Beyond Blueberries｜Ben Greenfield's Tips and Tricks for Biohacking Brain Health

Calling my talk today. Beyond blueberries. Beyond blueberries. Because a lot of this stuff, I mean, Matt already touched on this, that if you don't have a lot of foundational principles in place, like a lot of what Alex was talking about, right, emf, good diet, mitigating mold, mycotoxins, addressing your personal environment, sleep, etc, then you know, I mean, a lot of this stuff, pdmf, photobiomodulation, cranial electrical stimulation, a lot of it isn't going to do a lot for you or in many cases just because when you're up regulating mitochondrial activity, specifically in neural tissue, and you're kicking off more reactive oxygen species, if you're already in an inflamed state, you're actually not going to do yourself much of a service, may actually create more inflammation. And so you want to have the foundational principles in place. But once you have those in place, there's some cool things that you can do to hack the brain using technology that normally wouldn't been available to us, us as consumers, but now we can get our hands on pretty readily. And I say to be on blueberries, they just last week came out with a study that showed that blueberry extract, blueberry powder extract, which we already know is a very powerful sirtuin for repairing DNA, especially when co ingested with something like nad, is also fantastic for cognitive function. This is a great study showing something as simple as blueberries actually can assist with things like executive function, in this case visual, auditory memory. However, what I think is cool is taking a lot of these things, nootropics, smart drugs, blueberries, and blending them together with some of the technology. So I'm just going to show you guys some of the cooler pieces of technology that I mess around with. And really when you look at this, it's kind of cool because.

You'Ve got a lot of professional athletes now tapping into this stuff, like Golden Warrior basketball team. They're probably at the top of the totem pole as far as a team that's actually using a lot of this technology. I don't know if anybody read the book Head in the Game, I think is the name of the book, but it features a lot of the mental engineering tactics of a lot of pro athletes now. And you have guys like Steph Curry, I don't know if anybody saw the ESPN special on him where they're throwing a tennis ball at him and a basketball at the same time, and he's wearing these strobe goggles that actually limit the amount of light that he's Receiving while also producing some confusing cues to his brain. So he's actually increasing his visual auditory processing speed really, really well with these strobe goggles that were available for a while through Nike. You can still buy them, there's consumer devices. But that's just one example of how a guy like that is basically kind of replicating what some of the old school guys had naturally, like bambino Babe Ruth. We know that he had like a 20 to 30% upregulated audio visual processing speed, just naturally. And a lot of these folks now in the NBA are tapping into that using stuff like these goggles. There's LeBron James. He's another guy who's known for having a pretty good career based on his age. And that's what you see a lot of these older athletes. Tom Brady is another guy who does this. They do have a pretty long career based on comparison to a lot of their peers because they're using a lot of these biohacks like LeBron James. One perfect example because we're really focusing on cognition today. Not necessarily performance and recovery, but cognition brain optimization. He does a lot of cryotherapy, which we often associate with recovery or drop in inflammation. But cryotherapy is cool. I mean, you see an upregulation of some motifs, some proteins that specifically will do things like heal synaptic connections or grow new synapses in the brain based on production of cold shock proteins that can also act to produce almost like an anti inflammatory stimulus to neural tissue. And so he's not just healing his body, he's also healing his brain when he does stuff like this. Todd Brady is another guy, no driving a long career. He sleeps in infrared pajamas. He actually does a lot of the same stuff Seth Curry's doing. He does a lot of the same stuff LeBron James is doing from a crowd therapy standpoint. Does a lot of vibration therapy obviously, as you can see from this photo, gives himself nice head massages. So the cool thing is that we live in a day and age where we can tap into a lot of these same technologies. And I'm super interested in this because I think it's probably the only way I'm going to eventually beat Matt Dawson in our one on one annual basketball games. So I'm coming after you. I've got the strobe goggles, I got the blueberries, got the crowd chamber. Yeah, keep working on that free throw, but you're going down. So I'm going to show you some cool technologies here. This is the first thing that I actually became interested in was transcranial direct current stimulation. I listened to this fascinating radio Lab podcast. Anybody heard the Radiolab podcast? They do some really cool science explorative concepts. And they talked about this gal who, who was practicing with a sniper rifle and learned a lot of the motor skill acquisition that she needed to stay calm while shooting a rifle using this TDCS technology. And so the Radiolab podcast and article that went along with it, and by the way, I showed you on the first slide a resources webpage where I've got links to a lot of these podcasts and articles that I mentioned. I'll show you again at the end that same link if you didn't get a chance to jot it down. But basically we talked about how these people get 9 volt batteries and doing DIY TDCs from places like Radio Shack. And I didn't build my own tdcs, but I got my hands on this unit called a Halo. Anybody use the Halo before? Very, very cool device. What it's advertised to do is specifically help athletes with motor neuron recruitment. Meaning when you stimulate specifically via what's called cathodal stimulation using tdcs, you upregulate motor neuron activity, but you also have an effect on the brain. Not only do you increase neuronal activity in the brain, but you get this release of excitatory neurotransmitters. So any skill acquisition or any learning process that you engage in after you've used tdcs or while you're using tdcs is actually amplified. So it's a cool technology. It's now being used for things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia. Relatively safe, relatively well studied. And there is device called the Halo. You can purchase this halo, you put it on your head, ties to your phone, and you can activate your own TDCS sessions. And again, it's not just for performance, it's also for mental acuity and cognition. The interesting thing is that I've got a few friends who are professional athletes, specifically in obstacle course racing, and I loaned this to one of my buddies who's a complete beast, and he actually wore this thing for 20 minutes, went to his normal workout, and he couldn't move for like three days because he was actually recruiting motor neurons that he simply wasn't used to recruiting. So it actually, really, really does turn on both muscles and the brain. So TDCS is one kind of cool device. And I'll be taking questions too after this for any of you have questions about how to use any of these. But generally it's about a 20 minute session before you do one. Anybody in here use PEMF much? Pretty popular technology nowadays, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. Far, far different. Because a lot of people will see a presentation like Alex gave and say, well, I thought EMF was bad. I thought we were supposed to avoid getting exposed to non native emf. But most of the stuff he's talking about, that's a very, very short wavelength and high, high frequency. Okay, short wavelength, high frequency, that's non native emf. That's the type of EMF that can be damaging, as Alex explained. But a PEMF signal, it's a very low frequency, extremely long wavelength. We're talking about, like if you were to stretch out a cycle, It'd cover about 68,000 miles on a 1 Hz cycle of PEMF, whereas the same cycle on something like a cell phone is going to cover about a meter. So it's a much, much longer, more natural wavelength. And when they study this specifically for things like cognition and brain health, what you see is an increase in blood flow to the brain. Meaning that any smart drugs, nootropics, medicines, anything that you would take in conjunction with pemf, you can deliver more rapidly to the brain. And there are small portable devices, a couple very good ones. One's called the Flexvolts, another one is called the ICS M1. And these are small portable devices you can travel with. I have one up in my hotel room right now, the ices M1. And I can put that in delta, gamma, beta, alpha, whatever zone I want to be in. And for example, if I'm going to settle down for a nap, I can put it in delta mode, place it right on the occipital bone on the back of the head, and you almost get like a brainwave entrainment effect. Because PMF can assist with shifting your brain to a specific wavelength state. So not only is it going to increase blood flow to the brain, but it can also shift you via brainwave entrainment into a specific brainwave state. The other cool thing about PMF is it increases mitochondrial activity, which a lot of these things do. Like the red light therapy. I'll show you also. So you're also getting more ATP produced, more energy produced. And the more powerful devices are especially interesting. Like I use one made by a company called Pulse Centers, and it comes with coils, with cables, with a pad that you can sleep on, or a pad that you can get a massage on. It has a chair that you can sit on and work with that's a more kind of expensive unit used a lot more often for inflammation, for recovery, for performance. But these smaller devices like the flexpulse or the IC7 one, they're really, really cool, just as portable devices that you can use to stimulate the brain. So PEMF is another cool technology.

