Ben Got COVID (& What He Did About It), How To Fix Issues With Your Brain, The "God Cap" For Neurofeedback, Do Home Neurofeedback Devices Work & More With Dr. Andrew Hill.

All right, here's what's funny. Or maybe not funny, but interesting. I recorded the introduction to this podcast for you, and then I went back. I'm actually going back right now as you're listening to me and recording even more, because what you'll hear in a moment is I was recording basically all of my sponsors and my discounts and stuff for you guys before the episode, and my son was recording with me, and I was jamming back and forth with my son about the fact that I thought his mother and I had had Covid because I was congested and she was, like, having trouble smelling her coffee and tasting her coffee, which was super annoying for her. So we both went out and got tested, and we both tested positive for Covid. Then I got some people who came back and said, well, that test has an alarmingly high false positive rate. But then, like, six other people that we had been with that week also tested positive for Covid and also were symptomatic in kind of the same way. We were, like, just didn't feel well and had the sniffles and, like, a little bit of a sore throat. And so I got Covid. Yeah, I got Covid. And it was remark. And I realize this isn't the same for everybody. There are. There are people who are metabolically compromised, people with a high level of inflammation, people who are obese, which is basically the definition of having a high level of inflammation, older people with a higher free radical load, you know, people who might be vitamin D deficient, etc. And so I realize this isn't the case for everybody, but for me and my wife, it was kind of a joke. We actually turned to each other at one point while we were falling asleep in bed, and we were like, why did the economy get shut down for this? And I realized it's very controversial, and there's a lot of other considerations here. And I'm not saying that Covid was not a big deal and that it didn't severely affect the lives of a lot of healthcare practitioners and a lot of people who got it and some people who even died of. Of it, or I think more accurately died with it. But anyways, I got Covid and my wife got Covid. And then when I tweeted that out, a bunch of people asked me what we did about it, because I essentially, you know, I felt fine the whole time. It was about two days worth of symptoms, and I did not skip a beat. But a lot of people asked me about my approach. So very quickly, I'll just tell you what I did as soon as I had the symptoms of COVID and and then what I continued to do for about four days after getting it. Cause I didn't want any long haul symptoms. And Several physicians, particularly Dr. Matt Cook, who helped me out quite a bit when I pinged him about this, they said that by treating even the asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases, they had noted that it resulted in pretty much folks not getting long haul Covid symptoms, like some of the backend stuff that happens with long term inflammation. So what did I do? What did I do when I got Covid is exactly what my wife did. And again we were fine the whole time and also completely symptom free after two days of sniffles and a little bit of like a nagging sore throat. So. And then again my wife, I didn't. But my wife kind of lost her sense of smell and taste for about a day. So here's what we did. First of all, the loss of smell and taste, this is really interesting. What I did for my wife and she regained it super quickly was I had her doing roach rosemary and peppermint essential oil. And this, this spray that I get from this guy named Dr. John Laurence in Sarasota, Florida, Florida, called Glutastat, which is like a glutathione nasal spray that also has a bunch of essential oils in it. So she was essentially doing like aromatherapy, literally like sniffing essential oils up her upper nose or putting them into her hands and then sniffing her hands. So she was basically keeping her olfactory nerves kind of like trained to keep trying to smell. And then the other thing that we did, this was just based on a personal hypothesis of mine was we have these Vielight devices, it's spelled V I E Light and this is intranasal light therapy for activating the mitochondria in neural tissue. And I actually had her using that Vielight every day for about three consecutive days. You turn it on, it automatically turns off after about 25 minutes. And so I had her doing that and then smelling essential oils and using this Glutastat spray. And the other thing about the Glutastat spray and also the peppermint arguably is there's some antiviral activity to the glutathione and to the, to the peppermint. And so that, that's what I had her doing for her sense of smell and for. I also did it just because I didn't want to lose my sense of taste and smell. I don't know if I would have, but that's what we did for the taste and smell thing was the Vielite and then sniffing essential oils and. And we did that for about three consecutive days and just kind of sniffed the essential oils whenever we kind of felt like it. And then use that glutathione nasal spray, three or four sprays per nostril, for about three days, a few times a day. Another, another thing that we really focused on was quelling the inflammation because I think most of the symptoms that you get from COVID are related to inflammation and the cytokine storm. So what do we do for that? First of all, we both took zinc and vitamin C. I'm not going to give you any product names here unless it's. It's completely necessary, like that Glutastat spray. I don't know anywhere else you can get it. So I'll tell you, that's where we got the Glutastat. But I don't want you. I don't want this to sound like I'm trying to make money off of what we use to manage. I'm not going to give you guys any links or codes or. I just don't want this to be about it sounding like I'm trying to profit off of COVID or something like. Or me getting Covid. But anyways, we did vitamin C, just like a whole foods form of vitamin C and did about right around 2,000 to 3,000 milligrams, so kind of high dose vitamin C. But we did that three times a day with vitamin C. We combine it with zinc. And the deal is it appears that for what's called the zinc ionophore activity that you want for Covid, that zinc needs to be combined with some kind of plant polyphenol. So we did zinc, but we combined the zinc and the vitamin C with quercetin. And quercetin is a plant polyphenol that a lot of functional medicine docs are using for Covid, but you combine it with the zinc. Okay, so we did the vitamin C, the zinc and the quercetin. The other one that we did was vitamin D. And if you listen to my podcast with Dr. Mercola, there's a lot of evidence that low vitamin D may increase your susceptibility to having more Covid symptoms or long haul Covid. So we both did about 4,000 international units of vitamin D daily. Okay, so those were our vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc and quercetin. Now we also were doing that glutathione nasal spray. Okay, but in addition to doing nasal spray, we both have a nebulizer that we use if there's ever a cold or something like that going on. Nebulizer just like this countertop thing that is like a mask that you put in your face and then it's got a little container that you can nebulize fluids in. And based off a really interesting discussion that I had with Dr. Joseph Mercola, who swears that in addition to maintaining vitamin D status, nebulizing hydrogen peroxide, like a very low concentrate food grade hydrogen peroxide is super effective. I actually nebulized hydrogen peroxide mixed with colloidal silver. And I would just do that while I'd work at my desk during the day. You know, one time, about 20 minutes a day for three or I think I did it for four days consecutively. But I was nebulizing silver along with hydrogen peroxide. That might seem kind of fringe, but it was super easy. I just bought food grade hydrogen peroxide off of Amazon, diluted it. You can't find the instructions that Dr. Mercola published if you Google because he's banned from Google. But if you go to like DuckDuckGo and search for Mercola hydrogen peroxide nebulize, you'll find the instructions. And I did exactly what was indicated there, but then I added a little bit of silver to it because silver has some pretty cool antiviral activity as well. And my wife did the same thing. And then we also did a few kind of like fringy kind of things. And I, you know, you don't have to do this stuff, but I think it's smart. So we both have, well, we don't both. We own one of those ozone generators and we drank ozone water every morning. And for her smell and taste, we also did like the nasal ozone insufflation. You really want to make sure you follow instructions with ozone because it's, it can be damaging to the respiratory tract if you use it properly. But we both use ozone every day. I even have a document if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ViralQA BenGreenfieldFitness.com or I'm sorry, VirusQA BenGreenfulFitness.com VirusQA I mentioned somewhere in that document how to get your hands on an ozone generator. And what we used and anyways just drank ozone every day. That's really potent antiviral activity. The other fringe fringy things that we did was we both did peptides, we Both injected for three consecutive days, Thymosin Alpha 1, TB500 and BPC157. If you go to the website for the International peptide society at peptidesociety.org, you can find a physician who will prescribe you peptides. And for quelling the inflammatory firestorm, I think they're super useful. So we both did that for a few days in a row, injected BPC157, TB500 and thymosin alpha. I also got my hands on the pharmaceutical drug Ivermectin, which is an anti malarial drug that's used off label by a lot of docs for Covid. And my wife and I both did the full 24 tablets of Ivermectin. So three days in a row, eight tablets of Ivermectin. I don't know if we needed it, but I just did it just for peace of mind because I didn't want to get long haul syndrome. And then the only thing I should tell you is in the fringe department, I own a biocharger. You probably heard my podcast. I did with the folks at Biocharger. They have an antiviral protocol loaded up into that thing. And I ran the antiviral protocol every day. Just in the morning while I was sitting in my chair in my Zen den reading my bible. I just it's a 21 minute protocol so I just play it while I was doing my morning devotions and just kind of blast you with all these so called rife frequencies that they say are antiviral. Again, I'm not going to claim there's like double blinded human clinical research behind it, but it was like one of those things where it's not going to hurt. So I did the biocharger as well. So in summary, vitamin C, zinc, kercetin, vitamin D, nebulized silver and hydrogen peroxide, drank the ozone water, did the peptides, BPC TB 500 and thymosin alpha 1, took ivermectin, did the biocharger, and then also did the essential oils and the Glutastat that I'd kind of huff up my nose along with my wife for the taste and smell. The only other interesting thing is that my Oura ring score actually showed four consecutive days of temperature increases before I actually even noticed any symptoms or anything like that. Every single because I went back and checked my oura ring, showed four days where the temp went up about 0.3 to 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit. My body temp. So if you happen to have a ring or something that's testing your body temperature, and you see it's consistently rising day after day. You may want to go get tested and just check because it seems like if I would have known that in advance and seen it going up day after day, I actually might have even caught this even earlier. So that's really interesting. And the UCSF actually did a really interesting study on unusing body temperature data. I think they actually use the OURA ring to signal whether you might be developing Covid. So that was it. Yeah, so I got Covid and that was how I dealt with it. And I feel fine. And again, I don't want to downplay it. I think that it can be problematic for many people who are metabolically compromised or have inflammation or who are elderly, etc. But it was kind of. Kind of a walk in the park for my wife and I, and that's. That's everything we did. So I hope that's helpful for you. Sorry about going on and on, but now I'll. I'll get into to the actual. To the actual pre podcast banter now that I've had my pre. Pre podcast banter for you. You can leave your questions in the show notes, by the way. And I'll give you the URL for the show notes during today's episode. On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, people are often like, what's the best device to buy? And that's not the right question. The question is, what should I be doing with my brain and what are my goals? We just have second brain maps. Is like, OCD is really reduced. And the brother's like, why am I not getting these amazing results? And I'm like, I don't know.

