Mark Sisson: Forget VO2 Max — This Is What Peak Health Actually Looks Like at 72

What is it about longevity that we really are seeking to achieve? And it's mobility, right? We want to certainly live longer, but we want to be able to do things as we live longer. We want to be able to walk around the world and travel and play with our grandchildren and sorts of types of movements. My focus became one of more of a decathlete perspective, which is rather than focus on just that one metric, the V2 max, all these things start to have real impact. — Mark Sison is my podcast guest. He's been shaking up the world of health and fitness for like 20 years plus. Uh he ignited the ancestral health movement in 2006 with his wildly successful blog, which I think is back up based on what you're about to learn in today's show. He's got a book called The Primal Blueprint. He founded Primal Kitchen Food Company, which you may know of as the uh the crack cocaineesque ketchup and mayonnaise that we all know and love that's super healthy and guiltfree. And he has a company called PUVA. One of my favorite shoes to wear, uh, toe shoes. All the show notes for everything we talk about are at bengreenfieldlife. com2026. Mark's last name is Sison. ben greenfieldlife. comsis2026. Let's go talk to Mark. Mark, it's been a while. — Yeah, Ben, it certainly has. Good to catch up. — As a matter of fact, I think uh by a while, I mean the last time I saw you kick my ass with a fat tire ride on the Miami Beach. — You got to tell me that was fun still, right? — Yeah, it was humbling. Uh which I guess is fun. It was character building. — Yeah, exactly. — How's Miami treating you? Oh, amazing. Uh, no, I love it here. It's like, you know, it's my it's my happy place. It's like a playground and a kid summer camp and a resort and a spa. What can I tell you? I like warm water. The water's, you know, 20° warmer than what I'm used to in California, so it's all good. — Probably a lot warmer than the pond in my Idaho backyard. I don't know how how long ago you jumped back into this, but it seems to me like you've been writing a little bit more like just from the newsletter I've seen for example online on beehive. — Yeah. So, uh you know, we had a big issue with Mark's Daily Apple about 3 years ago. um can't talk too much about it, but because Craft company Craft bought Primal Kitchen and with it they got Mark's Daily Apple and there was a sort of a hacking incident that happened that they were unwilling or reluctant to put the site back up for a long time. So, it's only recently come back up in terms of Mark's Daily Apple. Well, while that was down, I started thinking about all of the things that I want to say, all the thoughts put out into the universe here and I didn't have a platform. So, I started site on Beehive. It's called Marxist and Untethered. — I'm subscribed to it, but I didn't know Mark's Daily Apple was up. — Yeah, it's just in the last I think in the last couple weeks it's up again. Yeah. — Well, is it going to be kind of like the database and repository of all the articles that you did over the years, but then your new stuff is now going to Beehive or are you going to start publishing on Mark's Daily Apple again? No, — there's both. So there's Mark's Daily Apple, which is more of the conservative, you know, dietary and fitness and health advice. And then uh Untethered is more of the spicy my viewpoint on what's going on in the world and AI and you know, economics and all that stuff. Yeah. — Oh yeah, we can get into that. Um, before we uh open the AI can of worms, I think maybe like a week and a half or so, you sent out your old man Olympics goals, which I thought would be kind of cool to get into because you're pretty much like you kind of fit in there and I don't know if you appreciate this or not with the or in the category of like a Lar Hamilton for me, just like a dude who's crushing it physically. physically and mentally with age. — Uh, and so I always pay attention when I see somebody like you publish what your physical goals are. I'd love to dive into what the old man Olympics goals metrics are, though. — Yeah. So first of all um this you know this came about as a result of uh my analysis of what's going on with the overhyping of the concept of V2 max and you know guys like Peter Patia and Huberman and Ronda Patrick and you know all of the pundits

that we've known and love for a long time seem to peg V2 max as the gold standard for longevity and for risk reduction for all cause mortality and things like that. And I started really, you know, examining um V2 max as a concept. I've I've, you know, obviously as an endurance athlete, it's been the major metric that I focused on throughout my career, but one of the things I want to point out early on is that I was a fairly good runner and a fairly decent triathlete in the early days. And my V2 max was not that impressive. It was like 67 was the highest I ever recorded. And if you look at what's going on in the world of athletics now and you know marathon runners, the guys who are the best in the world are they have to have at least 80 and usually in the 90s and Kristen Blumenfeld just record 101 which is the highest recorded V2 max ever. — Oh my gosh. Wait, who who got 101? — Kristen Blumenfeld, the guy who was the, you know, Iron Man winning all the Iron Man events now. Just ran 721 last uh in a in an Iron Man last week. Uh, do you know what he weighs? Because obviously part of it is — he's a big boy. I don't know what he weighs, but you look at him and he does. He doesn't even look skinny. He looks, you know, he's he looks like a muscled a well muscled guy. — Okay. So, he recorded a 101. — I know. So anyway, in con so in the context of my, you know, rather meek and meager 67, I started, you know, in retrospect looking at what is it about V2 max that is so because, you know, Peter would say that uh people with in the two top 2% of their V2 max for their age, you know, have a 400% uh lower risk of all cause mortality than those in the lowest quartortile, for instance, which, you know, anybody who who's in the top 2% of V2 max is now almost entirely focused on V2 max. You know, you really have to be a an endurance beast to be able to get that high and to record those sorts of numbers. And I think in the process, you have to forego a lot of other life skills, you know, which is what happened to me as a marathoner. I didn't ski, I didn't play tennis, I couldn't play basketball or football because I was a runner. I was al always sort of focused on developing aerobic capacity and anorobic threshold and all of the metrics that we use in the endurance world to my detriment and eventually you know you become this skinny whizzed old you know bag of bones and skin and but you can run a marathon and so you know God bless you but I looked at you know what it is what is it about um longevity that we really are seeking to achieve and It's mobility, right? We want to be able to do things. We want to certainly live longer, but we want to be able to do things as we live longer. We want to be able to walk around the world and travel and and play games and play with our grandchildren and, you know, have um and dance and do all the sorts of types of movement and save ourselves in the event of a fire or not trip and fall and break a hip. So my focus became one of more of a decathlete perspective which is rather than focus on just that one metric the V2 max uh which you know they they're using also as a proxy like grip strength is another one they use as a proxy for — Yeah. Well the three you hear most often are V2 max grip strength and walking speed. — Yeah. Walking speed. Right. Yeah. So in putting together this list of things I just thought well like what you know what would be a good um measure of all round fitness and so I have things like you know a 90 second hang dead hang I mean big deal but that's a real measure of grip strength you know how fast can you run the quarter mile um how long can you hold a

