What a Pharmacist Actually Takes After a Melanoma Diagnosis

In '23, I got diagnosed with melanoma. It kind of like hit me hard 'cause I thought I was invincible. I was young, I was successful, and I thought that—

My guest on today's show, I met him in Las Vegas at a longevity conference for doctors, and I've learned a lot about him. He used to be a pharmacist, and then he had a health scare and shifted from reactive care towards prevention and long-term resilience and made some pretty interesting products along the way. His name is Mazen Qarnabi.

So I was like, you know what? I should make something something that is really up to standard that make my body work better. I didn't look at margins. I didn't look at how the label looked. I wanted real results. And that's how I started putting Zenos together. I like to do things that can make me fully understand my body, and that's what I do.

The show notes are pretty easy. BenGreenfieldLife.com/XenosPodcast. That's the name of Mason's company, or I should say Zenos. BenGreenfieldLife.com/XenosPodcast. NOS Podcast. Let's go talk to Mason. Dude, I don't remember if you recall when we met Mason, but we were in Vegas.

At the A4M, yes.

Yeah, at the A4M, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. That's a mouthful. And, I went to— you had this sponsored after-party or gathering or dinner or something like that. And you and I hadn't talked before, but you told me you came out of, I think the, like the pharmacy industry. Is that right?

Yes. So I'm a pharmacist by trade and I own and operate pharmacies throughout the country. So I was one of those guys that you come in with your prescriptions and would be able to like fill your drugs all over. So I was on that pharmaceutical side of things.

Wait, did you get to wear the white coat and everything?

It's actually funny because I was always a rebel. I never really liked to wear those things. I always thought it was like for like, it wasn't, it was like not something that I would want to wear. And I actually have a funny story. I have an old lady that came to me when I first graduated. I finished school very young, so I was 21 years old. And I had this old lady customer that comes in and she's like asking for the pharmacist to help her. So the tech came up and called me. So I got out of the counter and I came up there and I said, how can I help you, ma'am? She looks at me, she gives me that look. She's like, I asked for the pharmacist. I'm like, how can I help you? She's like, I want the pharmacist. So this woman literally for 5 minutes freaking out on me, doesn't believe that I'm a pharmacist. Had to go up the wall, bring my pharmacy license with my driver's license for her to see, to believe that I was a pharmacist. I wasn't dressed like one. Yes.

Were you like full Zuckerberg mode, like sandals and a hoodie or?

No, no. I was all Gucci'd up from top to bottom with Saint Laurent shoes, bro. I was never the Zuckerberg type.

Yeah, of course you were. Tell me more about the pharmacy. Like how'd that get started?

Okay, so I went to pharmacy school because my dad wasn't, my dad doesn't come from money. So he had to build himself. So he could not get educated. But in the back of his mind, he always wanted us, me and my brother to get educated, right? He wanted us to be doctors. So I don't know if I wanted to be a doctor, but to appease him, I kind of enrolled in pharmacy school so that could be as my pre-med instead of going into biology or some other major that I cannot use. So I went into pharmacy school in order to become a doctor later on. But then once I saw blood and dissecting pigs and that smell of formaldehyde that I could not eat for days after, I was like, this thing is not for me. So I stopped at a pharmacy.

And by the way, just so you know, I TA'd I studied anatomy and physiology for 3 years at University of Idaho, so I lived in formaldehyde and sheep hearts and human cadavers. And yeah, you have to have a taste for that.

Yeah, I could not eat. Literally, my appetite would be like shut for days. I was like, I'm not built for this at all. Plus, I cut myself in the lab once and I saw my blood, I actually fainted. I'm like, I can't be fainting in front of patients. So, I was like, no, medicine is not for me. I wish though, right now I'm looking at it, I wish I finished.

Well, I mean, you're obviously doing other things now, which we'll eventually talk about. So, the pharmacy, was this in the US?

Yes, in the US. I went to St. John's University in New York.

And were you working for a pharmacy or did you like start your own pharmacy?

