Our dear friend Dr. Halland, invited us to help bring together some of the top thinkers, innovators, and doers in the human optimization space and hosted a chat in NYC. Our CEO, Saad Alam joined the organizer Dr. Halland Chen of Impact Health Institute, Lauren Berlingeri of HigherDOSE, and Dr. Oz Garcia of Oz Wellness. Each expert shared their insights into the current state and future of the medicines, practices, and habits we can all engage with to achieve greater health and wellness.
In this Deep Dive, you will learn …
Event introduction with Dr. Halland Chen (0:18)
- This is the first of several in the Becoming Superhuman Series
- It is not just about biohacking or becoming superhuman it is really about being your better you
Saad the CEO of PRIME (keepmeprime.com) speaks (2:23)
- Personal story illustrates how and why he got into the human optimization world
- He turned 35 and felt his body and mind changing, went to a physician who told him it’s just normal aging, he wanted to combat it and live until 120
- After this experience, he has dedicated his life to achieving optimized health and longevity and helping others achieve the same
Saad’s four pieces of advice for those getting into biohacking (4:00)
- Own your journey
- There is not a silver bullet that works for everyone
- Consistency is essential
- The people that are into biohacking and health optimization are responsible for telling other people about these exciting technologies and solutions
Dr. Halland Chen Founder of Impact Health speaks (7:23)
- he moved to integrative medicine after spending most of his career in this reactive “sick care model”
- Definition of biohacking
- The importance of sleep and the importance of being aware of how much you are getting and what quality
- The different stages of sleep and what they mean
- Sleep hygiene and the ways to hack your sleep
- Additional advice on biohacking things relating to exercise, supplementation, food intake, meditation
- NAD, what it is, how it can be used for biohacking, how it can be put into the body, and how we can use its role in the body to make us healthier and live longer
- Cryotherapy, how it helps physiologically, and how it relates to Wim Hof
- Stem cell therapy, PRP, exosomes, how they are all used, and how they differ
- The increase in popularity of exosomes and how it can be combined with other therapies
Lauren Berlingeri co-CEO of HigherDOSE (26:40)
- HigherDOSE is an infrared sauna company with 11 locations in NYC
- They have recently launched sauna blankets, which allows infrared therapy to be part of your lifestyle
- Benefits of sauna therapy include downs all cause mortality, reduces dementia, Alzheimer’s, pain, arthritis, it detoxifies you
- Located in Equinoxes, hotels, and retail
- Lauren’s background and previous role as a TV host
- The “DOSE” in HigherDOSE stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins
- They have gotten strong endorsements from celebrities and other influencers who have experiences and enjoyed HigherDOSE
Dr. Oz Garcia is a pioneering nutritionist, wellness physician, and bestselling author (41:44)
- His background and how he got into healthy living and biohacking
- His stories of running with his friend in the park and going to the Everything Natural store
- He started noticing how the things he was eating and doing were impacting his body, how he felt, how he slept
- The benefits of neurofeedback equipment and what they can do for you
- He is almost 70 and believes he will live for another 70 years
- Aubrey de Gray, one of the top geneticists and longevity researchers in the world, predicts that the first person to live to be 1,000-years-old is already alive
- There are so many tools out there for people looking to become superhuman in body and mind
- Recommended The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler for anyone looking to develop and stick to morning routines
Full Transcript
Narrator: Let’s face it. You’re going to get older every year, but you don’t have to age the same way your parents did. Technology is giving us options. Prime connects you to the people, the science and the solutions that make getting older sexy. It’s simple. Live longer, get stronger and love more.
Dr. Halland C.: Welcome everyone and thanks very much for showing up. We have a fun presentation series for you today, and we have a few guest speakers as well. But thanks so much for coming everyone, really appreciate it, and this is probably one of the first of several in what we call Becoming Superhuman Series, and it’s really not just event about biohacking or peak performance. That’s why I wanted to introduce the whole concept of a guest panel, is actually it really comes down to a lot of the things that you don’t even think about, which we consider sort of being superhuman, or being your better you.
Dr. Halland C.: That was the whole nature of how we did this panel, and I’ll start off with some introductions as well. I’ll probably just read bios, so excuse that if I have to read off the sheet because everyone’s so amazing I want to make sure I don’t miss anything. I’ll be talking kind of like in generalities on some biohacking topics. There’s just so much to dive into.
Dr. Halland C.: So first one going to speak is Saad. Saad is the CEO of Prime. It’s one of the premiere online longevity destinations. After dropping out of med school and attending business school, Saad ran marketing research for a $4 billion pharmaceutical brand where he was responsible for $250 million of incremental revenue. Shortly after that he decided that corporate life was not for him, and he went on to running marketing and sales for Health Central, a Sequoia-backed company and one of the largest healthcare publishers, which went to have one of the most successful exits.
Dr. Halland C.: Saad then went on to raise several rounds of venture to fund and sell an educational technology company that helped kids improve their critical thinking skills through principles of neuroscience. During his time as CEO, Saad has been featured in Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune and CNN as a technologist. Since, he has gone on to found several companies on that, and right now he’s focusing on making Prime, making it one of the most impactful biohacking longevity and optimization and peak performance sites online. Thank you, Saad, for being here, and then we’ll have your presentation deck as well.
Saad: All right, wonderful.
Dr. Halland C.: You can come up if you want, I’ll just chill to the side.
Saad: I’m actually going to be … Can you guys hear me all right by the way? Is it loud enough? Okay. I’m going to be pretty quick here, and the God’s honest truth, I’m going to be quick because I think they are a lot more interesting than I am. Real quick with a show of hands. How many people do we have here that are actually what they would consider biohackers? Okay, a few. How many people do we have here that are physicians? Okay, all right. How many people are terrified because they don’t know what they’re going to learn here today? I mean, there are a few, right?
