ago, and here is very interesting. Three quarters of people who are going up buying this whole product now. It's mind-boggling to me how well it is resonating with people.

Ben:  Yeah. It is interesting. And it is smart from a business standpoint. You're actually explaining something to me yesterday because we do have a lot of people listening in, who I think are probably also interested in just like how you think about things from a business standpoint. And I think the way you described it was something like a flywheel. When you have a business, technically, the customer should be getting an improved experience each time. You'll do a better job explaining things, just I did with flywheel.

Naveen:  It's important that any business that you create, if your thousand customer is getting exactly the same product that your first customer got, you have not created a flywheel. And the second part of that concept is if someone is doing the thing your first time versus tenth time, if they're getting exactly the same value, then you have not created a flywheel. And the flywheel concept is every single person who is actually part of that ecosystem is making everyone after them better and everyone before them better because now, the data that you're learning from is making the artificial intelligence better and better and better. And now, even if a new company to come along and they may have 10x better technology, but the fact is you learn from the million people already what is going to work and not going to work. The technology itself cannot solve the problem of learning.

Ben:  Give an example of a flywheel concept in a business. Perhaps some businesses people might already be familiar with.

Naveen:  Very, very simple. So, today, when you look at the gym, you go to the gym, it doesn't matter you are the first customer or you're a thousandth customer, you're going to get the same treadmill, same thing, everything's the same, because they're not looking at to saying, “Hey, Ben, we know what type of a person you are. We've done all the analysis. And based on all the thousand people, here is what we want you to do. Here's what you should do.” So, unless you're collecting the data and analyzing the data when someone comes along, and so you would literally fit here, and this is what most likely to benefit. And the second time when you do the test a third time, now we're going to continue personalizing for you, but we already know you're going to fit here.

Ben:  Right. So, if someone were running a gym based on the concept of a flywheel, when a member joins the gym, they would get, for example, VO2 max test, the body fat test–

Naveen:  Well, this is [01:05:37] _____ test, right?

Ben:  Wait. Okay. So, functional movement analysis, et cetera. They would have a program preferably from a scalability standpoint that's delivered via artificial intelligence or an analysis of those results. That program then gets printed out, it would get handed to them. And every month, they would repeat this battery of tests. And every month, the artificial intelligence would get better and better at recognizing the exact direction that person is headed so that that person, basically just from a pure business standpoint, is going to, for each month that they're a member of that gym, get greater and greater amount of value delivered because that gym is learning more and more about their body and able to steer them with greater precision towards their goal. And what you're saying is that a successful business should always be stepping back and looking at. This is, hopefully, helpful for any of you out there who are running a business or who are trying to make your business more unique or more valuable to people is what you're looking at is, how am I making this customer a better person by collecting data about them so that their experience can be tweaked and customized with each successive month or week?

Naveen:  And even the first time. So, while you're saying is that, “Hey, that works for that person,” but point is having done millions of people, I'm already–I had to know you're going to be most likely here. Do we get you a better start and then make you better?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  So, that is the key is that if you're selling something that's a product and everyone, it doesn't matter the first customer bought, they got the same bag of coffee. But now, if I can figure out based on your analysis and say, “Your coffee could be coated before I send it to you with all the nutrients. I would spray those nutrients and coat that coffee bean for you because I know based on your health intelligence, that's all the nutrients you need.” And now, let's assume you're a coffee drinker. Can I coat my coffee with all the nutrients before I send it to you?

Ben:  Right. Or, I mean, there are many directions you could take for this, but let's say at Kion, for example–and we saw a lot of coffee and we've got energy bars. Even if someone were to do something like fill out a profile of mood state score each month, quick 10-minute survey and we see, “Oh, your energy levels were lower this month. You reported on your sleep being lower quality, but we also noted that you ordered double the amount of coffee. We've recognized that you're probably overstimulating yourself. Therefore, we're going to recommend that you get L-theanine and one of our adaptogenic blends or something like that this month to–because we're noting perceptions that–consuming too much caffeine, something like that.” So, you're collecting information about the customer, then customizing their experience and collecting data about them that you can then go back and look at patterning on to be able to make a better decision for that customer moving forward.

Naveen:  And making that AI so much better, it becomes such a great experience. They can't switch anymore because they just don't know why, but every time they get their coffee, they say, “Oh my god, I just feel better.”

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.

Naveen:  And they just don't know why. But you're constantly improving on it by coating it with different nutrients, doing the different things, adding things to it. And there is no reason you can create a custom coffee for them. People somehow think the coffee beans are coffee beans, but what the coffee beans were, the actual nutrients that you give them because it's just a delivery. So, remember, these things are delivery mechanism. Bars are delivery mechanism. What if the bar, essentially, you can incorporate all the nutrients that you're talking about into the bar itself and just think of a bar as a delivery mechanism?

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. And then, see, folks, just so you know, because I've talked to a lot of successful people, just having the blessing of being able to run this podcast, talk to people a lot smarter, a lot more successful than me. I see this pattern over and over again outside the box thinking, and what you would refer to as moonshot thinking, this what if thinking, this idea that you described, “Why now? Why me?” And this whole idea, even Tim Ferriss, I think the way that he does it is he sits down and kind of like paints out the worst-case scenario of a decision, like what could go wrong if I took this drastic decision, list all the things that could go wrong, and what you might do if those things went wrong?