So, I interned at Duane Reade when I was in third year. So, I had to do my internship, then did the hospital rotation. And then when I graduated, Duane Reade offered me a job to be a pharmacist. So I worked for them for a year, and then I shifted to CVS. I did the night— the night grave, the graveyard shift, right? So I used to do from 8:00 PM to 8:00 in the morning, 7 days on, 7 days off, and they would pay you for 2 weeks. So I thought it was cool in the beginning because I had that whole week off, but none of my friends were off. They were all working. I got sick doing it, so my body could not recover from that lack of sleep, right? So I kind of, but that opened the door for me to go and do some type of like part-time work at independent stores. Working at chains, you never see the actual business side of the pharmacy. You're a robot. You go in, you fill scripts, and you just leave. But working at an independent, it kind of like gives you numbers, it gives you profits. You know how to order the medication. You get to see the business side of pharmacy. And that's what made me fall in love with. And then we took a gamble on a store store on the Lower East Side, and we, uh, we invested in it, and I left the chains.

Who's, who's we?

Me and my cousin.

Okay.

And my brother. But it was me, my cousin, my brother that we, uh, ventured on one store, and from there, that was the beginning, and we never looked back.

So you started in East Side, uh, was that Manhattan?

Yeah, on the Lower East Side on Grand Street and Clinton.

Did the, did this series of clinics you guys have, have a name?

Uh, the pharmacies? Uh, well, it started as Carnaby Drugs, but now my baby is Cedra Pharmacy. So Cedra is located in California, in Texas, in New York. So those are my babies.

Okay. So somebody drives by Cedra Pharmacy, that's you and your brother.

Yes.

But obviously, I mean, you know, I know this because we had a conversation in Vegas and I kind of saw what you've been rolling out over the past couple of years. You took a shift at some point.

In '23, I got diagnosed with melanoma. So it kind of like hit me hard because I thought I was invincible. I was young, I was successful, young family, and I thought that life is great. But then with this diagnosis, that unexpected diagnosis, plus I'm Middle Eastern, so it's very rare to get melanoma. It's like my, not my type of skin, right?

And just because you naturally present more melanin on the skin surface?

Yes. So it's like for me, it's easier for me to get tan. I never like was afraid of the sun. I was raised in in the sun. So it was never kind of like in the back of my mind I would ever get melanoma. And so when I got diagnosed with melanoma, and at the same time, a woman that works with us, she had a son who is in his 30s that got diagnosed with melanoma as well, but his outcome was catastrophic. So she ended up losing her son. And I had to kind of like live through that with her, the emotions and how she dealt with it. So in my mind, I'm like, shit, this can kill me. So I needed to do something better for me, for myself, for my family. Like I said, I had a very young family. I have 4 children, and I don't want to die young, right? So it kind of got me looking into how can I live a healthier life? How can I do better for myself? How can I go and find other ways of making my body work better? And, that's what got me looking into this whole longevity and wellness field, and I fell in love with it.

Now, you obviously have a lot at your disposal when you're looking into longevity and wellness field. I mean, there's biohacking and red light and hyperbaric and freaking peptides and all the things. What attracted you to the idea of supplements?

Because I felt like it's more of a natural way to kind of like optimize your body. And looking around on the market, like what I said in '23 when I started looking to see what's available and how I can make myself live a healthier lifestyle, I started looking to see what's available on the market. And all I saw was like labels and formulations that don't have the right dosages and stuff. So I was like, you know what, I should make something that is really up to standard that make my body work better and take away the guessing game from me. And, and so that's how I started. I never started it to be kind of a business. I started it to be just for me to, to kind of like improve myself.

Do you think though, like, as a pharmacist, that you look through the lens of supplementation differently as far as like the formulations and things like that?

I have a better understanding of, of things and how the pharmacology of things in the body and how the body reacts to it, yes, because I went through 6 years of schooling for that. So it kind of like prepared me to fully understand, I guess, better than the average consumer and how the body reacts to it.

So with Zenos, am I pronouncing that right?

Zenos or Zenos? It's Zenos, actually.

It's Zenos.

It comes from like, what makes me Zen? So the whole thing is like, what makes me Zen? Yes.

Yeah. Okay, got it. Like, what led to you actually starting that? Did you just like, go out, start to source stuff, and slap a label on it? Did you know beforehand? Did you have certain formulations in mind or how did you actually put it together?

I did a lot of research and I started, like I said, I was looking into different formulations and different products and how it can make the body look so much, feel better and work better. And, what I saw out there was people looked at margins, they looked at how the label looks, before they looked at outcomes. So I wanted to do something completely different because if I wanted to take this, if I wanted to make a supplement, I'm making it because I want to personally take it. I want my family members to take it. So I didn't look at margins. I didn't look at how the label looked. I wanted real results. And that's how I started putting Zenos together from the ingredients that we picked from the dosages that we put in them. I wanted everything to be at an optimal dosage and the most efficacious way of taking it. And that's how, like, I formulated Zenos.