Cranial electrical stimulation. This is interesting because it's based on this concept. There was a Roman emperor, I think it was Claudius, and he actually had a therapist who would use an electric fish they called electric torpedo fish. And they would actually slap this over the emperor's skull to deliver electrical stimulation specifically to the trigeminal nerve or the vagus nerve. And so when you stimulate the vagus nerve with this type of stimulation, the CES stimulation, you can affect heart rate variability and overall vagal nerve tone, which is also going to affect cognitive function, focus, relaxation, a de stressing response, et cetera. If you trigger the trigeminal nerve, you can also see an increase in dopamine and serotonin, which can actually assist with relaxation and sleep. There's specifically a CES device made by Fisher Wallace. It's an FDA approved device called the Circadia. That one's available for any consumer. It's a couple of electrodes that you slap on either side of your head. And it's actually really cool. You feel a mild stimulation right over the trigeminal nerve. If you have an eye mask on or your eyes are closed, you get these flashing light signals that you can actually see behind your eyes. And it stays on for about 25 minutes. Very, very good with insomnia. People who need to lull themselves to sleep for decreasing stress a little bit. And it's a very, very simple device to use. There's another one made by David Delight called the David Delight Pro. And this one has electrodes that attach to either earlobe. And it's actually a light sound machine. So you have headphones, headphones on, the electrodes on, and then the lights flashing. And that one, very similar can be used to very quickly induce a state of deep relaxation. So CES is, it's pretty cool technology, primarily used for relaxation, for sleep, for de stressing, or kind of cooling the body down. But I would definitely, I would definitely put it into category of brain biohacks. And I actually have one of these devices in my, in my hyperbaric chamber. And I'll put it on when I go into the hyperbaric chamber. And you just knocks you out. Based on some of the other things that I'll tell you, the Hyperbaric can do for your brain. Photobiomodulation. These are the laser lights that I was joking about, but they're actually very cool. There's a company called Vielite and Violight has been working for a long time on consumer head worn devices that can do things like stave off Alzheimer's and dementia, but also be used to enhance focus, to enhance kind of a gamma wavelength meditative state. They have two devices. One's called the Alpha and one's called the Gamma. I own both. The elf is a 10 Hz frequency that you would put on your head for about 25 minutes. And what happens is that these lights increase the activity of cytochrome C oxidase. What you're going to do is upregulate that part of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria and you'll produce more ATP in neural tissue. The interesting thing with photobiomodulation, how many of you physicians in here are utilizing NAD in your practice? So we know that NAD is one of the electron donors in that electron transport chain. And so if you combine something like photobiomodulation with sub Q or intravenous or even like sublingual NAD or nmn, what happens is you're hitting two different parts of the electron transport chain. So when you have this cytochrome C oxidase upregulated, you're kicking off more ATP. And then when you're using NAD or NADH as a donor, you're also creating more ATP. So these two actually stack really well when we're talking about combining modalities. The NAD with photobiomodulation. And this Bilite device is a very good way to do that. You can use a larger red light panel, you know, a Nova, Thor, a Juve, something like that. But these head worn devices go specifically targeted to neural tissue and typically have an intranasal device too to actually shine red light up the nose. So these things are like. Best way I can describe it is like a cup of coffee for your brain. You wear it for about 25 minutes in the morning. Again, like a lot of these things that will stimulate neural tissue, you can create excess reactive oxygen species. Especially when you're using photobiomodulation. You wouldn't want to use this any more than once a day or so, but it's a cool device. And the other interesting thing is in addition to nad.