And this idea of thinking big, thinking outside your comfort zone, or creating scenarios that might seem like silly what-ifs. Like even as you're describing this to me right now, Naveen, I'm like, “Well, no. I can't take a fine, single-origin coffee from Guatemala and bastardize it by changing the ingredient profile, the roasting profile, the nutrient profile of it, or pre-grinding it and packaging it with this stuff because you'll decrease the shelf life.” But yet it's a thought exercise that might lead me to a solution where I could say, “Well, no. I could still give people wonderful tasting, organic, antioxidant-0rich coffee.” But then as they're in their shopping cart getting their coffee from Kion, I can say, “Here are the other products that we're recommending to you that you bundle with your coffee.” So, the coffee is the same, but it's what they might be co-ingesting with the coffee to make it a customized experience for them.

Naveen:  So, you take all those supplements that you're talking about, powder, and say, “Hey, here's a coffee. When you brew it, throw this in the coffee itself and brew it with that.” Right?

Ben:  Right.

Naveen:  So, my point is you can deliver. I mean, those are all delivery mechanism.

Ben:  L-theanine, eleuthero, reishi, ashwagandha, those type of things.

Naveen:  Those are delivery mechanisms. And again, when you are looking at this concept, don't focus on how. And that's really the difference between the engineers and the people who are operator. Every time you give them a concept, they're thinking, “So, how am I going to do that one? That's not going to work. That's not going to work.” Forget how, just focus on, does this need to happen? Does this make sense? Is this what you want to do? And then, you figure out how to do that, right? If you think the coffee beans really need to not be grounded, that's okay. Can you now have a powder so you can essentially just say, “Hey, sprinkle this in the coffee or pour this in the coffee, or if you're brewing it, put this in there?” Whatever it is, those are all thousand different ways of delivering. If you're delivering water, can I change the cap? The cap has all the nutrients. So, when I open the cap, it delivers all the nutrients. You don't want to be mixing it because it might get different flavor.

Ben:  Right. Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, I had water once. This company sent me this brilliant water concept where you literally had like all of your multivitamins and your nutrients. They were in powdered form in the cap of the water bottle, and you just depress the button on the top of the water bottle and all the minerals and the vitamins went pouring into the water bottle, then you drank the water bottle. But stepping back, big picture, I just want you guys to know like this is how successful people think, this is how billionaires like Naveen think. You think outside the box. You don't limit yourself with the logistics of the scenario. You instead create the ideal scenario. And then, after that, you figure out whether or not you can make it work or–

Naveen:  How to make it work.

Ben:  And again, I think you'll probably admit this, Naveen, you don't know how to do a lot of things, yet what I've noted that you do is you then create a team. Like you then surround yourself with the people who, for all the logistics surrounding the what if, can solve the logistics. Your job is to immerse yourself in the books to research, follow the people on Twitter, and come up with the ideas that seem really weird or really outside the box, then you find the people and you say, “Make this work.” Or even, is this possible if it's remotely possible to make it work?

Naveen:  I never ask, “Is this possible?” Because that shows that there is a possibility it may not work.

Ben:  You say, “Make this possible.”

Naveen:  Make it possible. How should we do that? So, that's actually another concept I think you'll–when you do something, the question you have to ask is, what problems will need to be solved for it to work? So, let's assume someone says, “It is not possible today.” Got it. What problems will need to be solved for it to become possible? And then, you say, “Oh, I can solve that problem this way. I can solve that problem this way. I can solve that problem this way.” Now, this problem need to work on and solve that one and then we are done.” My point is that literally breaks it down and it's about going back to the things we were talking about asking the right question.

And that's another thought of an entrepreneurship, and I don't know how many people who are listening to it actually care about entrepreneurship. But in my mind, everyone is an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is someone who solves a problem. So, that means even if you are working for a company, you are an entrepreneur when you just don't think about the problems, you don't think about the solution, you actually go out and do it, then you are an entrepreneur. So, my point is it's not just about starting a company, it's about how you solve the problem. And it doesn't matter what you're doing. In your personal life, there are problems every day. How do you solve them makes you an entrepreneur.

Naveen:  So, I'll give an example. As you know, my other company other than Viome right now–I always say Wiome, it's not Wiome, it is “V.” Indians can't pronounce the word.

Ben:  Viome.

Naveen:  V as in Victor, right? V-I-O-M-E.

Ben:  Yes.

Naveen:  And I started the name of the company that I can't pronounce. Indians cannot pronounce the word “V.” I don't know how.

Ben:  Yeah. You say Wiome, huh? I just realized that. Yeah. You created a company you can't pronounce.

Naveen:  There you go.

Ben:  Yeah.

Naveen:  But the reason is because “Vi” is life and “Ome” is science, science of life. That's what I did. But I love the name, right?

Ben:  Yeah.

Naveen:  So, somebody else can pronounce it. But coming back to it, my other company is Moon Express. And the reason I mentioned that is when we were saying we can go live on the moon, you know what the people said? If you're going to live on the moon, how are you going to grow the food on the moon? That is how people ask. And I said, “That's a dumb question.” Because the right question to ask is, “Why do we eat food?” Because once you simply change this question, “How to grow the food?” the only solution is to grow the food. But if you ask the question, “Why do we eat food?” You say, “Oh, that dumb. Okay. We eat food because we need energy, and we eat food because we need nutrition.” And you said, “Oh, energy.”

