Joe Cohen | Mitolife Radio Ep #190

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
genetics, supplement, good, vitamin, interesting, butyrate, high, eat, genes, people, carnivore, dna, bdnf, increased, labs, canola oil, snips, studies, felt, joe

Matthew Blackburn 00:18
You're listening to Episode 190 of Mito Life Radio. I'm Matt Blackburn, your host and today, I'm interviewing Joe Cohen, the founder of SelfDecode. So I heard about this website SelfDecode several years ago, I think shortly after it launched in 2016. And my friend, Dr. Tyler Panzer, reintroduced me to it. And then I had him on the podcast and he really piqued my interest in this subject of genetics. I think it's just one more piece of information to use, along with bloodwork and other tests; Saliva, urine, hair tissue mineral analysis, it's one more piece of information to use to really dial in your nutrition, your supplements, and your lifestyle. And I really do think that genetics matter, when I paid for their premium account on SelfDecode, I was really shocked going through my wellness reports how accurate it was, with my symptoms, for example, more likely sinus congestion. That's absolutely true. More likely, nearsightedness, I got LASIK eye surgery, I was blind for most of my life before then, absolutely true. Increased need for vitamin A, I feel incredible on high dose retinol, from cod liver oil, higher levels of testosterone. That's absolutely true. All the blood tests I've gotten have showed that my testosterones in the higher range, and it's pretty easy for me to maintain that. So my experience with SelfDecode, and their analysis of gene mutations has been absolutely accurate. And I'm curious what you guys will think about it if you try it out. So if you've ever gotten 23andMe, or any Ancestry kind of website, where they take your saliva and analyze your DNA, you could plug that into this website. And it will look at 83 million gene mutations. And it breaks that down into digestible bits of information via the health reports, and even personalized blogs, which is my favorite aspect of the website. So I'll let Joe explain it and ahead of time, I want to apologize, I do my interviews now on Zoom. And for some reason, it stopped recording at some point, and then started again so there's going to be a little gap. So my apologies, but it caught most of the conversation. So here we go, here is Joe Cohen. Alright - Joe Cohen, welcome to the show.

Joe Cohen 03:22
Hey, thanks for having me.

Matthew Blackburn 03:24
Yeah, I'm really excited for this one. I'm sure I'm going to learn a whole lot. I recently had my friend, Dr. Tyler Panzner, on the show, and he recently became a SelfDecode practitioner. I guess he was doing it manually for years, he said using like Genetic Genie and other websites to help people with their mutations. But what's cool about what you're doing with SelfDecode is it's making it a lot easier, where even a lay person like myself can go in and just quickly see what mutations they have, whether it's with a vitamin or mineral, or even personality traits, which is really interesting to me. So before we jump into all that, you often say that you won the genetic lottery for bad genes. That's how you got into this.

Joe Cohen 04:20
Yeah. So we could start with that if you want. There's, you know, there's some people that I like to do interviews, just even when I'm having normal conversations, and I found that there's like these mutants, you know, they can sleep five hours, four hours, they can exercise eight hours a day, they can eat whatever they want. And they're just like, you know, they're fine. They got no issues, and they're just built like mutants. And so, I was not like that. I was not built like a mutant, meaning, you know there's a lot of things that I'm sensitive to. And, you know, I have to - I have to do the work in order to be optimally healthy, it doesn't come, you know, I can't just eat whatever I want, I can't just do whatever I want. And I realized that what was working for other people was not working for me, I was on a long journey - they're just following what other people were doing. And, you know, just copying, I think humans are built to copy what someone else is doing. And I just said, this is not the way for me, because it's not working for me. And I could see it and it makes sense, because you'd also see all these wars on diet and, you know, there's like, how many wars do you see on a diet on diet stuff? And by the way, I've interviewed people who are very healthy with a vegan diet. Right? I just the other night, and again, I'm not a - I'm more of the other side of that, right? I eat more of a carnivore diet, but just the, you know, this person wasn't lying to me. He's like, "Yeah, I do an Ironman." I'm like, "Okay, what is an Ironman, exactly?" Like, I never really got into it. He's like, "Well, it's like 180 kilometers of running." I don't know what he was - I don't remember the exact kilometers, but it was like a crazy amount of kilometers of running and swimming. And - I forgot what the other thing was, but it was just like, and I'm like - "You know, what the hell." And this guy is like playing volleyball. And he's like, he's just exercising 10 hours a day. And I was like, "What's your diet like?" He's like, "I eat a vegan diet." I'm like, "holy shit." Guys eating a vegan diet, which I think is not good for the vast majority of people, not everybody. This guy's like - he's immune, we've got a mutant over here. I'm like, "Do you ever get sick?" He's like, "No." Like, I'm like, "What are - what happened during COVID?" He's like, "I don't - I didn't think I've ever gotten like - I got it but I didn't really feel anything." Like, what the hell's wrong with this guy is immune. And I've seen it wasn't only him, I've seen other people, like, I know how to identify the mutants now, they can eat whatever the hell they want, a vegan diet just and just built like mutants. So but for most other people, you know, the 99%. They're not built like mutants and I would say that I had a lot of weaknesses, that, you know, that are not very common in terms of my diet, in terms of all these different things. But you know, everybody has weaknesses. It turns out, and I don't think one of my weaknesses isn't is - let's say cancer, right? And a lot of people get cancer, and they seem like mutants, and all of a sudden they get cancer one day. And so everybody has their own weaknesses. This, you know, when I say won the genetic lottery, it's, it's more like I won the genetic lottery of, you know, things that - they, I was noticing that I'm affected from an early age, but everybody's got their weaknesses. And that's the key, every person needs to find their weaknesses and every person needs to optimize according to their weaknesses. So I won the, you know, certain genetic lottery and it's, it's about optimizing for my weaknesses.

Matthew Blackburn 08:50
I love that. Yeah, I think we both been in the same world, like I've been into natural health for 13 years and did veganism, vegetarian, raw veganism, never did carnivore really, but I did a lot of intermittent fasting. And even with that, there's still many battles, right? Because there's some people that say everyone should be intermittent fasting. And then some people said, no one should ever be intermittent fasting. And maybe the true reason between your genetics, or some people need to eat frequently. And -

Joe Cohen 09:21
Not even in between, it really depends on a lot of factors. Genetics is one of them, right? I mean, there's genetics, and then there's also what else is going on your life, what are you doing? But definitely, genetics is a big factor. It's no question about it. But also, you'll notice that a lot of people who are into fasting are also eating a high fat diet, and fat takes way longer to break down. And so if you're eating a high fat diet, fasting is going to be better for you, generally speaking, but guess what? I ate high fat diets and fasting was better for me but still, it wasn't very good. However, I found ways to improve it if I wanted to. But overall, I'm not a big fan of fasting - in the morning. Maybe a little bit, but not, not much. I feel like you want to have a good meal in the morning. But again, that's just how I'm built. And it works for people. So I'm not a person who is arrogant to say that, you know, somebody's telling me, something's working for them, like, No, you don't know what's working for you. I'll tell you what's working for you. Right? I and so, I do believe people that they have these, you know, everybody does well with different things. And the idea is, is that you, you know, I've been experimenting for 15 years, and in pretty intensively, and not everybody's got 15 years of experiments to do like me, right? Right now for me, it's more of an occupation almost. So even though I have the genetic stuff, I'm always gonna be doing it because it's my occupation, but this is not the occupation of everybody. And even if it is, I still use my genetics all the time, right, even though it's my occupation. So what is somebody who it's not their occupation, without any kind of genetic data without any kind of personalization - like, what are they doing? They're just, you know, every - it's kind of like my mom, almost every week, she finds like a new guru, that she is like, Okay, this is - not every week, I'd say every, like three months. And she's been doing this for like, 40 years. I'm not kidding, it's like every three months she's got like, a new philosophy. I was just like, "What are you doing?" And she's, you know, I don't want to name any names, but it's just like, every three months is like a new philosophy. I was like, "What is going on?"