When you're, like, putting together a multi-ingredient formula, do you kind of, like, select a whole host of ingredients that, you know, go after a specific function? Because you guys have, like, Brain Zen and Muscle Zen and Mood Zen, you know, all these different Zen-based products. Are you reverse engineering it somehow or how do you actually think about formulation, I guess?

What we saw that you need about 1,000 milligrams a day dose. So, we made sure that when we designed that product, we have that 1,000 milligrams a day dose of that. And, that follows with every single aspect of our formulation as well. So we look like, for example, what would make the body eliminate and make the mitochondria or the cellular rejuvenation work better? So we looked at like all the different ingredients that are on the market and we saw whatever we can hit, hit that mechanism within 4 to 5 different pathways. And that's how we chose our ingredients and that's how we kind of formulated everything together. So, it's not just one pathway that we're activating, we're trying to attack it from 4 to 5 different pathways when it comes to the brain, when it comes to cell health, when it comes to your gut health, all that stuff.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I was talking with an NAD product formulator recently and they were saying, "Well, we target enzyme degradation, we target the precursors, we target some of the cofactors like sirtuins." And, I think a lot of people don't realize in the supplements and especially the supplements formulating industry, there are multiple pathways when you're trying to achieve something like, let's say, cellular health or mitochondrial health or gut health or brain stimulation. And so, when you look at the label of a supplement, a lot of times that's why you might see 5 or 8 or 10 different ingredients. They're not just all random ingredients thrown in there for let's say in the case of the brain, memory or cognition or executive function or word recall or, let's say, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, they're trying to target each of those with an ingredient that crosses over and hits as many of those aspects as possible, right?

There's one issue with what I'm seeing with our formulation is that people that, like I said, not everyone is fully educated at at the supplement game, right? So the first thing they look at is price and they'll be like, why is your product so expensive? They're expensive because the way we formulated them is you're getting the right dosage and you're getting a stack from 8 to 11 different licensed ingredients in each one of those stacks. Right. And they're formulated in a way that will synergistically work together to give you the best possible outcome to your body. So and if you wanted to break down the cost of these individually, if you wanted to break the stack and do it individually and buy them, you'll end up realizing that with us you're saving money. And that's the message that we're trying to put across is that we took the guessing game out of your personal stack. You don't need to go and guess what you need to take. So the way we formulated it and we took also the price in the price point in consideration is that we want to make it accessible to people that really want the best outcomes out of the supplementation and not end up ending up spending a fortune on them by individually buying them separately.

Yeah, you use the term licensed ingredient earlier. For people not familiar with that, uh, what does it mean for some of you, a licensed ingredient?

Like, for example, you can have, uh, the same ingredient in two different bottles that actually will do different things in the body because it's used— they use different salts, different form of the actual ingredient. Ingredient. So what we did with the licensed ingredient is that the companies that are making and sourcing these ingredients have undergone long studies on their product. So it's the purity, it's the actual results, the pharmacological result that you get from taking these drugs. These are all studies and backed by their own published studies. So that's why these ingredients are a little bit more expensive. To use, but at least you're getting the purest form of these ingredients. And, that's what we chose to put in, in Zenos Health Supplements.

So, what you mean is when someone looks at the label of a supplement and they see ASM-66 as a form of ashwagandha or Cognizin as a form of, I think, choline if I recall properly, or Creapure as a form of creatine, those are examples of licensed ingredient.

Licensed ingredient, correct. Yes. 100%.

So, well, speaking of CreaPure, let's talk about that because I think I told you I'm basically addicted to your creatine gummies.

Which flavor you like, by the way? Which flavor you like the— Blueberry.

Oh, blueberry by far. Blueberry is amazing. 4 in my smoothie every morning. I think is, gosh, I should have looked at this before the podcast. The gram dosage per gummy is how much?

It was 1.25.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I'm getting around 5 grams of creatine in my smoothie and then I may or may not munch on a handful throughout the day. But, creatine gummies, I don't know if you saw some of the reports over the past couple years, they've kind of gotten a bad rap lately due to multiple reports on them not having adequate amounts of creatine or at least not what they say they have in them, not being stable and getting converted into creatinine over the process of the exposure to water and the gelatinizing process. The purity is an issue, not using pure forms of creatine. So, unpack the creatine gummies for me and what's different about them or what you look at when you're doing a gummy product like that.