Plants get energy from photosynthesis. What if we could do that? Bacteria get energy from radiation. What if we could do that? What if you were talking about CRISPR? We have bacteria who grow on radioactive nuclear waste. They have figured out how to protect their DNA from the radiation and how to use radiation for energy. Now, if you take that genes from those bacteria, use CRISPR to modify our own genes. Could we thrive on just radiation? “Honey, do you want to go out and get some radiation?”

Ben:  It sounds more fun to have a ribeye and maybe some lemon, blueberry, vegan cheesecake, but I get that idea, I get that idea. Why do we eat? And then, you solve that problem.

Naveen:  Yeah.

Ben:  It's super interesting. Now, one thing I did want to ask you about the moon, because I know you want to travel to the moon. In our last podcast, we talked about the rocks that you had harvested from the moon. I know that you find the moon intriguing, but a lot of people say, “Why are we spending all this money exploring this place and going to the moon when we have this vast quantity of, for example, ocean?”

Naveen:  Sought problems in that–

Ben:  Right. Why wouldn't we go and explore this vast immeasurable quantity of depth that we've barely even tapped into on our own planet before we go burning carbon and sending people to the moon or exploring the moon?

Naveen:  Well, let me give you two separate answers to that. First is this idea of, “Do this or do this.” It's a mindset of scarcity that if I do this, I can't do that. So, idea is, yes, do this and do that. So, that to me is the mindset of saying, “Why do I have to limit to just doing this? Why can't I just do this and that?” Right? So, that's first concept. Second is we as all humanity is living on a single spacecraft. We call that a spacecraft or planet Earth. What if our spacecraft gets damaged because we got hit by an asteroid? All eight billion or nine billion of us are going to get wiped out just like dinosaurs. So, do you want to be a species that get completely wiped out? Because we didn't back up. We didn't go to the moon, we didn't go to the Mars, we didn't go to the Pluto, we didn't go to a different galaxy altogether. So, we could literally be out of this galaxy.

Now, somehow, we have this idea this is the planet and we are somehow very unique. I mean, imagine, our galaxy is in our solar system. It's somewhere. The thing is our solar system in our galaxy sitting on the side. We are nowhere to be found in our own solar system and we're literally a speck of dust in our own solar system. Our solar system is a speck of dust in our galaxy. Our galaxy is a speck of dust in this universe. And our universe may be a speck of dust in this multiverse. So, my point is there are all these things out there and we now took the holy species and saying, “This is the speck of dust you can live.” Because now, and the speck of dust get wiped out, everyone is gone.

So, the thing that I find really fascinating is I hear people say, “I am really worried about our planet.” Really? Let me just tell you something. This planet would do just fine. Worry about the human species. When the asteroid hit the planet Earth, guess what happened. Asteroids were substantially bigger than us. They died. Planet in fact did just fine, so much so that it created humans. So, my point is human species may die out if we don't become a multi-planetary society. But planet would just go on and probably create a super intelligent human species for all we know.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. That's where I have the advantage of being a Christian. I can just say God made the planet and he's not going to let it go away because he works really hard on it. But we already had our hour-long discussion about that on our walk.

Naveen:  But God also created the universe. God wants you to live on all its creation.

Ben:  Yeah, that is true. And that's something I recently wrote an essay about this on my website called “Our Father's World,” and it's about this idea that everything–if you're reading the Bible, there's a verse about this that says, “Everything was made by God and everything is good. And therefore, who are we to say that the thorn of a rose is bad and to be cursed? Who are we to say that, whatever, psilocybin or cannabis are completely off with this?

Naveen:  Or that living on the Mars is not possible.

Ben:  Who are we to say that the moon isn't worthy of exploration just as much of the ocean? And I realize this is kind of more esoteric woo thinking, but I was just curious. That's a good answer that spirit of abundance would dictate that it's not that we should explore the ocean to the detriment of moon research or moon exploration, why not do both?

I'm very curious with as much research as you do and how much of a voracious lifelong learner that you are. If there are specific scientific journals, or books, or websites, or podcasts, or resources, you could give your top three, your top five, your top two. But if people want to explore some of the things that you found to be particularly intriguing or helpful, either things that you think are interesting right now or things that you've found to be really foundational for your own education or both, what are the top resources that you would give to people?

Naveen:  So, again, that depends on topic to topic. So, when I was learning about microbiome, there were 30 or 40 journals that I followed on microbiome. When I'm looking at understanding the cellular health, then I go read 40 journals that are actually just on biology.

Ben:  Paper or online?

Naveen:  Online, all online. And then, what I also do is I read lots of books. And here's, by the way, the trick that I think most people don't understand. When you read one book on that subject, the author's view becomes your view. When you read 10 books on that subject, you have now not only 10 different views, you end up creating the 11th view that is your own based on everything now that you've seen because now you're able to connect the dots that no one else has done, and you create a unique view, and which is what gives you the tremendous advantage.

Ben:  I like that. And I'll piggyback on that to comment that the more books that you read on a specific topic, the more that you realize that just because something is on paper or written on the internet does not mean that it's true.

Naveen:  That's right.

Ben:  And this is something where people fail a lot. They assume that because something was able to be published, it is therefore true. And the more that you immerse yourself from kind of like a horizontal standpoint across a wide variety of books, even if it's in a single sector, the more you realize that there are some areas of disagreement, and there are some areas of discontinuity, and there are some areas where people disagree with each other or conflict with it from–

Naveen:  Yeah. And that's where you can add value.

