How To Test Your Blood Anytime, Anywhere In The World With Talking20

Hey, everybody, it's Ben Greenfield here and I want to tell you guys a quick story. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and you may have heard me mention this, but I was at a conference called Biohack youk Life. And this was Dave Asprey's conference down there where we were really delving into a lot of cutting edge tips and techniques and tools for enhancing your performance, enhancing your health, self quantification testing, stuff like that. And I happened to meet actually at a dinner on one of the nights when we were down there, Heather, who happens to be the person you see in the video next to me right now. And Heather has a really cool background and she showed me something during dinner that literally blew my mind because I'm. I'm big time into this whole test. Your biomarkers know what's going on inside your body, be able to optimize your biology by having a really good finger on the pulse of what's going on with your body. Heather just completely blew me away with what she knew and understood and actually had developed when it comes to this stuff. So. So this is going to be a really, really cool video for you guys to be able to see. So, Heather, thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Ben. Thanks for the great introduction. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you're excited. I'm also very excited. We have put together sort of something I think that's really empowering for a lot of different communities.

I'm totally going to interrupt you really quickly because you're being humble, so I'll talk for you.

Well, I'm Canadian. That's part of how we do things.

You're like an MD, PhD or something like that, right?

I just finished both doctoral programs together, so this was an extended. I did a PhD in Vancouver, and then I finished my medical degree actually this year as well. And having that experience over many years, it gave me a lot of opportunity to observe, like, the way we were doing things and opportunities to sort of maybe speed things up and maybe even empower people in a way that's different than the traditional establishment in medicine does. I think everyone can agree that, you know, the system is working as hard as it can, but it's a little overwhelmed with our hunger for knowledge right now, like everything we can read online about ourselves. And what I saw when I was training was that while we carry the stethoscope around and we sort of like do a lot of traditional practice, 80% of the decisions we make actually come from blood tests that we do and often you get into the hospital, somebody listens to what's going on with you and then triages you to a certain set of blood tests. And so I sort of thought that was interesting. And I came across some technology that had been around for many years but hadn't been really implemented in the way that we're doing it. And basically I'll introduce you to the way this works. It's an at home blood test that you do. You order a little kit from us online. So it's just a little package like this. Everything that you need comes inside this package.

And this includes a little lancet that you use to prick your finger. And I can show you how to do that in a second. And you collect a couple of drops of blood on this little card and you let it dry for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes and then you stick it in the envelope that's in that kit and you mail it to us. And we are going to run for you virtually everything you can get from.

A lab that you have to normally go through, you know, visit, go into a clinic.

That's what I wanted to get into here. Because.

Don'T get me wrong, I have done, I've tested with probably like almost 10 different companies in terms of like trying out all these different test kits that you can get sent to your home. So I've really geeked out on this stuff. And.

One of the things that you have to do is you have to go fill up tubes of blood at your local lab and drive and you know, basically go, go out of your way and also bleed a lot to get a lot of these values. And what you were showing me was like this tiny little, little card. Now I, what I want to understand though is how you can do that. Like, how can you do that? And everybody else is having to go and, and give tubes of blood at like a lab.

It's a great question and we get that a lot. I want to preface by saying that seeing your physician and going to get lab testing is still like essential. What we're offering here is sort of like a frontline set of blood tests that.

Don'T replace the services that you have with your physician. That's really important that everyone knows that obviously. Right. What the reason we can do this is because.

Something that not everyone realizes that in North America particularly, you've probably already used one of these cards when you were born. So there's a requirement right now that when a newborn baby is born, we take a heel prick and we put their blood on this very card. And we analyze it with a mass spectrometer, which is what we use for different potential metabolite disorders, which could kill you very quickly when you're born. So this technology actually exists and.

It'S been used in a way that's very sort of a yes, no answer. So you get that test done when you're born and we'd know, okay, you have this dangerous condition and we know, we treat you. What's happened with mass spectrometry, which is what we're using, is that in the last five or six years, the technology has just made some significant improvements so that we can now not just get a yes or no answer from this. We can get like, wait a minute, you're at 50 nanograms per deciliter of that molecule. So it's what we call quantitative now. And it's been sort of this slow progression of that technology. And there's other things that have to do with more about the medical system and how it works. They collect large tubes of blood from everybody because they don't know exactly what you've been ordered to have. And so they just collect everything and then they run specifically what is needed from you. And they might need some serum or they might do different things with that sample. And we know that, we know what we're going to do with this. So we just basically collect the blood one way and we don't need very much.

So it's kind of to do with the historic. If you look at medicine the way it's worked, and it sort of gets a system set up and it runs it that way for many decades and doesn't change very quickly. And, you know, combined with this technology just sort of taking some leapfrogs in the last couple years.

Gotcha. Okay, so for all the health geeks out there, let's talk about those five different circles that you showed me with the blood drops. What happens after I send that to you? What do I find out?