Saad: I’ll tell you what my story was really quickly, and the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you about what I do, and then I want to tell you about why it’s important probably for everyone here. When I turned 35, which was two years ago, I’m still pretty young, and I started feeling incredibly old and I went to my physician, I had reduced mental acuity and stamina and my muscle composition was change, and he said, “Saad, it’s just part of the normal aging process and you just have to deal with it.” And I said, “That’s bullshit.” I said, “I see 80-year-old people looking like they’re 45, and the God’s honest truth is I want to live until I’m 120, so this isn’t acceptable.” And he said, “Listen. You just have to deal with it.”
Saad: So I went on about a year-and-a-half long journey, I spoke to about 100 different physicians, I interviewed 4000 people, and what I learned is one very simple thing. Everyone wants to live for as long as possible, and the second thing is no one knows how to actually do it. So what we decided to do is we opened a very simple site, it’s called Prime, you guys can check it you. It is the largest peak performance optimization and longevity directory right now in the country. We just launched it about two months ago, we’re moving pretty fast.
Saad: Now, the reason … hit the next line … that I want you guys to pay attention is, for me particularly, these four things have been incredibly important as I have figured out how to actually hack my own health. The first one is own your journey. So here’s the most important thing. You guys are all here, and you’ve actually probably said to yourselves that we know there is a better solution out there than the one your doctor’s probably providing for you, and so you have to remember to take that piece of information, and you have to cultivate your own health journey throughout this entire thing.
Saad: The other thing too, is that you can’t think that there’s any silver bullet. If someone tells you, “You do this one thing, you do this one infusion, you do this one stem cell therapy, and you are going to be younger for the rest of your life,” that’s bullshit, right? The reality is that you have to do multiple things over the course of a long period of time, much like Lauren, Dr. Oz and Dr. Halland are going to tell you about in order to actually be the best version of yourself.
Saad: The third one I have to say, is you need to be consistent. How many times do you wake up in the morning, it’s 5:15, your alarm goes off, you probably say to yourself, “I’m going to journal, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to get myself to the gym,” and then you don’t do it. I mean, I feel like that’s me every other day probably, realistically. My girlfriend probably knows. She hears my snooze go off 25 times. The reality is that in order for you to be successful you just have to consistently do the same thing over and over and over again, and the truth of the matter is, a lot of the time you kind of get down on yourself because you don’t follow through with everything you’re supposed to do.
Saad: You go out, you listen to podcasts, you learn, but the truth is, at the end of the day, maybe you hit … or no. You bat like an .800, maybe a .500, which means one out of two times you’re doing everything you’re supposed to. The most important thing is to be consistent.
Saad: And then the fourth one is, if you came to these kind of groups five years ago, people probably though you were a quack. I’m dead serious, right? They thought you were absolutely crazy. And so let me ask you, how many people did you tell tonight that said, “Are you crazy?” Does anyone want to give me a show of hands? No. I’m the only one. Great, because we’re all together.
Saad: Here’s the reality, right, is you guys are all responsible for telling more people about this. I think that’s the most important thing. So you come in here, you learn a bunch of stuff, you tell people, “Hey look. I heard about infrared saunas, or I heard about these amazing healthcare clinics that Dr. Holland’s putting together, this amazing supplementation that Dr. Oz told us about, you have to make sure you tell people, and you have to make sure you’re an actual advocate for this entire movement. Because here’s the most exciting thing. This thing is starting to happen and it’s happening now.
Saad: My job is speaking to 100s of physicians, going across the entire country, and groups like this are happening everywhere across the country and this thing is very, very real, right? We’re right at the beginning of this technological renaissance. It allows us to live until we’re 110, 120, 130 and with that, what I’m actually going to do is I’m going to hand the mic over back to Holland, so you guys can start hearing some real interesting things that are going on.
Dr. Halland C.: Great, thank you Saad.
Saad: All right, thank you guys.
Dr. Halland C.: So my background is I’m an MD, I’m double certified in pain management and interventional pain and spine stuff, and pretty early on in my career I realized that a lot of what we were doing was just giving people drugs, promoting surgeries. And while there’s always a time and place for it, I realized we were in what we call this sick care model. Very reactive medicine. So I really transitioned very quickly into what I call more of a biohacking/regenerative medicine world, where I really just focus on helping people heal and actually fixing the problem at its source.
Dr. Halland C.: That really heavily influenced my way I practice medicine, and I like to call it well-care. We’re all in the model where a lot of may not be actually sick, but there’s things that we want to be better in. That kind of why the whole title of Becoming Superhuman really resonated with me, because I think a lot of us actually are not sick, we actually are just looking for ways to be better and healthier. The whole idea of sort of biohacking kind of came into play where it’s not just even about what you think that athletes will do or these super-sophisticated things that might not be you, it actually can come down to very core principle things.
Dr. Halland C.: And so that’s actually what I really do a lot now in what I call my practice. I really just focus on really the well-care model, and really dive deep into what actually moves for you. In terms of biohacking, there’s certain things that you may see that are pretty common, and there’s thing you may not think about. In my talk today I’m going to talk about sleep, NED, which is a supplement, cryotherapy and stem cells. I have a lot of slides, so I’ll probably just blast through some of them.
Dr. Halland C.: But I thought sleep would be a fun one to focus on, because a lot of people actually don’t really view sleep as a biohacking thing, but it’s actually probably one of the most important biohacks you can do. Really briefly, biohacking, what is that? It’s really the optimization of performance, health and wellbeing through the utilization of science, technology and a deep understanding of human physiology and nutrition. And I like to say really what I want to do is work with your physiology, and that’s really where you can get out of the whole drug paradigm and surgery paradigm, is that when you actually know how the body works, it’s actually a whole very complex, intricated system that actually can encourage itself through the proper use of certain techniques that are not drug-related, or something procedure-related.