So that's an example of doing, like, the wrong kind of neurofeedback, actually causing damage.

And then that's not reality. It's not a diagnostic process. You haven't decided what is true. You decided what is plausible.

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

Yeah.

Remember that one time that we went down to LA and we put those funny electrodes on our heads and did a whole bunch of like, spaceship flying with our brains?

Oh, yeah, that was really fun.

Yeah. And I think. Didn't both you and Taran do it?

Yeah, we both did.

Yeah. And we found out that Tara, that you and Taran had almost identical brains. You can get a little closer to the mic if you want to. There you go. But. But I think Taren had increased levels of distractibility and spaciness.

Yeah.

Compared. Which is funny because that he kind of is that way. We're talking about it without even here, which I feel bad about. And then dad's brain showed, like, a bunch of signs of all my concussions and TBIs. What was really cool was they had us play all these brain games. We were there for, like, I think I was there for a week. And then I took all the equipment home with me. And you guys trained. How many times did you train? A few. Three times. Yeah. Yeah. Enough to. It's kind of cool, though, how you can almost think your way. Well, you can't think your way. I don't. People should just listen to the podcast. What do you think?

Yeah.

Oh, just listen to the podcast, people. It's with Dr. Andrew Hill. All my podcasts with him are absolutely amazing. He's super, super smart. He's the geeky brain biofeedback wizard, and always pulls a bunch of crazy stuff out of his hat or his head, I suppose I should say.

Yeah.

And yeah. So check this one out. And I'll link to all my previous episodes with Andrew in the show notes as well. Okay. So do you think I have Covid? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Well, here's the deal. I'm kind of sniffly, and I have a little bit of a cough. And then mom two days ago got sniffly. She got a cough. She was in bed with aches for, like, half the day, and then she was fine the next day, and she took you guys on a hike, and she came back and we made a great dinner. A bunch of, like, fresh sushi.

Yeah. And.

And amazing stuff that she should have been able to taste. And she was like, I can't taste this. And then I made her a really strong cup of tea, and she's like, I can't smell this and I can't taste this. So what do we fill? We filled her up with a whole bunch of kion immune shout out to kion, sponsor of today's podcast. Tons of. Of bioavailable vitamin C and zinc. Really unique form of zinc that gets absorbed really well. And then we did a bunch of glutathione. I had her do ozonated olive oil. Like, she breathed in olive oil, which is really cool. Which is the only way to breathe olive oil or breathe ozone without damaging your lungs is. Is to. Is to put it through olive oil first. And then what else did she do? We did a propolis spray. Be Propolis spray. Also a sponsor of today's show. And what else oh, and nebulize. She nebulized glutathione and zinc. And then I gave her a bunch of, like, our. We joke that our house is the best place on the planet to get coveted, if you get it, because we have everything here. And then she. And then I injected her with Thymus and Alpha 1 and TB 500 and BPC 157. She feels pretty good. She's totally loaded. And so all of us now we're doing like, vitamin C and Kia immune and zinc and all this stuff. But anyways, the Greenfield family might have Covid. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I mean, for. I don't know, maybe because we take care of our bodies, but mom went and got tested this morning. Did you know that? Yeah, yeah, she drove in and got the test, but it wasn't the rapid test, so we'll find out. Man, it was back. I guess it was way back in 2017 that I visited the Peak Brain Institute in LA for this special kind of advanced brain scan and brain mapping system called a quantified electroencephalography, or qeeg. And it was really interesting and I came back and did a podcast on it because Dr. Andrew Hill, who kind of is the mastermind, pun intended, down there at the Peak Brain Institute, found a whole lot of interesting things in my brain, like evidence of some of my history of concussion and traumatic brain injury and even a buildup of things like tension deficits and increased distractibility and limited sleep on set and some other things that were limiting my cognitive performance. I wound up doing a few days of neurofeedback at his facility, which is kind of like meditation on steroids, where I was flying a spaceship with my mind, and every time my brain subconsciously shifted into brainwave patterns considered to be unfavorable, the spaceship would stop flying or the music generated by the neurofeedback software would fade away. Kind of like this cognitive slap on the wrist. And it really went up fully retraining my brain. We did a follow up qeeg, and the results were dramatic. You know, as I mentioned in the commercials leading up to this show, you know, both of my sons, they were. I think they were nine or 10 at the time, also went through some of the training down there with Dr. Hill, which is also fantastic for kids. But, you know, over the past years since then, you know, Dr. Hill has written a couple articles for my website, and I'll. I'll link to all of that if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PeakBrainPodcast It's P A K Peak Brain Podcast. I'll link to the previous article and the previous podcast that I had with Dr. Hill. But there's so much that have kind of happened with neurofeedback of late and he's so plugged into that whole world that I wanted to have him back on the show to ask specifically some questions about a lot of these new devices that are popping up and you know, these, these consumer devices and how they work and you know, what the current state of the neurofeedback industry is and how home training works and you know, some, some of the new kind of up and coming topics in neurofeedback. So if you like to geek out on all things brain and biohacking the brain, then you're gonna like this one. So strap on your spaceship suit and get ready to fly. Andrew, welcome back man.

Ben, thanks so much for having me. Nice to be talking to you again. So good to hear your voice.

Yeah, yeah, you too. And obviously your, your place down there in Culver City in la, I assume you're.

Yeah, we have peak brains worldwide. The five offices we have are still seeing clients. We've done a bunch of things to accommodate, you know, different types of safety, of course, and throughput. And we've also shifted a lot more of the business towards virtual and remote services, which were already a big piece of peak brain sort of specialties doing remote neurofeedback. But we've done some things to make that a lot more turnkey and reliable and accessible to people. So you know, we're definitely still open but it's affecting the business. We have a gym model business for those folks who aren't aware of us. We're basically a personal trainer for the brain kind of business model where people come in and do their fitness assessment, in this case of brain activity and attention performance.

And that's the qeeg, right? That's, that's the so called fitness assessment.

Yeah, we did a few QEEGs with you. We also did, I think some attention tests where we had. You like the attention tests are there to get you so unloaded, so bored that we can probe brief resources of attention. And we then compare all that stuff, the attention performance and the resting brain activity to normative databases or age matched population comparisons. Not to see why you aren't average or to care that you aren't average per se, but to sort of say, oh look, here's a way in which you're Unusual. And for a lot of people this feature could mean X. So use the ways in which you're really unusual against the average person to sort of predict some bottlenecks or some low hanging fruit or some things that might be regulated in a way you care about. And if you find things that are at that level, and we found some things, as you were mentioning for you, then you have really good sense of what might be worth going after. Because pretty much any bit of data you can measure in real time, you can train using those biofeedback processes. You can exercise your slow brainwaves down, get crisper, your fast brain waves up and get better regulated, sharper or whatever. And the process ends up becoming pretty heavily individualized, I think when done well. And that's why we, we treat it like personal training. But it's an interesting thing to become a gym basically in this modern world, changing things around a little bit.