Matthew Blackburn 11:52
Yeah, I think that's a, that's a slow way to find what works for you. But if you get addicted to that novelty of the next new thing, like the next diet, or the next protocol, or whatever, I think that can become just like any addiction.

Joe Cohen 12:09
Yeah, but it also goes to show that it, it's not working for her, right? And she's just of an older generation that, you know, she's like, 70, it's just like, it's just not, she - genetics is like very new for her. She doesn't really understand it. So it's just like, she's not - she's very - she doesn't know what's going on. I would - but what's, what she's been doing for 40 years has not been working. I mean, I asked her, I'm like, has that what have you kept in the last 40 years from all this stuff? She's literally been doing this since she was 17. More than 40 years, right? I'm like, what have you kept? And she's just like, well, basically, like, she kept two things. She eats like a groundup salad, puts vegetables in a blender. And then there was like a couple other things like ginger and garlic its' like, okay. Mainly, it was ginger and - that's what you gain in 40 years from bouncing around every three months to a new guru. And spending like, crazy sums of money over that time period. It's just nuts. It was nuts.

Matthew Blackburn 13:31
I think a lot of us that are into health, the family thing is so tricky, right? Because we love them and we spend time with them and see, you know, we might see flaws and what they're doing, you know, and it's just such an easy switch. But sometimes they need to hear it from someone else. That's what I've seen. Sometimes they need to read it in an article, can't be from me, you know? Sometimes they just need to hear it from some other person.

Joe Cohen 13:54
No, I mean, the thing is, she actually, she, it does help to have other people. Right so she does, in certain ways respond to like, if an MD says something or whatever, she's an old school generation, where she cares more about that, but she would listen to me I feel like even if, like I used to have a podcast that she used to listen to that she's like, Oh, I love the podcast, you should do it again. And I just got so busy with building SelfDecode. I stopped it for a long time. And I'm restarting it now, you know, I have some episodes coming out. But it's just like, you know, she's just like, you know, she doesn't really read that much. And she doesn't - I don't know, it's just the - she likes the podcast and she likes following fads. But-

Matthew Blackburn 14:47
I'm pretty sure I'm more of an auditory learner because I have a whole bunch of books but I seem to retain information better listening to it in a podcast or even like a lecture versus reading words on a paper. It's interesting.

Joe Cohen 15:01
Interesting. I'm not sure where I retain it better. I think I retain it probably better written. But a podcast is good because if you're doing other stuff, it's something that you can listen to while you're doing other stuff.

Matthew Blackburn 15:21
Right, yeah. Well, Joe, moving on to, like the nitty gritty details here with genetics, Tyler Panzner, on my show kind of went into it a little bit. There's a lot of big words, heterozygous, homozygous, and I think it can be intimidating for people getting into this, because there's some terminology to kind of wrap your head around. But is there like an easy way that you found to describe genetics to the person on the street?

Joe Cohen 15:54
Yeah, I don't think people you know, need to know that stuff. We built SelfDecode so that people don't need to know exactly what heterozygous is. And, you know, any kind of terms per se, right? Even, you know, it can be super complex -- genetics and I think that is the it's - it's a little bit unfortunate that it's so complex, because of how powerful it is. And the other thing is that because it's so complex, it's hard for somebody to discern what's legitimate in the space and what's not legitimate. And even as an expert, it took me a while to wrap my head around things and really understand what the hell's going on in this space, right? And that's why we had to build a platform, because I got into it already in 2015. And, in 2019, we started rebuilding the platform because there's this thing that we found was called polygenic risk scoring. And polygenic risk scoring was something that nobody was doing in the consumer space. And there's still nobody - SelfDecode because the only person is the only company doing that. And so what is this polygenic risk score, and so it came out in 2018, that they would do these studies on like, specific variants. And most of the time, they couldn't be reproduced, meaning like you'd have a study, like, Oh, this is really cool. And I was looking at him like, Oh this is great, I see a study. I'm like, Oh, this is really cool. And then the more you're into it, the more you see that, why can't they reproduce any of this stuff. And that's where it started to get like interesting. And it turned out that for a lot of traits, not all of them, but for complex traits, like cardiovascular disease, like mood, there's hundreds of thousands, or millions of variants at play. And the only way to actually predict stuff is to look at that number of variants. Otherwise, there's certain traits where you don't need as many variants. But for like these, these complex traits, you need a lot of variants. And we're looking at what you know, I already thought we were way more advanced by looking at like 50 variants per report, compared to other companies that were looking at like two, or whatever, three, sometimes. Genetic Genie is just the list of random snips, none of them, almost none of them are even -- validated by multiple studies. And then it's really like the gulf between what we have and what Genetic Genie has is, is humongous. It's just like basically, like it's so humongous. But in any case, I think that it's still useful for people to sometimes look at specific genes, because they can sometimes enlighten you about a certain mechanism that might be happening in the body, right? But in terms of prediction, you want to look at what's called this polygenic risk scoring. And when we did internal studies - so there's external studies that you can look up, and there's internal studies, the external studies show that basically, if you don't do polygenic risk scoring, it's basically like a coin flip in prediction. Basically, you can't predict without polygenic risk scoring very well, for the vast majority of traits, complex traits. And we did internal studies we wanted to see what does it look like if we just use a couple of very significant snips. And the same thing occurred, it's almost like a coin flip, right? It's maybe slightly better. But with the polygenic, risk scoring, you start to get significant results. And so if you look up these genome wide studies, getting variants for people, every gene like, in most of the time, every time they do one of these genome studies, different variants come up with a significant - it's not even the same variants. And the reason is because every study is using like slightly different methods and different approaches, and they're - they're getting information out but it could be very, very tricky, with what's signal, what's noise when you're dealing with so much data. And so the bottom line that I'm trying to convey here is because genomics is so complex, people don't really understand what is legitimate, and what's not. I think that's part of the reason why there's a hesitation about getting into it, because people just like I don't know enough about this. And but that really creates a space where anybody can just, you know, input some snips and say we're predicting, you know, input like a bunch of variants and say, Oh, we can predict whatever we want, right? There's a specific company, that doesn't even tell you what variance they're looking at, doesn't have any references. They basically just have a PDF of, you know, just the words. And they're just telling you, they're predicting everything about you. And when I like looked up - I spoke with but then, I say, how many variants are you looking at in total? They said, 83 in total. And I'm thinking we look at 83 million variants in total, right? It's just like, how are you getting? One, 100, you know, 1,000,001 conclusions from 83 variants. So the idea is, is that people don't understand what is going on and in and I don't think this company even knew that they're not doing it legitimately. I told them, but, you know, I don't think they want to hear that. But in any case, you know, I mean, there is - they are doing something a little different. They're doing like a hypothesis, stuff where, you know, they're forming a hypothesis, and sometimes it can be true, sometimes it won't be, right? But they're really trying to form very broad conclusions around stuff that doesn't have the evidence. But in any case, yeah, I'm just saying that it is a very complex field, the way that we're doing it, SelfDecode, they don't have to be - know what, you know, different things are in order to understand it, right? We're doing all the complex science in the backend, we have a bunch of machine learning scientists and AI scientists, and genomic scientists, and they just can look at the results. And you know, and understand it.

Matthew Blackburn 23:09
One cool thing that Tyler taught me how to do is you could search like, say, vitamin D receptor, and you search VDR. And I did that last week and I found basically, what it says alternative allele, does that mean a mutation? That's kind of my current understanding, right?

Joe Cohen 23:33
So we use that terminology, simply because the science used it. So we didn't want to kind of reinvent the wheel. So there's what's called a reference allele and what's called an alternative allele. And this is basically just the stuff that they determined is the reference alternative. I think it has to do with what was maybe the original allele a million years ago, whatever it is, but allele is just a, you know, a letter in your DNA. It's, you know, it's one of the variants. So there's the reference and alternative allele. And really, the only way to think of it, just don't think about the what it is, it's just that we say, here's the - here's the reference allele, here's the alternative allele. Here's what the alternative allele means and that's the only thing. Here's the population frequency. And the population frequency allows you to see how common or rare it is in the population, which could be useful in certain ways, right? 99% of people have varying, even if it's a risk variant. It could be very significant, by the way, but it's still like, well, 99% of people have this so I'm just like a normal person.