Dr. Halland C.: Sleep. That’s probably something we don’t really think about. Traditionally it’s just how much sleep do you get, and if that’s did you get enough sleep? And really, it gets so much more complex than that because I used to think, “Okay, if I go to bed at 2:00 AM and wake up at 7:00 AM I can be super-productive and that’s normal, and I don’t need a lot of sleep. Maybe I can function like that, but there’s actually a lot of problems with not getting enough sleep, and so really for things from cognitive impairment, memory issues, heart issues, pancreatic stuff, I mean, sleep deprivation is actually considered a cancer risk factor by the WHO Organization, which the World Health Organization.
Dr. Halland C.: Other than the fact that how much sleep do you get, it’s really about the ratio of sleep, and I’ll cover that in one our graphics. Sleep is really actually benefit because it’s an anabolic state, so really you produce energy, protein synthesis, tissue regeneration, and really when you get enough sleep it’s improving your cognitive function, physical function, mood and the organ function. A lot of sleep what we break it down into is everyone knows about dreaming, which is REM, but really the bioback is how much deep sleep do you get?
Dr. Halland C.: Deep sleep is a component of sleep where your body basically is actually repairing, growth hormones being secreted, your body actually has the ability to recover and do things. And so when we talk about that, we talk about our circadian rhythm. These are things that your body is naturally programmed with. Some of us have a very standard circadian rhythm, some of ours are modified. Probably in another lecture I’ll cover what your sleep chronotype is. It’s the reason why some of us are morning birds, it’s the reason why some of us are night owls. And then, if you read any of Dr. Michael Bruce’s stuff, he’ll kind of break it down to even more. And so, on my particular schedule, I like to go to bed at 1:00 AM, but I like to wake up more at 7:30-8:00, so I structure my life around that. I don’t really see clients until 10:30-11:00. But that’s just because that works for me, so I’m not going to fight my sleep cycle when I know that this is how my body heals and repair.
Dr. Halland C.: Kind of back into the whole concept. The reason why we don’t think about biohacking sleep is that a lot of people just thing it’s a quantity thing. Sleep is actually really about quality, and the real big thing is actually deep sleep, and so there’s three phases of sleep, what we call light sleep and actually deep sleep. But this is where it’s the most critical one, and then obviously you have REM, and this is where a lot of consolidation of ideas and memories can happen, and a lot of us probably … I don’t know if a lot of us have them, but I wear an Oura ring, this actually tracks my sleep. And if you have a Fitbit watch that also can actually track it as well. They may very but, in general, getting an idea of what your sleep looks like can give you some indication of where you’re going.
Dr. Halland C.: It’s kind of like that old saying, “You really can’t manage what you don’t measure,” and the idea of measuring sleep just by how many hours you got is actually extremely inaccurate. Sleep Cycles. This is what we call ideal sleep cycle. You get a lot of deep sleep, that’s that N3, and really the first third of your night and you get more REM sleep near the later part of your night. That’s kind of when you wake up, you remember your dreams and stuff. If you really think about your lifestyle or your habits, I lived in Florida for a long time and I was a night owl. You know what? That’s probably why I didn’t get a lot of deep sleep. I was always going to bed to at 2:00-3:00 AM and I was losing my deep sleep phase cycle, so I really didn’t get enough sleep in terms of high quality sleep.
Dr. Halland C.: There’s a lot of very interesting sleep strategies that you can hack. I call this sometimes sleep hygiene. You’ll hear about that. It’s about how much light exposure to get, a lot of things like artificial lighting, fluorescent lighting can affect your circadian rhythm, which then can affect melatonin production, which then obviously then leads to your body not going to bed on time. The quality of your bed mattress, that’s why you see these things like Purple mattress and Casper really popping up and being super … really just dialing in into that whole market of why it’s super-important to get a good nights rest.
Dr. Halland C.: And then air quality. Obviously that seems obvious, but a lot of people don’t realize that there are mold exposure or certain things in the filters that don’t actually help promote good sleep, and temperature. There’s actually an ideal temperature to actually go to sleep because when your body, when it drops its temperature, it actually initiates sleep. So a lot of this is very evolutionary. You really can’t fight hundreds of years of how we used to do things over time.
Dr. Halland C.: Again, what I talked about, this is where you hear that whole concept of blue light spectrum and people wearing those funny orange looking glasses or your iPhone at night, actually having what we call sort of this color shift, the day shift, it’s actually to promote your body to actually go to sleep better by not messing up your internal circadian rhythm.
Dr. Halland C.: Then things like exercising daily and really, I think, one of the biggest things for me was actually going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time. That was a simple one that I didn’t really think about, but just even consistently going to bed and waking up on the same time, even on weekends, dramatically improved my deep sleep.
Dr. Halland C.: From a supplement standpoint, we’ve got Dr. Oz here who’s a master of this. He can dive deeper into it in either this lecture or another one. You know, there’s certain things that you get just from supplements, right? Melatonin production that can improve the sleep initiation, and that’s really what it’s mostly for, but really other things like magnesium citrate, it’s a mild sedative, it can help with your cortisol levels. Cortisols are related to stress. You have potassium citrate, which is synergistic with magnesium and this can reduce muscle spasms.
Dr. Halland C.: sleep support things. Obviously tryptophan, everyone knows about that as being a precursor. There’s other little things that you can do from a supplementation standpoint. And then this one says zinc increases testosterone levels, I kind of tie that into more something else. This is all studies that if you go into the literature, if you’re a male and you get less than six hours of sleep, you actually have testosterone production levels of someone who’s 10 years older than you, so that’s actually just a reason why you want to sleep enough on that alone.
Dr. Halland C.: There’s a lot of people who say, “Oh, I should maybe get testosterone or biodentical hormone supplementation.” You just need more sleep, and it’s something simple to do. Essentially that’s kind of why I think sleeps the very secret biohack that no one really actually pays attention to.
Dr. Halland C.: Food intake. Again, certain food habits. Don’t eat two hours before going to bed, consuming a slowly digestible food such as meat no later than four hours before bedtime. You could do MCT oil, about 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime, you can even do some certain collagen proteins or even a spoonful of organic honey. Likewise, body temperature. Avoid exercise two hours before sleep.