Yeah, and obviously I think one of the first things people do when they hear something like that and hear that neurofeedback and for a deep dive into some of the background of it, they could go back and listen to some of other shows. A lot of people, especially in this day and age, who might not be traveling or who may want to stay at home, they're out there googling, maybe even Googling right now, home neurofeedback devices and they're going to come up with, with this list of devices like the HeartMath Institute's HeartMath training device or this new one I've been seeing advertisements for, made by the same people who make Muse, called the Mind Lift. That's spelled the Y. Yeah, the Mind Lift. And you know, I actually wanted to ask you specifically about these because, you know, compared to like, you know, the expense of going to California or working with you or getting kind of the large amount of equipment, because it was, you know, it was like a full laptop and a bunch of, of electrode gel and a whole bunch of stuff I had to take back home with me to do home neurofeedback training. Why wouldn't somebody just get like a Muse headband and use their Mind Lift software or something like that?

It's not that different from what you did once the edges are smoothed off essentially. And nowadays mindlift, when done for goals, like when done with a client, is a process of engaging with a clinician in their database of people who use Mind Lift. So you hire a coach or a trainer to do your Mind Lift, ongoing your protocol selection, your tweaking, ideally and that's really the process. It's a pretty good remote management of neurofeedback, but it does rely on the Muse headset device. So for folks who are just getting into this stuff, the Muse is a piece of hardware made by Interaxon. It has some cool software attached to it. Initial value proposition was around meditation training. And it's not so much neurofeedback for meditation, but it's almost biofeedback for meditation. Let me give you guys some distinction because I often get asked the distinction. In this case, it's a pretty squirrely one because it's both on the brain, but broadly. You think of old school biofeedback as training the body, the peripheral nervous system, like your hand warming or your skin conductance retention or your muscle tension for injuries or all kinds of things. Heart rate variability, like you mentioned, Ben, the heart math devices, which are great. I think in all the cases, peripheral biofeedback training, things that are input, if you will, by the peripheral nervous system is a voluntary process. You try, you think, you pay attention to how you're feeling, you try to feel different. Different. You change your breathing, change your mind, you meditate, you do something while you're.

Wearing the device so that you can get real time, real time feedback about how you're changing.

Real time gives you feedback. Exactly. And your mind is aware of the feedback. Oh, the pitch is going up means I'm more relaxed or the, you know, me clearing my mind means that the spaceship flies fast or whatever. That's peripheral biofeedback. If you're doing something and it's changing because you're changing the peripheral nervous system, you can't really change your brain waves voluntarily. So in cases like the HRV systems heartmath, you're clipping ear clip to your ear and you measure your heartbeat changing moment to moment. You can kind of change your heartbeat, you can slow your breathing down and speed it up. You can change the regulation of it and it will shift. So you can gradually learn to feel the shift from sympathetic activation to parasympathetic activation, the sort of ratio shift as you drop arousal level. Which is a great way to be super healthy is to exercise and do your life at a relatively low arousal level. You know, keep that cortisol low. But you can learn to feel that flex, if you will, into a low arousal state, into a parasympathetic dominant state by doing HRV biofeedback. Because you're practicing teaching the body to sort of like create that state briefly and you Notice it. And over time, it becomes this thing you can reach for, this accessible resource. Neurofeedback. When working on the brain is often involuntary. Almost always, in fact. You're measuring things you can't change by trying, like your brain waves. So if I measured, and I did this, we measured your brainwave on the right circle wire on the right, plus an ear clips, we measured your theta brainwaves, your beta brainwaves, and whenever your theta dipped on its own and your beta climbed on its own, we rewarded your brain by making the spaceship fly faster or the car drive whatever it was. So that's an involuntary exercise. So this is operant conditioning.

Now to interrupt real quick. So in the same way that I could kind of like settle down and use box breathing or say like alternate nostril breathing to breathe my way into a state of higher heart rate variability, which I could track with an oura ring or the M wave by heart.

Math or the HRV device. Heart math or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or any HRV device. Couldn't I do the same thing with my brainwaves? I mean, wouldn't I see a shift from say like beta to alpha?

Not really. Is a short answer really. Not in a predictable way, not in a voluntary way. What happens is you can get some gross shifts in the measurement and people think it's a brainwave shift, but it's not. It's actually a muscle shift because muscles are electrical. So Muse is kind of an evolution in some ways of the old Neurosky headsets, you know, and then different company, of course, Interaxon. But it's this forehead measurement device and that's one of the big complaints I have to get into. One of the big issues I have with the MUSE category is they tend to focus on the forehead as the place you measure. Forehead is really hard to measure. It's full of muscles, it's full of blood flow, it's full of noise.

And that's where the Muse is contacting, is the forehead.

Yeah, the old Muse just did that. The newer Muses is two of them. One does the sites across the forehead, the temples, and the two sites above the eyes. And it has a new jack you can plug in an extra sensor to put anywhere in the head, so there's some flexibility. But it still focuses on the forehead as most of the place you're measuring and training. And again, for its full of muscle tension.

Now, what do you mean when you.

Say noise, meaning you're picking up data from the electrodes that are touching the skin and you're picking up electricity, fluctuating electricity. And some of that electricity is being generated by groups of neurons behind the bone. And a lot of it's being generated by muscles on top of the bone. And since the electricity is so small, about 100 microvolts behind the bone, actually higher than that, but it's sort of attenuated, it's dampened by traveling through bone. So any muscle tension at all will cause big spikes of activity in the signal. Because it's emg, electromyelograph, or muscle tension causing electrical discharge. I'm sure your kids, when we were training those guys, I'm sure when they first started playing, they realized they could clench their jaw and make the ship crash.

Oh, yeah, totally.

Whatever it was. Yeah, yeah. And that was adding jaw tension. Big giant discharge of jaw noise, you know, jaw emg, muscle discharge swamping the brain measurement signals, because they're tiny little signals being coaxed out in some ways from beneath the scalp to measure. So all the forehead devices have this big problem of measuring through a lot of other things that aren't brain to get the brain activity. And the way you do that a bunch of ways, it all requires what's called filtering. And you have to think of. It's kind of mathy. But whenever you're filtering frequencies out, like muscle tension out of a signal, if you're filtering in the frequency, frequency math, you end up causing a sort of shift in time. Frequency and time are related in signals. And so if you really like aggressively push on one, the other one moves. So what you end up getting if you filter someone's muscle tension off their forehead to get some EEG out of it, is you get an EEG that is not time related to the person's brain. It shifts in time, it's decoupled. So what that means is you can't do real time feedback neurofeedback in some ways on that real time signal. But the muse has this amazing thing of providing almost like an index of, hey, wait, I meditated cool with the initial software. And so it lets you get into this habit. It's a reinforcer, behaviorally, not neurofeedback operant conditioning. But behavioral operant conditioning is what the muse gives you because it actually encourages you to sit there and relax your forehead to get good signals.

So you're still getting benefits. It's just not quite as powerful as traditional neurofeedback training. Training because of the noise.

And the other piece of it is that you, even if you use the mindlift Software and the mindlift ecosystem, which involves hiring a clinician and going through some goals and doing some mini assessments. If you do all of that and kind of mirror the process, emulate the process of working in a neurofeedback coaching environment, it looks a little bit the same, but you still haven't done the full head mapping, you still haven't done the deep clinical reviews, you still aren't getting control over the process in a more nuanced way. Like I can't use the mind lift to do the neurofeedback I did with you and now I use really high in clinical software. I actually upgraded you to it, I think not too long ago. But we use really high clinical software and I can't do things with simple systems that I might want to do. Multiple channel coherence, replicating all the, you know, flow state, access, consciousness work you might want to do. Can't we do that as well? Or targeting stuff individually? If you get trauma work or seizure work or something, the classic one size fits all system says, oh, for adhd, you want to bring up this frequency, but you have trauma and that frequency tends to like crack open your old, you know, wounds in that way make you super reactive and throw off your sleep. Like people are whole creatures. You know, we both train a lot of people across different domains and people are variable.

Yeah.