Ben:  And that's where you really begin to develop a well-rounded view and you realize, “Oh, wow. I can read.” But just because it's written down doesn't mean it's true. So, yeah. Don't just read one book on longevity, read 10. So, that being said, what are some specific resources?

Naveen:  Yeah. I'm just going to continue on that thought. I'm going to come right back to answering your questions, specifically, right? So, that's one part of reading the books. Other thing is you also want to read the things that are maybe tangential or even not related to the subject that you are currently interested in. And the reason for that I say is that more often than not, the solution to the problems that you're trying to solve may lie in completely different industry. So, for example, health is a great thing. You don't want to be reading lot of the current thinking on human biology or how the medical system gives drugs because a solution may lie in a big data problem that is being solved in totally different industry. It may lie in the nanotechnology that is being done in somewhere else. It may lie into the AI that is being developed for some other problem.

So, the thing you also want to do is develop the horizontal knowledge that we were talking about, the foundational knowledge of many different industries, and that is the key because you want to learn the vocabulary, the basic vocabulary of different industries. And the way I did that was, first of all, I watched a lot of TED Talks. I go to Singularity University. That's S-I-N-G-U-L-A-R-I-T-Y.

Ben:  Yeah, Singularity.

Naveen:  Singularity University. And there, you learn about the nanotechnology, the neuroscience, and a whole bunch of subjects. And once you get the basic foundational knowledge, and when you read a book, then you say, “Oh, I now understand what that means.” And sometimes here's a part that I think we have to be humble enough. When I read the first book, there is almost 70% of the stuff I don't understand because it's the first book I read. And then, I go back and sometimes I watch the Khan Academy videos trying to understand–

Ben:  Khan Academy, yes.

Naveen:  I'm not kidding you. Honestly, I was talking to Ali (ph), and then she's telling me about all this stuff that we're doing in the mitochondrial health. And she said, “This glycolysis is happening from how carbon sugar get glycolyzed, and then you go look at the pyruvate pathways, and then we look at these Krebs cycle, and then we go look at the electronic transport chain.” I'm thinking, “What is the bad thing here?” I took a deep breath and I said, “Okay. I'm going to Khan Academy and I'm tapping electronic transport chain.”

And I've now gone through every single way how mitochondrial work, and I'm looking at the endoplasmic reticulum, how actually the things mitochondria produce, how it goes out the thing into plasma, how it's going to get converted into protein. But the reason I see that is it is okay. Now, when I read the second time the same thing that she was–I said, “Now, I get it. Now, I have clear understanding of why it is important and what is going on.” Guess what, now I can read second book and third book and a fourth book, and now every time I find a new concept, I go back and learn that concept.

Ben:  You will like this tip because I know that you and your wife like to walk a lot. For example, I don't subscribe to a great deal of podcasts, but I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks because I like to walk, I like to hike, and I'll just view life as a constant series of education for my ears. And I have discovered one particularly helpful app. It's called Castbox. It's not the only podcast consuming an audiobook consuming app that will do this, but it has a search engine in it that searches not only the title and the keywords and the description of a podcast or an audiobook, but the audio itself.

And so, if I have anything that I want to learn about in preparation for an interview–for example, let's say that you and I wanted to spend an entire interview talking about moon rocks. I don't know very much about moon rocks, but I can go to Castbox and I can set up a search term for moon rocks. And I can download like 15 different podcasts that are a deep dive into that topic. And sometimes when I'm preparing for an interview, or wanting to learn a specific thing, I will use a keyword search term on audio, and then I will just crush as much audio as I can for a whole month, which is listening and listening–

Naveen:  So, what did you do to prepare for this one, dude?

Ben:  Do to prepare for this one. Fortunately, I know you're just this hack from Seattle, but I still have yet to read your book “Moonshots,” which I want to read. I just haven't gotten my hands on it yet, but you and I have talked enough back and forth to where I pretty much knew a lot. But what I did do was I read a few papers on transcriptomics. I read a few papers that are on the research section of your Health Intelligence website to better wrap my head around the testing of the proteins via RNA expression versus via–just looking at the genes themselves, the genetics themselves. Normally, if I would have been super prepared, I would have finished doing this Health Intelligence kit class, but–

Naveen:  And you were going to be doing that one next week.

Ben:  But you're an [censored] because you didn't let me do the test yet. So, I think I'll get there on Monday and I'll let you guys know what the results are like on that if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/moonshotman. I'll link to that test, and then I'll also probably put my results up for you guys.

Naveen:  Here's what I'm going to ask you. So, this is something. You take so pride in the fact that you take great care of your body. You take all these superfoods. You take all these smoothies and all these teas. You have to tell me what that tea contained, the tea that I drank this morning.

Ben:  That tea, that was chaga, cacao nibs, cacao shells, cayenne pepper, sea salt, monk fruit, and a little bit of eleuthero, ashwagandha, and reishi, so that the energy was more stable and didn't result in a big rise and crash.

Naveen:  Here's the thing. So, you're going to do the Health Intelligence test, and here is what you're going to get. You're going to get the top six things, first of all. You're going to get your gut health score, you're going to get your mitochondrial health score, you're going to get your cellular stress, immune system health, and you're going to get your stress response health. And under each one of them, it's going to show you like your cellular senescence score, the stress response score, you're going to get everything underneath it. And by the way, you get your biological age. So, question for you is you get that stuff. You're going to look at that. And let's assume your biological age is actually higher than your chronological age. Are you going to tell me, “My test sucks,” or that thing that you've been doing just really don't work?