Okay. Well, I'm glad that you brought that up because it's a major, major issue now in the market because most creatine that are on the market now are kind of candy diet, like dye this in like a halo on top of them to make them look like they're saving your body. But meanwhile, there's a lot of horror in them because the most creatine powder that is, that is on the market now comes from China. So it's not, it's not pure. It's not in its pure form. When it reacts with water, like I said, the issue becomes creatinine, and that's very bad for you because it can affect your kidneys and stuff.

So also, by the way, I'll just throw a fun fact in there, not to derail you, but if you make like a creatine smoothie or put creatine in your smoothie, let's say, or mix creatine with water, you should not wait to drink it. The longer that you wait, the more the water converts the creatine into creatinine, which isn't necessarily harmful. You see the kidney— if people get a kidney test and will show high creatinine, if you're taking creatine and that's the reason it's high, it's not harmful per se. If creatinine is elevated and it's not because you're taking creatine, that could indicate kidney issues. But the issue is not that creatinine is harmful, it's that it's basically a waste of money. You know, you're not getting your creatine, your creatine inside your muscles.

Yeah, exactly. So to, to eliminate that issue, we, uh, use Creapure, which is the purest form of creatine monohydrate on the market when it comes to purity, when it comes to, uh, the actual ingredient in it. So it's like the, uh, the most studied, form of creatine available. So we decided to go with that because like I said, when, when we picked all the ingredients in Zenos, we wanted everything to be at the purest form and, and the right dosages. This is one of the one way for us to kind of like tackle the, that issue. And when it comes to the formulation of the gummies, we went with a very solid manufacturer here in Miami, NV Labs. Where they follow strict, strict guidelines and protocols where they can kind of like eliminate the, the water retention inside these gummies where we can kind of like control the level of creatinine in them. So I'm very proud of the, of the formulation that came out, especially we don't use any sugars. All 4 gummies give you 20 calories. So you're really getting the full dose at a very minimal caloric intake and sugar intake.

Yeah, but they do have a little bit of sweetness. What are you using for the sweetening?

Allulose.

Okay. Yeah, allulose is actually, I consider that to be kind of like a negative glycemic index sweetener. It's a little bit more expensive as a raw ingredient, but basically it seems to, not making medical claims here, but it seems to stabilize insulin sensitivity and still provide sweetness, which is kind of paradoxical. But yeah, you see stevia, you see monk fruit, Allulose. The other thing I like about it is it doesn't produce a lot of the bloating and the gas that you get from the sugar alcohols, the O-Ls like the erythritol, the mannitol, et cetera.

No, I like allulose because it's the healthiest form of sweeteners that you can put right now in your body without getting any of the bad negative side effects from the other stuff. Yeah.

And, the Kreapir issue, I mean, I know this because full disclosure, I have a supplements company, We have a powder, a creatine powder, and there was a shortage for a long time from the Creapure powder from Germany. And, a ton of companies in the supplement space shifted to less high-quality versions of creatine. And so, that led to a lot of the reports in the news that people may have seen about there being a ton of tainted creatine products on the market. So, creatine gummies, you look at stability, you look at conversion to creatinine, you look at manufacturing processes, and you look at the the form of creatine being used, which is CreaPure. So yeah, you guys nailed it. I mean, the blueberry and the mango are both pretty good, but the blueberry is a— it holds a special place in my heart now.

I like the blueberry. I like the blueberry. I love them. Some people say no, they like the mango, but for me, blueberry is my personal favorite. Yeah.

And you look at supplement companies and it's pretty easy to find stuff that supports the brain, supports the muscle, supports longevity. I like your guys' formula in many of these avenues. But then there's some stuff that people don't talk about as much. Kidney health, I briefly brought that up when we were talking about creatine, but you have this product called UriZen.

UriZen, yes.

Yeah, kidney support and also urinary tract health fly under the radar. So unpack that one in a little bit more detail for me.

I'll go backwards a little bit. So working as a pharmacist, I always saw women that used to come and complain that they always catch UTIs. They're always, especially like if they're sexually active and every time they, they, they have sex, they have to take 50 milligrams of Macrobid or Macrodentin, which is an antibiotic, and it causes a lot of side effects. And I worked the bench for 17 years, Ben. I've seen it all. I've heard it all. I've seen it all. And I don't work.