And while every third guy might want to lose 20 pounds and show their abs, the path to get there is a little different. I mean, you know the mechanics really well to get somebody better in shape and better performant, feeling better, a lot of different ways to go after it, it. And you can bring whatever tools you need to bear to tweak the process so that it's a little different if you're coaching me or you're coaching a 20 year old or you're coaching a 7 year old woman or you're coaching somebody who has no time or somebody who insists on being vegan. Like there's different criteria for what you have to adjust to. And then brains are more different than bodies. The good news is they change faster so you can get massive shifts rapidly.

It's interesting though because there's a couple things. If you look at mindlift, for example, sorry to keep kicking this horse to death. They say they provide a detailed, detailed snapshot of your unique brain activity, like before you start training. But that's not the same as a qeeg.

Not the same as a qeeg? No, it's a spot measurement of a handful of sites instead of this Referential normative process. So it's sort of like one set of ideas. Same thing that the muse did when they first came out. The muse with their meditation software. They did a bunch of eegs of meditators and said, oh, okay, meditation is high alpha state, slow alpha frequencies, et cetera. We're going to put a meter on our little software that says when your alpha goes up and slows down and your beta drops away that you're meditating. Which is true for like maybe two thirds of people. You know, they're producing some meditation type waves, but for some people they're falling asleep and getting meditation meters going up on those apps or some people they're anxious and getting the meditation meters going up. It doesn't make sense because it doesn't actually track. So they created this really pretty nice tool to encourage behavior, but not necessarily, necessarily a really neurofeedback tool with the first muse and the mindlift approximates a little closer. Traditional personal training style neurofeedback. But it doesn't do sophisticated enough assessments. It doesn't provide the ability to make the process more granular. It's like if you had to train someone who only had some kind of old school, clunky, silly fitness equipment that they could use, really. They couldn't find a boulder or a kettlebell, they couldn't find some free weights, they couldn't find any for this silly little. Not to pick on it, but Suzanne Somers ThighMaster or something. Okay, fine, we'll figure out a way to make that work for you.

Well, it's so funny because if you go to their website, they have a picture of this guy sitting in front of a 70s esque computer monitor with a bunch of electrodes coming off his head. And they say the only way to train using neurofeedback used to be in specialized clinics that require multiple visits due to the complexity of eeg, which is basically they're just describing Peak Brain to me and then they say now you can do it anytime, anywhere with this headset. They ship out.

Well, the device that we ship out now, I mean I'm a traditional clinical practitioner, I'm not a traditional business model guy because I'm not a therapist. Peak Brain's work sort of between Apple and Equinox in our mission statement, you know, so for the brain and we're not therapists, we're like a gym, a spa and a mechanic. But you know, everything but your doctor essentially for your brain. So we provide brain mapping education. We teach you to read your Maps, we teach you to use them. Provide free maps in the offices for the community of clients and biohackers who work with. So it's just really a growing kind of knowledge base, not just kept in the mind of the therapist or the clinician. So the problem that mindlift is latching onto, which is a real thing, is to get really good neurofeedback. Historically you've had to work with really good people who had lots of deep knowledge and you had lots of silly, hard to manage setup things as well and both those were hurt and it was lots and lots of expensive equipment.

Yeah. And if you click through to like the 700 plus peer reviewed studies that they're linking to from their for neurofeedback for ADHD or anxiety or PTSD or.

It's not their study.

Cognitive head. Yeah, it's not their study. It's actually using traditional clinical EEG equipment similar to what you're using. So it is kind of interesting. I don't know if it's close to false advertising but it is interesting. So I love to run this stuff by you just because I get so many questions about it.

Yeah, it's better than doing one size fits all system. I love they have an ecosystem of clinicians ready to jump in and help. I've trained a few clinicians who are using their system to administer neurofeedback and I'm hearing the pluses and minuses. I'm seeing it, I'm working with a little bit myself over the shoulder people and it's great. It's sort of trying to solve a particular problem. I'm a little biased Ben, because I'm trying to solve the same problem in terms of managing neurofeedback. I mean you and I worked, we were texting back and forth and now we went to Slack and we've been refining our communication. At one point I gave you a Google sheet based chart to work off of. Then we moved a business process flow app we built and now I'm in the process of moving all of that to mobile. I have a quantified self app. It's not just about neurofeedback but it's about tracking everything. Sleep, stress, tension, mood, neurofeedback, exercise.

And you're able to ship those out to people's homes?

Well, we have a neurofeedback software system from Peak. Yes, but what I'm talking about is the sort of quantified self piece of, of it, sort of management of the process that's always been One of the hurdles that's hard to manage, people are often like, what's the best device to buy? And that's not the right question. The question is, what should I be doing with my brain and what are my goals? Because you can do any good. I can do good neurofeedback with almost any system you know, but it's hard to do sophisticated neurofeedback without some knowledge. You can't do, you know, you can't take any good system and with no knowledge do good neurofeedback. Unfortunately, there's no one size fits all self running system that works very well. And some of those systems that claim to be such cause either adverse effects or no effects for some people. And there's a lot of adverse effects for those one size fits all systems out there that I end up cleaning up.

I think I asked you this before, but it was a few years ago in a podcast that we did about why there isn't some kind of easy to apply like a God cap that you could just pull over your head that automatically fits your head, that doesn't require you to kind of like place the electrodes and put the messy gel in your hair and do all of that yourself. Like, how close are they to developing something like that?

We're getting closer. We're getting very close. We already have a cap technology where you pull a cap over your head and all the wires are now in the right place. 100%.

Oh, really? I didn't know that. Geez, man, you're keeping me in the dark.

Yeah, and it's just, you know, there's compromises because individual locations are often more precise, a little bit more precise. And pasting a wire on depends what your goals are for doing full head assessments. Nowadays it's better to throw up a stretchy cap that fits pretty well, gel it up. Or you can use saline. There's new caps now that you can just squirt water, saline, and then there's a real gel to wipe out later on because it's just toweling your head off. But the big problem is brainwaves are really hard to measure. Measure. This gets to the root of your question, is that electricity is behind lots of layers of bone and tissue and skin and everything else. It's really, really hard to measure. This is why people should not be all that worried, in my opinion, about non native EMF 5G and whatever else, because I've worked for the past 30 years of my professional and scientific career across different domains, trying to get signals across Those barriers of fat and the skull and everything else, including MRIs and EEGs and MEGs and TDCs and TMS and ADCs and all kinds of different technologies trying to bridge that, those barriers. It's just so darn hard to get any real signal strength, I mean, anything through that barrier. So we need to make a really, what's called low impedance connection with tight electrical connection from those measurement points at the point of the scalp. Historically, there are technologies in white papers.

Yeah, well, and that normally required for people who haven't seen, like the videos of me doing this with you. Like, I have to use like these shoelace strings with knots on them and like find one spot and then put electro gel on that, then find the next spot, then keep my fingers crossed and put it in the right spot and then apply it.

Well, we. We now have a little help. I mean, Ben, if you want to jump back into adding active, because of course we should get you back up and running. We do everything now with live support. So what you would do is you would just stick a wire to your head, getting pretty close, and take a quick snapshot and just ask one of the coaching team and they'll say, you know, centimeter to the left. Okay, great, guys. Thanks. Yeah. And if you have trouble, they can hop on your screen. It still seems.

I mean, it still seems clunky, though. Compared to just like being able to just pull on some helmet and just press go, it's a little clunky.

So I'm working on this quantified self platform to track all of the healthy habits you're doing and build some AI to start predicting for you what's making impacts historically and help you spot things. But this quantified self app has the neuroback tracking platform that I've been building built into it. And the last piece of it is all the session plans, all the workout plans will get pushed and synchronized with the training software in real time. So your high incidental software you have called eager will receive the training plan out of my. Out of your pocket, or my pocket in this case. Like, you'll say, hey, you'll wake up in the morning, your aura ring will tell your phone that you didn't sleep as well. You're shorted on deep sleep suddenly.

Right.

And that will tell my app. App. And I'll look at that and say, whoa, wait a minute. Ben sleeps off. Why is it sleep off? Oh, we tried a new protocol yesterday. Oh, yeah, that one can throw sleep off. And I'll make an adjustment for the next three protocols to, like, try to tweak it and I'll hit save. And then you go back to train a couple days later and the adjustments are made. And there's a note for you saying, hey, I made a small change because your sleep is thrown off. Let's see if this works better.

And how. How long would would a protocol, like, if somebody's gonna do something like this, use that app to kind of ping them and let them know that it's time to use their home training equipment. How long would a typical session last? We're Talking about like 10 minutes, a half hour.