Matthew Blackburn 24:57
So is there - so you're just saying it, there's not 100% way to see, like, makes like, make sure I have 13 VDR mutations it's, it could be, if I have the -

Joe Cohen 25:10
No so the way that the way that these - the way that these companies - the way that other companies are doing it, and we used to do this, but it's problematic from a scientific perspective is they just look at the minor alleles, the minor is just the less common alleles in the population. Now, there's a few problems with that. What population are you looking for? So one, you know, the African population could be different than the Asian population and that's different than the European population. So just saying something is a minor allele is a little tricky. Now, a lot of times you have something that's a minor allele in every population. But having a less common allele does not mean it's bad, it could be protected. So we don't want to flag something as negative, which by the way is what Genetic Genie does, they flag, things that are less common in the population is negative, which is problematic. What we flag is, if there's a study attached to a trait, you know, a certain snip or variant that has shows that you're higher risk for something, and we show you what variant that is - is connected to that risk. That's the way that you should look at it, not in what's more or less common now, there is some value to looking at certain variants that are extremely uncommon, maybe like one 2% 5% of the population. And you might be able to build some hypotheses from that. But that's pretty advanced stuff.

Matthew Blackburn 26:48
Yeah, yeah. I notice on some of the articles, I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head, I think it was when you search vitamin D, you have like the individual reading for my account, like built in, like it would say, your genetic show this, and then it has like a little mini article about that. Do you know what I'm talking about? I can't think of a good example.

Joe Cohen 27:11
Yeah, so there's - there's okay, see, basically, you search for something, let's say you search for vitamin D. So there's many different things that you can, that you will get from vitamin D. Number one is, and this is a new feature coming out so let let you in on in a bit, you can look at vitamin D, and see all the things that it's good for, and, and how those and what your risk is for all those things. So you could see, wow, I've got high risk for certain things, and vitamin D is helping me with, that's kind of how our personalized supplement works now, we look at where your risks are. And then we take the supplements or the supplements that is good for those risks. And so we have that personalized supplement, but you'll be able to search for anything. So say, hey I wonder how this supplement is going to be working for me. But and you can just search for that and it will tell you all the things that it's good for. We already have that capability but it's kind of not as a feature, the feature is that we just give you a personalized supplement, but you will be able to, and you can click on any of the things that we show you. And you could see what it's what it's good for. But you could - you'll be able to search for it as well. But in terms of - Yeah, so anytime you come across a supplement or any lifestyle thing, or whatever you want to know about, it's just going to, we already have that capability built into the reports. But it's not in a way that you can just search for it and it'll show you very clearly. But what you're talking about is when you search for, let's say vitamin D, so there's a bunch of things that come up, there's a report on vitamin D. So we're typically looking at a polygenic risk score for whether you're predisposed to lower or higher vitamin D levels. There's personalized blog posts, where you can see, like, this is custom content that we've written for genes related to vitamin D, you could read about that and see what your specific variants are. So it's kind of like reading a blog. But in this case, it's personalized for you, because, you know, you could see what your variants are. And so that's really cool. And then there's, you can look at certain gene, you can look at genes and snips that are connected to vitamin D. And so there's different there's, you know, it gives you like a whole platform to really either do a deep dive or just look at things like that we give you directly from - that we've already done the analysis on we have like faces to make it much more simple. So you could really take it from very simple to as deep as you want to go though.

Matthew Blackburn 30:01
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I just went under DNA and the blog tab and I didn't know they're all listed there, because I was trying to find these personalized articles just by searching. And it's kind of difficult but yeah, says your personalized snip table. And so the other day I was dicking around with VDR for longevity. And basically it says I have one allele that's associated with longer lifespans in certain populations. That's pretty cool.

Joe Cohen 30:30
And you can also click on the topic, which blog posts you want to read about. So typically, the way that I recommend to you SelfDecode and genetics in generals, you know, and biohacking in general? I don't know if this is how people do it. But this is how I do it. You focus on a goal, what do you want to improve? And one goal at a time, you don't want to do I want to improve everything about myself in the next week, right? You have one goal every month, I have one goal in mind, what do I want to improve, you know, our main goal, and then maybe some auxilary goals, but they're kind of more in the back of my mind, I have one main goal. And it could change every month, every few months, whatever it is. And once I optimize it to a level that I'm happy with, I go to the next goal. And then I go to the next goal. And then I go to the next one. You know, every - literally every month is different goal, right? And so I mean, sometimes there's themes, because I will rotate my goals, and you know, come back to goals sometimes. But I always have one goal in mind. And so that's kind of how you want to use the site as well, what is your goal? Then look at that, go down that, you know, rabbit hole or whatever it is, right? Go, look, search of that goal, and get the information that you need to to help you optimize that goal.

Matthew Blackburn 32:07
That's great. Yeah, it's a really focused approach, otherwise, you're just spending a whole lot of time trying to do everything at once. And how you track your progress, I'm - I look at a lot of debates in the health community and right now, one of the interesting ones to me, is whether we should go - go off lab tests are our symptoms. And some people say lab tests are useless. Some people say symptoms are useless. And it's a really interesting discussion to me.

Joe Cohen 32:40
And some people say genetics are useless. And some people say everything's useless, you should just breathe in air and don't eat, right? It's just like, the answer is that everything is useful. It's - your DNA is super useful. Your lifestyle, your symptoms is super useful and your lab tests are super useful. That's exactly why we've incorporated all those things in SelfDecode. That's why - I mean it was a decision for me because like I said, they're all really useful. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, right? Your DNA is really good because it's, it can tell you so much information. It's just like this massive encyclopedia about you, right? And the negative to that is sometimes you can get lost or whatever, that's what I'm saying. Go to the part of the encyclopedia, that is exactly where you want to focus on, right? Don't start reading from A, like oh, okay. A, you know, our, our committee's like, no, go to exactly what you want to start reading about your body. And that, you know, for me, it's, again, different periods have been gut, mood, brain, cognitive enhancement, longevity, reducing cholesterol, whatever it is, just increasing creativity. Every couple of months is a new goal, but whether - whatever it is, but in any case so there's yeah, I think you want to - people should be focused. And the DNA is really good at just giving you a bunch of information. And it's telling you what your predispositions are, but I have predispositions for a bunch of different issues that either I'm not old enough to get, or two, I've biohacked it, right, I've been able to counteract and reduce the risk for that, right? That's - and so there's a lot of things that maybe I'm high risk for, like gut inflammation. And I see it on my genetics, but then I don't have gut inflammation now because I've been able to biohack that. And then there's a lot of other things that you know, I mean, you have the same DNA, whether you're 2 or 100, but the risk of cardiovascular disease, when you're 100, is going to be way higher than when you're 2 years old, your risk at 2 is basically almost zero, where's your risk at 100 is like, you know, 80% chance, and the next year, you're gonna die, right? Like, so your DNA is super useful but you also have to understand that the, you know, the environment and your age and a whole bunch of other factors have - come in to account, then your biomarkers are also very useful in terms of tracking certain things. Right? You could have - so I always, if you can track something, I always recommend tracking it. And then just looking at your symptoms is also super useful to also track but also to, it can give you hints sometimes, you know, a lot of modern medicine is based on symptoms. It's like taking information from your symptoms. And also, you know, based on your lifestyle, you can predict if you're a higher lower risk for disease based on the lifestyle risk, so you have the genetic risk and your lifestyle risk. And you could also look at your biomarkers, and that gives you a decent picture.

Matthew Blackburn 36:23
Yeah, I'm glad you you said you have the same DNA when you're 2 as when you're 200. Because we had a few people asking, Can you change your genetics? You know, I think epigenetics is blown up. You know, I think Bruce Lipton or a bunch of people have been talking about it for years. And I think the only way I mean, that's like advanced biohacking is like changing your genetics would be like with a CRISPR machine, right? Or they're looking into like, tinkering with people's DNA.