Is that what you call working at the pharmacy? Working the bench?

Yeah, I worked the actual, like, yeah, I worked the bench for 17 hours, 17 years, and I worked 6 days a week. And in the middle of the city on the Upper East Side, and you have the wealthiest of women that would come in with the attitudes, forget it. Like, it was a different world. So all I always used to hear is that, that. So I wanted to create something that will actually be a replacement for taking the Macrobit or the MacroDentin, right? Because A lot of women suffer from that. And I feel that kidney health is one of the most important things that you have in your body, especially if you want to get rid of all the toxins that are in our body, right? We have the liver and we have the kidney. So we definitely need to make sure that both of these organs are properly working to flush out anything. So that's why the idea of UriZen came out, right? And usually people ignore kidney issues until it's too late. No one, like, no one really takes care of the kidneys unless it's really like too late. So I wanted to create something to kind of like help with that, right? So UroZen is more for urinary tract support and kidney support, right? And we built it— we built it in a way where it's not an irritant. It's not something that you need to take only for short-term, short period of time. This is something so natural that you can actually take every single day. And kind of like help support your urinary tract functions from eliminating the adhesion of bacteria to the urinary walls to flushing it out to making sure that the kidneys are getting all the nutrients that they need to function well. So for us, the idea of a healthy kidney kind of correlates together with a healthy body because if you can't flush out the toxins, you can never make your body work in an optimal way.

Okay. So basically, the kidneys, and we're talking about filtering 200 quarts of blood daily, that's waste, it's excess fluids. It's why a lot of people will avoid eating liver because they think it's the filter of the body. You should be more careful with the kidneys actually. The liver is just detoxifying and then removing—

I don't like liver. You like liver? I can't.

Look, man, come to my house sometime. I will make you incredible liver steak. I do an 8-hour sous vide, it's super tender, melts in your mouth, soak it in kefir for a day before. Oh my gosh, you're making me hungry. I can make good liver. Anyways though, so the kidneys are important. You've got alpha-lipoic acid and astragalus in there, which is that just to protect kidney tissue from oxidative damage or?

No, it's to get the microcirculation levels really up and then also nutrient uptake as well too. That's why you put those in there. So you get more blood supply to the kidneys. So you'll get that microcirculation like really like going and you always keep a really fresh supply of, of blood coming in and oxygen and nutrients to the kidneys.

Okay. What about the Acoranthus aspera? What's that one do?

I think that's the natural stone breaker kind of.

Yeah. So, so like the mineral deposits that would lead to kidney stones. Yeah, that was my understanding too. It kind of helps the body manage mineral deposition specifically on the kidneys. Yes.

So we prevent stones from forming in a natural way.

Now dandelion root— it's kind of funny I used to take that pre-show as a bodybuilder as a pretty potent diuretic to get a lot of fluids out of the body so you're multiple tart against your skin and so that you could make weight. Think some wrestlers will use dandelion roots sometimes also for that. Why do you have it in this product?

It's also kind of like help the kidneys work in a much better way to eliminate all the toxins out, right? So, the whole thing is kind of like super boost the kidneys to work at a very optimal pace.

Okay.

And then, cranberry. My wife, I actually gave her UroZen because she gets UTI. I mean, she probably loves me sharing this publicly, but maybe like once every 3 months, she'll She'll get a UTI and I don't like it because I don't like to see her suffering and I also like to have sex with her and she doesn't like that if she has a UTI. But, she used to take just cranberry extract. Do you guys have that in this one? I think it's called—

Yes, yes. It has a cranberry extract in it. It's one of those licensed ingredients as well too that we have in it.

Okay. And, that acts as an antibacterial agent in the urinary tract?

Yes. Yeah, it kind of like flushes out all the toxins out of it, like all the bacteria. It kills it because it gives it such an acidic level into the urine. So it kind of like flush the bacteria, kills the bacteria out.

Okay. And you're saying you don't have to wait until you have a UTI to use something like this. You could use it for something like daily kidney support.