plank how many dips can you do in my case I want to do you know 20 dips one and a half times my body weight 10 reps on the hex bar. — Yeah. And by the way, I thought the dips one was interesting. You know, you tend to see push-ups and pull-ups kind of as the body weight exercise metrics. Did you just choose dips for a different reason? — I mean, again, that could be a proxy for pull-ups and push-ups, too. It's like you could do all of those and throw those all into the list, but in this case, I just was putting together it, Ben, it was literally the list for that day because the list changes every once in a while, right? Well, it's a good list except for those of us who can't train for a hard stand up paddle for an hour through the ocean or ride a fat tire bike in the sand for an hour straight, but I could probably come up with the Idaho metric of that. — I'm sure you could. And I invite you to do so. And by the way, I put together a list that I felt I would be the only one my age in the world who could do it, right? So I would win this particular decathlon. you know, if my son got in, he'd say, "Okay, you have to play nine holes of golf and score, you know, and at least be less than four over par or something like that. " — Right. — Um, it's just a what it is, again, it's sort of a fun, — not just a game, but it's a fun way, analysis, is a thought experiment on how do I organize my workouts so that I'm not too confined to just lifting weights. You know, if you again, you look at some of the people in this space and it's just about lifting weights. It's just about heavy forget the endurance stuff. Forget all of the sprinting. Just lift weights and you'll be good. So, in my case, I want to sprint like I'd like to be I want to, you know, run the 100 in under 15 seconds. Run the um run a quarter in 90 seconds. Doesn't sound like much, but you know, at again at my age, I'm 72. All these things start to have real impact. You know, a three-minute plank is is, you know, and then for example, one of them is stand on one foot with your arms crossed and your eyes closed, balanced for one minute. Try it sometime. It's not easy. So again, as a now we're combining strength, endurance, mobility, speed, um, agility. At one point when I had my slack line, I would have said, you know, be able to, you know, traverse 100t on a slack line, too. But all of this in service to a well-rounded fitness, not just one that's focused, laser focused on achieving a high V2 max. By the way, one thing that people don't understand about V2 max, it's genetically predetermined. There's a maximum that you can get and you can never train yourself above that genetic maximum. So, you can bust your ass for the rest of your life trying to get, you know, above if you're a 45 year old guy and your max is 55, you'll never get above 55 no matter how much training you do. I think those who would argue for the benefit of V2 max would say, well, it's a general proxy for aerobic fitness, which could translate to lowered risk of cardiovascular disease. And then what I think you might be getting at is that the emphasis on it is so great that the training really shifts towards, you know, whatever like, you know, weekly, you know, Norwegian 4x4 protocol and multiple highintensity interval training sessions per week and getting your long zone 2 in. and you kind of skew the training towards a pretty big focus on aerobics and not some of the other metrics that you've mentioned, you know, like mobility, grip strength, etc. — Yeah. And so you sacrifice muscle strength. I mean, best example I can give you is I was a, you know, I ran I was a 218 multiple sub220 marathoner. I weighed, you know, 40 pounds. I weigh 172 now. So I'm 32 pounds heavier now. same body fat. I lifted weights. I was I was an aggressive weightlifter in those days. And I could put 225 up. I could do a lot. But I couldn't keep any muscle on because the running was so catabolic. The pursuit of this V2 max high-end optimization was so catabolic that it cut into the rest of my life, functional ability to navigate life and you know climb a ladder and get out of a window in a burning building and you know save your dog and whatever the you know the real life skills that people talk about. That was really the revelation. Now, one thing I will note is that most of the things that I do in terms of training, whether it's sprinting one day a week, uh, heavy lifting in including a heavy leg day, a bike ride, those all build V2 max. So, the fact that I'm not focusing on V2 max doesn't mean I'm not optimizing. — Yeah, I was going to say like the fat tire bike, the stand up paddle, you're definitely building it. And I think, you know, I mentioned the 4x4 Norwegian protocol. That's one. Gosh, I think like Dr. Rhonda Patrick has talked about that quite a bit. You know, four minutes maximum sustainable intensity, four minute recovery four times through. Last I checked, that can maintain V2 max at like once every two weeks, you know, and I think that's realistic for somebody to be able to throw in. But yeah, I think you know training every single day to increase V2 max something is going to be sacrificed and arguably some of that is going to be related to mobility and functional activities of daily living and strength which are arguably more important than being at the pointy edge of votics. — Exactly. By the way, the the Norwegian 4x4, I love this because 50 years ago we called that mile repeats. — Yeah, — it literally was. We you know we'd run a mile 442 It's one to1 work to rest ratio. Yeah, — it's been around for a long time. So, it just all these things get relabeled as some fancy new protocol because somebody retested it in a lab and found out, oh yeah, it does it really does work. — Hot topic, pun intended, in the biohacking and health optimization world is also thermal stress. You know, the focus on uh sauna and then also cold plunging. Obviously, uh, whatever being submerged in an ice bath for 3 minutes wasn't on your old man Olympics goals, but I'm curious your thoughts on just thermal stress in general and where that would fit in. — You know, I've been cold plunging for 15 years, and Ben, I'm over it. Uh, that's the bottom line of cold plunging is that it is distasteful, which is why people do it. It's a hard thing to do, and that's the main reason people do it. I don't believe I don't buy into the brown fat activation for most people. I don't