Joe Cohen 36:53
Either that or the vaccine. No, I'm kidding. But yeah, you're right, it is genetic, there's your genes and genetic expression. So the big argument with the vaccine is that mRNA vaccine is actually changing your genetic expression. But there's a lot of people thinking, it's changing your actual genes. This is not the conversation to weigh in on that. But there's, there's your genes, and then there's your genetic expression. What we're doing is showing you what your genetic predispositions are, what your genes are, and we're showing you how to change that through genetic expression. So we are also I mean, it goes hand in hand, right? If, if your genes were just fixed, and no, and you couldn't change that, what your genetic expression was, then no drug would ever work for you, no supplement, no lifestyle, everything that you do is changing your genetic expression. (Zoom audio recording cut out) I took thymine, and I was like, Whoa, this is just the massive like, this is exactly what I needed, right? And so ever since then, I've been making sure to get extra thymine.

Matthew Blackburn 38:26
That's awesome. Hopefully we're still recording I don't know why when I said recording again. Do you think there were any blood tests that are accurate because I'm really into the fat soluble vitamins, you know, A, D and K I think those are really important. And -

Joe Cohen 38:45
I don't think A is - I don't think A is very accurate. Vitamin A.

Matthew Blackburn 38:49
Okay.

Joe Cohen 38:51
Yeah, I don't - vitamin D, obviously, is accurate. Vitamin K I'm not sure to be honest.

Matthew Blackburn 39:03
Yeah, cuz the arguments that I've heard is like these are fat - they're stored in the fat you know, vitamin D is interesting because it's like in the fat cells but it's not only the liver, you know, or it's, I don't know, I guess they're all over but you know, it's it's kind of different with those because you can't look in the liver, look in the fat cells, or.

Joe Cohen 39:23
So vitamin K is an interesting one. I actually, if - when I look at my genetics, it says increased need. But I actually figured out before that that I needed more vitamin K. And so when I started eating like more animal foods, just, you know, I got away from more plant foods. I focused more on animal foods. I found that my gums were hurting. Like when I would floss, of course every night, my gums would hurt. So what the hell's going on here? And I don't know, I don't know how I figured it out. Maybe it was just through reading or whatever. I took, I just took vitamin K and it went away. And, and then I just realized, like, wait a second, and then I stopped and then every time my gum started to hurt when I floss, I just took vitamin K, and it went away. And so now I just take vitamin K every day, and it never hurts, because, you know, I'm taking it. So, I mean, you know, my, my genetics says, I have an increased need for vitamin K. So I guess that's what's going on here. But yeah, I mean, so there's, I don't know, there's different ways to know if you're deficient in something, obviously, you could look at your symptoms, you could look at labs. Again, I had a different with thymine. I found that out through my lab, we have a genetic report now. But I, you know, and then vitamin K, just through my symptoms, but you know, a lot of things that could have just figured out from my genes, and that would have helped me out.

Matthew Blackburn 41:09
Yeah, interesting. I think that's really important for vitamin D, like, I've been getting back into that lately. And I think the general recommendation is to like test every quarter when you're supplementing so that you know, like, if you need to stop, or if you need to up your dose, either way, to go off your 25 OHD test.

Joe Cohen 41:31
Yeah, I don't really, I don't really take vitamin D supplements. I just get sun. I like - I live in warm climates and -

Matthew Blackburn 41:43
Well have you heard - have you heard Joe, like the DHCR7 is basically the dehydrocholesterol, you know, big long word, or basically, it's a gene that works with the sulfation of cholesterol to make D3 from sunlight. And Tyler got me on to this, because basically, he measured is 25 D in the middle of summer, and he was low. And then he looked it up and he found that he had this mutation. And I don't know, he's homozygous, I'm heterozygous and we've been talking about whether, you know, it says understanding that homozygous is more of a big deal, usually than heterozygous. But that's one that I never even considered, because I guess there's some people that can't make, I don't know, if it's D3 at all, or as much, maybe a combination. From -

Joe Cohen 42:34
It's probably as much, right, it's as much everybody can make some D3. But there's all these kinds of things you have - I mean, everything is like, you know? Yeah, I'm sure there's a he's probably got something there, right? I mean, we have a D3 report so you could see, for me, I never had a problem. I, you know, mind says typical need. But, you know, there's all kinds of genes related to that. And it could be the vitamin D receptor that maybe you're not, it's not having as big of an impact, or it could be the creation of vitamin D. And I think that's, that's the way to do it is, he developed hypothesis. That's, that's something you could do with genes, too, by the way, you can develop hypotheses, but you want to check them. It's not a bad thing to develop hypotheses. I'm not against that, with genetics, I'm just saying it's very complex. A lot of times they can be wrong. But he might be on something if he's got certain mutations there. And he's out in the sun a lot in the summer, his vitamin D is not going up. He's onto something, you know what I'm saying. I developed a hypothesis with lectins. So we, and if you look up in SelfDecode, lectin sensitivity, you're gonna see it's the only report that says hypothesis on it. Because I'm like, I just need this. It's like, you know, one of my main hypotheses of genetics, it, there's no direct studies on it, but I had a lot of clients that I looked up and anytime I thought they had a lot of food sensitivities, or lectin sensitivity, I found that they had these variants in the cannabinoid receptors. So I was like, we got to do this and just, but you know, the team's like, there's no, like good hardcore science on it. I was like, just put hypothesis in the title. And so we have a hypothesis in the title.

Matthew Blackburn 44:39
I have it pulled up it says I'm typical leptin sensitivity.

Joe Cohen 44:44
Yeah, so you might not be leptin sensitive. Typical means that you're not - you're not lectin sensitive. Do you think you're leptin sensitive?

Matthew Blackburn 44:56
I don't think so. I mean, I yeah, I feel good on you know a lot of different foods? Yeah, the gluten one's interesting. You know? That seems to be a really individual thing.

Joe Cohen 45:10
Yeah. And so what about the gluten one? What is your gluten sensitivity show?

Matthew Blackburn 45:16
I think it's typical. Let me pull that up. Oh, maybe I didn't generate it. I don't know.

Joe Cohen 45:24
You got to generate. Yeah,

Matthew Blackburn 45:25
I think I was - yeah, non celiac. Pretty sure I was typical. We, by the way, we don't- Oh yeah, typical.

Joe Cohen 45:33
Okay, I'm increased. I'm telling you I cannot eat gluten and I cannot eat lectins, it floors me. Yeah. And what else is there? I mean, yeah, there's so much - there's so much information. That's what I'm saying is like you do the DNA test, you get all this information. It's crazy, right? It's just the - it's a no brainer. What is your BDNF levels like?

Matthew Blackburn 46:02
I think I had - I think I'm pretty average, like typical and almost everything. When we look it up, but I'm pretty sure.

Joe Cohen 46:11
No, you're definitely not typical in almost everything just refresh. Maybe you have to generate the reports, when's the last time you generated?

Matthew Blackburn 46:20
I usually stay on top of it. I think the other day there was like an error they didn't generate or something but

Joe Cohen 46:27
No, but there's new reports that we put out. If we update a report or there's a new report you got to generate it takes like 5 - 10 minutes to generate. In the old site they would generate in like a split second, because we weren't using a lot of data. And now it's like, you don't understand that it costs a lot of money to generate the stuff that's why we also don't do it automatically. Like the the crap that's out there - it costs like less than a fraction of a cent to generate everything that you'll ever generate, because they use like 100 snips.

Matthew Blackburn 47:09
Wow yeah. So Joe, on the BDNF, I brought up the gene and it looks like I have two alternative alleles. And then there's a bunch of articles but I don't see anything else.

Joe Cohen 47:22
There's the you probably have to just generate it. Generate all button.

Matthew Blackburn 47:27
Got it. Okay.

Joe Cohen 47:28
Now, there's also a search feature you just type in BDNF. I could normally share my screen quickly. I can do that.

Matthew Blackburn 47:39
Oh, wellness report. Right, it'd be under wellness. So likely typical.

Joe Cohen 47:46
Okay. My BDNF is lower and that's a big thing by the way. If you have lower BDNF is there's a lot of very important.

Matthew Blackburn 47:57
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, right? For people that haven't looked into it.