Dr. Halland C.: I was that guy working out at the gym before it closed at 11:00 PM, so that obviously didn’t really help me very much. Cold exposure. Some people, they are into this cold shower stuff and I love it, but I do that more in the morning. That actually primes your body, it doesn’t help your body got to sleep. And sleeping naked, obviously that’s a temperature thing but there’s probably other benefits for that as well.
Dr. Halland C.: So emptying your mind, meditative stuff, all that will really help you. Stop working one hour before bedtime. Again, it’s hard. We’re so used to even surfing our iPhone, even if it’s casual but your mind’s working, and if you don’t have what we call this sleep routine it’s no different than your workout routine. I treat my sleep routine like my workout routine, it’s pretty much the same thing. People’s to-do list, they want to do that before bedtime, do it tomorrow. Gratitude journal, mindfulness, positive affirmations, all these things have been scientifically shown to help improve your sleep.
Dr. Halland C.: Again, kind of the whole blue light exposure. That’s really pretty much related to just basically stop working before you’re trying to go to bed. And then power naps. There actually is sort of this ideal time, really it’s 20 minutes, avoid caffeine one to four hours before you actually take your nape, but there’s this interesting paradoxical effect. If you actually take caffeine just before you take your nap, it has an interesting effect on the adenosine receptor, so you actually could do caffeine immediately before your nap, that can help out a lot. And just even wearing a sleeping mask, again, it’s the whole idea of getting all this light exposure. We’re basically no different than some plants, right? Photosynthesis, your body can absorb certain light, so from your eye standpoint blackouts, like blackout curtains or just even a simple eye mask can help out quite a lot.
Dr. Halland C.: Your sleep goals, this is where I really get intrigued by, and there’s a lot of bullet points on here, but I would say the biggest thing is your deep sleep. The goal’s really 10 to 20%, so what does that translate to? It really means you really want to get about an hour of deep sleep overall. If you’re that person who wants to sleep only five hours I totally get it, I respect that. If you can get 50% of deep sleep then that’s fine. That’s the holy grail. How do I sleep for five hours but essentially … it’s almost like I slept for nine hours? That’s some stuff that I’m very interested in and I think that can actually be influenced by doing all these things, and also neurofeedback stuff.
Dr. Halland C.: NAD biohacking. This is probably one of my favorite things. NAD is just a special molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, and essentially what it is, it’s the basic building block for all your cells to produce energy. Your mitochondria use NAD and they convert this into this energy building block called ATP. Without this, every function in your body ceases to exist. And conventionally, some of the research says that every 20 years you lose about 50%, so if you’re about 60 you have about 12.5% left. That’s kind of why, if you start going in, that’s why we’re dying at around 100-110. Well, not always that old, but essentially if your NAD levels go down, among other reasons of chronic illness and disease. And so you can see that NAD really plays a role in everything.
Dr. Halland C.: Cell division, DNA repair, mitochondria, inflammation, that’s a huge one. The whole premise of aging is really inflammation in the body. It obviously effects you on a cognitive level, vision level, there’s hearing stuff, cancer, essentially anything that powers any cell in your body needs this, so if you’re deficient, that’s why these things manifest. And most of what people heard about NAD in the days is it was used for detox. When you think about that, if you can get somebody off of alcohol and opiates and all these very difficult drugs with just essentially using NAD infusions, what do you think you’ll do for someone who’s relatively healthy? And that’s what was happening 2013 when Harvard did the study, they actually realized that it was helping with mitochondrial dysfunction. It was actually also playing a strong role in longevity.
Dr. Halland C.: This was actually one of the main reasons why NAD has become such a big player in the field, and kind of why I even isolated out is really this sort of peak performance/biohacking/well-care treatment. And so there’s indirect forms of doing this. You can do NAD supplementation, we’ve probably all heard of Elysium. It’s a pretty popular NAD tablet. But likewise, intravenous … I love the intravenous ones. I personally do it when I fly a lot, usually about once a months. There’s typical doses like 500 to 750 milligrams, and the real thing is it takes a long time to infuse, about three to four hours, and that’s because it’s a pretty hard hitting molecule.
Dr. Halland C.: You really can’t do it super-fast. There is people who do do it, but it has some side effects, meaning like you may feel some stomach cramping or your heart might have palpitations, but that’s how I always say it’s part of it because it’s such a powerful molecule, but it’s actually very … if you adjust the rate, you won’t notice it as much.
Dr. Halland C.: Cryotherapy. That’s one of my favorite things to do likewise. Essentially you’ve seen the machines where you go inside there and there’s a whole bunch of benefits which can range from improved recovery, in pain relief, even in potential weight loss. I’m more of a fan of the Wim Hof Method, it’s actually very similar to cryo but on a deeper level it’s actually several things. I actually went to go to Poland and train with Wim, and a lot of it was just learning breath work, jumping into cold rivers, kind of to really train your mind. It’s really both a combination of mindset and breathing, so you’re really intentionally breathing in oxygen and out CO2. And then, with the mindset, the goal is actually a little bit of some voluntary control of your autonomic nervous system. And what does that mean? That means you can actually control things that normally just happen automatically, like secreting adrenaline or doing things like helping your cortisol level, which is the stress hormone.
Dr. Halland C.: But then on a physiological effect you can actually maintain warm body temperatures in cold exposure or reduce inflammation and increase your metabolic rate. For example, one of our last trainings we went on top of a mountain, it was like negative 19 degrees centigrade, we’re basically wearing nothing, just our swim trunks, climbing a mountain for two-and-a-half hours and none of us got frostbite. It kind of shows you the power of the mind when you combine that with the breath work and a lot of his techniques. It’s pretty powerful.
Dr. Halland C.: And so one of the things that he’s really well-known for, they did this study in 2001, they basically said, “We’re going to inject you with bacteria in your veins and let’s see what happens.” All right? So most likely you’ll get sick, but the participants, there was 112, the participants who did the Wim Hof Method only got a mild headache, but everyone else pretty much got sick like you expect, fever, chills, headaches. Really the conclusion was that the Wim Hof Method provided the ability to voluntarily control your immune system. Again, if you start thinking about what is aging? It’s a combination of inflammation, immune system, that means that we actually do have the power to actually control how our body heals and how it responds.