Ben:  That's a tough call, man. It's a tough call. The way that I think is I would first go and look more into the research on your website on the actual data, the big data behind the test itself because I'll first look for any holes that I could punch in it that I could say–it says this, but it must be wrong. But then a lot of times, I will try what I'm recommended to try. And if I note changes in heart rate variability, and sleep, and inflammation, anything else, then that's pretty good verification to me that that's the case, for example. I think it was even when I did your Viome test that I was found to have a very high count of–I believe it was actually the hydrogen sulfide-based bacteria that you referred to earlier, and I decreased my intake of cruciferous vegetables of glutathione and a lot of stinky sulfurous foods like eggs and–

Naveen:  Broccoli and sprouts.

Ben:  Yeah. Broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower. It didn't completely stop those, and then I lowered the amount of garlic that I was consuming, and I noted less of like a rotten egg odor in my stool. And so, for me, that's a simple test. It's like, “Oh, okay.” Apparently, I'm feeding those hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria a little bit too much. I should back off on this stuff.

Naveen:  But the same thing happened–

Ben:  I'll just always experiment with the results.

Naveen:  So, this is interestingly, you also show your immune system health. We look at every single cytokine. We show you literally how your immune system is doing. So, now, that's the trick is that you do the test, you follow the things, and you do the retest, and you say, “Holy shit, not only I feel better, my scores are getting better.”

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to doing the test for sure. And I know we're getting a little bit short on time. And again, I'm going to link to everything we talk about at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/moonshotman.

But if there's one other thing that I want to ask the Moonshot man here, I want to have him a captive audience, with everything that you have learned, whether developing the Health Intelligence test, traveling the globe, hanging out with a lot of health influencers, what do you think is the most remarkable thing that you've done for your own health in the past year?

Naveen:  Okay. So, first of all, I mean, I feel that I have been inspired to learn more, the more I have met some of the brilliant people. And again, I'm not just trying to give you a compliment. You literally are top of your game. I mean, when it comes to fitness, you are on top of the game. They just know two ways about it. And having learned from you and many others, I have changed my own lifestyle. And not only I've lost 20 pounds–I mean, I'm now 61 and I am better off now than I was when I was 40.

Ben:  You have veins in your biceps.

Naveen:  I mean, I'm not kidding. You didn't see me that three years ago, right? So, my point is I look better, I feel better. Not that I need more energy in my life. I am more energetic now at 60 than I was at 40.

Ben:  And what would you say is the top thing that you've done this past year?

Naveen:  So, first of all, changed my diet significantly. And based on what I learned from the gut test and the Health Intelligence test, and some of the basic things that I would have never thought. I mean, I ate almonds. I mean, I would have never cut that out until I realized they were causing me grief. My grandfather and my dad told me that is the superfood. You eat almond because you want a better memory. I mean, I was told that if I didn't eat that, I'm going to lose my memory.

Ben:  I have a client who did a Cyrex food allergy panel and I got the results in yesterday. And one of his top staple foods is almonds, and he's lit up like a Christmas tree off the charts for an autoimmune reaction to almonds. Not an oxalate sensitivity, which is completely different issue, but yeah, a lot of people don't realize these staple superfoods that you might be chopping on all day long.

Naveen:  Spinach, by the way, is another one that surprised me.

Ben:  Yeah. So, for you, it was oxalates?

Naveen:  Yeah.

Ben:  Yeah.

Naveen:  I mean, my point was I would have never ever thought that I'm going to–spinach and kale and almonds were bad for me. And those were the surprises that we're like, “My god, what was I thinking?” That means it turns out there's no such thing as universal healthy food. It really depends on each individual. The other thing was really starting to think about these nutrients because I realized that even though the foods give you a lot of nutrients we talked about, but sometimes you just have to supplement because you can't get enough of them in the food itself. And sometimes, as we talked about the fisetin versus strawberry, sometimes you just can't eat the food so you have to still get the nutrient that you need.

So, other part that I really find to me is every day–and I think you and I talked about on our walk. This was really interesting. I think it would be good to bring it out. Every day, you do something really interesting, everyday morning routine that you talked about, the gratitude. And to be able to feel that you're learning something new every day–and I was telling you that for me, I do the same thing. I asked myself, “Am I intellectually better today than I was yesterday? Am I emotionally better today than I was yesterday? Am I spiritually better today than I was yesterday? How am I growing into all these three dimension?” To me, I feel the day you stop growing, the day you stop learning is the day you have actually died. You become a zombie if you're not learning.

So, to me, the intellectual curiosity and learning is what makes us who we are, drives us forward and drives the humanity forward. If we're not the people who constantly learn and constantly were intellectually curious, we as humanity will never make any progress. Progress depends on people like us who constantly are curious, “Why not? What if? Why not? What if? Imagine.” I mean, these are the words that we use all the time. Imagine a word where illness is optional. What if that was possible? Why can't it be done? These are the words that we–and those are the explorers I admire. Richard Branson, I mean, exploring. How many industries he changed are simply exploring the ways. And you and I, we know. Obviously, you're not going to go have a trip in there and you're going to go meet with them again. But the point is these are the people who just constantly changed the way people live and experience their lives.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. And a few closing thoughts of my own based on what you've just said. A, I 100% agree on learning. And just so you guys know, learning hurts. Learning makes smoke come out your ears. Learning is almost a hormetic stressor in and of itself and it's not supposed to feel comfortable, it's supposed to feel kind of tricky when you're trying to figure out that new fingering on the ukulele song you want to learn, or you picked up that book full of 10 different words that when you're reading on the Kindle, you don't know what it means so you got to press the little learn word button on the Kindle and go discover, which is one great thing about learning new books on a Kindle or on technology.