buy into the, you know, the anti-inflammatory benefits of it. I mean, maybe to a certain extent if you're an NBA player and you've got a game tomorrow night and you sit in a cold plunge, as they have again for 50 years after tonight's game, so you can do it again tomorrow night. But so much has been written also in terms of co-plunching about the negative benefits of coal plunging. The fact that it's that it if it does have any ant anyin inflammatory benefits don't do it after a hard workout or you'll negate you know some of the biochemical signals that workout produced. — If you do I mean volume is important. I think a lot of that is looking at like 10 plus minute cold soaks long enough and cold enough to reduce muscle temperature considerably. I think taking a quick cold shower after a workout or doing like a 30 second cold plunge so you're not hitting out at work and sweating later on is reasonable, but like the long cold soaks. Yeah, I agree. You see uh inhibition of mitochondrial biogenesis and satellite cell proliferation, all those other things that happen. — At the end of the day, cold plunging has become a dick measuring contest with people seeing how long they can stay in and then brag about it. And that's when I got over it. That's when I'm like, you know, it is unpleasant. By the way, I started cold plunging not for any of those benefits. You know, as a as an ex triathlete, I hated swimming. I hated getting in an 81 degree pool and an 81 degree public pool until I got warmed up. I just hated that first experience. And so, 20 years later, I'm out in my backyard in Malibu in my unheated pool. I'm like, this is I'm going to train myself to get into cold water and not get all freaked out about it. And so every night at 10:00, I'd walk out from my house to my pool, which was variously between 48 degrees and 52 degrees in the winter time. Walk in slowly, not dive in and jump out, walk in slowly, you know, give myself the mantra, you know, it's not good or bad, it's just a sensation. And then stay in there for 3 minutes and then uh and I had a I did have a jacuzzi right next to it. So I get in the jacuzzi and warm up, go to bed and sleep like a baby. So, it was more of a mental thing. It for me, it always was. It was never about the purported brown fat activation, fat burning benefits. Jesus, I mean, I've got, you know, I've got pretty low body fat as it is. I don't want to lose more. — Yeah, that that's funny. Parallel paths. I accidentally got into cold thermogenesis just because you have to train uh in the water year round for triathlon. And so Idaho winter, you know, 5:00 a. m. in the morning, standing on the edge of the YMCA pool with a little draft coming in the door, uh 80°, I mean the up here, like more, you know, low 70s and your body hits the water and you're goosebumping for at least the first 10 minutes of the swim and you're doing that like 5 days a week and then during race season, you know, multiple 40 to 60 minute foray in the cold water, you know, in rivers and lakes and oceans. So, so yeah, it's kind of force cold thermo. I think for me, uh, as far as like the thermal stress component, a big part of it is I just love to hit the cold right after I finish my sauna session. Feels amazing. You know, you get a big rush of endorphins. Uh, you feel good. But for me, it's not about shivering and fat loss. It's just about blood flow. And that I take a siesta in the afternoon. I finish my siesta. I turn on the sauna right before I start a siesta. I get out. I'm in the sauna for 15 minutes. Jump in the cold plunge. Back to work. And to me, it's an incredible way to start the afternoon. — No, I don't disagree. I think that that's a but again I think that's a uh you know an activation of uh central nervous system and you know has less to do with the thermic effect of the heat and the uh brown fat activation of the cold and the you know the heat shock proteins and whatever. It's just more like it feels good which look I would not deny you that at all. That's one of the reasons I did this every night in Malibu before I went to bed. Cold plunge finish with a with a jacuzzi and sleep like a baby. So, I'm not denying that has that benefit. But in terms of the, you know, back to the old man Olympics thing, the ability to withstand 4 minutes in a 48°ree coal plunge, you know, has that doesn't intrigue me anymore. — Yeah. near nearly everybody that you mentioned early on, not that this is a uh an under the bus podcast, uh Peter, Andrew, Rhonda, and many others have also in the past few years really, I think, increased the sales of non-alcoholic uh products, NA beer, NA mocktails, uh NA wine, NA tequila, because of the stance that any alcohol period is toxic, poisonous, and add I think you have a different take on alcohol, but I'd be curious to hear your rant on alcohol. — Interestingly, um I could give you some science that says that the body produces ethanol and ethanol burns within the human body naturally providing seven calories per gram. Uh we don't produce a lot of it, but we can produce up to 30 35 grams a day of ethanol on our own. — By the way, is that like a a KB

cycle byproduct? — Sure. So, and it's not a massive one. It's not a major one, but it is definitely something that the human metabolism, the human liver is equipped to handle quite easily. Where it becomes problematic is quick overdoses. In terms of our ability to withstand small doses of alcohol, we certainly have that ability. It's been part of the human experience ever since we figured out how to ferment berries and mead and corn and honey and things like that. So now that brings us to what is the utility of it? Well, there's no real utility of alcohol. It's not like we do need it for a fuel. There's no requirement for it. But the fact that we can we do make it in our body. We can combust it. I mean, one of the examples I use is that 5 g of glucose in the bloodstream is considered normal. And if you have seven grams of glucose in the bloodstream, you are diabetic. Some overage of glucose is very problematic over the long haul as well. So if we're just kind of arguing the different toxins, you know, any of these things come down to it's not so much the nature of of the substance as the dose. All right, back to alcohol. So, you know, I enjoy a glass of wine, you know, pretty much every night. And I think there are types of alcohol that are probably really problematic for a lot of people, especially the ones that have the sugars in them and lots of, you know, lots of additives and things like that. I stay away from those myself. Certainly, if you're someone who has an organic issue with u alcohol and has is lacking some of the critical enzymes in order to um metabolize it, stay away. By all means, stay away. I'm not an advocate for everyone drinking alcohol, but for those come to me and say, "Look, I enjoy a glass of wine once in a while, but now all the pundits are saying any amount of alcohol is is bad. " I disagree. I don't think that any amount of alcohol is bad. I mean, I have a glass of wine at the end of the day to take the edge off. I would say any amount of stress, the amount of cortisol that I might secrete as a result of having had a bad day or stressful day or, you know, worrying about or ruminating about something is maybe mitigated by that glass of wine that I have. Yeah, I think one of the interesting points you made in a recent newsletter about alcohol was basically uh yeah, it disrupts sleep uh with hefty doses like right before you get into bed, but having a glass of like I don't know whatever organic biodnamic red wine with a 6 p. m. dinner is not going to thrash your 10 p. m. bedtime. — Not at all. And you know, I drink, as you know, I've been a big fan of dry farm wines for a long time. These are wines that are sourced for their relatively lower alcohol content to begin with, for their lack of additives. There are no additives. These