Yeah. Training sessions. Half an hour. Typically, if we're doing EEG training, we often do HEG or blood flow training for vascular support, for migraines and concussions and things, and that will add some time. 10 minutes. Usually it's kind of like, you know, almost like a hyperbaric in the box kind of thing. But these are short sessions, and the metaphor of training is really quite valid. Right, because you're doing half an hour, 45 minutes, three times a week, maybe four times a week, you're giving some rest periods. You're getting enough after effects. You're not getting doms in the brain or anything. But you do get effects. I mean, I'm sure you would agree. You train, you might feel it when you're training, you might feel it later on, you might actually feel it when you're sleeping, or you might notice it the next day. All of the above or none of the above. It's a pretty gentle, subtle process, but it unfolds after every session for about a day, day and a half. And then you get to sort of consolidate the learning, observe what the effects were and iterate. Tell your trainer, your coach, hey, here's what's happening. My sleep got thrown off. My sleep was amazing. I was really focused. I wasn't traumatized, whatever. And then you get a little adjustment in your TR plan. So that's my biggest complaint with these systems that. That are becoming more consumer focused is. And the other big problem I have just to pile on a tiny bit onto the Muse is the forehead is not the place most neurofeedback works best from. Most neurofeedback works best from the strip that runs ear to ear.

Okay.

You know, there's. There's really a bunch of places that are really critical that are involved with stress performance, sleep performance, and attention performance. And I think if you're not working on those areas, you're kind of missing the boat about how the brain works and foundational stuff. It's like trying to get good abs that actually work on your diet. Like there's something else missing, you know, and how you work. So attention, sleep and stress have to be worked on. And the combination of sleep and attention is largely regulated by a strip of tissue that runs left to right. So ear to ear and the default mode network what we're directing our attention to, especially with regards to evaluating things, paying attention to stuff, orienting the danger, evaluating things. The things called the anterior cingulate and the posterior cingulate, those are the midline, front to back. So there's an X or a plus sign on the top of the head front to back and left to right that you have to kind of master. There's five locations. Front midline is anterior cingulate for switching. That's one that gets a little hot in beta waves if you get songs stuck in your head all the time or if you bite your nails a lot or if you're a CEO. Like I can't tell if it's the OCD marker or the CEO marker. It's one of those. You have a hyper latching onto things mind but if it's successful, if you use it, then maybe you just have a lot of beta. Again, not to be concerned from a qeeg why you're on average, but to point out what's interesting and go after it if you want to. For half an hour you exercise these little waves involuntarily as I was describing. And after about three or four sessions people start feeling it. And after about 15 or 20 sessions there's an enough shift in the actual resting activity, the resources, the actual traits the person has that you can start to see it on assessment tests. So we typically do a minimum, about 40 or 50 sessions and a brain map at the beginning and halfway in at the end. So you know, nice three, four month courses or minimum. And we get across that time frame linear change in assessments of attention and brain performance and brain. So people end up getting for like attention things and sleep things and stress things. A few standard deviations of change across the average person. Which usually means going from, you know, severely ADHD or concussed to not that much at all or maybe above average or knocking seizures back by half or pulling the teeth at PTSD or something.

The training you would do then in response to this app you, you seem to be indicating that there's some kind of a, like a newer hardware that, that you're using along with it as well.

We've taken the clinical systems, which used to cost ten grand or so, all in with amps and software and hardware and we've worked out a way to produce a turnkey home use version of it with the vendors. And so now we send you home, not just the training software and hardware, but we actually send the QEEG systems initially we send them virtually and so we send them physically rather and work with them remotely. So we do the brain maps without you coming into any office. And the device we use for the brain mapping is the size of a deck of cards and weighs less, believe it or not, the amplifier 21. And you have a cap you put in your head for the mapping and we help you gel it up remotely. You send that back, unless you want to buy one of those. And then we do the training with these smaller amp devices, very similar to what you have, the new software you have. But the last piece that I'll have out at the end of the quarter is the quantified self dashboard that round trips all of the coaching, clinical management, self quantified perspective that you're looking at, all the interventions aggregated against the feedback loop. Here's how my sleep is changing. Here's how my stress is changing. Here's how my day is changing. Here's how much alcohol had today. Because I rely on the fluctuating sleep, stress, mood, attention reports to know how your brain is changing. It's one of the most critical aspects of neurofeedback is that people are so individual.

Yeah.

So as I lean on your brain, let's say, you know, your boys had the exact same brain. They didn't. But had, they had a similar brain map, roughly. I could actually, I was speaking earlier to two brothers who are adults and they're twins, identical twins, and they have similar ish brain maps. So I made similar guesses about the things I might want to work on, similar resources might be operating for them. And they were somewhat similar in their complaints, so to speak, or goals. But one's dealing with a lot of different things and much more suffering and he's getting some really good results over the past month and a half or something. And I'm training, I don't know, I think I'm training both brothers in both their lives or something at this point. And one of the brothers, the other brother, the one who's not, not quite as severe, asked me today, he's like, why am I not getting the same benefits quite as rapidly as my brother is? I'm feeling it, I'm getting Some better sleep. I'm feeling some things move. I had some good energy yesterday after the training, but he's having amazing results. It's been 15 sessions and we just did a second brain map and he's a couple standard visual results. His OCD is really reduced. A bunch of things are really changing for him. And the brother's like, why am I not getting these amazing results? And I'm like, I don't know. Because people are individual is a short answer. And with similar brains and similar goals. I mean, different people are different people. And you have to iterate and be gentle and experience changes your brain and nutrition and all kinds of things. So the process is iterative. There is no one size fits all prescription for ADHD or for anxiety. Even if you had one thing you wanted to work on or for laser like peak performance or creativity or athleticism. I work a lot of CEOs, a lot of actors, and they come in typically for peak performance goals. CEOs want to perform better, the actors want to perform better. But when you look at their brains, typically there is some sleep dysregulation, there's some stress phenomena that are a bit dysregulated. And they also want to work on those things, obviously because they're foundational. And so you end up working on the whole person. But if you crank on someone's attention who has anxiety, or you crank on someone's creativity that has trauma, you create what are called ab reactions or, you know, negative side effects because the person's brain was not really supposed to go that direction. And you can do that with neurofeedback. You can create side effects. And if you hammer away without giving feedback to your practitioner and the side effects keep showing up, you will create permanent, relatively speaking, side effects. You'll just regulate sleep and make seizures worse. A model of an autistic came in one time and he was 8 or something. He crawled into my office and he was under the chair, the desk kind of screaming and flapping and really uncomfortable. And she'd gotten a neurofeedback system from somebody like three, four months before and done 80 sessions of a protocol that someone had given her. Not understanding that it's a nuanced process. You don't just work out, you do lots of tailored PTOT kind of working out. So she did one thing and his language regressed, his iconic regressed and started screaming again. He went back, back to his two year old self. He was doing pretty well at age 7 or something. And we had to spend like about 3, 4 months backing all that out. And then, you know, happy story, the kid graduated out.

So that's an example of doing like the wrong kind of neurofeedback, actually causing damage, wrong thing. Could you do something like that with one of those home devices? Like, could that happen with like a mindless or something like that?

It does happen, yeah. I get people all the time, and I don't want to name names, but I get people all the time who've been using a one size fits all size system who say, wow, my anxiety was really made a lot worse and somewhat permanently after a handful of sessions, or my brain fog was really thrown off, or my sleep was really disturbed, or I don't feel sharp anymore after using this one size fits all system. And you have to do a brain map as a short answer, a nuanced, thorough, you know, complete analysis of your brain with someone who knows how to teach you to use it.

And that would be like, like an actual QEEG. Like with somebody like you, an actual QEG.

