Ben Greenfield On What Actually Works For Longevity, The Biohacks He's Stopped Doing & Why Living Longer Isn't The Point

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

Hello, everybody.

Michael Bosstick (0:00)

Welcome back to another episode of The Bossticks. Today, we have Ben Greenfield on the show. So what happens when you spend decades testing almost every variable of human performance on yourself, only to realize some of the things you thought mattered don't really matter at all? That's Ben Greenfield, and it's been about 700 episodes since we sat down with him last. With that, Ben, welcome back to the show.

So I was telling you before we started that you're difficult to do these with, not because we could talk to you about a million things for hours and hours, because there's so many rabbit holes. The last time you were on an episode 248 and 278 in February of 2020, August 2020 Those were some dicey times in 2020

Ben Greenfield (0:40)

Yeah, we've been through a lot.

Michael Bosstick (0:41)

Yeah, almost got ripped off the airwaves. But since then, I feel like you got a new updated book, upgraded, updated, what do you call it?

Ben Greenfield (0:53)

Yeah, small, the T.

Lauryn Bosstick (0:53)

You got a movie that just came out.

Michael Bosstick (0:55)

You got a million things.

We want to know all the cutting edge things, the things that we're not going to get thrown off the air for. But to start, what are the things that you're most excited about right now? And what do you think's changed most about you over the last six years?

Ben Greenfield (1:10)

What I'm most excited about, I would say, first thing that comes to mind, probably because this is a discussion I was just having with somebody who was dealing with lime. And then there's microplastics and mold and mycotoxins and all of these things that we're all aware of now that probably human beings have been dealing with for all of time. But we just have better detection methodologies. And many of us are a little bit more orthorexic with a lot of time on our hands and access to advanced diagnostic testing. So a whole bunch of people have things in their body that they want to get rid of. And this whole field of like plasmapheresis, right, pulling blood out, filtering it, putting typically something like albumin back in and then an IV or like full body blood filtration, which is super gnarly.

You can do this in the US, but like you go to Mexico and get all the blood sucked out of your body, typically via a catheter in your jugular.

Lauryn Bosstick (2:07)

Have you done it?

Ben Greenfield (2:08)

Yeah, it's my job to do all this stuff. Like I experiment with it not because I'm sick, but I write about it, I podcast about it.

And then there's another version over in Europe where you can literally get like your body heated, so the blood comes out faster. And then they add ozone into that mix. Long story short is in the whole field that I'm in a lot, health and biohacking, this idea of like oil change for the body is kind of like the big new thing. And there's, I mean, you can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting the clinic here in Austin. That now does some kind of like plasmapheresis, ozone dialysis. Like you sit down and you got a catheter.

Michael Bosstick (2:49)

And people are holding the bags up.

Ben Greenfield (2:51)

You know, they were holding up the bags. Look at all my stuff. Yeah, all the stuff they pulled out of my body.

Michael Bosstick (2:55)

I remember years and years ago, this was probably really early. And you were probably switched on to this. But I think people like thought it was strange at the time. They would talk about Keith Richards because he was, you know, from the Rolling Stones and he was, he lived so hard and partied so hard, but they said he would go to like Switzerland and do these kind of things. And it sounded like a fantasy. It didn't sound real, but maybe he was just switched on.

Ben Greenfield (3:13)

That's the trickle down. It starts with like pro soccer and rock stars and then just kind of eventually comes down to the rest of the general pop. What's changed in the past six years? I would say maybe not six exactly, but the reason I came down was for this film, which is about the realization that I had, that this whole mountain that a lot of people are climbing of health and biohacking and looks maxing and veins in the abs or whatever, is pretty unfulfilling in the long run and people are spending too much time on that versus the things that we know are truly fulfilling, like faith and family and relationships. I'm totally getting like Disney cartoon esoteric on you now, but this really is I think the biggest issue facing the health world right now, is people are like self-obsessed and also very carried away with self-preservation versus like generational preservation, legacy, family, kids, passing on your wisdom. Instead, it's just kind of like, well, how can I figure out a way to like live as long as possible with almost like this attitude that it's game over when you die, because there really isn't like a strong spiritual or family foundation that the identity is tied up with. And instead, people's identity is wrapped up in like how fit and how healthy or how looks maxed.