are biodnamic wines. These are wines that are grown without irrigation. So the grapes that they're used to in many cases are not as you know sugary and uh whatever that whoever grows these grapes has to produce the wine that year from that vintage from that crop based on the natural rainfall. A lot of these wines are not overly merated. You know, in the US, we get a lot of these, particularly in California cabs that are just so deep red, dark, you know, whatever because the skins, the red skins are ground up and ground. That's where all the tannins and that you the histamines reside. And so you put those in the wine. Now you've got tannins and histamines and sulfites and added sulfites and sugar and extra alcohol. Now you have something that's probably, you know, uh less desirable from uh from the ability to have a glass or two and have like zero effect from having had it other than, you know, a mild wine euphoria that, you know, lasts until you go to sleep. — Yeah. I I think the major issue with alcohol just from a kind of like an esoteric social standpoint is there are so many people that just associate it with partying, irresponsible activities, drowning your sorrows, escapism. It's pretty rare that I talk to people who literally are just okay with having a glass of wine with dinner and don't associate that with alcohol abuse. I mean, you know, I've been probably averaging three to five drinks a week for almost 17 years. I can't tell you the last time I got drunk or had more than like a glass of wine and a cocktail. Like, you can actually drink responsibly and moderately. I just think so many people associate it with irresponsibility or lack of temperance. I mean, and it doesn't have to be that way. — I don't disagree at all. And so I just I speak to the people who got kind of freaked out by people by again the online health pundits who suggest that any amount of alcohol is horrible for you and any amount of alcohol is bad. I'm not buying that. If you are uh and to your point, I mean, I've been drinking wine my whole life and I can't say I've been drunk in the last 20 years. If anything I run into people who will do like the 75 hard or you know some amount of time uh completely avoiding completely abstaining and one of the first things that happens once they decide they're going to allow themselves to have alcohol is they go out on a bender you know and just get drunk and you know burn through a couple of 12-packs or a bottle of wine. It's like, well, by being consistent and moderate, you actually, you know, kind of paradoxically decrease the chances that you're going to fall into abuse because you never get to that point where you're like, gosh, it's just been so long. — You know, I as I say, maybe I have a particular um way of looking at everything in life, which is, you know, I use the minimum effective dose. So, what's the minimum effective dose of food I need to to, you know, to get through the day? Not what's the most I can eat. What's the minimum effective dose of protein? I don't want to get 200 grams a day. You know, maybe my minimum effective dose is 110 or 120. What's the minimum effective dose of exercise? Like, I'm not an exercise fiend. I do as little as possible to stay as fit as I can. You've heard me say this in the past. It's better to look fit than to be fit. Now, the irony is if you do what it takes to look fit, you're probably pretty fit. And so, in the case of wine, what's the minimum effective dose of wine? Like there's a point at which and I hit that, you know, I'm like, "No, I don't want like I might have a half a glass of wine left and go, nope, I don't need to finish it. I don't I've had the wine that I need for tonight and that's it. " — I think also, by the way, for those of you who haven't read some of Mark's deeper thoughts along with some really good sciencebacked uh citations on alcohol and its true effects, I'll link to some of his articles in the show notes. So, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, cold plunging, V2 max. You know, it's no secret that biohacking is kind of the hot topic right now. Is there anything else, you know, in the whole biohacking world that you think is overrated or waste of people's time or complete distraction right now? — I got to tell you, I'm um emerging, I guess, as the antibbiohacking guy. I just I'm not buying almost any of this stuff. Whether it's the methylene blue, uh you know, whether it's the compression sleeves, whether it's the um you know, getting 48 years of Zen in 15 minutes with a headband on

you know, we can go through the whole litany. And I go to some of these shows and I see some of the protocols and some of the equipment and I just I have to roll my eyes and go, "Look, if you guys haven't covered the basics, get your sleep dialed in. " And by that I mean 67° dark room, some ambient white noise and sleep, you know, 8 hours plus or minus a night. If you haven't figured that out, your diet out, um, gotten your protein dialed in, gotten your, you know, your eating schedule uh, strategized so you develop metabolic flexibility, if you don't have your movement patterns, if you're not walking every single day, don't start talking to me about methylene blue and and, uh, and or doing your um, as Brian Johnson recently did, you know, your culturally appropriated ritual inebriation ceremonies. I mean, Mark, I know a guy and he's working hard, you know, 14 hour days, sleeping very little, eating when he gets a chance, usually very quickly. And he told me, "Look, I, you know, been struggling with low HRV and I've heard the intraasal CAX and Cank peptides and a veagal nerve stimulator and this little device that you wear that kind of like coordinates you into resonance breathing would be really good for me. " And you know, my reply was like, "Well, well, yeah, maybe, but there's a lot of lowhanging fruit going on right now. " and you can't like, you know, Cmax snort your way out of sleeping six hours a night and then just grinding all day. — And I think, you know, we I grew up in an era at and you maybe even more so when grinding was the only way to succeed, right? And so everybody bragged about working 70, 80, 90 hour weeks and foregoing their family life in pursuit of their career and like what kind of life is that? Then that's what you're focusing on. And if your health is going to suffer as a result of that, that was you making a choice. That had that's not that's your fault. It's you making a choice. It's not like there's anything you can magically do to fix that. I think the thing that bothers me most about biohacking is this pursuit of the magic potion, the magic injection, the magic pill, the magic protocol that obviates the need to do the hard work. And you and I know that life is about doing the hard things and reaping the benefits. And at the end of the day, you know, we're getting into a realm that scares the hell out of me. It's a realm of promised abundance. — Yeah. It's interesting, you know, and maybe this is too broad of a stereotype, but I don't run into a lot of former athletes, competitive athletes, who tend to be prone to overdo the biohacking. It's usually like the tech bros, the people who never really got a chance to push themselves physically in high school, in college sports, in club sports, whatever. There does seem to be a mentality of, you know, the type of person who never actually learned what, you know, blood, sweat, and tears in the gym actually