There'S a molecule called melanin. And what melanin will do is it will absorb near infrared and far infrared wavelength as well. As the red light that's produced by many of these devices and kick off about four ATP every time a photon of light.

Strikes the melanin molecule. There's a great book about this called the Human Photosynthesis. And so what that means is that humans can actually photosynthesize very similarly to plants and get free energy. If you have high levels of melanin in your bloodstream while at the same time you're out in the sunlight or using one of these photo biomodulation devices, there's a couple good sources of melanin that you can use to do this. Chaga is one. Chaga is very, very good. So you could do like chaga tea prior to using photobiomodulation. The other one is methylene blue, old school fish tank cleaner. It's now widely used by a lot of biohackers as a nootropic. You can get pharmaceutical grade methylene blue, which is a good source of melanin, or this chaga extract which is a good source of melanin. And you can combine either of those with photobiomodulation. And if you were to stack nad on top of that as well, that's a very good kind of more advanced biohacking combo for cognitive performance.

The next one is light. So I would consider light to fall under the category of regulating circadian rhythmicity. And this is a really cool trick that I use because I travel a lot. And as we know, these so called zeitgebers or circadian rhythm cues include time of day, when you eat, when you're traveling is going to reset your body's clock. So a lot of times I'll skip breakfast, I'll have a late breakfast. But when I'm traveling and especially when I'm outside of my time zone, I'm actually pretty careful to eat breakfast at whatever the morning time zone is, wherever I've traveled, because that jump starts the circadian rhythm. Same thing with say like a morning movement session. It helps to reset the circadian rhythm when you've traveled across multiple time zones. But probably the most powerful psyche is light. And the idea of being able to use some of these devices to hack light specifically via photoreceptors and neural tissue and also in the back of the retina is actually a really cool idea. So I'll give you an illustration. Right now I'm three hours ahead of my normal time zone, right? So when I go back to Washington State and I'm on Pacific time zone and let's have been waking up at 6am here. Then my body is trained to wake up at about 3am back home. So what I can do is if I wake up at 3am, I can keep myself in the dark. So if I do decide to get up, I'll put on the blue light blocking glasses that you normally wear in the evening. You put those on in the morning, you don't look at a lot of blue light, you don't look at a lot of screens. You wait, wait, wait until the time arrives when you actually do want to start waking up in the time zone that you're in. And then you can use these light producing devices, especially if you're unable to get out in the sun. Let's see, it's a great cloudy day. You got to work indoors, you got to be in your office. There's one device called a human charger. And the human charger directs light into both ears and targets photoreceptors in the brain. It was originally developed in Finland for seasonal affective disorder, but it's also used now and marketed as a device for circadian rhythmicity, for jump starting a sleep wake cycle. The other one is called the retimer. The retimer are a pair of glasses that you wear that produce light in the greenish blue wavelength spectrum, which is interesting because a lot of these seasonal affective disorder light boxes that you would buy for sad, they produce a very bright white light, which is actually mildly damaging to the retina. And these greenish blue lights are a lot more natural. It's a lot more similar to the blue light that you get from sun. So what you can do is you can actually use both at the same time. You put the glasses on, put the light buds in at whatever time it is that you want to wake up or send your body a message that is morning. And you shift your circadian rhythm very, very quickly. I mean, within one to two days, a process that would normally take, depending on how many time zones you've traveled, seven to 10 days. You can achieve regulated circadian rhythmicity using these light cues. So those are a couple of devices that I really like to use is the human charge and the retimer glasses. And they just created a new human charger that allows you to play audio from your phone while the light's going in through your ears. You can listen to a podcast, listen to a meditation, listen to music, and at the same time you're blasting your brain with light.

Neurofeedback. Does anybody in here mess around much with neurofeedback training like the Muse device, for example, which is gonna pick up on electrical cues from the brain. The M wave device, which is more of a heart rate variability training device, which will pick up electrical cues from the heart. The idea behind these is they're not just metrics, they're not just wearables that are quantifying data. But a true neurofeedback device is actually giving you some type of feedback that shifts your brain into a specific state. So I first started messing around with this stuff at the Peak Neurofeedback or the Peak Brain Institute, which is a NeuroFeedback Institute in LA. And it's very simple. And a lot of those pro athletes that I showed you, they're using this now to be able to, for example, control alpha beta brainwave ratios that are more focused, less stressed during times of competition. But I used it for about three months. And the main things that I noticed based on my initial QEEG brain mapping was I had a high, high amount of distractibility. My brain was very, very good at going into, like, the.