So we basically punch those circles off the cards. We do little 3 millimeter punches and we prepare that and then run it into our machine. And right now we're offering, we're optimizing our system for a set of 17 blood tests to be ready by the summer. So everyone that's ordering cards right now, so sending them in to us from all over the world, actually we have those stored and like date stamps so we know what your blood reading is going to be from that date in the past.

What you just said, I want to interrupt you. You said people are saying this to you from all over the world.

Yeah.

So let's say I've got a bunch of triathletes down in whatever New Zealand or Australia who are watching this video. They can actually do this.

Yeah. So what's interesting is an incredibly powerful aspect of this, which is sort of subtle, is that instead of needing, you know, necessarily a doctor's office not to replace physicians, I'm not going to say that we're doing that, but in some cases, let's say if you're looking at vitamin levels or hormones, you know, these kind of things, you don't necessarily need a lab nearby or even what we call the cold chain, so refrigeration system that reaches out to the remote communities. What you need is an mailbox and Internet access. We send you this system and you send it back to us and we send you a result anywhere in the world. So we're talking about giving.

A large portion of the planet the opportunity to learn this type of information in a way that I'm really excited to finally offer. I think it's cool.

So what is it like vitamin D, cholesterol? You said 17 things, and I think when you were talking to me at dinner, you were saying that this could potentially expand to be like hundreds of things.

So right now, off of single drop, we are shooting for the three estrogens. So estradiol, estrone, that group, progesterone, testosterone. We've got cholesterol, CRP, homocysteine.

We'Ve got vitamin D3, all the B vitamins, vitamin A.

All the vitamins basically that everybody knows about.

I'm probably missing a couple. They're all on our website on our you pick pack. So if you want to buy, we have a $99 deal where you can pick five of those and you get a card and you can basically pick out of that whole list what you want us to run. And then we also have a gold card subscription that's really been popular, where you get 24 or 36 of our cards. And every test that we develop in the next two or three years, depending on which package you get, you will get automatically run off your cards. So we are looking to, you know, this machine can see.

Hundreds of thousands of things off of these drops. One drop, actually. So we are in a slow process now where we tool up our equipment for each test. And that takes a little bit of time. And once we have that running, though, we just roll that out as a new test that you'll get if you want it or, you know, as part of the subscription.

So basically, like, if I were going to get one of the cards, like whatever, 24, the 36 months of testing, I could test every single month if I wanted to.

Yeah, we make it flexible. You know, we have different types of users. So as a guideline, you could do a monthly test for three years or you could do it all of them in 30 days. And you're going to, you know, if you're. We're doing things like cortisol. So there's different. You might have a personal interest in. Like, I want to do an experiment with this. So we did one as an example. We had a bunch of very high cholesterol foods that were deep fried chicken nuggets and this kind of thing. We ate this meal and for 10 hours every hour we took drops on separate carbs and ran that and watched the cholesterol double from baseline. An hour and 15 minutes or so after that meal, which really no one has, to my knowledge, demonstrated. I've never heard of it because you'd really have to sit in a lab with a big arm to show that. And so we're doing that with all different types of foods we started doing.

So I could like do, I could like do Ironman Canada this year and I could test hscrp, fibrinogen, interleukin, testosterone, and I could do that for like every day for 21 days after the race and see exactly what happens to the body every day after doing like an Ironman triathlon.

That's exactly the type of use that we're hoping to see. And we want to know actually from you guys what you want us to build into our system. We have an option, if you have a test you want us to run that no one has ever, no one in a lab anywhere has set up before, but you are interested in that molecule or we have an option, a designer pack where we will build that test for you. It takes, give us about three weeks to set it up and dedicate it to you. And you get that test for that year. You don't pay for it. But basically.

That'S exactly the type of data that I think this is much more powerful than people realize. Because what's going to happen is you're going to figure something out and you're going to start sharing that you did that. And then all of a sudden.

I'm going to learn like, okay, yoga is what I should do every day, or how often I do it, or the cycling or whatever it is that I want to do to optimize my performance and reduce my cortisol or what it does to my hormones. So it kind of becomes very addictive. And it's like, it's just access to what's happening inside me on a regular basis. It's very personal and it's very accessible. And our whole platform is like, you got like, play with this. Like, you know, I can't even think about what you guys might want to do. I just, I'm like, I can see that this is.

You don't want to know how fast my mind is spinning right now. Like, I could, I could take you like one of my clients and just like write out their entire training routine and test them for a week and see exactly what their, what their blood and their body is doing every single day based off of that specific routine to know if that's the one, one that's going to be perfect for them.

When you're over training and what you're over training, everything, this is what's, I think, exciting is also you guys are at the front line of this type of discovery. And what's great for me is I did a PhD and it was a really interesting look at how we do research in our society. But I think in this era of social media, we're gonna get a lot more information by just giving people the information they need and play with it and share it, and that's, you know, that will unburden. I think a lot of the scientists, there's probably like 10,000 of them working on a given problem in the world at one time. And imagine if you had 50,000 athletes, all highly motivated, studying this at the same time. And it's citizen science. It's research and crowd based. Yeah, and it's fast. It's fast.