Dr. Halland C.: Stem cell therapy. I was actually going to make this pretty light. Most of my talks are on stem cells all the time, so I saved that for the end. I have a little bit of time, but essentially stem cell what is it? It’s basically a cell that can replicate and also differentiate and transform into another particular tissue. The whole idea really behind stem cell therapy is what can we do to use this to help heal our bodies? And it’s pretty powerful. I mean, most people say, “Hey, I’m getting stem cell therapy, it’s PRP,” that’s actually not stem cell therapy, so I just wanted to bring that to light, because really it’s actually promoting things in the area that are very stem cell-like in action, right?
Dr. Halland C.: Growth factors, promoting other cells to come into the areas, and yes, definitely helping stem cells come into the area as well. But it’s essentially not really, truly stem cell therapy, but it’s become so mainstream it’s actually really nice that people actually are considering this as an option rather than just saying, “Hey, maybe I should get knee surgery.”
Dr. Halland C.: There is a whole bunch of stem cells, you’ll hear things from people talking about bone marrow to fat, I talk more particularly on a special cell line called the adult pluripotent stem cells because I think it’s particularly interesting, and it also is, I think, a different form of science where people can actually do more novel things with it, and particularly these are secreted from your bone marrow. They’re more of an inactive form, and it’s considered autologous, so it’s actually from yourself to yourself, so that’s actually very safe. And essentially they become activated when your body’s in stress, so low oxygen, low body temperature, severe organ disease.
Dr. Halland C.: These are these rescue cells that can help actually make your body recover, and so there’s different cell types even in this whole category where we call small embryonic like stem cells, or MU cells, which is a multi-lineage differentiating [inaudible 00:23:55] inducing cell. Basically, these little guys help your body recover in times of distress and they can be harvested in a lab, you can actually then activate them, you can reinfuse them into people, so that’s kind of the interesting part about that.
Dr. Halland C.: More interesting now is the whole concept of exosomes. That’s kind of a very popular topic that’s come into play, and these are basically your body’s FedEx system. There’s these little cell packets, they come out, they secrete their little growth factors and messenger proteins, and they essentially help this whole genetic communication interface with your body cells. So this has been pretty popular, because if you start combining exosome therapy or treatments with stem cells or other things from what the rest of the guests will talk about, I really do think you’ll see a synergistic effect. It’s again the idea of attracting local stem cells to the area, providing growth factors for regeneration, reducing cell death, helping the immune response in a positive way, initiating blood flow, reducing local inflammation, pretty much all the things that we talk about when we’re talking about aging, and disease and healing.
Dr. Halland C.: We’ll next dive into the rest of the talk. We’ve got Lauren up net, and then her presentation will be on infrared dose. I’m going to give a little intro for Lauren. You have your microphone as well? All right, so Lauren is dedicated to inspiring others through fitness and naturally healthy lifestyle practices. After launching her career as an international model, Lauren went on to star in her show, Women versus Women, which was growing over-
Lauren: Women versus Workout.
Dr. Halland C.: Oh, it says …
Lauren: It’s not Women versus Women.
Dr. Halland C.: I just noticed that. It does say, for the record, Women versus Women on here. That would be interesting too.
Lauren: Workout.
Dr. Halland C.: Women versus Workout, I like that as well. Grossing over 15 million views and receiving a Webby Award nomination for best host. This experience led to to extreme sports hosting for brands such as UFC, EA Sports and IMG. Having cemented her name within the fitness industry, Lauren decided to expand her expertise earning a holistic nutritionist and health coach certification at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Her venture into the health and wellness start-up spectrum began in 2014 as one of the creative minds at aloha.com, doing product development, leading the brand ambassador program and brand partnerships.
Dr. Halland C.: Currently residing in New York City, Lauren is now co-founded, co-CEO of HigherDOSE, a spa focused on next level health and wellness therapies. HigherDOSE, which provides spa-focused service and information on getting high naturally currently hosts four spas in New York City, with both countrywide and international spa expansions. Perfect. Thank you, Lauren.
Lauren: That’s a lot, yeah.
Dr. Halland C.: She is very well accomplished.
Lauren: Thank you, Dr. Holland. He pretty much went over every single biohacking tip out there that is truly amazing that can change your life, so I am pretty much here to focus on my favorite biohacking tip which is the infrared sauna.
Dr. Halland C.: I’m going to give you clicker.
Lauren: I have to say, I did do his NAD IV with the exosomes. It was a three-hour NAD IV, and I’ve never felt so good in my whole entire life. It lasted for a good solid two months. It was the clearest, most I would say energetic I’ve ever been, and it was just truly such a pleasure to experience, and that was probably the most extreme biohacking thing I’ve ever done. That was with Dr. Holland in his office.
Lauren: But what I’m here to talk to you guys about is about my company, it’s an infrared sauna company. We actually have 11 locations here in New York City, and I’m sure some of you guys have been to our locations before. Has anyone been to HigherDOSE before? So we got some hands there. Let me see if I can work this.
Lauren: Okay. HigherDOSE is a one of a kind spa experience at the intersection of wellness, health and beauty. Combining the benefits of infrared and healing light therapy, HigherDOSE’s signature sauna spas and body wraps give you a natural high that makes you glow from the inside out. Infrared is a light therapy. It is very different than a traditional sauna. Traditional saunas heat the air, whereas infrared heats the body. Your eye also picks up on the invisible light spectrum and releases serotonin, just like you’re in the sun. It’s a much healthier, more effective way to sweat out your toxins, look and feel your best, and ultimately have glowing skin and be able to handle-
Dr. Halland C.: This.
Lauren: Oh, I didn’t know this.
Dr. Halland C.: Yeah, no. This is on.