Yes, exactly that. And also with the Vizen that we have, which works on the vaginal microbiome as well. So we kind of formulated those two together. So I was lucky enough to, to have met Dr. Labib Elmiye. He's a, he's a world-class gynecologist that deals a lot with women's health. And with his help, we were able to formulate these two together, Vizen and Uryzen. And then mine is kind of like to create this environment where, like, like you said, you like to have sex with your wife, and there's so many other women as well that suffer through that, right? So, we kind of give this where you take it every single day and you can live your life, you can have a healthy life, like a sex life without having any issues without have to resort to taking antibiotics.

From a vaginal health standpoint, I've seen the vaginal inserts like the probiotics that are for the vagina specifically, but then yours is an oral product?

It is an oral product, yes. Okay.

How does it work exactly?

It's built around targeted lactobacillus strains that matter for the vaginal flora balance. So that's basically the whole idea behind it, right? Plus it gives the gut and immune support and it has also a cranberry component to it. So we also put the cranberry in it as well too. So it protects you against, like it gives you urinary protection and it also gives you the, it gives you that, the support where you heard about the gut and health, like the gut and mind axis, right? But people forget.

Yeah.

So people forget that the gut vagina axis as well is very kind of connected as well. So this is our approach where we want to have an environment where natural and good bacteria grow there. So kind of like overcome the growth of bad bacteria in in the vaginal wall, in the vaginal area.

Okay, so you can actually influence the vaginal microbiome via supplementation with oral probiotic strategies?

Yes, you can. And that's the whole idea behind the— behind VZEN.

What of—

I don't know if you know the answer to this question, but do you know like what a woman would notice if she started using a product like that?

I don't want to say the lack of getting UTIs, maybe the lesser UTIs that they get. Like if, say, someone— a woman gets 5 UTIs, say for example, a month from sex, right? So when they start realizing that they haven't changed anything but taking these UTIs, like these Vizen and UroZen, and their UTI levels go to like maybe 2 a month now or 1 a month, that's one thing. They don't get the discharge anymore. They don't have the smell anymore. Some women discharge a lot. Some women have a funky smell down there. So this kind of helps with everything. So they'll get to realize, they start to sense their body. They don't have the itchiness. They don't have the kind the dryness there. So, that's what they utilize, that's what they start sensing. Okay.

So, it'll affect not just the potential for urinary tract infections by balancing the microbiome, but you're saying it could improve things like lubrication, fluid production, and then also just the overall smell, I guess, for lack of a better word. That's right. Okay. Cool. I gave that one to my wife when it arrived because I didn't feel a strong urge to take Visen myself.

You keep your vagina in tip-top shape.

I haven't followed up with her on the Visen yet. I need to go in our pantry and see if she started using it.

Ask her what she feels about it. Would love to know the feedback.

And then, I noticed you have this system you call the Inner Balance System and it is this UroZen and the V Zen.

And then, you have the Beauty Zen.

Yeah, the Beauty Zen. Again, kind of similar to oral supplementation affecting the vagina, and that might be a new concept for a lot of people. Oral supplementation for things like hair, skin, I don't know what else you're focusing on with Beauty Zen, but walk me through Beauty Zen and how it works.

Okay. So, Beauty Zen is basically the skin side of the Inner Balance. It's what ties together what's happening on the inside and what shows on the outside. Right. Because a lot of people, like, they might feel good inside, but when they look themselves in the mirror and they don't like what they see, kind of like messes everything up. Right. So we wanted to focus also on the outside of things to kind of like tie everything together. So what BeautyZen is not a generic hair and skin type of biotin bomb, right? BeautyZen is built to support skin elasticity, collagen integrity, and hair density from the inside out using bioavailable keratin, biotin, sabbatin, saw palmetto, and a stack of clinically backed actives that hit the inflammatory DHT hormone. So the idea is less breakage, stronger hair, fuller skin, more elastic skin. That's the whole idea behind BeautyZen.

Okay, got it. Now, keratin, some people might recognize from high school biology, that's kind of the structural protein that makes up hair and skin and nails. You said bioavailable keratin. I mean, as you can imagine, if you were to munch on a hair, that's not going to digest that well. Do you know how you actually make keratin bioavailable?

It's, it's one of those licensed ingredients that we bought. So there is this company, I think it's called Keratin Glow. So they developed the science behind it and they have the data to back it up. And we thought and we used it based on the data and what they showed us. We thought it was a great product to include in it.

Okay, got it. And then, you know, you look at If you were to go to a cosmetic or beauty clinic, believe it or not, I know a little bit about this.

Well, listen, you're a good-looking guy. You're a good-looking guy. You take care of yourself.