And learning is supposed to take you outside your comfort zone. It's supposed to involve immersing yourself in topics with which you might be unfamiliar. And that I am convinced is one of the best ways to keep the brain young, especially if you associate that learning with actual physical implementation. And what I mean by that is I think the very best that you can do is walk while you're listening to an intellectually challenging audiobook, or go to the gym and learn something that makes you fall in your ass the first five times that you do it, or brush your teeth with your left hand while you're standing on your right foot. I mean, the list goes on and on, but learning is supposed to be a little bit uncomfortable. Second, yeah, I'm totally getting to go to British Virgin Islands–

Naveen:  But brother, you didn't talk about gratitude. I want you to talk about that thing, journaling practice.

Ben:  Yeah. We'll get to gratitude also. But yeah, I actually want to interview Richard Branson. He's on my list of guys. So, I'll have to go to–so tell Richard I'm coming for him. And if I can't make it to British Virgin Islands, he's got to come here and we'll throw him in the cold pool. And then, the last part is yes, I'm working on a–actually, the second to last part is yes, I'm working on a rewrite of my gratitude journal, changing the name into the spiritual disciplines journal, and it's going to involve four different practices. A, in the morning, you write down what you are grateful for. And you also write down one person who you can help or serve that day. And then, in the evening, you engage in a process of self-examination in which you write down, “What good have I done this day? And what could I have done better on this day?” And in addition to that self-examination set of questions, you say, “How did I best live out my life's purpose on this day?”

And so, the journal encompasses multiple variants of practices of self-spiritual discipline, particularly gratitude, service, self-examination, and purpose. And there's an inspirational quote or verse on the top of each page, and it's something I've been wanting to do for a while. So, during this pandemic, the first 70 days, I wrote a cookbook. And for the next 20 days thus far, I've been working on the complete rewriting of the journaling, and that's something I've been–anything I do, I practice. And so, I've been doing that form of journaling I've just described. What am I grateful for? Who can I help or serve in the morning? And then, what good have I done this day? What could I have done better? And how did I live out my life's purpose in the evening? So, I should have that book done in a couple of months and out to people.

And then, finally, you west side Seattle guy, are you ready to go into downtown Spokane now and see how the east side has developed? How long has it been since you've been to the east side?

Naveen:  I've never been to east side. I just thought this is just nothing but farmland.

Ben:  Oh, just rednecks and people with pickup trucks and gun racks, but I'll bring you downtown. We'll go to a nice juice bar. We'll go check out the waterfall, and who knows, maybe you'll fall in love with Spokane and like it better than Bellevue.

Naveen:  Well, I thought falling in love is something we always do. You have to first fall. The day you fall in love with yourself is the day you can fall in love with the world, right? So, there you are. So, first of all, I'm just so grateful for you, for your hospitality. You have been an amazing host and I just want you to know that you have an amazing family. Your wife is just so sweet and your kids are just marvelous. I mean, now I'm just so impressed with you and your family that I hope I get to host you at our place next soon.

Ben:  I'm in, man, I'm in.

Naveen:  Alright.

Ben:  Alright, folks, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/moonshotman. I'm going to link to Naveen's book. I'm going to link to my other two interviews with him. I'll link to this Health Intelligence testing that we talked about. I'll link to some interesting research articles based on the oral biome and a few of the other things that we discussed. And also, that is where you can go, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/moonshotman to leave your questions, your comments, your thoughts, your feedback. I read them all. I love to hear your guys' thoughts. So, if you think Naveen's a complete [censored] and I should never have him on again, you can let me know and I'll be sure to pass that on him. But Naveen, in the meantime, congratulations on your third episode, third recording, third interview, and thank you, everybody, for listening. Until next time. I'm Ben Greenfield along with the great billionaire and entrepreneur, Naveen Jain, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the shownotes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful “Ben Recommends” page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormone, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please, also, know that all the links, all the promo codes, that I mentioned during this and every episode, helped to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. When you listen in, be sure to use the links in the shownotes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

 

 

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is driven to solve the world's biggest challenges through innovation. A man who knows no limits, Naveen pushes big dreams into action—spurring massive cultural and technological change. His audacious vision and magnetic personality continually inspires others to follow what feels impossible.

The founder of Moon Express, World Innovation Institute, iNome, TalentWise, Intelius, and Infospace, Naveen sees beyond the current business and technological landscape, creating companies that make a true impact.

Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon India's “Most Admired Serial Entrepreneur,” and the receiver of the “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for his pioneers in technology, Naveen has been repeatedly honored for his entrepreneurial successes. Red Herring also recognized him as one of the “Top 20 Serial Entrepreneurs” and with the “Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Naveen Jain's next endeavor is to travel to the moon, using lunar resources for innovation here on earth.

Whether it's business or life, Naveen is guided by one firm belief – our only limit is our imagination.