Joe Cohen 48:00
Yeah. Click Quicksprout for the brain. So if you're lower BDNF, you have to make sure you're getting enough exercise, light there's also a lot of supplements that increase BDNF.

Matthew Blackburn 48:16
Interesting, yeah, my - sleep spin, uh, you know, we all have issues. And I think people in the limelight, it's hard to talk about them sometimes. But I try to stay as transparent as I can, with people, my audience quote, unquote, or whatever. And my sleep used to be better in the last two or three years, I've had a lot of stress moves and stuff, but I'm trying to get my deep and my REM up with my Oura Ring. And I think I was just missing like movement and exercise. So I recently started like, the stationary bike with oxygen, exercise with oxygen, like breathing like the big bag like 93%. And I feel like it's improving my overall health. I feel incredible, just like 30 minutes a day on that thing. It's pretty cool.

Joe Cohen 49:00
Oh, exercise. I mean, I'm not sure exactly how much the - I take some oxygen too I don't know how that improves sleep. But exercise is is one of the best things for sleep. There's no question about it. And part of that by the way is through BDNF. So if especially if your BDNF levels are lower, it's even a bigger problem. Basically, you want to increase BDNF in the daytime, so that your body - when you increase BDNF in the brain, in the daytime, you sleep much better. So it's kind of like that's the rhythm you want to get into. And the way to do that is through bright light, exercise. And it's interesting because there's a whole bunch of ways that I know that my BDNF is low besides the genetics, it's like any supplements that's good for BDNF helps improve my mood. But here's the thing, if I exercise a lot, it helps replace Sun for the mood benefits. Interesting enough, like a lot of a lot of the mood benefits because they both are very good at increasing BDNF. And so yeah, big - BDNF is something that I really learned from my genetics actually, I wouldn't have known that, it's not my genetics. Collecting sensitivity was also my genetics helped me figure out what was the pathway there. And I rode through the cannabinoid system. Dopamine, what's your dopamine? Your DRD2 - type in dopamine.

Matthew Blackburn 50:39
Putting me to work here. Let's see

Joe Cohen 50:42
Yeah, I'm just curious.

Matthew Blackburn 50:46
Let me see, yeah, a lot of the stuff I've been seeing is like typical. Dopamine wellness reports, let's see.

Joe Cohen 50:55
Go to the -

Matthew Blackburn 50:56
Typical.

Joe Cohen 50:59
Go to the health report section. When you go to that it automatically will sort by all the highest risk.

Matthew Blackburn 51:06
Oh, there. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I didn't know you could do that. Okay. Yeah. So higher lactate, blood calcium, testosterone, that's good. More likely anxiety, sinus congestion, arachidonic acid, estradiol higher. Higher arginine, higher cavities, more likely food allergies, and brain fog. It's it's depressing when you get to this section.

Joe Cohen 51:35
Right but you can also look at the stuff that you have low risk or typical. Well, on second you're like, I'm typical and everything and then you're like, whoa, wait, no, it's not possible.

Matthew Blackburn 51:52
Yeah. Wait, I did - I don't know if you've heard of like, inside tracker. I don't know how good that website is. I think I learned about it through Ben or some biohacker. I don't know. But I measured like 43 biomarkers last week. I just got it back yesterday. And my HSCRP hasn't went down since my last one, like five years ago. It's like, been at a 10. And I'm going down this rabbit hole last night and it's like associated with periodontitis and all sorts of stuff like, you know, sudden cardiac arrest. But I guess -

Joe Cohen 52:29
Wait what was the number? What was numbers?

Matthew Blackburn 52:31
It was 10.

Joe Cohen 52:33
Oh, that is high. You know, you can upload lab tests to SelfDecode as well.

Matthew Blackburn 52:40
Cool. Well yeah, it's I think I might have mentioned it to you. But tomorrow, around this time, I have a little consult with one of your practitioners. So I'm really excited to delve in for an hour and see what they have to say.

Joe Cohen 52:53
Yeah, I didn't know that actually. Interesting.

Matthew Blackburn 52:55
Yeah, cuz you're doing kind of like a limited release where you're taking on a certain amount of people, right, to do one on one's? SelfDecode.

Joe Cohen 53:02
Correct, yeah. Yeah, we're gonna be doing that, exactly. We are doing that. Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 53:08
Think I'm one of the first so that's cool.

Joe Cohen 53:11
Oh, interesting. Yeah, no, it's - we're doing exactly, we're doing limited release. I do think that genetics goes, it does go well with coaching. Just because there's a lot of information. So no matter how much you - how you slice it, it's just this people - they're gonna people are gonna have questions, right? I mean, a lot of stuff you could understand yourself, right? But there's just, I mean, think about it, how much data you have in your DNA, right? And everything. It's just, it's your blueprint, everything about you.

Matthew Blackburn 53:48
Yeah, going back to labs for a second Joe, like on your website, there's the tab shop labs. And it's really cool. I think I might have started to order like home tests, which I didn't know existed. But are there labs you recommend that people that most people should get just to get an idea of what's going on?

Joe Cohen 54:12
Yeah, there's a lot of labs. I think I can give you some of the labs that maybe, I mean, there's kind of labs that I look for, I think a lot of the standard labs are actually pretty good. I wouldn't underestimate those then there's let's see what we got here. So-

Matthew Blackburn 54:38
Is it - because like making the connection by CRP, it could add possible connection to autoimmune disease. So I notice you have an auto immunity lab for like $700 for members. So it might be worth doing.

Joe Cohen 54:52
Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you - I guess it - okay so it comes back to focus. What are you trying to optimize right now, right? And every section, whether it's the genetics, or labs, or the lifestyle analyzer, you could pick a category and it'll show you, like for the labs, you can pick a category and show you what labs are relevant for that category. Right? I mean, maybe, like, I don't know, if you want to be public, but what, what are you trying to optimize? Right? That's, that's like the question that you have to ask or - and everybody, you're always trying to optimize - I mean, I'm always trying to optimize something. And your, your listeners also have to have, you know, we have to be able to understand, so you ask, what labs should somebody track? What are you trying to optimize? Right? Like, you have to answer that question. If you try to do your health, kind of like, well, probably everything I do, you know, on one foot, not gonna work.

Matthew Blackburn 55:59
Right. What I'm kind of doing, which seems like a little bit of a focused approach is I got those 43 markers. Okay, you know, this inflammation marker hasn't budged in five, six years so let's dive into that. And I, you know, on the on what you were just saying, you could categorize immune function and inflammation. And, and I think one of these has, you know, HSCRP but it also has all these other inflammatory markers in there. immunoglobulins panel, and everything that goes with that. So I could like, do a deep dive into that section, right?

Joe Cohen 56:40
So is inflammation - so sometimes you could, you know, sometimes you have a goal. And then you want to look at the markers for that goal. But it seems like you're saying that you found the marker, and now you want to make that your goal, right? Really, what is your goal, though, is that longevity? Is that?

Matthew Blackburn 57:02
I'd say longevity, yeah.

Joe Cohen 57:04
Okay. So that, okay, now we understand what your goal is. That's very important, right? I kind of understood from longevity, because it didn't seem like you had any big problem. And you're just like, well, I took some labs, and this came out not optimal. So that's my focus is, that means you're probably like longevity and anti aging. That's your goal and that's, that's a good goal. You know, sometimes I have that goal. Every couple quarters. I mean, it's actually, it's been one of my most recent goals. So it's a note - it's a note worthy goal, right? I probably had that goal in the past 15 years, maybe, like 15 times, or 10 times. And then I go to something else. But in terms of longevity, okay so inflammation is important, for sure, you want to keep track of your HSCRP. And if it's above one, then you got to get it down. And genetics is actually I'll tell you, so you want to look at this in many different ways, right? You want to look at, let's say your genetics to see what might be causing your inflammation, we're going to be having a disease section, which can like look, you'll be able to look at autoimmune diseases. We have certain conditions right now. But basically, you want to see what is high risk that might be causing higher inflammation. Right? I think this is probably a little more advanced. So this is kind of a topic that you might want a practitioner for. Right? Because you have a general kind of inflammation, you really have to try to find what, you can do it yourself, but it's just it's a little more advanced. So it could be related to certain nutrients, it could be related to a whole bunch of things, right? Maybe you might be deficient in nutrients, I would check your genetics to see what nutrients you might - there's a nutrient section there that you could filter diet and nutrition. And if you look at the DNA wellness reports, just click on diet nutrition, but that's kind of just the basic thing. Because again, your your goal is at the is longevity. So you want to see what nutrients are you more likely to be deficient in because that's a that's related to longevity. Right?