Okay. Yep. You got to do an actual QEG, 19 channels, plus the ears, a full head cap at least every so often. The training does not require that. The training can be like working out. You know, you can pick up a kettlebell, a simple exercise, and do huge functional, you know, movements. A snatch or clean is a. Every single muscle pretty much is involved. And some of the simple 1 and 2 channel neurofeedback protocols have those kinds of, you know, whole brain engagement, involvement and training kind of thing. You don't need to put a cap on to training brain, but you do need to put a cap on periodically to measure the general tendencies. Your brain has these things that don't change, and that's important to understand about brain mapping or qeeg, the analysis of Ben Greenfield's brain against the average guy who's your age today. And in a year, there's no change. You look the same against the average person year to year to year, unless you're fatigued, you had a concussion, or you did really good stuff to your brain, like spent six months meditating, did three, four months neurofeedback, then you see change. But when the brain map picks up the resting tendencies, the traits, the resources, the averages, it's kind of like we're measuring how tall you are, not if you're sitting up or standing down. You know, it's not how you're using the resource. So when you look at a brain map, you have to kind of take into account the goals, the history the person. And then that's not reality. It's not a diagnostic process. You haven't decided what is true true. You've decided what is plausible. And that gives you actionable things to do. You build a workout plan and then you try it. Oh, these are your goals, athlete. This is your fitness level now, probably. I think I found some relevant things in this DEXA scan and this strength assessment I did with you. Cool. Let me build you a plan. Let's see what happens to those goals you have for less back pain and better sleep. From a fitness metaphor here. So it's that kind of iterative process where if your client calls you and says, I couldn't lift the groceries yesterday after my workout, oh, okay, we'll back off a tiny bit on your arm day or something. And my equivalent is, oh, I was super focused after that training, but I had a hard time falling asleep. It was kind of weird. Okay, why don't you take a quarter hertz off the frequency of beta. I bet it will be a sweet spot for you. So that piece of it is missing or potentially missed unless you're being very iterative, very nuanced and kind of working with somebody who is a little bit skilled in the process, you know.

Now, for, for you being so plugged into the whole neurofeedback world, I don't think there was like a consumer electronics show this year, I don't believe. No, but are there, is there anything else that's kind of like new and upcoming in terms of developing technologies or approaches to neurofeedback to get you excited right now?

The field, as I know you, you've lamented and I'm sure I've talked to you about. The field still really stuck 50 years ago in a lot of the basic tech. EG is an old stuff tech. I mean, it's hugely old tech a hundred years while there are things changing. I think that what I'm more excited about is actually all the ancillary sort of quantified self marketplace, if you will, because 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the idea of doing stuff to yourself to make change in yourself was a little radical, but not so much anymore. And looking at your methylation status of regimes or your C reactive process protein for your heart disease risk or whatever else it is, became something you did in the past 10, 15 years. And now that's exploding into the brain, health and wellness space. So what I'm excited about is the merging of neurofeedback into everything else. So, you know, I use a Bunch of wellness and tracking apps and I tend to aggregate all my information into one that I love called Cronometer.

Yeah, I like Cronometer for nutrition. That's a super helpful piece of software just for general, general polyunsaturated, monounsaturated saturated fats, calories. You can get a really good breakdown.

Yeah, tons of stuff. And plus I do a lot of fasting and so one thing I'm concerned about is not just watching caloric and macro, but I'm sort of like a little concerned about shorting on nutrition because I do look at a couple months of fasting not at once, but intermittent cycles of fasting for a few months at a time and that produces potentially nutritional holes. And Cronometer is great for saying, okay, here's something you might want to, you know, think about adding to your nutrition or here's the whole. I love it for that, but I also have it aggregate my sleep a lot of my. To get a little tangent here on other biohacking, but I've been using the Biosense breath acetone device a lot to gauge and sort of range my fasting. I have this whole program that I've been building about ways to take middle aged dude and middle aged people's sort of insulin resistant, classic American, you know, thick midsection body and anti age it and get control over it and stop the trajectories and start going younger and healthier. Mostly for brain support reasons why I've been doing this for years, but it's gotten critical for me personally, having turned 50 a few days ago. So about four months ago said okay, if I was coaching somebody else who came to me and said yeah, brain stuff's good, but how do we get abs? What would I do? How would I really implement a solid plan? So I did a four month plan for myself doing a variant of the Matador dieting program. Matador is an old school study that showed that if you do diet breaks, you can kind of reset leptin graylin levels and not cause us rebound. I have no problem losing like 50 pounds, 30 to 50 pounds by fasting. Three to five months exercise.

Yeah, that's like an intermittent diet almost where you're engaged in periods of intermittent energy restriction and then kind of refeeding to ensure that the metabolism doesn't reset.

Exactly. And then you eat at maintenance or even above.

Yeah.

And so the classic matter of study was two weeks on, two weeks off caloric restriction and then feeding. I don't do that. I do a very, I call it an insulin reset or a lit cycle. Leptin, insulin and mtor sensitization cycle, which is 22, 2, 444 and 66. Six fasting cycles. And I shuffle them and I sort of work up into the 66, six.

Wait, what, what were those numbers again?

Two. Two, two. Two hours of restriction and two hours of eating a Nomad, one meal a day. Day. So when people haven't fasted before, they come to me and they're like really heavy or they're really sluggish or they're really old, whatever. Then I'll suggest a 16, 8. I mean, women, women of childbearing years is a very particular hormonal profile. Be careful with fasting. But outside of that particular person, 16, 8 is a good place to start once you can tolerate it. The real program is do 22 twos. You know, much of the time, once those are comfortable, you know, throw in a 44, four every other day, 44.

Hours fasting, four hours eating. And during that four hours eating, it's still just one meal.

Could be two. Okay, but it should be keto or at least protein heavy, low carb. I don't consider keto a high fat kind of milieu. Unless you don't have much body fat and then it kind of needs to be. But for most of us who are pretty, who are not super shredded, you can lose tons of body fat even faster. If your keto is a high protein versus a high fat keto, just keep the carbs low for the nutritional ketosis, then you're good, but all bases covered. So I've been doing a high protein, moderate fat fat, low carb kind of keto, and then cycling, essentially rolling 44, 44 hours and then eating two meals, one or two meals that are, that are high protein.

But then you said 66. Six is the last part of that, right? So you're 22, 2, 44, 4, 66, 6.

And then I do 66 hour, like about once a week. Well, I was doing it once a week for a while to really drop weight or get shredded. And then I backed off to about once every two or three weeks on the 66s, because what happens is you often feel good 44 hours in. I try not to make it too regimented at the beginning. Beginning I make it very regimented to teach the body how to resensitize insulin. But once it's actually over the hump, the 66 becomes a stretch goal. Oh, 44 feels great. Hey, look, I'm at 48 and it's 6pm I'm going to sleep. Oh, look at. You know. And you end up learning to manage hydration, electrolytes when you can exercise hard. And there's a bunch of things I would factor in to make all these things easier. But over a few months of that, you know, you end up with beautifully sensitive insulin. 1. I'm using tools like the, my biosense.

To watch blood, which is a breath ketone monitor, right?

Yeah. And it's mostly so I don't have to measure blood so often because I'm sure you know, blood, the ratio of endogenous ketones, nutritional generated ketones to glucose, the glucose ketone index GKI has quite a lot of research validity for the deeper you can get into a low glucose, high ketone state, the more you move into different metabolism, metabolic environments that do different things. And you can move from kind of anti inflammatory into a pro growth into a sort of like anti aging, anti cancer, anti seizure. You may get really deep into those numbers. So like you had cancer that's really bad or you're trying to really trying to kick something that's crazy. You want to have like seriously high ratios where you have almost very low glucose and very high blood ketones. But to get a measurement in the blood that is valid. Some papers came out recently that I'll dig up, up and forward so we can put them in the show notes. But some papers come out recently showing that the variability of BHOB in the blood is so high that to get a really valid measurement you have to measure pretty much every two hours because it's a fluctuating pool. But acetone is a signal of the generation of the pool. It's not the use pool like bohb. It's almost like an outflow of the process. So acetone changes more slowly. What I've found is that I can kind of think of my calories that is my ketogenesis. I, you know, my acetone in like a two to three day window, whatever I'm eating in the previous two to three days is what affects my acetone today. You know there's some, some drawbacks to the meters like these meters, this one here, the, my biosense, which I love, tops out at 40 parts per million acetone which is about 4 ketones and I can reliably get above 4.

Yeah, but they're, they're actually, the biosense is interesting. They're using like the latter part of the exhalation to supposedly get a more accurate level of breath acetone detection.

Yes. They have a cool little thing. They watch the pressure of the breath and as you finish the exhale, they capture the last segment of it. And I found it to be pretty. There's just a couple of quirks to it. I found to be pretty good at tracking information. And it's given me a much better sense of my own. I mean, I know how to do Paleo and I've been doing all kinds of things for like 20, 30 years. I was doing the Rob Fagan natural hormone thing, you know, years ago. I've done all kinds of crazy low carb diets and Paleo and primal and who knows. But I never really understood where the edge was. I knew what the math was, but now I know where the edge is in terms of fat, carbs, ketogenesis, how long it takes me to kick back into after carb loading or whatever. So I have a much better relationship with the whole process. And it helped me refine essentially what I've been coaching other people on from a sort of gerontology, insulin reset kind of perspective. Perspective. It helped me do it properly for myself and sort of cement some of the routines and the whys for myself, not just the numbers.