In my first episode with Naveen, “Age Reversing Via The Gut, The Ultimate Anti-Anxiety Pill, Customized Probiotics & More With Billionaire Entrepreneur & Viome Founder Naveen Jain.”, we discussed:

• Why Naveen thinks most microbiome evaluations are complete snake oil…
• How Naveen licensed $21 million gut sequencing technology from Los Alamos laboratory…
• Naveen's shocking prediction about the next big thing in health care…
• And much more…

Then, in my second episode with Naveen, Poop, Bacteria & You: The Latest Cutting-Edge Science Of The Human Microbiome (& How To Affordably Test Your Own Gut)., we discussed:

• Whether or not human microbiomes “evolve” with changing technology and civilization trends such as the industrial revolution…
• How Viome can use a single stool sample to determine the overall health of your gut…
• How you know whether the disease is causing the microbiome to be deleteriously affected, or whether a poor microbiome is causing the disease…
• And much more…

(You may also be interested in watching or hearing Dr. Ally Perlina, Viome's chief science officer, go over the results of my own microbiome analysis.)

In this podcast, Naveen travels to my home in Spokane, Washington and we chat about the latest in longevity, life, and the latest innovations in fitness, mental health, and immunity—plus the latest on mitochondria, biological aging, and cellular health.

During this discussion, you'll discover:

-Naveen's observations of Ben's daily life in Spokane, WA…6:35

• Dedication to family
• Positive outlook on life
• Role model to many, but also to the boys and wife
• Love for nature and for God
• Lightbulb moment – “You're not raising your children, you're raising your grandchildren”
• Establishing traditions that will last for generations

-The proper role of the elderly in society…12:20

• Important to pass the wisdom from the elderly on to our children and grandchildren
• You're a pariah in Eastern culture if you dishonor your parents or grandparents
• BGF podcast with Marisa Peer
• Book: You Can be Youngerby Marisa Peer
• Post-menopausal women live longer when given a matriarchal role
• We're all connected in a larger ecosystem
• The “love bucket” is never-ending

-The big questions that propel Naveen's quest for knowledge…19:30

• “Why me?” and “Why now?”
• We are not genetically predisposed to chronic disease
• Excessive focus on genetics (genes don't change, the expression does)
• Digitizing the human body: chemical signals transmitted through the brain and body
• Change biochemical activity via diet and lifestyle to attain desired objective
  • What if? – The key to starting anything in life; Do not worry about the “How?”
• Too much faith in testing; we all have different genes
• Personalization and precision in testing genes, the microbiome, etc.
• Tech is more accessible and affordable than ever before
• AI can interpret data that wasn't possible even 10 years ago
• “What is it I believe that most people disagree on?”
• Not the right answer, but the right question

-How the gut microbiome affects the chemical signaling in our bodies…34:00

• Over 40 trillioncells in our body, generating chemicals we ignore while focused on DNA and genes
• “Micro poops” signal to the human body what to do
• 90% of serotonin produced in the gut (by your own epithelial cells, waiting on signaling from the bacteria in your body)
• Worry more about what organisms in your gut are doing, rather than what organisms are in the gut
• More diversity of microorganisms in the mouth than in the gut (less than 1% in quantity but diversity is higher)
• Benefits of chewing food adequately and in a relaxed state
  • Sends signals to the gut on what's to come
  • Symmetrical issues if not adequate, or food too soft
• Alzheimer's may be traced to leaky gut syndrome
• Clean the mouth, not merely brush the teeth
• BGF podcast with Dr. Dominic Nischwitz
• Ben's oil pulling mouthwash kills opportunistic bateria: pour ingredients into a mold and put into refrigerator;
• Oil pulling recipe:
  • Melt coconut oil
  • Peppermintessential oil
  • Oreganoessential oil
  • Rosemary or cinnamonessential oils
• Copper tongue scraper
• Ayurvedic flossing tools using neem tree twigs 

-The foundation of an integrative understanding of the gut…44:45

• Gut-brain, gut-liver, gut-mouth axis
• Viome Gut Intelligence Test(use code GREENFIELD to save $10)
• Health Intelligence (understand how the human cells are impacted by the gut)
• Blood tests are scalable and affordable; goal is to make cellular tests the same
• Viome Health Intelligence Test
  • Look at every gene expression in the blood
  • RNA test
• Fasted exercise induces AMP-K (cellular stress)
  • AMP-K significantly increases PGC1-α, the master regulator for mitochondrial biogenesis
• Metformin, berberine, etc. induce xenohormetic stress (exercise in a bottle)
• Cellular senescence results in excess aging and inflammation
  • Consumption of NAD, NMN, NR, etc. exacerbates cellular senescence
  • Senescent cells, in youth, can assist in anabolism (pro-growth); as these accumulate with age, can result in excess aging and increased risk of chronic disease and inflammation
• Docs who administer NAD utilize anti-senescent cell compounds
  • Quercetin
  • Oleuropein(olive leaf extract)

-A method of testing that is truly personalized to the individual…56:15

• Testing multiple pathways leads to more educated decisions on nutrients, supplements, etc.; quantity of said compounds
• Health Intelligence does 2 things: gut microbiome test and blood test combined
• To be launched soon: Whole-body Intelligence – saliva, stool, blood
• True personalization vs. categorization
  • Demographics (gender, race, etc. are categories)
  • Look at an individual at the molecular level
  • Precision supplements, nutrients, etc.
• A solution made to order for each individual based on molecular testing
• AI and robotics drive production costs down
• Whole foods vs. supplementation:
  • Supplements are not an alternative to whole foods
  • Eat the right food, avoid the bad food; supplement to fill in the gaps
• Health Intelligence tells you what foods to eat and why; what foods to avoid and why; and then the additional nutrients
• Precision supplements – One nutrient found in a food may be given, but not the entire food; some other nutrient in the food may not be good for an individual (You have to eat ≈20lbs of blueberries to get the same amount of nutrients you get from a 12mg capsule)