Okay. The other thing that I had a real problem with was, right, a very long period of time to fall asleep due to racing thoughts in my head. And those are, those are a couple of things that they identified on the initial QEEG that I did. And then I trained for about three months using these biofeedback devices, essentially. You know, one example is you have a software program that you're looking at that's playing on the screen in front of you, a spaceship flying. And every time that you shift into the brainwave that you're trying to detrain, such as increased beta brainwave production, what will happen is the ship will slow down or the smoke will stop coming out of the back. Ignition of the ship, or the music will.

Such a slap to your brain. Your brain shifts back into the brainwave state it's supposed to be in. And eventually, with repeated sessions, you can train your brain to almost rewire the type of brainwaves that it's shifting into.

The cool thing is that you can use a lot of this neurofeedback software for anything. You can watch a movie, and the whole time you're watching a movie, you can have it hooked up to the neurofeedback software and the movie that you're watching, the soundtrack will fade, the screen will start to fade every time you shift into the brainwave state you're not supposed to be in. So it's actually a really, really cool way to passively train your brain. And many of you have heard, for example, of the. I think it's called the Psycho Cybernaut Institute in that one's in sedona. Dave Asprey's 40 years of Zen. Up in Seattle. There's some institutions that just put you through, like, seven days of very intense, deep neurofeedback. Many people like that approach. What I did was I went to the Peak brain Institute in LA. I bought all their equipment for about. About $6,000 or so of an investment, but then took it home and just trained at home with smaller sessions, about 30 minutes a day for around three months. And, you know, it was great. The biggest thing I noticed was I used to walk into a cocktail party or a group gathering, and I would be hearing like eight different conversations in the room. And I couldn't even focus on the person right in front of me because I was hearing this conversation, this conversation, this conversation. High amount of distractibility. And my amount of focus, my ability to be able to be present and just focus on one thing at a time with a lot of distractions going around. That was the biggest thing that changed in response to snow feedback. So it's also a cool way to train. And the muse is a little bit. It's not quite as powerful, but it's more of a home version, what I was doing there.

Yeah. And they've got a new piece of software that, that. That ties to the music called Mind Lift. I don't know if you use Mind Lift yet. Okay, so you use Mind Lift. Cool. Yeah. Mynd Lift. For any of you guys who want to Google it, look it up before we dig into it tomorrow. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. That's something that's been known for a long time to assist with brain oxygenation in a state of TBI or concussion. And it actually can be a really, really cool way for somebody who doesn't have a TBI concussion to actually enhance oxygen delivery to the brain, again, to deliver more of a nutrient, a smart drug, a nootropic, anything you've consumed prior to climbing into the chamber, into the brain. The main problem is that the reason HBOT works so well for TBI or concussion is that it has a vasoconstrictive effect. You get a little bit of a flooding of reactive oxygen species when you get in there. You get a little bit of vascular constriction. And that's good if you're trying to limit something like inflammation and leakage, leakage post TBI or concussion. But for somebody who wants to actually increase blood flow to the Brain, that's not actually a great response. Now, if you've done repeated hyperbaric sessions, what happens is your body begins to create its own endogenous antioxidant response when you're in there. So you get a little bit less of that vasoconstrictive effect. But for anybody who wants to use hyperbaric to actually get that neural enhancement, that cognitive enhancement that you can get from it, what you have to do is you have to stack a vasodilative substance when you take it. Like anything would work. Arginine, citrulline, beetroot, any nitric oxide precursor, sildenafil, viagra. Anything that's going to increase blood flow is something that you take prior to the hyperbaric. And what will happen is your brain, you'll notice your brain feels far more turned on and you're less groggy when you get out of it. If you're using it for a TBI concussion, you'd want to do the complete opposite. You'd want to allow for vasoconstriction. But hyperbaric is another cool thing, kind of like pemf, where if you combine it with any nutrients, nootropics, smart drugs, medicines, et cetera, that you're taking specifically for the brain, it will amplify the effects. Just because you're getting a lot more oxygen, you're getting a lot more mitochondrial activity in neural tissue. Brainwave entrainment. I kind of touched on this already when I was telling you how pemf, like, if you set your PEMF device at a specific frequency, you can induce alpha, beta, delta, gamma brainwave production. That's essentially what brainwave entrainment is. But there's also some really cool apps and devices that you simply hook up to headphones and play. They can shift you into states really, really quickly, using either binaural beats or different forms of music and sound to shift you into a specific brain state. Some of the cooler ones that I'm showing here, Sleep Stream, I use that almost every night. It's like a DJ for sleep. You can play pink noise, white noise, brown noise. You can play delta waves, gamma waves. You can put your own mix together based on. You can look at your oura ring data and decide that you want want more delta sleep. So you play it in more of a delta brainwave state during the night. Sleep Stream is one that I like because it also covers up ambient noise. Another one you can see there, the hand with the wristband, that's the Apollo. The Apollo Neuro wristband. Very, very cool. I interviewed the guy that developed that, Dr. David Rabin, on my podcast because he was actually doing a lot of research for MAPS and was trying to figure out how he could elicit some similar brainwaves as one might get when using the type of medicines that they were using at maps, but without the actual consumption of medicine. And he developed this device that has about seven different modes. One for focus and cognition, one for meditation, one for relaxation, one for sleep. It's an inaudible sound wave that travels up the long bone of whatever limb that you put it on. So you put it on your ankle, it'll travel up the femur up to your brain. If you put it on the wrist, it'll travel up your arm bones up to the brain. And the cool thing is that it shifts you very, very quickly into the state that you want to be in. And it's even got like a social party session. It's got sleep relaxation. Really cool example of a unique way to do brainwave entrainment using sound. Brain FM is kind of like sleep stream. That's another one that a lot of people like. The new calm device of any of the brainwave entrainment devices that I use, that and the Apollo are probably the two that I use most often. Because the new calm, just because of the binaural beats, the sounds and what they call almost like a hollow syncs technology that's in it. It will knock you out within like two minutes flat. And I'll play that thing on an airplane. They have a 20 minute power nap session. A lot of times I'll play two of those in a row and just go into a deep, deep state of relaxation.