Didn't you guys do an alcohol test too? I'm putting you on the spot. You don't have to talk about this in a video if you don't want to because it'll go public.

I can't think if there's anything inappropriate about it, but I love red wine and I have favorites. And.

Sometimes as we've all, we all, if you have a little more of your favorite wine, you kind of feel it the next day. So I was curious about, you know, a different, a type of wine that I like. So I drank actually quite a bit of it in one sitting. You know, I won't talk about how much, but quite a lot more than I would normally have, definitely in the name of science. And I tracked every hour for 48 hours. You know, as I was drinking this wine, and then sort of like, as I tried to recover from drinking it, and. And what I've done is frozen all those cards. So I have, like, you know, almost 50 cards there. And what I'm going to do is look at, okay, the alcohol level in my blood.

You know, what was happening with my alcohol dehydrogenase, you know, the whole sequence of chemistry that goes on when we ingest this stuff. And each wine is actually different. So you know how my liver responded, because you do get a little bit of, like, a little bit of liver inflammation or liver damage that happens when you. When you drink and just sort of like, really pull out from that particular wine. What happened? And, yeah, I'm just curious if there's other wines that maybe would have a different effect and. Or other alcohol. And it's kind of a fun thing. Like, we get a lot. You know, we're looking for volunteers even to sort of, like, use our cards in this way. Okay, good, good.

And, like, you know, as long as the wine comes with the card.

Yeah. Well, I know we could, like, talk about that. That could be an interesting other connection. But we see what's really cool is what you can do with food, because, frankly, the moment you eat something that is just, your body is awash in what you just had. And so we never really get a chance to sort of see that. Like, I now have a hard time looking at some of the foods that we saw cholesterol changes in, and I don't eat them. But there's also a lot of debate about cholesterol, so I don't want to comment because there's very good and less good cholesterol.

You're able to even do something like look at particle size if you're using a spectrometer, right?

Yeah. We are going to.

Drill all the way into fatty acid, the components of all these foods, and how.

We're going to visit some folks at a big Paleo conference coming up, and they're very excited, and there's a lot of.

Is that PaleoFX?

Yeah, this is the conference coming up.

I'll be down there.

Oh, excellent. Yeah, so we'll be out there kind of. And we want to, like, people really feel strongly about certain diets and certain life choices they've made. And what we're kind of pumped about is we're going to give them a very empirical tool that they can use to basically prove what they're talking about. And. Yeah, so it's exciting. And I've played games, too, so.

Yeah, I Love stuff like this. Well, what I will do is if you're watching this video right now, I'm going to put some more information about Talking20, which is the name of this testing service, underneath the video so you can kind of see some of the stuff that you could get tested and some more details and where you can get the test and everything like that. If you're watching this on YouTube, just click through to the URL that you can see underneath the video. And yeah, I think this is super cool stuff. And if you have questions, you can leave them as a comment as well, and either Heather or myself will go in and respond. But I'm pretty excited about this, Heather, and I want to thank you for coming on the video and doing the show and tell.

Yeah, and what we'll do too is we're going to throw up a discount for everybody watching. We're going to do a 10% off for everyone that hears this in the next. We'll put it up for about, let's say two months. It's Ben's test, all caps. So Ben's test, and we'll do a 10% off. And on our gold cards, that can be in the hundreds, I think, if you calculate it like just over 100 bucks off. So, you know, we'll get everybody on this and if that helps, like, it's. It's just. It's been really fun to sort of hear about everyone's ideas. And we also love to get emails about, like, what test people want as well, because this is. This is a frontier, like these molecules. I mean, we know in hospital we study a classic set of 50, but there's also, you know, there's all these derivatives of all these molecules. So there's kind of a lot to look at and begin to study. And I think it's going to be really interesting and really fast once people get ahold of it. So.

Yeah, I like it. I like it. All right, well, so, folks, I hope that's helpful for you. And again, this kind of stuff is cutting edge. I mean, like, being able to get a glimpse into what's going on inside your body and being able to do something like get whatever, like a package and being able to test every single month and know without or, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you know, what's going on, where are my cortisol levels, where's my testosterone at all this stuff? It's just incredibly useful to be able to drive your diet, be able to drive your physical activity, your rest, your stress control, what you're doing is taking all these different things that you're doing in your life anyways and figuring out if they really, truly are affecting your biology. So it's cool stuff. It's not just for geeked out propeller hat guys like me or MD, PhD.

Geeks in disguise like Heather.

This is stuff that can help a lot of people out. So check it out. And I'm Ben Greenfield, and this is Heather from talking 20 signing out.

See you guys.