Anti-Aging Hacks, Conquering Knee Pain, Vegetables Vs. Viruses, Grittiness Tips, New Sound Apps For Relaxation, Free-Range Kids & More: The Most Listened To Podcast Episodes Of 2022.

Welcome to a very special episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Show. I have collected the top of the top episodes, the top of the top takeaways, if I can use that word enough. Top, topity, top, top, top. From 2022, I've got Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis revealing new anti aging biohacks and breakthroughs in precision medicine, many of which you've never heard of before. The next one is with Ben Patrick on how to manage knee pain, get rid of knee pain, old Chinese techniques to keep your a whole lot more. I have an episode with Dr. Thomas Cowan on vegetables, on viruses, on new dietary protocol is very interesting using vegetable powders. I have a podcast with Jeff Bondman on how to make yourself physically and mentally more gritty, more resilient, and as Jeff says, harder to kill. I've got an episode with Dan Clark and Kevin woods, the director of science and the CEO of Brain fm, a special form of sound that shifts your state of consciousness from anxiety to relaxation or wakefulness or focus or sleep. And finally, I have America's worst mom coming on to explain why we need more free range parenting and less helicopter parenting and what it means to actually let your kids grow. So, as you can imagine, this one is a doozy. All of the show notes you can find at BenGreenfieldLife BestOf2022, that's BenGreenfieldLife.com BestOf2022 and so, without further ado, we are simply going to dive in. Here we go. Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. All right, in this first clip are my guests Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. Their book Life Force is about precision medicine, regenerative medicine, anti aging, longevity, and a whole lot more. We talk about Tony's debilitating snowboarding accident, biosplicing stem cells, commonostics, counter strain therapy, young blood transfers, and plenty more. So enjoy. All right, so when I read this book, I kind of expected it to be another one of these longevity books, right? Like maybe eat your wild blueberries and your superfood smoothie. Eat like the Okinawans or the people in the Mediterranean. And maybe if you got a little bit of extra cash in the wallet, buy some NAD or something and call your doctor about stem cells.

Or.

And when I open up the book and began to read, I started to fold over page after page after page about ghost hearts and tissue regeneration and stem cells. Yeah, but different forms of stem cells and nad. But these upgraded forms, I'd never heard of. And holy cow, you guys really pulled together a pretty impressive body of knowledge in the realm of longevity and anti aging here.

Thank you very much. Well, you know, we interviewed 150, you know, Nobel laureates, some top scientists, medical doctors. So nothing in is our opinion. And, you know, it started out really, you know, I've been obsessed with finding answers to the quality of life for people throughout my life. But one of the triggers for doing this for me this time was, you know, I have this injury that they told me was going to end my career. And I'm used to going out to a group of, you know, 10, 15, 20,000 people and going 12 hours a day for four days in a row doing insane things with my body. But I had this experience where I was going down this mountainside chasing somebody much younger and almost near professional snowboarder, and he could do things I couldn't do. And that became obvious when I felt like I just broke my neck. I mean, the pain was insane. I ended up just tearing my rotator cuff severely. I was on a 0 to 10, like, 9, 9 pain. And so you know what I do?

I.

Well, I first I found out about PMF because I can only sleep an hour a night. And, you know, as you know, there's about 3,000 studies on it, and it can, you know, heal your bones in 50% of the time, help with your nerves. It reduced the pain to about a.

PI Pulsepulsed electromagnetic field therapy for people listening in and not familiar. It's kind of like a Swiss army knife.

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

Yeah, time to move into the basement and become a blogger.

Well, I hadn't thought about that. Perhaps that would have been a good move. But fortunately for me, you know, my brain kicked back in in my heart and I was like, okay, there's always an answer. And so I called Peter because, you know, Peter's my dear friend and you know, he's a rocket scientist and an MD from Harvard is like, I've heard so much about stem cells. Some people say it's all bs. All these doctors told me it's worthless. But I've heard from other people, you know, some of my athlete friends who are goats, greatest of all time, who went over to Germany and went to other places and swear by them. So I said, who should I talk to? And he said, well, you should talk to Bob Hararis. And I didn't know at the time, you know, I knew Bob was a neurosurgeon. I didn't know he's one of the earliest people to discover the impact of stem cells. And, you know, I didn't know at the time. It's like saying, I want to learn about basketball. Let me introduce you my friend, LeBron James, right? So I go see Bob and I'm so impressed by Bob. And Bob says, listen, Tony, at your stage of life, I was 53. He said, there's no way. He said, your stem cells have dropped off the cliff. If you go do autologous, which means the stem cells from your own body, it's not going to work. You need allergenic, big word for cells from someone else. But you need four day old stem cells with a force of life, life force in them. And I said, well, I don't want fetal tissue. And he said, no, you don't need to do that. We're talking about cord or placenta stem cells. He said, you know, they've been thrown away by most people, but it's the force of life. And he said, I told me where to go. So I listened to Bob.

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

No, I'm just talking about pregnancies when babies are born.

Okay, I got you. I got you.

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

Thing at the Vatican.

Yeah. And they asked me to be the cleanup speaker. And I was like, okay, I'll do that, but I want to come to the whole program. And I timmed the whole thing. And I met 11 year old that was supposed to die that Bob had turned around. The kid was 4 years old, and they saw no solution, and they got stem cells from his young sister, and he's alive today. I met people that were sent home to die with various forms of cancer. And then people didn't give up, and they went and got car T cells, for example, and they're alive today, seven years later. I don't know if you saw, but nature this last week said 10 years now these car T cells are still alive. It's the first time I've seen anybody in that market talking about a cure, but for leukemia and liquid cancers. And then I got to meet Jack Nicklaus, who, you know, the greatest golfer of all time. They were going to fuse his spine. He couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes without immense pain. And you know, spinal fusion does not work at least 50% of the time. Fortunately, he got stem cells. He's 82 now and he plays golf and plays tennis. You know, complete change of life. So I said, you know, I went to Simon Schuster and said, I want to do what I did with money. I want to go to the greatest sources on earth, I want to interview them, I want to synthesize and simplify it into actionable things that people can do. And I want to show people what they can do to have more energy, strength and vitality. But I also want to show them what's happening with longevity. And I also want to show them what to do with the big killers so that there's something else besides standard of care, which often is not enough, as you and I both know. So that's when we started discovering these things, like, you know, obviously about, you know, you know, gene therapy and what's happening with crispr where we're curing diseases never to cure. You know, we're taking stem cells and getting people to walk again, use the arms again. You know, we got, you know, there's a single injection that's made by a company right now that's in phase three trials, you know, the final stage. They hope to be approved the end of the year beginning next year. Single injection triggers your WNT pathway, the signaling pathway makes you make up new tendons. So if you have osteoarthritis within 11 months, you have all new tendons. And because it's a clean epigenome they're pulling from, you end up with like 16 year old tendons, even if you're 50 or 60 years old.