Yeah, it was a few, I think a few years ago in the International Journal of Obesity, I saw that study about the Matador diet, which I think stands for minimizing something, thermogenesis and deactivating obesity.

Adaptive. Yeah, it's the rebound from.

Yeah, I forget it. It actually stands for something meat going down. Yeah, yeah. But the idea is they actually did a pretty good study on it and interrupting energy restriction like this so called intermittent energy restriction with these energy balance rest periods. It did reduce compensatory metabolic responses. So it improved weight loss efficiency. And we've known that for a long time. I've told my clients that for a long time you go for about four weeks and you tend to see kind of a rise in TSH and a drop in some thyroid function, drop in metabolic rate. And it's that whole idea of even women who come to me who want to lose weight. I meet in many cases a Weston a Price ish type of diet, a lot of organ meats and ghee and fats and then lift heavy weights and they're all like, I'm going to balloon. And they all wind up seeing this really, really nice metabolic response. And you still have to pay attention to calories in versus calories out. But it's pretty amazing what you can do when you play with the metabolism in a way that goes beyond, beyond just a, just a strict calorically restrictive diet which just doesn't work out well from an endocrine standpoint. Long term. Is there anything else you're doing? Weight loss wide. Are you following your specific exercise program with this whole body transformation thing you're doing?

Yeah, I'm halfway into. I do it slowly, of course, Matador is a slow way to do it and so I've been doing like a two week on, one week off or something or two weeks on, two weeks off, sometimes the fall. So I'm 14 weeks, sorry, 16 weeks in about 15, 16 and. And I'm about halfway to where I want to be physically. And that has been the cycling, the fasting, going keto. I keep my calories somewhere between the BMR, which for me is about 1750 and a high TDEE of A. You know, when I'm being very vigorous is about twice that, about 3,500, a little higher. So I eat somewhere in that range every the day, maybe every day. But then I'm doing 22s. Like I was saying, I'm doing fasted low intensity, moderate intensity exercise every morning, morning in this case Ashtanga yoga. So I do half an hour minimum, usually about an hour of Ashtanga, which folks don't know is a flow Vinyasa style yoga. You're breathing, you're generating a lot of heat in your body. It's very inefficient and it's among the most calorically dense exercises you could do, so to speak.

But it's not done in a, it's not done in a hot room like Bikram, right?

No. The difference of Ashtang, it's sort of, it's a similar type of yoga, actually very similar. But in Ashtanga you're generating the heat in terms of internally. In Bikram hot power core, the room's hot and the heat warms you up and your muscles soften, you can move. But in Ashtanga you're generating the physical metabolic fire when you're really getting hot. So I can do Ashtanga in a cold New England barn and be sweating within 20 minutes all over the place. But Ashtanga is done at a certain rate, certain breathing pattern with a meditative focus. So I use it for exercise, for meditation, breath work, whatever, very efficient. I use it as a sort of ritual more than exercise. But I do believe in fasted exercise in the morning, sort of cortisol, low arousal levels, so moderate to low exercise for fat loss, for insulin sensitization, for maximal autophagy support low arousal levels. So walking, cycling, swimming, yoga, not raw mma weightlifting craziness. What I've been doing the past few weeks, just the past week or two really is freshing my learning a little bit on kettlebell. Kettlebells and I'm just starting to add now in a four day a week kettlebell program as well in the evenings. So I'm doing sort of, I finish yoga before sunrise and I'm doing kettlebells at sunset and yoga's every day. But kettlebells are like four times a week. Just start add that now basically.

Yeah. And it's interesting by doing that morning fasted exercise in aerobic state and not severely depleting ATP because you keep the intensity levels low, you don't get this. That can actually result in a little bit of that either compensatory calorie eating response or a little bit of a minimization of autophagy or muscle cell catabolism. So I'm actually on the same page with you. I'm a fan of if the schedule permits of doing morning fasted exercise along with morning cold and heat if you can and then in a fed state later on in the day doing more of the kind of the resistance training, high intensity interval training which is nice too because you upgrade regulate your glucose transporters, render yourself almost temporarily just as insulin sensitive as you'd normally be in the morning. So then you can go have dinner which tends to be a meal that a lot of people like to have a little bit more free anyways as far as what they're going to eat. And so I think that's the most beautiful scenario for weight loss is morning aerobic fasted cold heat and then afternoon intense exercise, et cetera. And then you kind of do any type of, of carb refeed or anything like that at the end of the day for those days you're exercising hard in the late afternoon.

Sort of what I'm doing. But I'm staying in heat up most of the time and my car refeeds are once every two weeks at this point in my plan going forward. And I'm also adding in more fasting.

I use that approach and I'm staying in keto as well. And if you look at a lot of the research studies, especially on hardcore athletes, 200 up to 300 grams of carbohydrates in some studies in these athletes as re feeds and they were still staying in ketosis. And granted I'll use like you know, glucose transporter upregulators like berberine or bitter melon extract or cinnamon or apple cider vinegar. Like prior to that evening refeed, along with an intense exercise session like weight training or something like that. But I mean, I'll do breath and blood ketone testing and occasionally I'll be out of ketosis, you know, not that I'm super, super duper strict about it, but for like one to two hours, sometimes I'll be out and, and then I'm fine after that. So I think it's a pretty good way to train and eat.

I'm trying to have only mostly protein fat meal in the morning or the first meal. If I do two meals, if it's a six hour, four hour doing two feedings essentially. And then I make it, I move all the carbs to the second meal if I'm gonna have any. They're only doing the fasting, you know, I'll give you some numbers. I started off a little about 23% body fat at about 195. Me a little heart and I'm about 170 and about 15% now, which isn't bad considering that only actually half the time was caloric restricted, you know, but 15%, you know, that fits health really well. Doesn't fit vanity as a 50 year old. Dude, come on, you know, I gotta get a little shredded. So I'm continuing the alternate day fasting. What I'm finding is morning fasted, yoga is fine fasted because I've been doing it for years exercise that way. So I'm good at pushing through that piece of it, enjoying it as a process. But I have a hard time picking up weights when my body's saying no, no, conserve all that extra energy because there's no glycogen in your system. Sit down. Down. No, no, sit down, hold still. You know, that's sort of like calorific state, which I'll get into sometimes 44 hours resistance training the night before and an hour of yoga, then the morning before, an hour yoga this morning and then like this afternoon I'm like, oh, let me sit down for a second. Oh yeah, sitting still feels good. And then I'm like just not going to want to go pick up those kettlebells later on that day is what I'm finding. So my strategy, which is to keep the fasting going for the growth hormone, for the autophagy, everything else. But I'm going to start breaking the fast, if you will, with just a couple hundred calories, kilograms of calories of amino acids, BCAAs and some HMB to kick off muscle synthesis before I work out as a pre workout with an egg protein or something for complete and then afterwards, because really all the research is showing that this may be impactful. After I work out refeeding, basically work to the point of glycogen depletion or shaking muscles with kettlebells, which is about 15 minutes at this point. And then refeed with ketones, exogenous ketones. Because there's some really lovely research showing that trained athletes get a nice MTOR upregulation in the muscle tissue. That's pretty profound if you post exercise refeed with exogenous ketones. So I'm going to try to put my thumb on the wheel everywhere, some of the thumbs go everywhere and see if I can't like shred that.

Yeah, good. One thing I would consider doing is, is the, the BCAAs, you know, from a pure muscle protein synthesis standpoint, potentially even due to, due to the higher amounts of leucine from a, from an insulin sensitivity standpoint, I don't think are as good as essential amino acids. And I realize like I own a company that sells essential amino acids. So it's kind of like the fox guard in the hen house. But at the same time, like everything I've looked into and every researcher I've talked to on, on this show about BCAA versus EAAs, like the consensus is for, for everything from fasting to muscle gain to neurotransmitters and beyond, like EAAs are better.

Yeah, I think you're right. Probably because I'm eating so clean, so to speak. The days that I am eating, I think I'm probably getting a pretty high hit of broad spectrum, so to speak, amino acids. And then the other thing I'm doing which is relevant for your question in the evening, I'm supplementing with a mixture of melatonin and phosphatidylserate.