Matthew Blackburn 59:44
Right, yeah-

Joe Cohen 59:44
For me-

Matthew Blackburn 59:45
Diet, nutrition, right. Go ahead.

Joe Cohen 59:48
For me, zinc, vitamin K, folate. Those are and then iodine are some of the things that come up as like I'm more predisposed to be deficient. And I have been deficient on all those things.

Matthew Blackburn 1:00:05
Wow, I share your - I have the iodine ones to increase need.

Joe Cohen 1:00:12
Yeah. Folate, riboflavin - riboflavin, I didn't know about until - I mean folate, I also didn't know about until I checked my genes. But I've verified that through supplementing, and I am deficient in folate. Even though my levels were high, it, because basically, when I take methyl folate, like, if I don't take methyl folate, my mood worsens. And so, I - pretty sure that whatever you want to call deficiency, or whatever, if I take more of it, I feel better. Same with vitamin K, same with zinc. So those are three nutrients that come up. And then riboflavin I need to experiment with more to see. You know how that impacts like, I have to actually experiment with it. Like, I take it so I'm not worried about it. But I want to see what happened. I don't take it, if I take a lot of it. I should do more experiments there.

Matthew Blackburn 1:01:22
Yeah, I think B1 and B2 - thiamine, riboflavin are kind of overlooked. Like a lot of people - I know, in my vegan days, I was like B12, B12. You know, and maybe B5 and B6, but you know, one through - one and two don't get a lot of attention. And I think riboflavin is linked to like anxiety. You know, if you're deficient and then B1's like blood sugar regulation, right, like using glucose?

Joe Cohen 1:01:51
B1, I mean B1 has huge amounts of things. Blood sugar, fat, mitochondria. It's really super important for the mitochondria, all the B vitamins are actually quite important for the mitochondria. And I mean energy, it's just thiamine is quite, is super important. All the B vitamins are super important. I megadose - I megadose in every supplement that you could think of just to see what the effect is. So I know exactly what every B vitamin does. I felt biotin was like a joke, until I megadosed on it. Like holy shit, this is a real - this is not a joke. Like I just thought it was one of those things that oh biotin it's just for your hair and nails. Dude that shit is legit and then when I read up on it, I was like, it was - I felt like it was increasing my like - so I just took it because I just took it because I wanted to feel like I have to megadose on everything. And I just, and then I was reading up on it more like holy shit there's actually a lot of information of all the things that this could do. And one of the things I read is that it's the rate limiting factor for myelin. So if you take more of it, you're going to increase your myelin now i - anything that increases my myelin, generally has good results for me. I don't know about you know, so I just thought like okay, but that is really powerful like that was pretty powerful. It was too much but I take - I make sure I have small amounts of myelin now.

Matthew Blackburn 1:03:42
We sound similar in the megadosing category because I tend to do that and I, you know I'm leaning towards more going on blood tests from here on out, but you know, in the past I've just gone off symptoms and how good I feel taking something and if my body says enough, then I just stop it or lower my dose. Like I was with cod liver oil earlier this year, I got onto it. My body was just asking for like 30 to 50,000iu vitamin A day, and on here it says increased need for vitamin A. But also increased need omega-3's which is interesting

Joe Cohen 1:04:18
Interesting. Right that's very interesting. You gotta increase the I have typical need for vitamin A, it's never helped me. Like I don't take it it's useless to me. Actually, it's even worse for me because when I take vitamin A it competes with vitamin K2 and then my gums start to hurt.

Matthew Blackburn 1:04:47
Wow, what's interesting is like, for the last two years I've been diving like I told you before we started recording into iron research and iron overload and then recently iron deficiency anemia. And I think both could occur just depending on the person's genetics. And if whether you know, they're raised on cereal or so many factors, but a lot of the cases of anemia, you could partially correct with vitamin A supplementation, it's interesting. So there's like this really deep connection between like iron and vitamin A, and in my genetics, it says I'm like less likely to be anemic. But then on like 23andMe, or other places I've seen that I have - was it Hereditary Hemochromatosis? Which I think I searched on SelfDecode, I didn't see that.

Joe Cohen 1:05:38
It's something that we're going to be releasing, it's just the we haven't done it because it's a medical report. It's like regulatory reasons we haven't done it.

Matthew Blackburn 1:05:47
Oh wow.

Joe Cohen 1:05:49
We're going to be releasing it - it might be one of those reports that we have to see exactly how we're going to be releasing it. But we will be releasing.

Matthew Blackburn 1:05:59
That's good to know. Yeah, I'm most excited about that one. Because just trying to make the connections here with because a lot of your - a lot of things do connect when you look at them. It's not just like, you know, islands of information, you can really connect some dots looking at them together.

Joe Cohen 1:06:16
For sure.

Matthew Blackburn 1:06:19
So let's see, where can we go with?

Joe Cohen 1:06:21
So-

Matthew Blackburn 1:06:21
Oh, go ahead, Joe.

Joe Cohen 1:06:23
No, no, I mean, you asked me before I don't want to go - I mean, we went on a tangent, but you said what kind of labs should you measure and your goal was longevity, right? So some of the simplest stuff, you should be measuring, blood pressure, fasting, blood glucose, heart rate variability, resting heart rate. You can measure your sleep, see how you're sleeping. And you can do that with an Apple watch or an Oura Ring or whatever. So you got some-

Matthew Blackburn 1:07:03
HRV, you've had experience with heart rate variability, right? Because that's, I guess I gotta narrow my goals again, but HRV for the last couple of years has been horrible. Like I look at some of my friends and it's like 120, 130. Mines like, 30, 40 all night.

Joe Cohen 1:07:23
Oh that's pretty bad. Mine is also - mine is pretty high. I mean, it goes minus 120 to 130. On good days, on bad days - On okay days, it's over 100 on bad days and when I say bad days, it's if I'm drinking alcohol. It's like 80 - 85 the alcohol tanks it. If you if your HRV is low, stay away from any alcohol. Zero.

Matthew Blackburn 1:08:01
I stopped drinking. Yeah, I was doing like a shot of tequila at night, you know, for a while and experiment. And then I just stopped and I feel a lot better, even without, you know, one shots not a lot but for some people it is.

Joe Cohen 1:08:14
I feel like I have to stop drinking. I didn't, I didn't drink until for the first like 32 years of my life. And I moved to Tel Aviv. And I've just been, I mean, I've been working a lot like over 60 hours a week here. But it's so easy to work hard and also party. So it's just, it's just so easy. Because like everything is like a five minute walk. And it's like, oh, you just go here, come back. And so I've been drinking more but I really should stop, it ruins my sleep.

Matthew Blackburn 1:08:53
Have you tried biohacks to like cancel it out or counter that? Because I have some friends that have done that in Southern California. Like, you know party but like take handfuls of pills beforehand to try to like-

Joe Cohen 1:09:07
I do. I do balance it out. I do biohack it but you can definitely biohack it quite a lot. There's no question about it. It's just that I don't like - I don't know. It's just it's not good for you, right? And I mean, yeah, can you take - can you take a poison and you know, try to cancel it out? Yeah. But is that what you want to do, I mean? Maybe.

Matthew Blackburn 1:09:42
Yeah. I thought it was like B - like the B vitamins, activated charcoal - sometimes people do and-

Joe Cohen 1:09:52
Well, so there's two main ones that I think are very important for that. Thiamine and NAC. The rest of them I think are - there's some other ones, but those are the main ones.

Matthew Blackburn 1:10:11
Yeah, NAC was really popular with COVID. That was interesting. I've never taken it consistently.