They've got some really cool recovery sounds for post workout recovery. It's an expensive device, about $5,000, but it works amazingly. It's probably one of the cooler devices I've found that allows me to actually be able to sleep on airplanes, in cars. I mean, I've crawled under tables at conferences, put that thing on and fell asleep. So the new calm is probably one of my favorite methods of brainwave entrainment, cryotherapy. I already kind of touched on cryotherapy, but really the main thing, like I mentioned earlier, is the upregulation of these cold shock proteins that can actually be really, really valuable for healing synapses in the brain. And it can also be somewhat stimulatory to the vagus nerve. It's a way to like yoga, chanting, singing, humming, meditation, breath work. All of these are Ways that we can increase vagal nerve tone and thus increase heart rate variability, which is going to allow for increased focus, decreased stress response, et cetera. Well, cryotherapy will also do that based on its stimulation of the mammalian dive reflex. There's also some research that just came out of Stanford that shows that when you can't fall asleep at night or you wake up at like 2 or 3am with racing thoughts, a cooling device applied to the forehead can actually shift blood flow away from the frontal cortices that causes that response and allow you to fall asleep. So they found that this device actually significantly decreases sleep latency. It's called an EBB edb. If you're a back sleeper, this would be a no brainer, pun intended, to grab just because it'll circulate. Cold water, kind of like the chilipad will do that under your body while you're asleep. I'm a side sleeper and I've experimented with the device a little bit. I don't find it stays on that well during side sleeping, but it's a cool idea, this idea that cooling the entire body can assist with the production of these cold shock proteins. Cooling the forehead can assist with restricting blood flow to the frontal cortexes. So this idea of using cryotherapy as almost like a neurological biohack, there's a lot to be said for it. And the one of the main things that I use is this Marozco forge. It's a tub that will maintain about 32 degrees Fahrenheit and around 110 degrees ambient temperature. So it's one of the best ways I've found to keep things super duper cold if I'm going to use cryotherapy. A couple other things I wanted to show you guys. The biocharger doesn't really fall into a category. It's like a category of its own. I use this two or three times a day when I'm home. I've had it for about, I think about six months now. And it combines negative ions because it produces the equivalent of about a thousand lightning strikes a second on this device while you're sitting next to it. It produces the same PEMF that I was talking about earlier. And it can be used for headaches, for mental acuity, for energy, for adrenal function. It has a Tesla coil that passes up through the center of it that's surrounded by nine noble gases. And when this Tesla coil emits its frequencies, these noble gases oscillate and emit frequencies that are specifically targeted to Whatever cellular function that you put the biocharger setting at, and then it produces infrared light, a little bit of uva, a little bit of uvb. So when we're talking about a device that stacks a ton of the modalities that I've been teaching you guys about, the biocharger is a perfect example of that. So this is a little bit more of an expensive hat, but I mean, I have one in my basement in my so called Zen den, where I put a lot of this stuff. And it's very impressive. I thought it was kind of gimmicky at first. And the more I use it, the more I realize that it's super powerful. And I've had really advanced meditation practitioners and folks who are super tuned into their bodies sit with that thing for something like a chakra session where it kind of sweeps all the chakras of your body. And they're absolutely impressed with it. They can feel it right away. So I'm a big fan of the biocharger as well.

I've shown you guys a lot of devices and we'll move to Q and A here in a second. But I would be remiss, not to mention just a couple of things. The first is that people who are demotivated, people who have brain fog, people who struggle with cognitive function, people who struggle with clarity of thought, in many cases, it's not about throwing more nootropics, more supplements, more blueberries and more biohacks at the issue. One of the number one things, things I found for myself for actually giving me mental energy all day long experience, afternoon slump and not being able to get out of bed in the morning, to be able to perform is a clear identification of my life's purpose statement. And I realize that might sound kind of hokey, couched into a whole talk about biohacking technologies, but man, I tell you what, when we're talking about foundational principles, and I really appreciate how Matt Dawson started this whole session with what is your why? You must not only know what your why is for being at this conference, but your why is for existing. You know, the Japanese call it Ikigai, or in Sardinia, Italy, it's called the Plan de vita, your plan for life. You must be able to have your one single succinct purpose statement that you're able to say to yourself as the, you know, the bullets from your email inbox are flying at you like something out of the Matrix and you're stuck in traffic and you're stressed out and life is moving a million miles an hour, you have to be able to return to your why. And if you don't have one single succinct purpose statement for your life, based on the unique skill set that God has given you, based on the kind of things that you like to do when you were a little kid, the kind of things that make time go by really quickly for you now, that put you in the flow, then you need to get serious and actually develop a purpose statement for yourself. There are many ways to do that. Wonderful books out there, like John demartini's Values Factor or Master Tips. Claim your power.