Melatonin and phosphatidylsera. Urine. Is that more, is that more for mental function?

PS100 has mental function, so it's cortisol to some extent. But, but no, these are both relatively low doses to cause a signaling effect on evening cortisol that is to accelerate the drop basically. And I microdose melatonin.

Yeah, I've seen, I've seen good data on phosphatidylserin for, for lowering the evening cortisol for sure. That's a good one. If, if you tend to, I mean, I think folks should, should get like a Dutch test Like a dried ur urine test to see if cortisol actually is high in the evening or potentially, you know, if, if cortisol is high. But, but cortisol clearance is low meaning you're not producing excess cortisol, you're just clearing it slowly and then decide whether or not to take phosphatidylserin. But, but for most people, you know that that's phospholipid, that, that does a pretty good job.

Yeah, I'm a 50 year old middle aged guy, you know, I, I know my hormone support broadly, I mean choline serine metabolism could probably use some support. So probably it's good for me. I'm also really trying to target belly fat because I'm a middle aged dude. So I'm all about the cortisol right now. And then all these things are about circadian stuff, right? So exercise and when you eat are a bigger impact on circadian rhythm than light or sleep. So that not eating too late at night thing, they're doing some fasting, not eating first thing in the morning or at the end of the day, those are actually bigger circadian support things than fat loss things effectively and anti aging autophagy things then blue lockers or blackout curtains or hacking your sleep in other ways. So I find that I can get decent good sleep in a shorted amount 6, 7 hours, but get really quality sleep by dialing in first thing in the morning before dawn exercise, it's a powerful for me thing that drives my body to wake up the next morning and fasting before bed so that I have a cortisol spot spike. Because if you eat before bed and you're north about 25 years old, you won't have any growth hormone release at night and there'll be no corresponding cortisol spike to wake you up. Basically it's just not a good thing. As you know, these are all cortisol and circadian timing things that I'm trying to just spin the wheel faster with basically.

Yeah. And I would be remiss not to ask you and this is probably the last thing I have time to visit today. You talk about phosphorus and melatonin, some of the BCAAs, this matador diet, but for you again, being kind of plugged into the neurofeedback and brain optimization world, are you still messing around any kind of nootropic or smart drug or is there anything you like that tends to I guess generally be safe? I know you're not a physician who's going to recommend medical advice here but what do you like right now as far as a nootropic or a smart drug?

Well, I still use the Trubrain stuff periodically, but I use it more as a spot intervention here and there. Chris has come out with some new drinks and things that are on Amazon that are pretty great actually. They're fun when I need to be a little more on or write a little bit more or something.

I haven't talked to them forever. I forget what are the ingredients in Trubrain?

There's a bunch of new ones, but the ones on Amazon are new PEP based power drinks and it's the orange boost drinks now. New Pep based, which is pretty cool. New Pep is not my favorite, but it's. And I think the centrofenazine or uridine in there, which is a decent. A decent stack. But what Chris is doing, that one's.

Like a liquid shot, right? Almost like the carbohydrate gels a cyclist would use.

Yeah, a little one ounce shot. Exactly. It's a little one ounce shot. Little like, you know, one ounce of a energy drink kind of flavor. And then recently they just sent me something to try recently. They got a whole bunch of ketones out, so a mix of esters and salts in a powder. It's like a nice little blend. And they have also some food bars that are nootropics embedded. I haven't tasted those yet, but there's a handful of new products.

No kidding. Yeah. I haven't connected with them for a while or looked into what they're doing, so that's interesting. I'll have to look them back up because I think when you and I first started working together down at the Peak brain, you introduced me to the true brain stuff. And I tried it. I liked it. I just kind of what happened really was I wound up switching primarily to qualia and then got into microdosing with like LSA and psilocybin and a little bit of Wachuma and. And some basic microdosing protocols. And then of course, just a cup of organic coffee. I never got into experimenting with that many other nootropics of late, but I'll have to go back and check out the tree brain stuff and see what they're doing.

Yeah. The short answer though, in terms of what I'm into is I tend to dial in a strategy for every person. That's a little bit different with nootropics because I find that I have to take a functional neuroscience approach even from which B vitamin you need or which race of Tam, you may want to try. Someone's into that kind of stuff. It's a little different person to person. The same way that I have to build, you know, custom neurofeedback I would have to build a custom nootropic strategy ultimately when it gets really deep into it. So there's a handful of things I like and my mom calls me every three months and asks for more, you know, of the same stuff. But I still don't think that there's necessarily a foundational level thing beyond stuff like D3 omega 3 fatty acids. Those are absolutely things. And then what I'm getting to a little bit now and thinking this is all relevant for the body stuff of course is creatine has some nootropic properties that's not insignificant. And I haven't started to use it.

I know I've actually written a few articles about that recently. I take 5 grams. I mean I don't know if I qualified as a nootropic. A lot of times I say I take it for performance but yeah, I use creapure. We actually make it now at Creatine we have a key on can creatine. I take five grams a day, year round.

Let me give you of a couple quest for a product then because I found an old product that I was. There's a specific compound that you can bind to creatine that used to be bound every so often and I found a version of it. It's called Alpha ketoglutarate and akg Alpha ketoglutter, you know, bodybuilder stuff. But it turns out it has massive anti aging properties in the krebs. Not the resveratrol you know, cert 1 stress ones but like other ones almost like the different the other side of the coin from the nad. NAD plus kind of anti aging aging. The AKG is the other half of the coin. So you get massive anti aging effects in animal models in akg. So I'm interested in getting a little deeper into trying just personally Alpha ketoglutarate blends of with creatine.

Yeah, I talked about that actually episode 419 of my podcast, I actually talked about that new research on alpha ketoglutarate and I found one company, they actually wound up sending me some to try. I think it was called Rejuvenation I believe was the name of it. Rejuvent, something like that. But yeah, I talked about that new research study and, and you know I, I took it. I didn't really measure telomeres or anything like that. But it is interesting, some of the.

Research and it's also, you know, it's one of these things that tends to float up. You know, you see from the 70s and 80s stuff in bro science and 20, 30 years later you see a research study on the same compound. You're like, wait a minute, you know, not every bit of bro science was crazy. Like, you know, the keto diet that I'm converging on is almost identical. This twice a day thing, it's almost identical to Vince Garanda steak and eggs diet, by the way.

Yeah, it all comes back around. There's a, I forget the name of the book. It's got a picture of a guy flexing on it and it's like the story of physical culture in America. And I read it and oh man, I'll find the book. And if you guys are listening and you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PeakBrainpodcast I'll link to it because it would. It was super entertaining, but it was essentially like the whole history of physical culture and it was covering some kind of a newspaper man who used to make a bunch of magazines and stuff related to physical culture. I think it may have been Bernard McFadden, I don't remember. But yeah, like half the stuff in the book that happened in the 30s and 40s and 50s all just kind of came back around. Everything from intermittent fasting to ketones to animal flow. All of it. It's crazy.

Well, Ben, let's, let's touch base maybe in a few months and I'll send you a pre and post picture I took some four months ago. Maybe in a few months I'll get your take on all the physical transformation because we all can't be Ben Greenfield specimens. But you also didn't pop out a fully formed as the guy you are. You took some time to build that form. And so I'll be inspired by you to take some of that path.

Yeah, for sure. And for those of you listening in everything that we talked about, I'll link to over in the show show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Peakbrain podcast along with my previous podcast with Andrew and an article they wrote for the website that's I think really, really good.

Yeah, we also have a discount link there. Yeah. Petebrainstew.com Ben, because you are one of our first podcasts I ever did Peak Brain, sorry, Ben Greenfield listeners get a better discount than anyone else ever does.

Yeah, I think it's actually peak brain. Yeah. Peakbraininstitute.com Ben yeah, something like that. Or BGF. I forget.

Yeah, yeah, we'll update it in whenever the show goes live for you. But people get a discount because they come in via your show on the ongoing services and things. So we can support you guys getting shift wherever you want to.

Cool. All right. Well, it's always good talking to you, Andrew, and hopefully I'll make it down there at some point to pop in and see what other fun things you have going on in the clinic down in la.

And if not, we'll send you some gear up to your area and you can do a brain map or something. We can maybe do caffeine Pre post, fasting vs cardio vs carb heavy pre post. You can that kind of stuff. It's pretty easy to do the remotes now, so do some cool things. Yeah. All right, my friend. Talk to you guys soon. Everyone who's listening, thanks so much for listening and I look forward to supporting when I can. All right.

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