-The “flywheel” concept in running a business…1:03:20

• Product constantly changing and evolving
• The value always increasing with each client or product sold
• Every person part of the ecosystem making everyone else better, before and in the future
• “How am I making this customer a better person with each transaction?”
• Technology itself cannot solve the problem of learning
• Collecting data, customizing the experience, use AI to constantly improve the experience
• “Moonshot thinking” (why now, why me?) – outside the box thinking
• Tim Ferris: “What could go wrong with this decision?”
• Create scenarios that seem silly; may lead to a viable solution
• Create a team to do the things you can't do, or don't know
• Never ask, “Is this possible?” Say, “Make this possible…”
• An entrepreneur is someone who solves a problem, not necessarily a business owner, CEO, etc.

-The case for space exploration in the midst of a slew of problems here on Earth…1:16:30

• Scarcity mindset: If I do this, I can't do that. Should be: If I can do this, I can also do that
• Planet Earth is a spacecraft; alternate home if it gets damaged
• The planet will be fine; worry about the human species
• Ben's essay: “Our Father's World“

-Recommended resources to think like a billionaire…1:20:40

• Read one book, the author's view becomes your view; read 10 books, there are 11 views: the ten authors' +yours
• Just because it's written or published doesn't make it true
• Read that which is tangential; the solution to a problem often lies in a different field or industry
• Singularity University
• TED Talks
• Castbox(searches audio itself for keywords)
• Ben's tea recipe:
  • Chaga
  • Cacao Nibs
  • Cacao Shells
  • Cayenne Pepper
  • Sea Salt
  • Monk Fruit
  • Eleuthero
  • Ashwagandha
  • Reishi
• The 6 things you get when you do the Health Intelligence Test:
  • Gut health score
  • Mitochondrial health score
  • Cellular stress
  • Immune system health
  • Stress response health
  • Biological age

-The most remarkable thing Naveen has done for his health in the past year…1:32:00

• Changed diet significantly (there's no such thing as a healthy or worst food; it all depends on the individual)
  • Sometimes, nutrients in food are not enough so supplementing is required
• Do something interesting every day:
  • Gratitude journalingand feeling that you are learning new things everyday
  • Am I intellectually better today than yesterday? Am I emotionally better today than yesterday? Am I spiritually better today than yesterday?
  • The day you stop growing, the day you stop learning, is the day you actually die
  • Why not? What if? Why can't it be done? Imagine!
• Live the life!
• Ben's re-write of the Christian Gratitude Journal, The Spiritual Disciplines Journal, involves 4 different practices
  • In the morning:
    • What you are grateful for?
    • Write down one person you can help or serve that day
  • In the evening:
    • Self-examination – What good have I done this day? What could I have done better this day?
    • How did I best live out my life's purpose this day?
  • The journal encompasses multiple variants of Spiritual Disciplines practices
    • Gratitude
    • Service
    • Self-examination
    • Purpose

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

– Naveen Jain:

• Naveen's Book: Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance
• Viome Health Intelligence Test& Gut Intelligence Test (use code GREENFIELD to save $10)
• 1st podcast with Naveen: Age Reversing Via The Gut, The Ultimate Anti-Anxiety Pill, Customized Probiotics & More With Billionaire Entrepreneur & Viome Founder Naveen Jain
• 2nd podcast with Naveen: Poop, Bacteria & You: The Latest Cutting-Edge Science Of The Human Microbiome (& How To Affordably Test Your Own Gut)

– BGF podcasts:

• With Marisa Peer
• With Dr. Dominic Nischwitz

– Book: You Can be Younger by Marisa Peer

– Other resources:

• Ben's coconut oilpulling recipe
  • Coconut Oil
  • Peppermintessential oil
  • Oreganoessential oil
  • Rosemary or Cinnamonessential oils
• Ben's tea recipe:
  • Chaga
  • Cacao Nibs
  • Cacao Shells
  • Cayenne Pepper
  • Sea Salt
  • Monk Fruit
  • Eleuthero
  • Ashwagandha
  • Reishi Mushrooms
• Copper Tongue Scraper
• Berberine
• NAD or NMN
• Nicotinamide Riboside
• Quercetin
• Oleuropein
• Ben's essay: “This is my Father's World“
• Article: Ayurvedic flossing tools using Neem tree twigs
• Viome Article: A clinically validated human capillary blood transcriptome
  test for global systems biology studies
• Your Genome
• Christian Gratitude Journal
• Ally Perlina going over Ben's own Viome microbiome analysis result
• Singularity University
• Ted Talks
• Castbox

Episode sponsors:

–Kion Colostrum: Nature’s “first food” that supports immunity, GI function, athletic recovery, and more. BGF listeners, receive a 10% discount off your entire order at Kion when you use discount code BEN10.

–Joovv: After using the Joovv for close to 2 years, it's the only light therapy device I'd ever recommend. Give it a try: you won't be disappointed. Order your Joovv today and receive my brand new book, Boundless as a free gift.

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–Butcher Box: Delivers healthy 100% grass-fed and finished beef, free-range organic chicken, and heritage breed pork directly to your door on a monthly basis. All their products are humanely raised and NEVER given antibiotics or hormones.