felt like. And again, like we just got done talking about, you know, the avoidance of overtraining being a good thing and the minimal effective dose of exercise, but I think there tends to be almost like a historical pattern of people who haven't really learned how to do the hard work trying to get dropped off by a helicopter on top of Mount Everest first, — which and there is some of that too, right? It's so that's probably my biggest complaint about this biohacking movement is that it is you're right a lot of tech bros and I think the world of tech is full of people who are looking for problems that don't really exist and then they create the problem and then they find the solution for it. So, you know, like my favorite example would be Soilent, the tech guys who assumed that everybody must be programmers and everybody must hate to eat because you have to stop coding when you eat and that so you order pizza in and you order and you have uh Coca-Cola at your desk and you keep coding all night and you sleep under your desk and little catnaps and then you have more pizza, another slice of cold pizza and then you code. And somebody said, "People hate to eat. There's just no time. let's create the beall end all supplement. And they called it Soylent. And it was the worst. And they raised, by the way, something like $150 million to start this company with the assumption that people just wanted to add water to a powder, slam it down, and get back to work. People love to eat, man. It's like what? So, so this is But that's the tech community making an assumption about what people what what's good for people because, you know, they have their own they're creating these problems, — right? And I think perhaps the 2026 equivalent of that is potentially the use of GLP agonist or triple agnus or quintuple agonist or whatever which do have a time and a place I think for diabetes and obesity as a way to simply quell the hunger response entirely so that you can continue to hammer. And there there's a certain kind of like flavor of almost like anorexia enabling that this has created where people are like, well, you know, I need to push through the day. I don't want to think about eating. Therefore, I'm going to inject this not necessarily for metabolic management, but just as yet another productivity hack. — Exactly. A productivity hack. I mean, it's when lawyers were taking Rolin to argue cases against athletes who'd been caught doping. How do you like that one? — Yeah. No, that that's the classic. I know people who are pro vigil by day, valley him by night, and that's just, you know, seven days a week. So, you mentioned AI earlier. You know, I don't know what your stance is on that right now. I mean, you obviously write, uh, you produce, you're a content creator, and then you also typically have pretty informed takes on just social trends in general. So, I would love to hear your thoughts on AI. — Well, it's it it's pretty negative. My thoughts on AI. It's pretty scary. I mean, I think right now AI is a fairly useful research tool, but currently all it is a word predicting device or a now it's a content predicting device, but that spits out based on a prompt spits out a

uh randomized answer based on all of human input into the internet over the past, you know, 50 years. And as such, it's still based on human input. Much of which is non-factual, m non-scientific, much of which is opinion biased, hate, and it's really difficult to call this down and get what I would say a real source of truth to start with for AI. And so my own experience has been in the early days asking it about myself, stuff that I knew about myself and having it lie and then I'm like, "No, you're wrong. " Um, and it defend itself, whatever. So, I know we've, you know, it's gotten better and better. But I think the mistakes and the hallucinations are not going to improve. I think it's still based on human experience, which is limited. And at the end of the day, I feel like it's going to be a fairly good research tool. I feel like it's going to it probably will eliminate uh the legal profession because I, you know, law is just memorization and being able to pull up a you know, factual case law and then apply it to the — Yeah. I mean, the the legal profession a great deal of programming, writing and copywriting, uh a lot of social positions, a lot of customer service positions. I mean, I think I heard this was a Microsoft research report that the job least likely right now to be replaced by AI uh is phabbotomy. Literally like that's a thing that people still don't trust a robot to uh to take their blood. — I love it. And uh no, that's a great point. Uh yeah. So a lot of these jobs are um you know there's not even like in law, even in medicine, in accounting, there's no right answer. There's opinions, right? So CPAs don't have the answer. When you submit your stuff for taxes, you could submit your all of your receipts to 10 different CPAs and you'll get 10 different amounts that you owe the IRS. So even some of these professions don't there's no right or wrong answer. And so to have AI come in and maybe do a slightly better job with a more legitimized opinion. Uh, that's probably a good thing. I think, you know, radiology, they talk about radiologists, you know, being um, obiated again because you can feed enough imagery into an AI and have it make probably a better diagnosis than a single individual could. You know, some of those are all existing jobs that are going to be rendered a little bit more efficient by AI. And I think that's what it does. I think when I see like my son just set up a, you know, a Mac Mini uh with six agents and he's reorganizing, he owns a warehouse, a fulfillment center, and he's reorganizing how the pallets are arranged and how the picking and packing happens. All of that is in service of maybe extracting another 5% efficiency from a relatively already efficient system. He's not inventing anything new. He's not all he's doing is is extracting a little bit more margin. So at some point all the margin that's available will be extracted and then that'll be then there'll be nothing else to do. I see people talking about a lot of the Instagram people talking about, well, all you need is your again your Mac Mini, your Claude Code, your, you know, whatever other AIs you want to put in there, create all these agents and everybody can start a business and every everybody can be a millionaire within a few days. Well, what product are you going to sell and who it to? Yeah, I think it was Elon Musk who basically said something to that extent that at some point at the end of the day there actually has to be someone making products that improve people's lives versus just creating digital products that train people how to make money making digital products. — No, that's and that's what it's become. It's become people selling programs to to coach other people on how to make digital programs to sell other people program. It's bizarre to me. So I think I don't think there's going to be much in the way of innovation for the foreseeable future. It's just going to be this margin extraction which good example trading on the stock exchange. There's no wealth being generated other than people extracting money from other people who already own stocks. So, it's a it's almost a zero- sum game on the stock exchange when AI is involved in figuring out how to make a trade and how to extract a tenth of a penny