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

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

Martin.

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

I'll jump in on Martin, who I know so well for 40 years.

Oh, you know Martin. Okay, so Martin's the other person. Yeah, that's fine. Tell me about Martin, because I know she did some different things.

Martin is extraordinary. So you have to understand, Martin was the creator of Sirius and XM Radio. She was a. A regulatory lawyer for satellite industry. Her daughter Genesis comes down with a disease, that pulmonary fibrosis that the doctors say to Martine, this is fatal. Your daughter's going to die in a couple of years and there's no solution. What does Martine do, the rock star that she is? She quits the board of her company, she cashes in, and she sets out on her very first moon. Actually, it's her second moonshot. Her first moonshot was satellite radio, which she made happen. Second moonshot was cure her daughter. What she starts with is a high school textbook, sits in the medical library, starts reading everything she can, not knowing.

Anything about, like, anatomy and physiology or anything. She comes from a tech background.

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

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

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

And this is a subtle nuance, by the way, Peter, that I think folks should know. This was like a worthless powder. This was like a totally abandoned, I don't know, what do they call them, like orphan drugs that nobody was using. She licensed it for. I'm sure the pharmaceutical company was kicking themselves afterwards.

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

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

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

Yeah.

And I mean, not only is it crazy that she comes from a background in tech, knowing nothing about this, winds up taking an orphan drug and turning it into an effective treatment for pulmonary fibrosis and saving her daughter, but then figures out how to make actual human friendly organs from pigs. All right, our next clip is from my interview with Ben Patrick, AKA the knees over toes guy. He is the go to dude when it comes to knee pain and really a whole host of biomechanical and biomechanical longevity and performance issues. We get into how to fix your knee pain for good, how to improve your sports performance, get a bigger vertical jump. A whole bunch of things Ben does with his athletes that definitely apply to the general population. And of course, walking backwards and why you need to do it.

Basically, the two things I can really look back and assuredly have done more than anyone in the world in the last decade are almost opposing qualities. One of which creates healing, the other which creates bulletproofing. So if we look at what creates healing, how do we get natural healing of a knee joint, but in a way that increases that shock absorption so that you don't have the wear and tear, right? So you're running into cartilage stuff. So that's your shock absorption in there. And so, you know, you could be pain free and pushing your body really hard and then like all of a sudden wind up with pain because of that, like, degeneration over time. If you think about the activities causing that, running would be one of them, right? There's like, over time, there's a lot of impact from running. It's been said that, you know, like a marathon is the equivalent of squatting, like 500 pounds or something in terms of how much force it is playing sports, all the landings. So think about you. Look how much running have you done? Look how much jumping you did when you were younger. There's so much impact and all that impact is coming forward into your knees. So if we start from a place where they're having successful results with preventing cartilage degeneration, it's simply backward walking in China that's been passed on from generation to generation to generation. But for something like running, I don't think backward walking is enough. It's just an interesting thing that they figured that out thousands of years ago to prevent cartilage degeneration in the knees. So they, they pass it on and they make their elderly walk backwards.

Yeah, and quick, quick rabbit hole with the backward walking thing in China. I think, I think it's crazy. And I actually started doing this. Somebody gave me a hard time the other day at my 40th birthday party because they're like, yo, every time I drive past Ben's house, I want to tell him he's going to die getting hit by a car because he's always walking backwards up and down like the road behind his house. Which is true. And I used to do it now and then, and now like every day. Because I go on a walk every day, I do probably about one tenth of the walk and I go on long walks walking backwards. I wasn't aware, I think, until you told me that it was like this old Chinese thing for keeping the knees healthy. But I would love to. And I don't know if you plan on maybe explaining later on as you're explaining your technique about why that works, why the backward walking does the trick, but be sure to come back to that if you don't plan on addressing it right now.

Oh yeah, we're going right into that right now. So that technology exists there for their elderly essentially to keep maintaining the ability to walk forwards. When you walk backwards, you're now strengthening completely different muscles. And if anyone listening to this is to stand up right now and then just take one step backward and stop and just hold that position, you would see that your knee is over your toes. So when you go backwards, you're actually doing knees over toes training. You're putting pressure on your knee. The pressure sends a signal to the body that you need to be stronger there. But unlike doing some heavy weight exercise or trying to bend too far into pain, if you find a pain free level of backward, well now you're able to put that pressure that you need to adapt and you're able to get a lot more blood flow. But what did I do was not just backward walking, I've done hundreds of miles now backwards, but against resistance, which I actually think is safer and more effective in the sense that let's Say you're hooked up to a sled set. My second favorite after a sled on turf. So you'll start seeing sleds on turf in a lot of gyms now. They don't usually have a belt set up. I have my own belt that I just finished designing that'll be out on Amazon. Way cheaper than any of the belts out there because it's not like a common thing. So I'm bringing a cheaper one. But if you imagine dragging a sled backward on turf, it actually slows you down. So it's almost less impact but more pressure. So we need that pressure on the knees over the toes in order to cause the adaptation of that area. And when you do this, I mean you can really get with the sled, you can get a 10 out of 10 burn. So for 10 years now, I've been chasing that 10 out of 10 blood flow. It takes a lot of blood flow to get down to the tendon level and even more blood flow to get down to the ligament level. So if anyone just understands this really quick, muscles, tendons, ligaments, you have an inverse thing going on here. The muscle is the weakest of the three, but the muscle is the most flexible of the three. So the ligament is the least flexible, but the strongest. The tendon is in the middle. So the tendon is more flexible than a ligament, but not as strong as the ligament. It's stronger than a muscle, but not as flexible as a muscle. And in terms of blood flow, it's very easy to go get a bicep pump. Much harder to get blood flow like to your knee, the tendons in your knee. And then even hardest to get it into a ligament level and even wicked hard in terms of getting down to a cartilage level. But I'm dead certain that you can actually create changes to the cartilage, these degrading kind of things. You can gradually reverse them out by finding a pain free level and gradually resisting it to the point that you're getting 10 out of 10 blood pumps pain free. So what I have used is a sled on turf. There is a company called.