Joe Cohen 1:10:20
Yeah, I used to take it for years, I stopped and I started. Now I don't take it, simply because I eat a lot of protein. I don't have a problem with getting enough cysteine in my diet. And I just feel like I take a lot of supplements now, because there's a lot of things I like to optimize, but-

Matthew Blackburn 1:10:41
I saw your story. It was like a handful.

Joe Cohen 1:10:45
Yeah, I take a lot of supplements. So I gotta be I gotta be very stingy with whatever comes in there. It's got to be - everything I have in there, I've got like, 20 reasons why I take it. Can't just be like NAC, you know, whatever. I don't know, there's got to be a bunch of reasons. NAC didn't make the cut, fortunately.

Matthew Blackburn 1:11:07
Yeah, on that topic. On SelfDecode, you could make a personalized supplement and it'll like generate it. I think mine is like 15 or 20 things with different dosages. It's kind of cool, based on your genetics.

Joe Cohen 1:11:24
Mhmm, yeah. Correct, yeah. And you could see why it's recommending each supplement, when you click on it, see what your risks are. Going back - do you want to go back to some of the labs?

Matthew Blackburn 1:11:37
Yeah, yeah, we keep jumping around. But it's all interesting stuff. But right.

Joe Cohen 1:11:42
So I'll tell you what I'm trying, I gave you some key ones, I'll tell you some of the things that I'm trying to track. And for longevity, my blood pressure is typically perfect. My HRV is very good. Like all the basic ones are pretty damn good. Now there's a few of them that are not maybe not perfect, or not ideal LDL cholesterol is one of them. Now there's a big debate about whether LDL has an impact. And again, it's I know why my LDL is high. I just eat a lot of saturated fat from animal foods. That's it. It's very simple when it just goes up in relation to that. So if I eat a lot of animal foods, my LDL goes up and since I'm eating mostly animal foods, my LDL is going to be higher. It's no, it's no mystery. Some people saying -

Matthew Blackburn 1:12:37
Yeah, sorry. Mine's 116. Sorry, as of last week, my LDL.

Joe Cohen 1:12:42
116 is not so bad. I don't think that's a problem. Mine is like mine ranges depending on how much saturated fat I'm eating. If I'm eating like ghee, or coconut oil, holy shit, it goes to 210, I'm not kidding. It literally goes to 210. If I just need like, animal foods, it'll just be, it'll probably be like, 170. If I eat more fiber, like a lot of vegetables, it goes down to like 145. And then, now I'm doing a couple of things that decrease it more, I want to see, well, I don't know, I'm trying to get it down to at least 130. I don't think I'm gonna - with my diet, I don't think I'm gonna go below 100. I've also, not every supplement I want to take though, for example, I put Berberine not in because that's one of the best things for LDL cholesterol. But I found that it's in, I just started exercising. Like before that I was mainly doing push ups. Well, before the push ups, I only started the push ups like two months ago. Before the push ups I was not really exercising much I would I would go on walks. And then I play volleyball on the weekend. That was like my whole exercise. And a couple months ago, more than two months ago, maybe like four months ago, I started doing push ups, only one set, like one repetition a day. So well - so I do like, I don't know, I started at like 40 - 50. Now then I got to 80 - 90. But I decided like basically a week or two ago that I want to there's a bunch of things that I wanted to do. So I want to lower my cholesterol. I want to increase creativity and extraversion and I want to increase my testosterone and what else did I want to do? And just be generally healthier, right? So it's like the testosterone - like free testosterone and total testosterone, those are two things that I wanted to work on. And my LDL cholesterol and, you know, like I said, creativity, extraversion, whatever. So I felt like okay, I'm gonna start working out. My body is - is pretty good without working out. Just doing push ups, my body was pretty good. And when I look up muscle in SelfDecode, it says that I have a higher predisposition for muscle mass, which I do. So I think a lot of that, most of its genetic, and I think combined with a good diet. I think that's what, that's what contributes to that. But in any case, I also - so I started working out to do that. And I also started taking Berberine also, for the same goal anti aging, and also to reduce LDL cholesterol - besides the LDL cholesterol, it's a great anti aging tool. And my muscles are hurting when I work out. I'm taking Berberine and I was like, let me see what the hell's going on here. I researched Berberine and AMPK because it's an AMPK stimulator. AMPK actually prevent is like an anti muscle building thing.

Matthew Blackburn 1:16:26
Wow.

Joe Cohen 1:16:27
And so I was like, oh, shit, I gotta get rid of this Berberine. So I get rid of Berberine and then that problem stops. So now I need to take check my cholesterol, like what my numbers are when I'm working out. And I uploaded a picture before I started working out like just with the push ups. And people were like, holy shit. And so I'm going to be - I uploaded a story now - you know what it's like after a week. But my goal isn't to be a workout junkie. It's just to workout one hour a week. I think one hour a week when you combine it with like, because I'm still gonna be playing volleyball, I still go on walks. And so one, that one hour a week is gonna be like 20 minutes, but in the gym, but it's gonna be like, not like, you know, relaxing when I'm in the gym, just really using my time there. And in doing that three times a week, 20 minutes, three times a week, and I'm already feeling a big difference.

Matthew Blackburn 1:17:38
That's awesome. Yeah, I see you posting your your shirtless pictures on social media. They look great. It's working. Yeah, I recently my friend John inspired me to get into kettlebells so I bought a few of those at the local Walmart because that's the only option I have way up here in the boonies and -

Joe Cohen 1:17:58
Where are you?

Matthew Blackburn 1:17:59
I'm in northern Idaho in like a pretty rural area.

Joe Cohen 1:18:03
Wow, what makes you be there, like what's there?

Matthew Blackburn 1:18:08
I just like the fresh air and the quiet you know, there's no light or sound pollution, can't hear cars, where I live from my house. And you can see all the stars you know if it's not a full moon, and I have a lake and 20 acres and goats and chickens and bees. The homesteading thing is kind of fun.

Joe Cohen 1:18:29
It's your place like-

Matthew Blackburn 1:18:30
Yeah.

Joe Cohen 1:18:31
Those 20 acres?

Matthew Blackburn 1:18:33
Yeah.

Joe Cohen 1:18:33
Wow. You could start like a camp there.

Matthew Blackburn 1:18:38
That was the original - though, I mean, I hosted some underground retreats for just like four people or a couple people in the past, but it's just a lot of work. And I just, you know, I don't think I'll end up going that route. But I do have my own, you know, float tank hard hyperbaric chamber, it's like-

Joe Cohen 1:18:59
I like it. If I need some fresh air, I know where to go.

Matthew Blackburn 1:19:05
Come on up. Yeah, that'd be great. And back to Labs is hilarious because we keep circling-

Joe Cohen 1:19:12
Alright, back to labs. So when I check out my homocysteine, I have a tendency to higher levels if I don't take B vitamins, mainly B6, B12, B9. So I have my eye on that. It's - so what you're checking is going to be what you need to like if you check homocysteine 5 - 10 times and it's optimal, you don't need to check homocysteine.

Matthew Blackburn 1:19:39
What about this Joe? Like, say you're a weirdo like us and you're into biohacking and optimization and I know you say stick with one goal. But what if I want to just go crazy on labs? Like could I just get different panels every month? Just to kind of see if anything's out of range, or?

Joe Cohen 1:20:01
You can. So I don't think that's a in con - that that's contrary to the goal. So if your goal is longevity, I think first of all, you want to do a bunch of labs and see what's out of the optimal range. And then you could start tracking those labs and seeing what you're doing. How can you get it into that optimal range. Not every lab, like I'll give you an example. So my T3 was not good when I wasn't very healthy. I got that into the optimal range. Because one of the things that decreases T3 is inflammation oxidative stress. So when my inflammation oxidative stress went down, my T3 went up. And it's just been interesting because I saw like a slow and steady trend, increasing my T3 and the better, I felt, the more my T3 was. Now I've also taken T3, of course, and didn't just fix all my problems when I took it, but-

Matthew Blackburn 1:21:08
I have a bunch of - I have a bunch of cynomel here that I bought Mexican drugstore website.