more per stock because a trade happens quicker or even the predicting the sort of quant type predictions about what's going to happen to this stock have nothing to do with the value of the company over time as much as it has to do with who's the idiot who's going to buy this from me in a week at a 5% % uh premium. So all of this is just there. It's just people taking money from other people. It's not creating wealth. It's not producing. It's not adding to the GDP. And that's what's scary about it. It's almost like it's become this um you know selfish opportunity to extract rent from other people. Talk about everybody being a rent seeker now. It's crazy. Unless you invent something new, unless you come up with something new, um it's just going to be extracting margin from existing businesses. — Yeah. Invent something new, come up with something new or create products that are analog that people already use. Like my sons, I tell them, good choice, good decision. They're in the card game board game industry, right? They're literally creating real analog products that require actual real humans sitting around the dinner table to utilize their product. and it it has to be a novel unique game, not a carbon copy of Monopoly or Scrabble or whatever. So, so that's an example of, you know, creating something that actually has utility. — Yes. — And then there there's other like I just set up a claude, what's it called? A um a co-work project that has access to my Slack, my ASA, my email, and my Google calendar. And at 5:45 a. m. it sends me a brief of my day, you know, what to expect, when my meetings are, any important emails that are in my inbox. And then at 8:45 p. m., it sends me an end of day summary for me to review before I go to bed and prepare for the next day. And that to me is valuable and something that saves me probably like 10 to 15 minutes in the morning and another evening. So, a few hours a week of just reviewing my calendar and planning out the day and reviewing the end of the day. — Okay. So, it's improving margin in your day. That's great. But it's not making your day it's not doing everything for you yet. And the danger is when it starts to do when we have a robotics and we have, you know, our lives are meaningless because we have nothing to do. There's nothing to tinker with. there's no reason to go work in the workshop or to because I can have my robot build that for me or there the dream that everybody has about this infinite wealth and this massive abundance is probably the scariest thing of all to me because first of all you talk about abundance like it's a good thing. Abundance is not necessar there's a point at which abundance becomes its own weight. — Uh obesity and diabetes is abundance too. — Great example. Great example over abundance. Yeah. So, you know, when we talk about abundance, we have to be careful that we're not losing our humanity because now all of a sudden, and by the way, the big question I have, Ben, is why do you wake up in the morning? Like when everything is done for you and everything is and you don't have to memorize anything. I mean, kids aren't going to have to remember anything. They're not going to have to. I just envision this world where everybody's a stupid, you know, idiocracy type world where because everything is done for you. You don't have to do the hard work. You don't have to put the time in to learn a language or to learn how to play the piano or to, you know, to learn some dance steps. It's all kind of done for you. What is there left to do? And then this is the same world where Dave Asprey says he wants to live to 180. I'm like, dude, why? like what's going to be exciting about any day. — Yeah. I think you have to be wired up a certain way to um be inherently self-driven and possibly autodidactic to a certain extent to where le let's say there is an age of abundance. Do you have a robot mowing your lawn and making breakfast and doing all your work for you? Well, there is the type of person who would still wake up and want to uh craft a music beautiful piece of music on the piano or the guitar or who would want to whatever get a rifle or bow and go hunting in the forest and learn to cook wild game or who will do something that still scratches that creative productive urge. And you know, you mentioned the movie. What what's the movie where everybody's lazy in the future? — Idiocracy. — Yeah. Idiocracy. And then, you know, like I think 95% of people will fit into the idiocracy bucket. But I like to think that some people will still have that inherent drive to be productive and creative in different ways. But I think that needs, you know, a certain amount of nature, certain amount of nurture. But I like to think that guys like you and me would probably fall into the category of still waking up in the morning and wanting to just like make — Well, this is the thing. I I'm a fairly wealthy individual and I can pretty much do whatever I want. And I get up in the morning and I have the same cup of coffee that I had when I was, you know, dirt poor. I do the same workout I did when I was dirt poor. I do the same 1-hour walk every night that I can do anywhere in the world with any amount of income. I still love my kids and my grandchildren the same amount no matter how much money I have. I still appreciate a good hike in the mountains again, regardless of what the wealth is. So it's at some point you get to where you realize all we have is the things that make us human and the layering on of more and more abundance to somehow make it that we don't have to work out that much because we can take a pill or we don't have to I mean for me the real the first thing happened when I realized I don't have to change the oil in my car. I don't have to replace the muffler myself in my car. I was in my 20s when I realized it, but you know, it just gets worse and worse or whatever uh over time. Yeah. I just feel like so much of what makes life enjoyable has nothing to do with abundance or wealth provided you have the right mindset. — Yeah. I was at a different conversation a couple nights ago and someone was talking about the world of exercise mimetics and they're there, you know, brought up, you know, peptides like uh called like Slooh PP32 or something like that basically causes mitochondrial biogenesis and you know skeletal muscle fiber growth or satellite cell proliferation with a pill. And my wife was sitting next to me, she's like, "That sounds horrible. I love to exercise. " I'm like, "Me, too. I'm not going to pop the pill. " — But the reason you love to exercise is because you like you like there's something in the human brain that wants you to do the hard stuff. And that's why every day I want to do something hard every day. And whether it's a workout, it's usually a workout. Um, but sometimes it's just grinding it out, you know, a paper or something like that, writing an article. But there's something that about doing the hard stuff every day that makes the rest of the day that much more valuable. And I think that's human nature. I think it's that's the sort of our modernday survival instinct, which is basically I made it through the day. We can sit around the campfire and enjoy, you know, be vigilant for the night for the night prowlers, but sit around the campfire and enjoy the fruits of our hard work during the day. And I think people tend to lose that. And you're right, exercise is one of those things that it just it