I have a whole article on my website about how to find your purpose in life. But if you don't have a single succinct purpose statement for your life, I challenge you to hone that down and to be able to say, my wife Jessa, hers is very simple. She says, I want to minister to my family. So anything she does, cooking, hospitality, goats, chickens, gardening, anything that's fueling her purpose statement. Mine is to read, write, learn, teach, sing, speak, compete and create in full presence and selfless love to the glory of God. If I know that purpose statement when I wake up in the morning, that rips me out of bed and it works better than any biocharger session or shoving any number of laser lights up my nose. That's number one. Know your purpose statement. If you don't know how to find it or you want to talk more about that, come find me afterwards because it is very important and I don't want to fill your guys heads full of toys and technologies without giving you that foundational principle. In addition to this foundational principle, we can throw all this stuff at our bodies all day long. You're going to learn a ton at this conference you already have about how to optimize your personal environment, how your genetics are going to influence your cognition, all these different biohacking tools and toys and technologies. But you can throw everything you want at this deep hole of yearning that you have in your system to be better and it's never going to fulfill you, I guarantee you. Lamborghinis, Ferraris, billion dollar mansions, coffee supplements, biohacks. All of this. All of this is gonna be unfulfilling at the end of the day because we were created. We were created by an eternal God. And what that means is all of us, deep down in our souls, we crave eternity, we crave union with God. And if you have not had some type of connection to the higher power that created you, you're going to Learn all day long today, you're going to learn all day long tomorrow you're going to walk out here super excited about all these new things that are finally going to make life complete for you. And a week from now, or three weeks from now, or a month from now, or a year from now, you'll suddenly realize that you're still not complete, that there must be something greater, there must be something else out there for you. So I would challenge you not only to find your one single succinct purpose statement in life, but to also consider that none of this stuff is going to be fulfilling because again, you're going to learn a lot over the next couple days until you've actually filled that God shaped abyss in your hole with God. Okay, so there's a hole in your soul. If you're searching and searching and searching, there's only one way to fill that up. So find your purpose statement, find God, fill those foundational principles that Matt was talking about, and then go out and throw all this cool shit on top of that, like icing on the cake, and you're really, really going to be truly optimized. So I think we got some time for questions. Yeah. All right, we'll do some Q and A. Oh, and here, oh, by the way, bottom of this slide, if you go to that URL, I have a ton of podcasts and articles and links, all sorts of ways that you guys can take a deeper dive if you want to. So this is a couple live questions first and some others. Yeah. So, Ben, thanks for wrapping up with purpose, because I think that's so foundational. You know, my experience has been I've got the flex pulse and I just got the biocharger and I've got the newcomer. I've done a lot of those things. But if you really don't have that purpose. Yeah, toys, toys, toys don't make you happy. You can find a great deal of pleasure in them, but like Anthony DeMillo says, you know, you can't be attached to them. But then again, I would say my own experience, coming from just severe gut issues and chronic fatigue, having the body aligned with your purpose is super helpful if you don't have the energy and mitochondrial health and the brain health. So what would be things, a measurement that people could have, and I would say this to Ben or to Dr. Mike, where they could prioritize of the gadgets that you shared of. Where to start? Right. How do you quantify what's working? Yeah, you know, they were talking about brain games earlier. Brainscape Brain hq. Most of those just make you better at playing the game. Arguably probably brainhq I think is the one that has the most research behind it for some amount of neural optimization, thermopedic gameplay. I'm a bigger fan of tracking your short term memory recall.

It'll burn the battery. Like if you just pulse electromagnetic field therapy, it'll drain the battery. Anything you're using in conjunction with really fast. So you do have to be careful. I mean you can have it off to the side of the device.

I can see something.

Sure. Most of the data on like neurofeedback and PEMF is. Most research in general gets done for clinical indications. So for the optimization stuff we do, there's not a whole lot of great data. It's kind of wild wild west as far as stacking, you know, whatever nad with.

Based on pathways, but there's not.

Nad.

A couple great questions online. First one super easy, so I just ask an answer real quickly. Anything. There's any amount of transcranial direct stimulation or photobiomodulation, whatever make you mad at basketball interest.

Next question is a serious question. So we Talked earlier about EMFs and how harmful they are in your environment. A lot of these devices have ems. How do you know, first off, one of these things aren't going to just hurt you? Yeah, well, I'm glad Alex gave his talk earlier because he hit the nail on the head. I mean you look at everything from a Class 1 Bluetooth signal causing red blood cell pumping to a lot of what we know about, you know, the far more sense signals including 5G and the effects on the synapses, the effects on neural inflammation. Most of these devices do come with a warrant not to have a near your head dictates that if I have a device and I cannot place it in airplane mode, or I cannot disable Bluetooth, or I cannot disable wi fi. I don't care how impressive or useful it is. I simply do not use it. You know the, the Apollo wristband that I wear, I can put that in airplane mode. My aura rig, I can put that in airplane mode. All the apps that I use all have downloaded. So the cell phone connection does not need to be active while I'm using it. If that is not possible for anything that I use, get some mic and no, so, so no wi Fi, no Bluetooth airplane mode functionality. That's, that's just my, my strict rule for anything I'm going to use or especially if I put near my head for long periods of time. Then what about supplements? Are there any supplements that you use on a regular basis to try to fix anything you can really lean to for brain optimization?

Yeah, I mess around with a lot of supplements. I would say.