But you're not pushing the sled, you're dragging, you have a belt, you're dragging the sled and you're walking backwards.

Great question. Backwards is mandatory. You can also. So like if, let's say you had like a 10 or 20 meter space, you could just go backward, forward, backward, forward, backward, forward. But you would have to do as much backward as forward. You see what I'm saying? So I'm actually a huge fan of forward on this sled for getting into leg strength and foot benefits. Because so much of what we do in the weight room, our foot is just flat, flat, flat, flat. Leg presses, leg extensions, hamstring curls. What about our fricking feet? So when you're even pushing a sled, and if you want, if you want to know, if you really understand a subject, see if you can teach it to a six year old. And I'm able to teach six year olds knees over toes. You know how I put some weight on a sled and I ask them to push it and their knee immediately gets way over their toes. But this is a very, this is getting a lot of pressure, but it's not that jarring impact. You're actually, it's a more controlled pressure. So you get stronger, you get blood flow to heal and strengthen at the same time. So I, so I. Now my ideal scene is I push pull. So every day, seven days a week, I push pull on the sled. But the backward would be the foundation. And it's always, it's not always as easy to have a sled set up that you can like push and pull. Like, someone could go on Amazon, get just like a cheap $50 sled, put some weight on it, go out to a park and start going backward every day. Then the next, the next sleds will have like pushing poles and you could set up for backwards. And I was starting to say there's a company called Torque Fitness and they sell one for $1,600. I'm designing one and I don't even care if someone hears this and beats me to the market, go for it. I just want the tools out there. So Torque Fitness has one, but it's a bit bulkier than is needed. And there's no, you know, with the sled, you know how much weight is on it. But with the torque, one has internal resistance, but you don't actually know like, what you're accomplishing. So it's very easy. I have one being designed right now that measures your distance in time. So it's very simple. Like, okay, I went backward 100 meters in X amount of seconds at X resistance. So those are $1,600 right now for Torque. I own them and buy them wherever I go because $1,600 is still cheaper than treadmill and a heck of a lot cheaper than knee surgery. So that thing is amazing. And you can push, pull with that thing.

This is like a sled that actually has the wheels on it, right?

Yeah. So it has an internal resistance so you can put it right out of the garage. And I mean, within five minutes you'll have, honestly, I think better than a PRP injection. That's just my honest opinion based on actually training people on this. The amount of people who have come to me, quote, my doctor says I have irreversible cartilage damage. I can never play my sport again. I will never regain full knee bend. These are the exact kind of things I fix every single day. So with that sled concept, we have a fundamental difference between. Let's think about a squat. Okay? Let's think about a squat versus pushing and pulling a sled. The squat, you let the weight move you, then you move the weight. With the sled, the weight never moves you. Only you move it. So if you're going backwards, only you move the sled. If there's £1,000, it just won't move. When you go forward, only you move this sled. If there's £1,000, it just won't move. So think about my mom, who's 67 and I've rehabilitated her ability to run 100% pain free. Like, she looks like she's in her 20s running and she does the sled every day. My program is sled plus at least two exercises. That's it. That's how important the slide is to us.

Yeah, well, well, you definitely, you definitely got to let me know once that sled comes out, because I will, I will. I have a sled, but the problem is like my driveway. And look, because I live out in the sticks and my sled is not on wheels. It's just one of the, the cheapo sleds. And I've got a belt and everything on it and I, I got it, you know, you know Brian Johnson, the liver king? Have you heard of this guy before? Yeah, big on TikTok right now. But he, he has this work called the Barbarian where he'll put ankle weights on two kettlebells, sled and backpack and do like a mile long sled drag. Apparently anyone who works for his, his ancestral supplements liver capsules company has to like do this workout as, as, you know, proof that they can actually work for the company or something like that.

But I, I think that's awesome.

I bought that sled to do the workout because I tried the workout. It's pretty hard. I just did like this farm road back behind my house. It definitely ripped, ripped me wide open. But the sled doesn't like it just It's a pain in the butt to drag up a dumb.

If you have an actual metal sled, you need turf.

Yeah.

Again, what we're trying to create, right, we're trying to get the pressure, but without the jarring effect. So what would be the worst? Like, so if you look at someone's knee gets worse and worse. What becomes scariest to them would be like landing. You see what I mean? Like the higher the landing, the more freaky it gets. Right? So it's not that the pressure inherently is bad, it's that this jarring pressure that you can't handle is bad. So that's where the sled comes in. That allows us to get significant pressure. I mean, your whole body gets stronger, you start sprouting people who thought they'd never have abs. It's like, what the heck? How am I getting abs? Because you're getting. It's like the. Anyone who comes and experiences with me in person uniformly says it's the toughest workout they've ever done. But the point is that you're able to get that pressure in a pain free way, in a non jarring way. So we actually intentionally start slowly. So if I'm doing 100 meters, I'm actually only going more intensely as I go. So like I'm taking very controlled, smooth steps forward and backward, gradually building up the blood flow and then as that blood flow is there, more and more. It's this amazing feeling of being able to exert at 100% without any pain. You know what feeling I'm talking about? You've probably experienced that so many times in different ways. But when you're like, when you're giving everything you have, but you're not in any like actual like joint or spine pain. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. And that's another thing I was thinking about with this so called backwards walking, which also, if you guys look it up, you might find it listed as. What's it called? Retro. I think they're just called retro walking.