doesn't even feel that good when you're doing it most of the time, but it feels it really feels good when you stop and you really feel good about yourself. And there's some biochemical, you know, there's some endorphin slash uh dopamine serotonin convergence there that makes you feel like, oh my god, this was a that was an amazing day because of the hard work. — Yeah. What is it? Uh Monday today. So Saturday I released a podcast with Dr. from Matt Dawson where we talked about like the morphological and metabolic changes between or differences between weight loss achieved using GLP- like drug versus weight loss achieved through diet and exercise. And as you would expect, there is just a slew of, you know, multi-organ system benefits that come from the approach that goes beyond the draw, like actually doing the hard things. as far as how that changes your body, you know, staves off future weight gain, etc. — I mean, that's the thing that's that scares me about this slew that you just talked about. What else is going on? What are the downstream effects? Well, let's go back to GLP1s. Tepatide or some of these that have apparently as one of their side effects or other effects is the loss of appetite for sex and connection. And there was that. Yep. Yeah. B b b b basically almost like a like a dopamine blunting that goes beyond food. — Yes. So the fact that it works for food, okay, great. But now you're not gonna now you have the main reason you want to lose weight is get laid, but now you're not interested in getting laid. — Yeah. — Or you know, and it works for again alcoholics who or drug addicts apparently who don't now have the craving for that um dopamine receptor or that uh canabonoid receptor. But again, these have these are sort of multi-effect drugs that are only being used for the one specific uh effect that they're or symptom that they're treating. — And if they could be used like training wheels for self-control and willpower, then why do you see perhaps a few people outside of this curve, but why do you see rapid weight gain upon stopping the the pharmaceutical if that happens? you know, they're basically short-term crutches that don't fix the problem. — The thing that I think I would be remiss not to talk with you about is uh I was golfing, but you know, my every 10-year golf excursion uh last week and I was wearing the new kicks that you sent me, the um the Paluva golf shoes. I got a few compliment. I got the PUVA court shoes now for pickle ball and tennis. So, what's the latest with Paluva? Oh my god, we're just having so much fun. I mean, this uh I get every day I get testimonials that are basically tearjerking testimonials about how we're changing lives about people who had real foot issues, couldn't really walk without discomfort or couldn't, you know, work out in the gym without discomfort now able to do so comfortably. You know, fixing problems over time

because they're reacquiring a good strong balanced gate. rewiring their perfect kinetic chain that had been rendered imperfect by the shoes they were wearing before. We have a lot of people in the trails. Uh we have a trail shoe called the ATR. We just introduced this one. It was sort of a it's the Ferrari of trail shoes now, but this is uh even right down to the colors. People are loving it. Again, the notion that you could somehow go off-road, go on the trails with boulders and jagged rocks and stuff like that and wear a stiff sold thick uh high hiking boot and not tweak your knee. Just boggles my mind. When you're hiking, you want to feel the ground. every rock that you step on. You want to you want your foot to land in a different position every time you put it down. not be forced to land in the same position but then slide off a angled stone or a wet angled stone because it was forced into a uh you know a neutral position by the boot. So reinforcing what the foot wants to do. be able to feel the ground and by feeling what's underneath, by the time you weight that front foot, the brain knows exactly how to organize your kinetic chain, how to roll that ankle a little bit off that stone or how to scrunch the arch around allow those toes to articulate between the sticks or around the stones or over the divot or whatever. Um, how deeply to bend the knee because you stepped off of a large stone. All these things, they get ne negated by stiff regular hiking boots. And by the way, they get negated by running shoes, thick cushion running shoes, etc., etc. So, Paluba was based on this idea that we want our feet to be strong and resilient and mobile. We want to reacquire this perfect gate that we were born with got screwed up by because of the, you know, the so-called high-tech shoes we're wearing. So, we make a shoe for all occasions. So, you now have a you have the court shoe, the pickle ball and paddle shoe. Um, we've got uh one of our top uh long drive guys in the world is wearing uh the golf shoe because it he connects with the ground better on his uh on his tournaments. You know, we've got the um again I said the hiking shoe. We've got uh workout wear. We have a winter boot we just introduced. — That is good to know. I was going to ask you when the Subzero or whatever is going to come out. I was actually in uh as a matter of fact, I think I texted you a couple years ago. We were both somewhere international commenting to each other about how many looks and comments we get when we're wearing our paluas overseas, but I was in Germany uh 2 months ago and it was cold and I was walking every day in Munich wearing my palas, but my toes definitely get colder. So, fill me in on this the winter boot. — Yeah, so we have a winter boot. It's got the shearling lining. It's uh it's leather. It's got um it's just amazing boot. It comes up above the ankles. I should have brought one out. Uh, I don't know how many people are watching this versus listening, but it's a really good-look boot. And uh, so I think we have one that looks like an LLBAN version of uh, Remember the two-tone. — Is it uh, is it insul? Well, I have one of the boots. Uh, I have like the brown kind of suedish looking boot that goes higher than the ankle, but it's not insulated. — No, that's the desert boot that's been around since day one. That's a great going out to dinner boot. I wear that a lot with jeans. That's not what we're talking about. No, we have a legit winter boot. Now, when I say legit winter boot, if like if it's below 30, because of the toes, you're still going to have a little bit of an issue. But, you know, we have you wear socks with it and between the socks and the boot and the shearling lining inside, you'll be very comfortable, — right? I could I could probably do like September elk hunting in it. — Yes. 100%. — Yeah. And stay whisper quiet. That's the advantage. So, one thing on your uh old man Olympics, back to that is the one minute standing on one foot with arms crossed and eyes closed. Fill people in on this idea of just like big toe activation, balance, and overall longevity when it comes to foot health because I because to me that's one of the biggest advantages. — Well, when we talk about longevity, the lowest hanging fruit in longevity, which nobody talks about, is foot health. If you think about it, after the age of 65, like one out of every three people falls at some point and breaks a hip and then 25% of those die within a year. Uh, another 30 or 40% are rendered pretty much immobile as a result of that fall.