I've seen this stuff. They got the slimy masks that have hyaluronic acid in them that you apply transdermally, but you actually have this like you're taking it orally.

Yeah. So, we feel that if you take it orally and you're taking the right ingredients, it can actually work better than just applying to the skin. You're actually— you're supplying your body from the inside out with like blood supplies of the right ingredients that you need, not just from the skin waiting for it to get absorbed. It's from the inside out.

So, beauty from the inside out. So, that's BeautyZen. I mean, you have a whole host of other products. We didn't even scratch the surface on your suite, but you're also kind of doing some other interesting things, I guess, in the IRL, the in real life space. And then, I also know that you yourself, we were talking about this down in Vegas, you're very interested in this whole realm of self-quantification. How do we know what we're supposed to take and when? So, for you, where does self-quantification fit into the kind of the what supplements do I take question?

Okay. Well, me personally, I don't build my supplement stack on whatever is trending, right?, right? I always look at what my body needs. I look at my biomarkers, I look at my blood work, I look at the wearables that I have, and that's how I kind of build my own stack. And I, so, and what I usually take right now, I'm on my ingredients. Like I take Cell Zen, I take Brain Zen, I take Burn Zen to kind of help me regulate my blood sugar, which is one of my favorite things that I have in our like suite of supplements, right? Right. And everything that I do is built on, on like, I build it off of data that I get off of my body. I don't just guess. I took away that whole guessing game out of it. Right. So, and before I add anything to my stack, I ask myself, do I have a baseline that says I need this? If I do, I take it. If not, I just don't, I don't use it. Right. So it's, uh, and I, and I really encourage people also to do that. Like you should not be falling into trends. You should really understand and fully understand your body and look at what your body needs and then supplement it according.

Get into a little more detail for me. What kind of data do you like to look at?

First of all, I look at my cortisol levels. I look at my vitamin D levels. I look at my testosterone.

Okay.

I look at my cholesterol, my lipid panels. I look at my blood, my complete blood work, everything. I look at my, what's that? The one for, for heart thing. I forgot. I'm sorry. I think I'm, I'm getting too old.

Oh, do you mean, do you mean like an imaging test? Like a CT angiography?

Yeah, I did that. I did also calcium. I did a calcium score. Oh yeah. Also for my chest, I did a, every 6 months I try to go do a full MRI as well. I want to understand my body, especially now since I was diagnosed with melanoma. And there's a 20% chance of me getting it back. So, I'd like to be ahead of the curve. I like to do things that can make me fully understand my body, and that's what I do.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I talk with some people on the phone about their health and just personal optimization, and many of them ask, "Well, what blood tests should I get?" And, especially for clients that I'm working with, I'm like, "Well, blood kind of scratches the surface." I mean, for me to get an ideal picture, Maizen, let's say I'm helping somebody design a diet or optimize a supplement protocol, I'm looking at the basic blood panel, right? Some of the stuff that you mentioned like the complete blood count, the lipids, comprehensive metabolic profile, vitamin D, minerals, et cetera. And then, now you can get a micronutrient test that looks at fatty acids, amino acids, fungal markers, metals. Usually, that test is called like NutrEval or a metabolomics test. And then, you branch out beyond blood. I mean, what I like to see is a urinary hormones test, right, which shows upstream and downstream metabolites of hormones called a Dutch test, a gut panel. There's one that's called the GI Effects. It's a 3-day stool panel, so you can look at parasites and yeast and fungus and bacteria, salivary panel for genetics. And then, if somebody has food sensitivity issues, I'll usually recommend they get some kind of a food sensitivity, food allergy test. And, that's baseline and it's a lot, but what's interesting is you can order a lot of these tests now to your home.

At home, yeah. You can do all that at home, yeah.

Or, I mean, some of them you got to drive to LabCorp or Quest, but the genetic test, the stool test, the micronutrient test, the food allergy test, and the urine test for hormones. You can do all of that at home.

Yeah, I just recently did. So, I did my stool at home, I did my urine at home, I did my blood work at home. And, by the way, we at Zenos also kind of partner up with Generation Lab. So, we're going to have our own biomarker testing. We're going 470 biomarkers across 20 across 21 organs now, not more than 19. So now they have— they added 2 more organs as well to, I think, skin and some other things.

Is that blood? Blood panel?