Retro walking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The interesting thing is a, there's actual studies on it. I think there was a four week study and I'll find it linked to it in the show notes. And it looked specifically for chronic osteoarthritic patients and found a significant increase in functional mobility of the knees and decrease in pain from four weeks of this retro walking. Not even with a sled or anything. Like these people are just like walking backwards. Like, like I do with my death witch walks along the busy road behind my House, Honest. I like to do a slight uphill grade. And sometimes if it's like super snowy and icy out like it is now, I'll just do it on the. On the treadmill. Because if you put your treadmill on, like two or three miles an hour.

You know, or turn it off is what I do.

Yeah, Mine almost has too much resistance off. But if I put on a super low speed, it's decent. And by leaning forward on the treadmill, you can kind of sort of simulate a sled push. And then you can also. You can also go backwards on it, so you can get a little bit of what you'd be getting from a sled on that. But then the other interesting thing that I've noticed, maybe not just from the backwards walking, but also from doing the other elements of your program, because I just do. I think there's about eight different exercises you sent to me. It takes like 15 minutes to go through them all. And so I've started to do that just two to three times a week. And the other thing, though, that I've noticed is it seems to really help out with pelvic mobility and also lower back pain. Like, sometimes, you know, at the end of the day, I'll have a little bit of lower back pain just from, you know, working all day. And, you know, even though I have a standing desk, your hips kind of get tight. But this. This backwards walking not only seems to be magic for the knees, but also it seems to really help alleviate low back pain.

Yeah. The studies on it are actually phenomenal, including for the lower back. And it sets a foundation that it makes it easier to get into more hip exercises. I'm gonna read you a message because a doctor sent it to me last night. His name's Brian Ziegler. He's a physical therapist. And he says, though I'm sure you're already aware, but the research in support of rokp, that's what I call it, reverse out knee pain, because it's like a broad category of dragging a sled or this, you know, so we just call it reverse out knee pain. Right. So he says the research in support of ROKP and all the really cool things it does, it does make me wonder why it hasn't been a standard of care for all knee pain for decades. I have research going back to the 80s showing the superiority of ROKP for muscle recruitment, force reduction and pain reduction almost seems to make any clinician that prescribed forward walking for knee pain negligent. And yet this was never mentioned. Once in PT school and not a single one of my 30 coworkers use it as a rehab tool. So that's why I had to be knees over toes, guys. Because the gross misunderstanding of this, it didn't work out. It didn't work out for me and it didn't work out for millions of other people. And when you run from understanding a subject, that's how you create a long term disaster. So this one category of just getting stronger backwards, if all you did was do it for just the simple concept of like, okay, if you think about most workouts and most sports performance, I mean, seven times as much money is spent studying acceleration as deceleration. So we already have lives where we've all tried excessively to go forward, you know what I mean? Like, like playing volleyball and jumping forward, jumping forward, jumping forward, you know, like basketball, running. It's not necessarily like the human body was designed to go from like a three hour practice to a this or that, you know, like there would be more of a balance, you know, like if you think out in the wild, what are the odds you'd be doing 3, 4, 500 jumps a day? There's no way, you know what I mean? So we've already excessively done it. So if all you did was just for the same reason, if you had never in your life heard of training back muscles and all you had done was bench presses and push ups, and you wonder why you have terrible shoulder pain, you know what I mean? And someone came and said, well, let's strengthen the back muscles, that would be pretty common sense. So if all you did was just from a common sense perspective was work backwards, you'd be putting in a smart investment. So can backward walking work? I think well enough for maintaining the ability to walk. I think it could get good general blood flow. But I think when you add a sled to the matter on turf, or one of these tank sleds that uses internal resistance so that you can do it on any surface. Even if you had, if you had an incline that could be pretty good, however, then you have the going down. So you'd have to go like extra slow down to make sure that you're not overdoing it. And like we covered with a treadmill at low speed or turned off completely and like using your strength to go backwards, those are all really good things. But the whole time for me I've been using an actual sled or a tank sled, you know what I mean? So I also can't say that like, yeah, a hill is going to work as good as these other things when I'm dragging a couple hundred pounds, you know what I mean? So if you think about the pressure with the knees of our toes, of dragging a couple hundred pounds, 100 miles and now people are like, you know, think I'm bull. And I get messages that say, you know, let's just be honest, you were dunking easily in high school, you know, and I'm like, you just gave me the best compliment ever. You know, it's almost for so many people. It's unbelievable how I've gone from being a athlete with knees to now having like freakish knees and being able to jump so high. But I'm also the only person who's actually put that much pain free pressure on that exact quality. You see what I'm saying? So there's the foundation right there. Now everything we do though, there's going to be different reactions to it in the sense of, so that's one exercise. So that didn't take us through a full stretch, that didn't stretch our hips, that didn't work, the front of the ankle, that didn't work, the hamstring, that didn't. You see what I mean? So it's like, yes, that would be a great start, but it's also not like that's all I did.

Okay, this episode, which was a little bit controversial, I interview my friend Dr. Thomas Cowan, who's a well known alternative medicine doctor who seems to be banned all over the place because of his talk about viruses and his controversial opinion on about them. However, I know Dr. Thomas Cowan through his wonderful vegetable powders, his organic vegetable powders that are a staple in my diet. You should go listen to any of my episodes with Cowan. But in this one we get into viruses, electromagnetic field communication, the so called invisible rainbow and plenty more when we're looking at the alleged genome sequence of SARS COV2 that's never actually been sequenced but is instead like a computer based, like a software mathematical model of what this theoretically looks like without it ever having been actually isolated.