Lauren: Sorry. Be able to handle the stressful New York City that we live in. I think one of the reasons why we’ve done so good here is just because it’s so hard to live in New York City, it’s so stressful, it’s go, go, go, we’re working all the time, it’s so hard to get that sleep and eat well, that the infrared sauna when you go in there, it takes away all your anxiety, all your stress, it detoxes you, you have glowing skin and you leave feeling calm and connected. It’s so beautiful and it all happens in one session, so I think that’s one of the major reasons why we’ve done so well so quickly.
Lauren: It also talks a little bit about our sauna blankets. We actually launched our sauna blankets too, which is our take home experience which we’re really excited about. Because, ultimately what we believe, is that everyone should be doing infrared all the time. It’s so powerful and the benefits are so good for you that this is not something that you should do as a one-off, like Holland said. This is something that’s a lifestyle. We really do believe that this is something that you guys should be doing one to three times a week.
Lauren: There was a 20 year long Finnish study that talks about the benefits of doing sauna therapy, and pretty much it downs all cause mortality, it gets rid of dementia, Alzheimer’s, pain, arthritis, detoxes you, it’s just so powerful for what it does, that this is something that we need to be incorporating into our lifestyles.
Lauren: Founded in 2016, HigherDOSE has amassed a cult-like following of celebrities, influencers, health enthusiasts, time strapped professionals all addicted to the benefits. HigherDOSE has popped up at retreats, festivals, summits, conferences, retail stores and joined permanent spa programming at luxury hotels and fitness clubs.
Lauren: We have two locations at luxury hotels. It’s a really cool experience. You get your own private room, you go in the sauna, you detox, you go and do a cold water shower afterwards, it’s such an amazing experience, and then we’re also located in eight Equinoxes, and we’re also located in health clubs so you’ll be able to get access to us all over the city.
Lauren: HigherDOSE sessions promise to leave you feeling euphoric, beautiful and rejuvenated. It happens in one session. I know, with a lot of the stuff, sometimes it takes six or eight sessions to see anything happen. One of the most amazing things about the infrared sauna is that you see all of these benefits immediately, so it’s really awesome. And there’s not many things that you can say about these kind of biohacking things that you get the immediate benefit. Sometimes it takes forever to see the benefits. This is something that’s immediate.
Lauren: This is just a little idea of the type of people that we have coming to us. Hannah Bronfman was one of our first clients. She posted once and we ended up booking out our location for the next literally three weeks. From there, we had all sorts of press that came in. They all started writing about it, and it was something that just happened so naturally. I can’t really even say that we’re that responsible, I think we’re a little responsible, but it’s something that’s so powerful and it works, that everyone just came to us and started writing about us.
Lauren: I’m not going to go over this too much. Pretty much just tells you about our locations, but go online to HigherDOSE, you guys can see all of our locations there. Every location is very different, so you want to check out what the spas offer. This is a little bit about myself and Katie Kaps, my co-founder. Dr. Holland told you a little bit about myself, I’m a nutritionist, health coach, fitness enthusiast. My show, I did all sorts of crazy things like train with Navy Seals, did NASCAR driving, motocross, I pretty much did things that most women don’t do and, as a result, I got addicted to this lifestyle, but also found it really difficult to balance my hormones. I found it really difficult to sleep at night. I was overdoing it.
Lauren: I had all these issues with my skin and I would wake up in the middle of the night and eat oatmeal, just to put myself back to sleep, because really it was too much, and I think there’s a big difference between women and men, too, and that’s why I’m here to sort of represent the female biohackers, because it’s very different. I tried to do a lot of these biohacking that a lot of people are obsessed with and it wasn’t always good for me.
Lauren: I feel like with this lifestyle you’ve really got to listen to your body, and when you listen to your body, you’re really know what words for you because there is so many things out there that are good for you, and Dr. Holland listed so many amazing ones, but you’ve really got to figure out what it is perfect for you guys. It’s really important because I struggled for so long with whole entire industry, so you’ve got to figure out what works for you. It’s the most important thing.
Lauren: These are just some of our partnerships that we’re really proud of. Partnered with a lot of cool hotels, a lot of cool fitness brands. We started our company three years ago and it just totally blew up. I couldn’t be more excited.
Lauren: This is the most important part, the benefits. The benefits are the reason why I started this company. When I sat down and learned a little bit about infrared and learned what it did for people, I couldn’t believe that everyone didn’t have access to this. I spent two hours in a boardroom when I was working for Aloha trying to figure out something that was anti-aging, weight loss, detoxifying, and we ended up creating a protein powder and a green juice powder, which was not that compelling. When I actually was introduced to the infrared sauna and I tried it and I felt the benefits, I slept like a baby that night, my skin was glowing, I just couldn’t believe that everyone didn’t have access to this. This was the why behind starting the company, and I feel like when you really do have a strong why, everything just falls into place.
Lauren: Very quickly, it detoxes you, burns calories, you release serotonin, it relaxes you, improves skin, circulation, it’s really good for pain and inflammation. It’s just super-powerful and it’s something that speaks for itself.
Lauren: What we’ve tried to do is a little bit different. We actually don’t own the technology around infrared, but we did do a custom sauna and it’s really beautiful. But what we tried to do is create a cool experience for people, because this is really something that is a lifestyle and you really want people to want to do this all the time, because a lot of these health things, they end up being more of a chore than they are enjoyable. Like, has anyone done cryotherapy before? It’s really hard. It’s like going to the dentist. It’s awful. I actually don’t like doing it at all. I have to talk myself into it, and then when I finally do it, I get that high and I’m like, “Oh my God, that was great,” but really I didn’t want to do it at all.
Lauren: I feel like that’s where we really differ is infrared is something that you want to do. It’s so gentle and relaxing and calming, that it makes you get addicted to it, which is so beautiful. What we’ve done is just create a cool experience, thinking of other ways to release dose. So HigherDOSE, DOSE stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, and those are your four main happy chemicals. So dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, we were trying to think about how do you release DOSE in one’s experience?