3, 7. Trimethylxanthine is probably the most common one that I'll consume, AKA the caffeine that you find back there. The world's most popular drug, which also stacks pretty well with a little bit of nicotine. So like on an intense day I'll do a little bit of nicotine, a little bit of caffeine. I like acetylcholine and I use acetylcholine for a long period of time, especially because a lot of these devices will upregulate neuronal activity to the extent where you're depleting depleting choline levels more rapidly. And then I started to use the stack called qualia mind. I use the caffeine free quality of mind just because it's got amino acids, got electrolytes, it's got neurotransmitter precursors. It's a very impressive stack for either brain replenishment or kind of like a nootropic or smart drug like effect. So I probably use that most frequently. I take six or seven capsules of that, probably three to four days of the week. And then I'll do caffeine usually about three weeks out of the month and then switch to decaf for about a week to reset my adenosine receptors. And then nicotine I'll usually go through about anywhere from 4 to 8 milligrams of nicotine a day.

I would consider NAD to be a mild nootropic. And I do about every other day sub q injection, about 100 milligrams of NAD. And then about five, six months ago I started using more regularly, a little bit more of kind of like a plant medicine based microdosing protocol. And so I'm, I'm doing that still probably four to five days of the week, kind of, kind of three different formulas for enhancing cognition or focus. And so those would be some of the biggies. Microdoses, plant medicine, quality mind, caffeine free, a little bit of caffeine, a little bit of nicotine. And then like I mentioned prior to like hyperbaric or red light therapy, anything that will increase blood flow to the brain. So first is done the most research in the world on microdosing. Speaking questions about that.

You have a new book on spirituality purpose. Yeah, yeah.

So my new book on on spiritual fitness, which is technically entitled Fit soul.

My birthday is December 21st. I want to launch the book on my birthday and have it be available for free to the entire world. If I print a bunch of hard copies, what I'll do is just, you know, have people pay shipping and handling just so I can ship it to them. But. So December 20th is when I'll have that book done. So yeah, yeah. Hopefully it'll be, it'll be helpful for people. Yeah.

What peptides did you use for brain optimization? Well, that's a good question. You know, I haven't used a lot of the brain peptides recently, but C Max and C Link are good as injectables because it's got adult in size that allows it to be absorbed through the skin. Dihexa transdermal. Dihexa is really good. If your issues are related to neural inflammation, VPC157 can be really good. Those are probably some of the biggies. Bpc157, c link, c max and Phi Hexa. I think those are the most impressive neurological peptides. So there's Also one called Ara490, but it's more of like a central nervous system kind of like a nerve repair type of effect. So I suppose if you had, you know, poor myelination or nerve issues or nerve pain, that might be one.

That also will increase your erythropoid. So that's kind of a cool peptide.

I think. Yeah. Yeah. TaylorMade isn't making too much now. Excel Health. I think that's also the NAD I'm using. I want to say Excel Health. I believe I'm primarily going through Matt Cook and Craig Conheiber right now for any peptides and I think it's Excel Health.

Yeah, they, they shut down a ton of them. Yeah, it's difficult.

Wells.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, there's some speculation that Peptide Scientist has decent peptides, but I'm still careful ordering online. I just. It's too risky.

Yeah, C60 is really good. Has anybody used that before? The Buckminster Fullerene C60? I mean. Yeah, the anti aging, the hair growth, I mean, it's, it's actually, if you get good C60, that's actual real C60 in olive oil. That stuff's pretty impressive. It's a little bit more of an anti aging effect though. You're gonna see a big spark in cognition. Probably the best guy for C60 is Ian Mitchell. I forget what his website URL is, But he's. Yeah, C360. I interviewed him on my podcast. He's probably the Most brilliant guy for C60 out there. Yeah.

Personal mission statement, purpose statement, and there's any kind of singular breakthrough that helped you get there or something you went through to help you get married. Yeah. You know, purpose statements can change as you go through different phases of life. When I was doing a lot of heavy competing, you know, and kind of like more masochistic adventure racing around the world and kind of being a little bit more of a cowboy and a warrior, my purpose statement was to inspire people to live a more adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. So that would get me through my workouts, that would get me through, you know, on a plane with a bike and shoes just to go compete.