That exactly right. And by the way, here are Christian Drost and I don't have the paper in front of me. He made the original PCR primers which are. That is the model for all the PCR tests that have been used since then. That was the first in the original paper he says this was a challenging. Again I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the paper in front of me. This was a challenging adventure because we didn't actually have a copy of the virus. We only had an in silico, meaning in the computer sequence, which the computer generated out of 56 million reads. And we actually had no idea where these reads as they're little pieces. And then he said, oh, well, these sequences must be unique to the virus. And then we did a blast search, and we found that those sequences are in 93 different parts of the human genome, and 93 different microbes have that same sequence. Now, let me just finish. So why does somebody say we have 10 to the 40 millionth gen or whatever, 46 power viruses in our quote virome? All of those are different genetic pieces, and they are not particles called a virus. And so they have redefined a particle as a piece of genetic material which is only coming because when you're sick, or not sick even, you break down, you make these little pieces and they call those viruses. They say that's why you got sick with no evidence of any particle or that there's any relation to any sickness.

So if we can't, then we haven't sequenced viral genomes, and we've just been puzzling them together using computational models, and we haven't isolated these particles that we're saying are a virus, nor have we found them in any form of infected tissue. I guess the question for me is, like, what is it that's causing the symptoms that people are running around with, complaining about, you know, the dry cough and the damage to the lung tissue and all the issues that made what we've experienced the past couple years a seemingly problematic sickness, whatever's causing it.

So. So let me say something about that, because A, it's a good question, and B, it's also not a good question. The reason it's not a good question is, you know, in some ways, if I had to do over these last two years, in some ways I might have stopped there, where I said. Because all I can tell you for sure is there is no evidence that this virus exists. And since there's no evidence that exists, it cannot possibly cause any disease. Therefore, there's no reason to mask or inject people with stuff or social distance or quarantine or any of that stuff. Makes no sense. Now the next question. Same with chickenpox. So the question is, so why do people get sick? So one thing I could say is, I don't know. I mean, all I know is it's not a virus. And one of the reasons, turns out I do know, or at least I think I have an idea of that But I would say the first and most important thing is you don't have to know the answer to know that it's not that. Like, if somebody says the reason for rain is there's elephants pissing up there in the heavens, and you look and you don't find any, you can say, I don't think that's right. And I don't really know why there's rain. But it turns out that, you know, if you look at a simpler illness like chicken pox, number one, we cannot find it in the vesicles. So here's how I think about this. First of all, we have misinterpreted disease. We say that you're sick with chickenpox, when actually what's happening is something happened to you, interestingly, like a viral culture. And this is where, you know, your great work has come in. The reason you break down a viral culture is you starve and poison it. So how do you make a child stick? You starve and poison it. How can you starve it? By not eating BEN Greenfield COOKBOOK food. Then you're starving, then you break down, and then you excrete toxins through your skin and through your snot, and you get fever to help break down your tissue. And all of that, which we call disease, is simply a cleansing process.

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

Right? We'll get to that in a second. Now, the next step is, we know if somebody says, yeah, but it gets communicated from one person to another, which to a certain extent, may be true, but it also may be an illusion. If you. If you put rat poison out and then you see one rat dying after another, is that because they communicated something or they just got poisoned and started dying? You know, for 100 years, they thought, you know, they saw sailors on ships, their teeth fell out and they went into heart failure and died. And they said, let's quarantine them. They have some communicable disease. And then somebody ate a lemon or a lime and the whole thing went away because they had scurvy. Same thing with pellagra and beriberi. And we've had a lot of experience of the.

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

Exactly. You can make up all kinds of Things, but you know, and even women communicate their menstrual cycle, right? You put 20, 20 year old girls or women.

Yeah, I've heard that.

And so isn't it possible, since trees communicate, you know, there's beetles here, you should protect yourself. Isn't it possible that children say, you know what, there's some problem here, like there's some toxin in the environment or some universal thought that's making us sick. Let's all do chickenpox together. And so there's some sort of electromagnetic field communication, and that's how things look like they're passed from one to another. Now to get into your question, it's very simple. So if in fact, you know, so first thing, has there really been more disease? You know, you look in, there's a town in Germany, I don't remember the name of it, that keeps very careful statistics of how many people died. And they did May, and I don't have the exact numbers, but May 2019. So before the pandemic, 7490, I think May 2020, height of the pandemic, 7300 people died. May 21, after 70% of the people were injected. Now we have 8600 people died. So this whole thing of, well, a lot more people died, doesn't look like it from that number. If there are people getting sick, it's the same reason as the chickenpox and the cell cultures and measles and hiv, just like you've said all along, you're being starved or poisoned or I would say deluded is the third reason.

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

It's called the Invisible.

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

Yes, that's possible. I would say, first of all, there's a lot in that book that's interesting and there's a lot that I actually don't agree with. But the problem here, Ben, is everything I said about viruses I can substantiate with literally scores of peer reviewed published papers. But when you get into so why do people get chickenpox except viruses, why do people get symptoms of dry cough and low oxygen? Nobody studies it. There's almost no papers. Now I do have papers showing that millimeter waves cause an interference of the availability of oxygen in the air. They also poison your mitochondria which uses the oxygen, making you have a metabolic disease relating to hypoxia. So I've seen that. And then you get breakdown in the tissues and even the production of little particles from breaking down your tissues that are confused with so called coronaviruses. Now is that proof? No. But my only point is because we already know that there is no SARS CoV2, that viruses are not pathogenic, that it's about time that somebody in our world actually looks into why we're getting sick. And you know, that's the kind of, the interesting thing for me is, you know, I mean, you're really, you've been pioneering this like folks, you've got to keep yourself fit, you've got to eat good food. You write down exactly what good food is, right? And you even give people recipes. It was a brilliant book you wrote.

I know I should have called it in retrospect. Now I'm talking to you. We should have called it the COVID Cookbook, right? That would have made a splash.