Lauren: So, dopamine, you release dopamine when you listen to cool music, Dr. Holland knows a lot about that at Burning Man, so we play cool, sexy music when you’re walking in, we diffuse essential oils, we have the right light, like he was talking about with the blue light being an issue, all of our rooms are red light. It really makes you feel relaxed and, as soon as you walk in, it’s an experience. And I feel like nowadays, this is really, really important is that you want to be creating experiences for people.
Lauren: One of our biggest things was getting people to Instagram about it. How do you get people to Instagram about it? You provide a cool, sexy experience for everyone. Very important. This just kind of goes into the details of what we do at HigherDOSE that makes us separated from what we believe every other company.
Lauren: The take home experience, I touched on this a little bit. It’s so powerful. It actually has an amethyst and tourmaline layer, which promotes and even deeper infrared. Oh, sorry. Which promotes and even deeper infrared therapy. We also have a charcoal layer and a layer. It emits negative ions, which is very relaxing and balancing to infrared. The charcoal layer is detoxifying. So this product has been really thought out. This has been something that we’ve been creating for over two years, and we’ve actually have, really now, a hard time keeping them in stock, so it’s a really amazing thing. If anyone’s interested in learning more about our infrared sauna blankets, come talk to me or learn more on the website.
Lauren: I only a few more minutes left so … We have amazing influencers. This is what this whole page is about. It’s crazy the amount of celebrities that came to us, and I think the reason why this is so important is because these guys are, I guess, huge biohackers. It’s their job to look a certain way and feel a certain way, and they really do embody that. These people would come to us and they would come to us like two or three times a week, and then they would fall in love with it so much that they would want our sauna blankets and our saunas. I really do feel like when you guys are doing something really powerful in the health and wellness space, the people just come to you. The press just comes to you. The cult-like following just comes to you.
Lauren: That’s something really beautiful that we’ve been able to experience at HigherDOSE is just the amazing community that it’s drawn together and really made this what it is, and we hope that one day we’re going to be all around the world. Thank you.
Dr. Halland C.: Yeah, no. I love the whole idea of infrared in combo therapy, and really I was just going to comment on that. It’s like stick to a routine. I mean, for me it’s a combination of how do you combine things, and I think that’s really what we talk about with biohacking. For example, part of my routine is when I fly a lot I like to do things like infrared and cold plunge, and I’ll do that to kind of reset my body, because I mean, I kind of just … I was in LA recently, and I always say my New York life follows my LA life, as Mark knows, and so I took a red-eye, I landed, I hopped into my next meeting, that was the rest of my next 30 hours. But what I like to do just to rest my body, I’ll do things in infrared, and then maybe I’ll cold plunge later on just to get that circadian rhythm back into play, and do these things where you just take care of yourself. A lot of us kind of just forget that’s part of your workout routine. It’s no different.
Dr. Halland C.: In addition to kind of the whole biohacking aspects of things and then the things that I talked about, the next big thing is I’ve loved to introduce Dr. Oz Garcia. You know, he … Woo! Love this guy. He is one of the … I’ll read his bio, it’s so long. I’m just going to somehow abridge it, there’s just so much to say. But Oz is going to give us a really nice over of stuff just in addition to … Look, nutrition and supplementation, these are the things that they’re not obvious, you know what I mean? And a lot of us eat food and there’s so many people I talk to that have gut inflammation or they feel bloated, and that’s because of our food. Your food can be your medicine or it can be your poison, and so a lot of us are … Well, not a lot, but let’s just say that there’s a good amount of people where it’s causing a lot of massive gut inflammation among other things.
Dr. Halland C.: Dr. Oz Garcia, he is recognized as an industry authority on age reversal and healthy aging. Also, as a nutritionist to the stars, Oz is the go-to nutritionist for A-list-
Dr. Oz Garcia: I hate that term
Dr. Halland C.: Okay.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I didn’t put that in there.
Dr. Halland C.: Oz is amazing, that’s the summary part. He really just treats a lot of well-known people. And essentially he’s really a bestselling author, he has four book, The Food Cure For Kids, The Balance, Look and Feel Fabulous Forever, Redesigning 50, I mean I really could just go on and on. Really what it is, he’s such a subject matter expert in all things nutrition and supplementation. I think you’ll just enjoy what he has to say about it. And really, it’s all personalized, I mean, and that’s what this comes down to, but there is also a thing that we talked about, how do you make personalization available to everyone? I think we’re coming to that point where this is happening. So part of the lecture title was Becoming Superhuman, but it was also how do we have mass personalization?
Dr. Halland C.: Kind of at the end of the lecture series I’m doing a survey. I want to get your feedback so we can understand how we can personalize the rest of our conversations with you, but it also kind of gives some insights on what are people seeing in the spectrum of what we call well-care. So Oz, if you can come join us up here, the stage is yours, but-
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’ll take it from here.
Dr. Halland C.: Okay, you want to take it from there? All right, great.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’ll keep it more conversational.
Dr. Halland C.: Sure.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Halland told me at the last minute that we needed slides, so what I’m going to do is keep it conversational, like I said. I think he prepared this one slide for me, and I’ll cover the subject matter as best as I can, given what the topic is on the table this evening, which is biohacking. Now, I got interested in biohacking, it was called that back in the 1970s. I started out as a hippy kid. I had hair down to my hips pretty much, back in 1967-68, and around 1972-1973 I started to wonder if I stayed in that lifestyle where would I wind up?