All of which happens as a result of a common a cascade of bad events that start with the feet. If your feet are strong, look, as a kid, you trip every day. You're a gangly kid. You trip over everything. Sometimes you fall, but most of the time you don't. You catch yourself, right? You if you trip, you know, your feet are strong enough and your quads everything's, you know, organized so that you you just reach out with it with the forward step and catch it and you don't fall. This goes away over time as you lose mobility and strength and resilience in your feet. This happens as a result of a lifetime of compressing the big toe against the other toes. I mean the biggest the most egregious effect of modern footwear is this squeezing the big toe against the rest of the other toes at the metatarsal head which in many cases causes bunions but in all cases — a lot of people have bunions by the way like — yes a lot and bunyions by the way are not they're not genetic. You don't have bunyions because your mother had them or your father had them. You have bunyions because you wore bad shoes. No indigenous people have bunions. That's just a it's a bizarre, you know, adaptation to crappy footwear. The big toe is the most important joint in the foot. It is essential for locom motion. It wants to spllay outwardly and it wants to be the last point of contact when you push off. So if you're barefoot and you have strong feet, you plant with a heel, you roll off the big toe. Plant with the heel, There's some supernation and some pronation going on in there. The foot is supposed to do both as a part of this windless mechanism that the arch, a strong arch provides, but the big toe is the most critical part of the foot. And the fact that we, you know, we squeeze it up against all the other toes and render it effectively useless and obsolete over a lifetime, it's just it's criminal. So PUVA was based on this idea that we want the big toe to be the hero, to be the the part of the foot that regains its strength. You want it to abduct away from the foot. You want the toes to spllay outwardly. Then if you run down a, you know, a beach at low tide on the hard pack sand barefoot and you go back and look at your footsteps, your toes are spled the widest when you're sprinting because that's that foot knows that's the where that's where the power is. So whether it's sprinting or walking up stairs, you know, you land on your toes, your metatarsal heads, and your toes spllay out when you're walking upstairs barefoot. the toes want to spllay outward. The feet want to be they want to be used. The intrinsic muscles of the feet need to be used and they become atrophied in most people. So with PUVA, we just said look, let's let feet do what they're supposed to do. Let's let people reacquire a strong perfect balance gate. Let's let them reacquire agility and mobility and resilience in their feet. And over time, that translates into the not just the ability to walk better and longer, but the desire longer. I mean I have so many people wearing belugas walking and thinking my I never felt so good walking. I can like every step I'm sort of conscious semi-conscious unconscious of every step I take and it feels good and people look — Yeah, you can say the flu is to walking what uh what sex without a condom is to sex. — That's okay. I'll All right. I'll uh I'll trademark that. Put that on the website. Yeah. — No, that's a good point. Um, no. The ability to like we when we're in Europe, we look for cobblestones a lot because we call that foot candy. Walking on cobblestones just feels so amazing, so great. As does bouldering on a riverbed. I know you've done that. And so there's a lot of opportunities here to kind of re-acquaint your brain with your big toe and with your feet because the big toe is wired to the brain. It's there's a direct connection between the big toe and the glute and brain. And without that connection, um, you know, you go to the gym and if you're wearing restrictive shoes in the gym and you start doing a leg day, you lose 20 to 30% of your glute engagement just by virtue of the fact that your big toe is not involved in that activity, which is why I know you know this from your bodybuilding days. Guys lift barefoot when they do leg days. You know, if you're doing squats or lunges, uh, or, you know, RDL's or whatever you're doing, — and now you can do it without getting kicked out of the gym. — Bingo. Yeah. And by the way, people would uh you know, wear socks, right, and say, "Well, I'm barefoot in sock. " No, socks do the same thing. Socks still squish the big toe against the other toes. I mean, we make a five-toed sock, which — I was going to say, unless they're toe socks. Yeah. — Yeah. Exact toe socks. Yeah. So, I mean, I really I feel more strongly than ever that we're changing the way the world looks at strength, foot health, mobility, and longevity through footwear. Well, um, Mark, you and I actually had on our last podcast, we also had like a half hour of talking about foot health. I think this is like your fourth or fifth time on the show. So, I'm going to link to for those you listening all of my other podcast with Mark, his website. Uh, we have a discount for Puva shoes. That's pretty good. I'll put that in the show notes. So, that's all going to be at ben greenfieldlife. com2026. Sis sso n2026. I'll link to Mark's Untethered newsletter and then now they know Mark's Daily Apple's back up to that. And uh Mark, you're incredible as always. — Oh, thanks, man. You, too. You got to get out here. We'll go paddling next time. I won't put you on the fat bike. We'll just go paddling. — Yeah, I'm game. I I'll take on a challenge. I can practice. All right, cool. Thanks, man. Thanks for doing this. I'll see you in Florida hopefully at some point in the next few months. — Yes, indeed. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more. Check out bengreenfieldlife. com. It's all there. bengreenfieldlife. com. See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like, and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings, and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life Show gets, the bigger and better the guests get, and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. 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