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

I know that if people's heads are spinning right now, they probably need a quick summary and then I've got a couple more questions for you. I don't even know if we're going to get to talk much about vegetables today. But perhaps this is where God has brought us this discussion, so we'll roll with it. So basically, I want to walk through this. You just interrupt me and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this because I have to summarize it one more time for people just to make sure people really get this. So basically in order to prove that a virus exists, you got to isolate it or purify it, right? And then like get a picture. Yes, essentially in very simplistic terms, what.

You mean by isolation, because mixing it with a vat of stuff is not right.

And I would agree with you on that point. I totally wouldn't. And so what a virologist would do if they did want to like isolate and characterize and like demonstrate the existence of a virus or a new thing like SARS COV2, they would take a bunch of samples from infected people, like blood or sputum or I don't know what else. You might collect some type of bodily secretion from people who are demonstrating symptoms of what we suspect might be a virus. And those symptoms are unique and specific enough to where we can say, okay, all these people are showing signs of something that shows that they have something that we suspect might be something. And then basically what they then do is they take those samples and ideally they would not mix them with anything else that has any other genetic material. And then they would do what they do in a lab, you know, filter it and macerate it and centrifuge it and purify this specimen. And that would be a common virology technique that I understand the virologists have done for quite some time to isolate like bacteriophages and so called viruses. And if they did that, that would allow them to demonstrate within, typically like an electron microscopy tool, a whole bunch of different particles that they would then be able to say are the isolated and purified virus. Then they could go and check those with microscopic techniques to determine the purity and to further characterize the particle, examining like the structure or the chemical composition or what we call the morphology. And then you'd have to extract the genetic material from that, right, from these purified particles. And then that would be done using like a genetic sequencing technique that, you know, that's old technology, it's been around for decades. And then you would analyze whether those particles are outside the cell, what we call like exogenous, meaning that they were something that originated from, from somewhere outside the human body. And they weren't like the normal breakdown products of dead or dying tissue in the body. And if you've done all of that, you would have fully isolated and characterized and genetically sequenced this particle that you would then want to call a virus. And then if you successfully did that, you'd then have to go out and show that it's actually causally related to a disease. So you'd have to expose a bunch of, like, healthy subjects. You know, preferably these days, they would be cute little animals, and you'd expose them to this isolated purified thing that you suspect is a virus in the manner in which you thought that virus might be transmitted, like, whatever, saliva or coffin or, I don't know, blood transfusion or whatever. And then if those animals got sick with the same disease as the original ones you were studying, you know, if you were to confirm that with some type of clinical finding or autopsy finding, then you would have the bodies in the streets and you would say, okay, we've isolated something we're going to call the virus. It actually causes a disease, and we've demonstrated infectivity and transmission in addition to the existence of such a virus. That's what you would ideally do, right?

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

Okay?

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

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

Yes, exactly. That's the virus.

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

It's not science, it's anti science.

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

Yeah, man. I mean, most times what happens is when we experience, and I like to refer to as load on the system, you know less about stress, and it's very individualized across the board is what I found in all of these studies.

So.

But when there's a load on the system and the system kind of starts moving into a state of arousal, right. And things start kind of working, I'm stressed, I'm feeling a certain way, there's some real distinct tactics to use because what begins to naturally happen in the untrained or undeveloped person is my systems start to work in conflict, meaning my brain, my thought patterns are, are skewing off into more than likely a future based outcome. Right. Fear is just a projection of the future, of what may or may not happen. So my mind is getting ahead of myself then, and it's triggering things that haven't even happened yet, which my body is trying to move into alignment, saying, hey, I may be under threat or something's going on. There's a perception that something's going on and I need more right now, in this minute. So central nervous system's kicking into queue. You're getting all the chemical dump, you're doing all those things. Mind starts shaping forward into creating kind of worry, doubt or whatever it might be, conflicting back and sending disconnected messages back down to the central nervous system. So I'm operating a conflict at that point. And, you know, you said something interesting about the way you want your boys to grow up. Right. And I really like to, when I'm teaching, I break down the difference between perception and discernment. I believe discernment is really a gateway to seeing what is actually happening, being very flat about it, versus a perception which is going to go through our filters, which may go through our biases, which is more interpretive, if you will. So utilizing the right breathwork, coming back to the present moment, anchoring into what's actually occurring, and dealing with the challenges at hand, kind of being very, very flat about it. You know, you used to call it, you'd see guys out of SEAL Team 6 or Delta who are, you know, guys have been in combat. We call it the thousand yard stare. It just looks like they're burning a hole right through you. They are. They have trained over time to be extremely discerning. They're just assessing factually what's happening. So when I can get to that place that actually starts to bring brain, heart, central nervous system into alignment, rather than this kind of disrupted space fighting against each other, compounding the effects. And now I am actually more settled and I'm allowing my body to do its natural course of action to give me the energy or the blood flow or the breath, whatever it is, I physically need, need to deal with it in that moment.

Can that be trained? And if, if so, how would you train something like that?

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

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

Right, right.

I'm usually going in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Yeah. I mean, it's really. I call it the return to the original breath. Right. You look at your kids till about age 5, 7, they're belly breathers. They don't care, don't have anything about it. Then they hit the playground, they got to start posturing. Shoulders rise, chest comes up, I move my breath up to the upper chest and there I am, shallow breathing because it becomes more about posturing and demonstrating return to the original breath. And the other thing that you're doing in that giving up control. I almost describe letting gravity pull the breath away, allowing the breath leave the body. You're also triggering the vagal nerve and you're sending signals of safety to the brain, you know. Right. So you're actually checking in with yourself going, hey, I'm safe. And this is another kind of core aspect of what we discovered. I fundamentally believe now, and I've said it several times, there's really only one question that matters to every being on the planet, and that is, am I safe? Like, that's the. That's the constant check. Am I safe? Am I safe? To say this, be this, do this? Right. Am I safe physically?

So, Right. Well, am I safe?

Am I.

What are the three things basically? Security and control? Am I loved? Meaning am I being seen and heard? And there's a third. Why am I blanking on the third? It's. It's to be loved, it's to be in control. And it's to be.