As I really developed less of a desire to just beat my body up and travel all over the world racing, and a little bit more of a desire to tap into some of the other elements of the unique skill set that God birthed me with, while also not completely forsaking my deep seated desire to kind of compete and still get out there and rough and tumble every once in a while. I began to write down just a list of all the things that I really like to do when I was a little boy. All of those things that I still like to do now, I kept on that list. And then I also thought about the things that give me a lot of joy, that really fuel me, and that specifically just put me into the zone. You put me in front of a blank page at 10am and I'll write until 1pm and feel like 20 minutes has gone by. I love to write, just flows for me. You do the same thing with my wife and she'll be crying in front of the keyboard after 10 minutes because she doesn't write. It's not a skill that she was born with. You give her a canvas and a paintbrush and she will make the most beautiful masterpiece. Though while I would have my head dirty in my hands and not even know where to start, aside from just throwing paintings, canvas like Cookie Monster. So based on that, you know, the purpose statement that I, that I formulated, that's currently my purpose statement to read, write, learn, teach, sing, speak, speak, compete and create. You know, those are eight things that I really like to do. Like all those things make me super happy and super connected to self and connected to God. But furthermore, I don't just want to. I find that one of my weaknesses is that I'll tend to multitask and not be present with any of those activities. And so I tack onto the end of those activities in full presence because I want to remind myself, can you be present as I'm doing each of these things that bring me joy and that satisfy my purpose in life. Furthermore, if you've developed your unique purpose and it is about you, how can you make money, how can you succeed, how can you have more power, glory, fame, impress more people, etc. It's not going to be a virtual fulfilling purpose statement. So I encourage you to couch your purpose statement, even though this doesn't have to be woven into the statement itself in the context of loving others, in the context of other people. And so at the end of my purpose statement, I say, in full presence and selfless love. And then finally, I want to do everything, every last thing that is put on my plate the very, very best I can. I want to do it the most excellent way possible. And I feel as though if we apply ourselves with supreme excellence to everything that we do, it's our way of saying thank you to the Creator who made us in his image. It's our way of saying, you made me. I'm going to take this body, I'm going to take this mind, I'm going to take this soul, and I'm going to go make fireworks. I'm going to do the very, very best job I can with whatever is put on my plate. And so when I say in full presence and selfless love, to the glory of God, that, to the glory of God reminds me, be excellent in everything. Be excellent in everything. And so that's kind of what inspired my purpose statement. But you know, it's basically what do you like to do? What did you like to do? What makes time go fast? What can you do with that purpose statement? To go out and love others to the most excellent of your abilities. And that's kind of how I formulated that.

That's great. Any other questions? How about a meditation?

I found it a little bit difficult to sort of get my brain to really focus.

There's a ton of different types of meditation. I don't have time to meditate, bro.

So I can tell you what I do. I mean, I'm trained at TM and you know, I worked with a TM practitioner for a couple of years, did not find it to be incredibly valuable for me.

Transcendental meditation? Yeah, yeah. Mantra twice a day for 20 minutes. Kind of a mantra based meditation.

I've also done a lot of breathwork meditation, primarily a type called Soma breathwork, which pairs breathwork meditation. But now my family and I all gather on the porch every morning and we meditate for about 10 minutes. And we actually use an app to do that. It is a Christian meditation app that presents us with God's word, with the prayer, with breath work, with an uplifting kind of message in each meditation. And we simply all gather around, we sit cross legged around the app, we play the meditation and that one is called Abide Abide. And it is a Christian meditation app that is just super simple for a whole family to gather around and do. So we do that in the morning with journaling and then in the evening we finish with journaling and music and a little bit more meditation before bed. So we're usually dropping in for about 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. But all as a family. Yeah. Tomorrow we have two sessions related at the first is evidence based approach, something about mindfulness based stress reduction. Just a quick intro to that. And then later Joey Spence is going to be joining us to talk about meditation specifically. And we're going to talk about some movement meditation briefly too. And then having a yoga session where we kind of go through that. But there's other ways to meditate other than just transcendental meditation where you don't have to just sit there for 20 minutes. So we're going to try to dive into that a little bit and do these techniques.

So ending with the purpose is beautiful. Can you tell people how to use the tools and how to shop?

Sorry about the basketball trash talk. Give us your one best toy. You got to choose one of these biohacking devices to save you. If you blew all your money on a caster, you can only afford one.

So entry level, I'd say the Apollo. You're looking at 300, $400. Very cool device. Again, I use it daily. I would say mid range again, you know, more like depending on what you get, 3 to 5K the new column. And I would say high range, probably close to 12 to 15k would be the Biocharger. So those would be kind of three and three specific ranges that I think would be of everything I showed. Probably the ones I choose, the Apollo, the Newcomer, the Biocharger.

And Blueberries.

But.

Ask my wife what my office and my closet look like and he'd probably call it that statement back. No, I don't do a lot, I don't do a lot of spreadsheeting or tracking. In terms of a really robust organizational system, I'm kind of more free, willing, throw something out there, see how it feels, assess a few metrics like I was talking about like sleep or hrv kind of move on, try something else. But I have a friend named Quantified Bob, and Quantified Bob has a whole website and he's just on Excel all day long tracking stuff. And to be honest with you, I just don't have a lot of time. I don't have a lot of time to finish up a workout and spend 20 minutes downloading all my power and heart rate data and hrv. Like, I'd rather take a shower and go be with my kids. So, yeah, I actually don't do a lot of organizational work with what I do.

I think you're unique in that way, Ben, in that you can subjectively tell how you respond to things. A lot of us struggle with that a little bit more and sort of fall onto the quantification. And I think either one's okay. Yeah. If you're not a real feeler, if you can't subjectively tell, like this scissors not working for me, then I think it's okay to lean on things like HRV and stuff like that as a better metric for how. Yeah, I mean, I'm also a real 80, 20 guy and super efficient with time. And again, like, If I've got 40 minutes to work out and the option to use 20 of those minutes, you know, quantifying my data and downloading my heart rate to my computer, computer and everything, I'm gonna work out for 40 minutes. I'm not gonna spend those 20 minutes downloading everything just because I'd rather just listen to my body and maybe batch a download at the end of the week. But, yeah, I just haven't found a great deal of value in fretting over numbers. Even when I look at my OURA ring data, it's 60 seconds, it's boom. What's sleep? What's HRV? What's my recovery? What's my latency? Okay, good. Close it. So I don't spend a lot of time fretting over quantification just because I think there's more important things in life. I don't think that was really my question per se, because I think you can.