Blood? Yeah. So it's a Tasso. It's the Tasso thing that you put at home and you just take it out, ship it in the mail, and within like 2 weeks you get full results.

That's actually an impressive amount of markers for a Tasso. So, people not familiar with that term, you literally just slap it on your arm and it bleeds into a tube, no finger pricking or squeezing your finger until you feel like it's going to fall off. Then, you just take it off and mail it in. It's pretty cool technology. The other thing that I know that you're working on, I haven't been to it, I heard good things about it, is an actual— I don't know if you call it a summit or a festival, but you've got this like boots on the ground experience.

Yeah. So, when I started Zenos, and like I said, I started from a personal thing that I wanted to get myself feel better and live a better lifestyle. And when I started getting all this knowledge, I wanted to share it with the world. And for me to do that, right, it's through education. Yeah, we're going to put up our education piece, but I wanted the message to reach across. So, we decided to do our first summit, and we landed in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia last October of '25. So everyone at first thought I was nuts. Why you want to do a summit? Why you want to get into that? I was like, listen, I want my message to come across where everyone can get access to this, right? I feel like it's God's given right to every human being to kind of get the information that they need to live a healthier lifestyle. So we decided wanted on Riyadh to be the nucleus because we felt in the US it's very saturated. And I wanted, since I'm Lebanese too, I wanted to be at that part of the world. And so we landed in Riyadh. It was a major success. And we were supposed to do our second one this coming October, but we all know the situation that is going on in the Middle East. So we kind of pushed it till next April. And this year we wanted to do even something way bigger. And that's where the idea of the Zenos Alive Festival came out. So basically what I'm doing is I'm taking a whole park in the middle of Riyadh and we're building our own fitness and wellness city. So it's going to be 7 districts from mine to wellness oasis to prayer oasis to a sports oasis to— we're building a complete world. And at night it turns into a Coachella type music festival. So that's the whole idea behind Zenos Alive, is that we want to showcase to the world that living this lifestyle could be cool, that you don't need to be completely like a hermit where you don't— that you need to go to sleep at 5:00 PM in the afternoon and miss out on life. That there's other ways where you can live a very good life and a happy life and live a healthier life. And this is what we wanted to do with the festival, is We can show you a much cooler, healthier way of living.

Sounds like a blast. I've actually never been to Riyadh. I don't think I've even seen pictures of it. But is that where people fly into? They fly into Riyadh?

Yeah, they fly into Riyadh. Yes. There's direct flights. There's direct flights from New York and I think in Atlanta, but most of them, most planes will have to probably like have a one, one stopover. Somewhere in Europe or in the Middle East.

Right. And stop through Dubai or Qatar or someplace like that. Well, it sounds super cool. How many days?

It's so it's 3 days for the festival and then we have 3 days for the summit. So the summit is what we did last year. It's exactly the same thing. So we have full academia during the day and at night we have real nice social dinner experiences. So that's 3 days. And then the festival is 3 days as well. So during the day. It's a fitness and wellness city that at night turns into a concert city.

And which happens first, the summit or the festival?

No, the festival first and then the summit.

Cool. So you can show up, you can party, listen to great music, dance, and then another 3 days of just learning and talks, more of like a conference type format after that.

Yes. And we're very happy and honored to have you there, Ben. Ben. So, looking forward to hosting you there and showing you around.

Yeah, I know. We talked about a little bit in Vegas then a few months ago. Yeah, found out I was going to be there, which is great. So, if you're listening to the podcast, I'll include links to the, I guess, the Zenos Health Summit and Zenos Alive, April 5th through 10th.

No, April 8th to the 14th. April 8th to the 14th.

BenGreenfieldLife.com/XenosPodcast. Zenos Podcast is where the show notes are. I'll link to everything we talked about including the delicious creatine gummies. And I mean, heck, mark your calendar, April 8th through 14th. I would love to see some of my podcast listeners there and hang out in a, what for me is a new part of the world. So, Mason, this is all fascinating. It's interesting to see things through the lens of a a pharmacist turned formulator. And I'm really looking to seeing more of what you're doing and also seeing you in Saudi.

Thank you very much, Ben, honestly, for this opportunity. And like you said, I didn't really get to meet you before, but I'm happy that we met in Vegas and I'm happy that we are developing a good friendship and I can't wait to have you in Saudi to hang out more and to do great things together. So thank you Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Have an incredible week, everybody. Thanks for listening.

Thank you.

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