Is that to be acknowledged or Be well, you said be seen, right?

So a lot of people jumping through the podcast right now scream, screaming it at us.

So. So fundamentally, here's what we're doing when we allot, when we bring everything together. You know, safety is a matter of perception. Most of us don't have quality anchors of safety from growing up. Right. It's skewed. Safety is not necessarily. We don't label it good or bad. It's a sensation in the body that we're radically unfamiliar with. And so when I align the breath with the cognitive tools, with the anchoring in the present moment, I'm validating the sensation being experienced in the body. Like right now, sitting at my computer, I'm sitting at my desk. I get to look out at the beautiful backyard. We've got eight inches of snow on the ground right now. It's snowing like a fiend. It's wonderful. And I get to breathe, sit in and anchor into this present moment, going, oh, how cool is this? I'm in the experience of the moment, and it's registering down into my lower systems as I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm good. The more I develop that, the more comfortable I become being in uncomfortable situations. Right. The more willing I am to kind of extend myself into the unknown or the levels of discomfort, because I'm developing kind of an internal power or confidence that I will be able to figure things out, that I will be able to deal with it, that I will, you know, be okay.

Yeah, yeah. And that, that reminds me, when you said that, that jogged my memory. It's control. So basically, you want to be safe and secure. You want to be loved, accepted, you know, noticed, seen and heard. And then we desire control. Like those are the three basic things. Safety, love, and control. All right, this podcast is interesting. It is with Dan Clark and Kevin Woods. These guys make an app that I really like. I actually use this app to play in the room while I'm asleep. My wife doesn't seem to complain, and I like it. It's called Brain fm. Kevin is a doctor in auditory neuroscience. He has a degree from Harvard. He's done work on how hearing in complex scenes is aided by attention and memory. The other guy on the show is Dan Clark, who changed his whole life using sound therapy. And Brain FM is a non invasive neurotechnology that can shift you into an altered or elevated state of consciousness with no nootropics or smart drugs or plant medicines or any compounds in general, aside from a simple phone app. So you'll Dig this one. And again, I'll link to everything we Talk about@BenGreenfieldLife.com Best of2022. People need to understand that the majority of music is made specifically to distract them. And that's so important that I'm going to say it again. If you're a great music producer, your job is to distract people or grab.

Their attention is probably even a better.

Way of saying it. Right?

Those things are equivalent.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you for the clarification. Grabbing someone's attention, distracting them, pulling them away from whatever they're doing so they sit up and listen to the radio and request that song again, Right? That's your job. If you're a good music producer and they use words like punchy or, you know, make that drum hit harder or whatever it is, it's all about grabbing people's attention. And, you know, more so in pop than other genres. Right. But Paul Music tries to do this. So at Brain fm, the point is to flip the script on that, right? So we look at all the tricks that producers use to make things pop out and we say, let's roll that back. Let's actually not do that. Let's do the opposite. Let's do something to make the music sit in the background more comfortably and not distract people. Right? So if you were trying to go from like Christina Aguilera to the best focus music, you have a lot of undoing to do.

Right.

For a start, right now, could we overlay heavy focus rate modulations on pop music and get it more focusy than it is right now?

Probably.

And there, there's all sorts of legal licensing issues and that kind of thing, but at its core, you'd be fighting, you'd be fighting upstream, Right. If you started with something like pop music.

Yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

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

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

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

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

So I could tie it into, like, Apple Health, for example.

That's the path that we're moving towards.

Correct.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

Yeah. And those headphones, by the way, those are the ones that transmit sound through the bones in your face. Like the similar underwater. They make the underwater finis, the underwater swimming headphones. And you could do the same thing again. You could be playing Brain fm, still have your ears, not have earbuds in them, still potentially be listening to or focused on something else. But the sound is literally transmitted through the bones, which is super cool.

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

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode. This next one is fun. It's with America's worst mom. At least that's what she's called, because she had a controversial episode in which she let her nine year old ride the subway alone. There's plenty that she gets into about why she did that. But her name is Lenore Skanazi. She founded Free Range Kids, which is a website that fights the belief our children are in constant danger from creeps and kidnapping and germs and grades and frustration and failure and flashers and baby snatchers and more. And she trains overprotective parents to give their children more independence and confidence, how to get away from helicopter parenting, how to make more creative, resilient and tough children who are healthy. So you'll like this one. And again, all the Notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com BestOf2022. You may have seen Lenore on the Today show, on the Daily show, on her own reality show, the World's Worst Mom. And she's lectured all over the place since that original article came out and also founded something called Free Range Kids. So I would actually love to hear this story from your mouth. Lenore, why were you dubbed as America's worst mom? What actually happened? This whole subway story years ago.

And I have to say the nine year old subway rider is now 23. So it's been quite some time and. But he was our youngest son. Still is, thank God. And he started asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before, here in New York City where we live, and let him find his own way home by subway. He's one of those subway kids. I'm sure in the suburbs there's scooter kids or fire truck kids or whatever. He just loved the subway. And so we talked about it, my husband and I, and we decided, yeah, he's ready. We're on the subways all the time is how we get around. He speaks the language. You can read a map. Let's do it. So one sunny Sunday, I took Izzy, our son, to Bloomingdale's fancy schmancy department store in a fancy schmancy neighborhood. And I left him there. And sure enough, the reason is happens to be that the subway is right underneath. There's a subway stop right underneath Bloomingdale's. And he found his way down there and he took the train a couple of stops and then he took a bus across town and he came into our apartment levitating because he had done something on his own that he knew he was ready for. And we trusted him. That's also a key thing, parents trusting their kids. And I'm a newspaper columnist by trade. So literally a couple months later, because I didn't think it was such a big deal. But a couple months later, when I had nothing to write about, I said, how about I write about this subway ride that my son took by himself? And my editor said, sure, sounds like a nice local Story. And so that was the story, you know, why I let my nine year old ride the subway alone. And two days later I was on the Today show, msnbc, Fox News, and npr. And that was just the beginning of me getting to the Ben Greenfield Show. So it's just been this wild ride. People were so sort of divided. A lot of people remembered the childhoods they had had with a lot of independence and freedom. And if they were in New York, they remembered their subway ride. If they were in the suburbs, they remembered being on their bikes. Everybody remembers staying out till the street lights came on and nobody else allowing their own kids to do that. And it's been my life's work to figure out why not considering that most parents today do remember that not only fondly, they think of it as the formative experience of their childhood was that free time that they had with their friends. And that's the one thing that most kids don't get anymore.