Dr. Oz Garcia: I had the good fortune of living not too far from Union Square, where they had the first farmer’s market in New York. It was also near one of three health food stores in New York. This one was called Everything Natural. Whole Foods was about 30-40 years still before it came into existence. I started going to the Union Square Farmer’s Market, and I saw somebody selling, a local farmer from New York, selling a juicer, right? And it was a wheatgrass juicer and he was growing wheatgrass. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s interesting. I wonder what that could possibly do for me,” as I was lighting up a Marlboro.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I bought the wheatgrass juicer, I bought some wheatgrass growing plates, and little by little I started to go to this particular health food store. I bought a book by a man named Paul … I think it was Paul [Rodsell 00:43:38]. I’ll recall properly in a moment, it was called The Miracle of Fasting, Paul Bragg. Paul at that time was about 95-years-old. Now, we’re talking about 1973-1974, and I read Paul’s book and I decided back then that what I was going to do is juice as much as possible, become a vegetarian, and this was without knowing anything. There was no Internet, there was no fucking Google, there were no cell phones, there was nothing. There was just this little crappy health food store.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I went back and I kept buying more stuff there and going to the farmer’s market and dragging back, every couple of weeks, 25 pound bags of carrots. And in my studio apartment I have shelves, I had windows that actually faced south. I built shelves where I started to put different plates with different sprouts, so I had alfalfa sprouts, wheatgrass, mung, radish and so on. Little by little everything started to change for me. My conscience began to alter what was in my mind, my sleep, and I began to wonder if I should probably gie up tobacco and weed. Things come around.
Dr. Oz Garcia: If you notice now, everybody’s smoking weed all over again, but what did I know back then? I figured I’m going to start dropping off some of these things and let me try out exercise. Let me see what that’s about, right? So a friend of mind got into running and asked if I would join him. Would I join him and run the reservoir in Central Park? And I said, “Sure, why not?” And back then it was a big muddy hole, and I had a pair of Keds, and I think I was maybe all of 24 years of age, and I met him there and we both ran it and I was completely wiped out. It was like, “What the fuck? How did I do this?”
Dr. Oz Garcia: And the both of us congratulated each other. That’s how I can remember, I still hadn’t quite smoking then, we both lit up and congratulated each other, put it out, and went, “We’ve got to do this again,” and kept going back and doing my runs, and bit by bit, back then Central Park was open to traffic so you would run with the cars. I remember to this day the first time that I ran the park completely, and I was a vegetarian, I was growing my own sprouts and getting massage, I found out about massage, and about saunas.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Back then there weren’t the kind of very unique destinations that you could go to and do infrared. You’d go to the Russian baths on 10th Street, and now you go to the one on Fulton, which I think is a little bit more decent, a little bit more democratic, and certainly do her infrared, but that’s what was available back then. I kind of put together this whole protocol of going to the Russian baths, eating my sprouts, doing my running, eating vegetarian and giving up things that, bit by bit, I realized were very damaging to my health, sugar, coffee, the amount of meat that I was eating … thank you. And the impact that that had on my very young conscience has brought me forward to where we are today.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’m almost 70. I’ve been doing this for about 40 years. I still run. Excuse me one sec. And now I’ve gotten really interested in Bikram yoga. The only reason I can run is in large measure because of Halland. I’ve gotten fascinated with the work that he does, regenerative medicine especially, stem cells and so on. The problem with the best thinkers in the field, to spend an afternoon with Halland or go work with him is an absolute mindfuck. The guy’s brain isn’t like anything you’ll ever encounter. I can’t say enough about him.
Dr. Oz Garcia: In this room alone you have different people that are doing remarkable stuff to keep your body relevant, to keep your brain relevant. I don’t know if John Hoekman’s here from QuickCryo. The gentlemen from OSSIO Strong here. That’s a really quite remarkable technology that you’re welcome to talk to them about. I think Rick is here from Recover. Yeah. And these guys have probably … I could talk about their stuff for hours.
Dr. Oz Garcia: The neurofeedback equipment that they promote, which is one of the ways that you can actually train you body, your brain to go into deep beta and gamma. Correct me if I’m wrong, Rick. But get you out of high states of beta where you’re just driving yourself absolutely crazy, that was one of the more remarkable things that they brought to New York City. He also has this thing that looks like that front of a MiG jet that you get into and will shoot you up 20,000 feet while you’re in there in a matter of seconds, and shoot you back down. One of the best ways that you can control inflammation in your body. So I absolutely love their work.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I don’t want to promote myself too much. I just make my stories somewhat interesting. I’m looking at how do I do this for the next 70 years? So I think it’s all really doable. I can make a prediction about where my body will be at in about a year, where it will likely be in about five. If you listen to people like Aubrey de Gray, who’s one of the great geneticists alive now, great thinker in life extension, he’s talking about the fact that the person who will lie to be a thousand years old has already been born somewhere on the planet, and that’s remarkable when you think about the fact that 100 years ago the lifespan for a woman was maybe 38 to 42 years of age, not much more for men, maybe 49. In a 100 year span we’ve gotten to a point where we’re looking at somebody who may live a thousand years.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I don’t really want to live that long. I just want to live well, so long as I’m around, and avoid any accidents along the way. Again, I want to thank Halland, I want to thank all of you for being here and giving us your time. I think that there are many tools that you can take advantage of from the panelists that are here tonight, the people that I’ve spoken about, everything from cryotherapy to extreme heat, to intimate and fasting, to neurofeedback. There is so many things that you can bring on board to regulate what goes on with your body so that your brain can function at its absolute best, that you can maintain your percentage of body fat very low the older that you get, and that you’re not falling apart because you’re using your brain.
Dr. Oz Garcia: One of the things that he said earlier, which I think is really critical, is that you have practices, that you have routines that you follow every morning and you stick to them. I learned a lot of my morning routines from a gentleman named Steven Kotler, a remarkable book that he wrote, The Rise of Superman. I would recommend that to everybody. And from him I learned how to actually put my morning routines together. So when I wake up at 5:00, I wake up at 5:00. There is journaling, there’s reading, there’s studying, there’s making my morning smoothie, there’s playing volleyball with my dog, there’s a whole bunch of shit that you do in the mornings that sets you up for a remarkable day, and everything else falls on top of that, how you eat, the supplementation that you take, whether you do cryo, or sauna, et cetera.
Dr. Oz Garcia: With that said, I want to thank you all very much.