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

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

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

At that time, I was a newspaper person and so I was writing about something different every day. But years later, when I went back and looked at earlier columns of mine, I found a couple that seemed like, oh my God, these are the breadcrumbs leading to the. I guess to the evil witch. Maybe we'll forget that metaphor. The point is that I had written a column when they were. When my sons were, I don't know, 5 and 7, about, yes, I let them go to the bathroom by themselves when we're at a play. They're boys, I'm girl. So I just stand outside. And I didn't think that was terrible. A lot of people dragged the kids in with them to the ladies room. And then I found a column of mine from a few years later that said, yes, I let my kids go downstairs and play in the courtyard. We lived in a skyscraper basically, with a big courtyard down below where there were no cars. And I was like, don't arrest me just because I trust my kids outside. So I did see a thread of this idea that our kids are safer and smarter than our culture gives them credit for. And I did see that culture had changed, obviously, since I was a kid walking to school and today. But I started Free Range Kids that blog the weekend after I'd been slammed on all of those television shows for letting my 9 year old ride the subway. Because most of the time, and subsequently, I mean, years and years of interviews, there'd be a little bit of banter and then at some point the interviewer would go for the kill and say, okay, it sounds great, your son looks happy, but how would you have felt? He didn't come home. And it was a response to that, the idea that I didn't care about safety. I do. And so the Free Range Kids blog and Free Range Kids has since become a nonprofit called Let Grow. And that's what I'm head of now, Let Grow. But the whole idea was that I love safety. Free Range Kids and Let Grow believe in safety. We believe in helmets and car seats and seatbelts would be stupid to drive without a seatbelt. They're right there. They don't change your experience. We just don't believe that kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. And so what I've been writing about and thinking about for many years is how did we get so afraid for our kids considering crime rise? I realize we're in a little bit of a weird moment now since COVID but since the 90s, crime had been going down. And so parents who weren't letting their kids play outside in the 90s or the 2000s or the 2010s were actually, those kids were safer than we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. And so it wasn't that crime was so dangerous or so off the charts. It's that our fear had grown. And that interests me because there was a sort of mismatch between our perception of what our kids could handle and our memories of what we could handle ourselves as children.

Where'd that idea come from? That emerged, you know, as you alluded to, like in the 90s and beyond, that our kids are not safe, that they're going to be in constant danger from like, kidnappers and germs and bullies and, you know, baby snatchers. And you should know when we go to our sleepover and, you know, God forbid that you not be able to see every last bite of food that goes into your mouth. Like, where'd that actually come from?

Well, there's a lot of reasons, as you might guess. The easiest one to understand, and I'm sure everybody sees this and agrees, is that the media really didn't focus on predators and child kidnapping until the 80s. And I don't know what age you are, but you might have grown up with, with the milk carton kits. There were two really high profile kidnappings in the late 70s, early 80s. Eitan Pates here in New York City and Adam Walsh in Florida. And after a miniseries was made about Eitan's disappearance and murder, which is the worst, horriblest thing you can imagine, I think in a move to try to help the world people, the national center for Missing and Exploited Children started putting pictures of missing children on the milk cartons. I'd say that was sort of a good idea, but sort of a bad idea because they neglected to mention that most of those children were not snatched by a stranger off their bikes or off the street. They were generally runaways or taken in a custodial dispute between divorced parents. But the impression we got, or you got eating the cereal or your parents did was that all these children were being snatched right and left by kidnappers. And in fact, the there was testimony in front of Congress that was absolutely wrong that said that 50,000 children are stolen every year. It's not the case, thank God, it's about 100, which is still horrible. But really we got the magnitude wrong and it sank into the fibers of our bones because we're parents and we want our kids to be safe. And then the tv, having made this miniseries and broken all ratings records about Adam Walsh's disappearance, said, let's make more of these. These are great. You know, TV exists to make money. And the more eyeballs you can get, same was with the Internet now the more money you can get for whatever, you know, for your station. And so we, you know, was the birth of Law and Order, which we see is just coming back again now. I mean, 20 years of every night some horrible murder, and then they got Law and Order svu, some worse murder of, you know, a child or disabled adult. I mean, just the scariest, most enraging, saddest stories. And your brain works like Google. And if you ask your brain, you know, name some cereals, it will come up with, you know, the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes and eventually it gets to the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. But they're relevant answers to your question. But if you ask your brain, is my kid safe waiting at the bus stop? Up comes the picture of Eitan Pates. Up comes the picture of J.C. dugard. Because the horrible stories are the easiest for us to remember. You can't remember stories of the millions of kids who waited at the bus stop and were just bored and got on the bus. So your brain also thinks that if something is easy to retrieve, if a result appears on the first page of your search results, in your brain, it thinks it's relevant. And so by having these stories so easily reached by our brain and so vivid and we all share them, it started to feel as if children were in constant danger. Even though if children were always being snatched, it wouldn't be a story, we wouldn't be able to remember them. So it's sort of like the. The most weird, sad story comes up easiest for us, even though it is a story because it is so weird and sad and unusual.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you really like me taking some of the top of the top snippets from popular episodes and putting them together like this for you in case you missed a few or you want to revisit a few, visit the show Notes where I have comprehensive resources for you and where you can also leave your questions, your comments, your feedback, and your thumbs up up. If you like this type of review episode, all of that will be at BenGreenfieldLife.com BestOf2022 Happy 2023 by the way. So I'm Ben Greenfield. Have an amazing week. Signing out. More than ever these days. People like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.