Joe Cohen 1:21:15
Yeah, welcome to my world.

Matthew Blackburn 1:21:19
I probably have low T3 than if I have that inflammatory marker, it's going to be a really interesting journey to find out what's going on there.

Joe Cohen 1:21:28
So you definitely have to track your hsCRP, that's a longevity marker. And if you have a level of 10 It's obviously not from air pollution, I'll tell you that much but it's from other stuff. And you got to - you should, that's for you, I think that checking - I mean, you want to check a bunch of stuff like testosterone. How is your HbA1c has your vitamin D, B12, folate, ferritin, white blood cells.

Matthew Blackburn 1:21:56
Yeah, I got - I got most of that tested last week and my testosterone I was bummed. So in 2016 my testosterone was almost 1300 and uh-

Joe Cohen 1:22:09
Oh wow, what did you do?

Matthew Blackburn 1:22:11
I was just eating a lot of oysters and ground beef and and now it's 733 which is still pretty good, but went down a lot.

Joe Cohen 1:22:20
Yeah, I mean, it's still nothing to worry about, but 1300 I mean, that's high.

Matthew Blackburn 1:22:28
I wasn't on TRT, tell ya that.

Joe Cohen 1:22:32
You know what it is, you're not getting sun, the Sun breaks down testosterone.

Matthew Blackburn 1:22:37
Interesting. Yeah. Wow. At that time, I was nude sunbathing a lot in a cold stock tank, cold tub, so. I don't know.

Joe Cohen 1:22:47
Oh, wait, was this the summer?

Matthew Blackburn 1:22:49
Yeah, yeah, I was doing the whole Jack Kruse quantum health thing. So like, grounded. New day Sun, 55 degrees-

Joe Cohen 1:22:57
Wait a second, It was 1300 when when you were in the summer or in the-

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:03
It was in the - this was September when I tested.

Joe Cohen 1:23:08
So that was 1300 or 700?

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:11
1300.

Joe Cohen 1:23:13
Okay.

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:14
Yeah.

Joe Cohen 1:23:16
Yeah?

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:17
Yeah. It's interesting but yeah, and this last test was around the same time, you know, August, so just a month before. But um, yeah.

Joe Cohen 1:23:27
So wasn't the timing.

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:29
Yeah, but my sex hormone binding globulin is 52. This last test and so I'm going to get back on that metal route. I think boron is good to lower that, right? It's a lot of things.

Joe Cohen 1:23:42
Yeah, boron, I think boron to increase testosterone. You should upload your results into the the SelfDecode.

Matthew Blackburn 1:23:48
I did. Yeah. Yeah, I might do a whole solo show on my podcast after I do that console with, with the doctor should be fun. Yeah, but uh, so yeah, Joe, we have a lot of questions. Do you want to jump into some of those?

Joe Cohen 1:24:07
Let's do it.

Matthew Blackburn 1:24:08
It's quite a few. And my girlfriend actually asked a lot of good ones here. Let's see, "Prevalence of vitamin D mutations? So earlier, you were saying you could look up the prevalence? And is that what you would recommend? Look at that, like, do you want to see the prevalence of VDR mutations? It will say that or?

Joe Cohen 1:24:30
It's an advanced feature. It depends on how advanced you are. I think that's one of the things with genetics is that you could - there is a role for people who are not that advanced. Just look at the end results, but your anyone's looking at snips and developing hypotheses from it. That is an advanced feature. I do that myself. And you know, Dr. Panzner is doing it and you're doing it now. So I think it's cool. I'm all for it, but it is an advanced feature.

Matthew Blackburn 1:25:03
Okay, cool. Yeah cuz the whole vitamin D thing. So he - it's such a heated debate that I've been in the last few years. And this whole genetics piece just totally changes the conversation of vitamin D supplementation, and supplementation with everything. I mean, as the as the owner of a supplement company, that individual aspect to it is, is really interesting to me. Because then you're not just throwing the whole kitchen sink at somebody, you know, and saying, you know-

Joe Cohen 1:25:35
Yeah, 100%. And I think, again, we're there - we're here to give information, right? And, you know, you could, like we actually, we don't care about, like, you know, we're here for the information. And I think that, like you said, I think you hit it on the nail. They had the like, exactly, right, that all these arguments for the past 50 years. Diet, this nutrient, that nutrient, this thing, that thing. They like, every - I keep on seeing them. Different people have different tendencies, right? And, you know, I mean, how many times have you seen some supplements working for one person and not another person, right? I'm a big fan of supplements. But the fact is, is that sometimes they don't work for one, the same supplement doesn't work for every person, every person is different, right? Same drug doesn't work for every person, same, you know, there's certain things that are going to be good for everybody, right? Exercise on, like, in at least some dosage, right? It's not healthy if you're just sitting all day. The stuff that everybody agrees on, you don't have to look at your genetics. That's the rule of thumb. Right? If everybody says that at least 15 minutes of sun is good in the day or it's healthy to be outside, you don't need to look at your genetics. Now. You can look at it for like, is it better to be out for longer or less, right. But the same with exercise, some people are gonna do it should exercise 10 hours a week? Like, no 10 minutes a week. But everybody says exercise is important. I think, you know, if you have - when I wasn't as healthy, exercising too much was a problem. Like I, you know, people with chronic fatigue syndrome, things like that. But yeah, I mean, it's also exercises is a bit hard on my gut. So if I don't take care of my gut, it's a problem. But now it's not a problem, because I know all the strategies, right. So the idea is that, you know, you got to really look at what is individual for you?

Matthew Blackburn 1:28:11
Yeah, yeah, I was definitely under exercised, even though I was like moving a lot and taking care of animals like the even the rigorous cardio just a few weeks of that it's like, I feel incredible. It's awesome. So when I'm snowed in here in the winter, that's going to be a game changer to do hard cardio indoors.

Joe Cohen 1:28:31
Right, sure.

Matthew Blackburn 1:28:34
But you have a supplement company, right? Getjo, you have a couple products?

Joe Cohen 1:28:38
Yeah, so look, I mean, my philosophy is personalization. But you know, we have a personalized supplement. I think it's a little expensive, to be honest. I mean, it's a little, it is cool. You can pick whatever supplements you want, and look at what it's good for. You could delete, like any ingredients. So it's very dynamic. I like it and that's cool. It's one way, but I also like, I built the formula that I just happen to do very well with based on my genetics, and some people are just always going to be like, "Joe, tell me what works for you." Like, okay, "Here's what worked for me, right? Here it is I have it in the package. There you go." And I just think that, you know, that's how some people want to operate. It's just what it is. So I've got, that's like a so I have Jo's Mood formula. I don't I don't care if anyone buys it or not. It's just what - it's something that works for me. It's like basically, it's also a general formula that I built because like, okay, here's some of the things that I think are - there's a lot of people that are just not going to do a genetic test. My mom and some of those people for whatever reason, they're just like, Ah, I don't know whatever. I think it's everybody should, course, but I just wanted like a formula that I can just like give to people, friends or whatever, right? If they're having a mood issue. So that's kind of, I only have two supplements. One is the mood thing and the other one is just an ingredient that I, it was my favorite supplement, but I couldn't get it anymore. So I had to just create it. It's Joe's resistant starch, where it's just - it's a resistant starch. It's not filled with lectins, like the potato starch crap that they sell or the green banana stuff. And that's like, my number one supplement for having butyrate. How much do you know about butyrate? Is that something you know about, a lot?

Matthew Blackburn 1:30:43
I used to look into it a little bit, but not too, not too much.

Joe Cohen 1:30:48
All right. Butyrate is like, yeah, exactly. There's something about it. Yeah. But butyrate is like the number one thing, I think is like, it's incredible. And it's just something that there's so much information about but the more you read about butyrate, the more you'll see that how incredible it is. Now, I've tried to take butyrate pills, and it's disgusting. It's literally disgusting. You're gonna you're gonna throw up, if you take butyrate pills. And I'm - so it's funny this, there's this new study that came out and - I saw it in Science Daily or whatever. It came out in frontiers. I think the journal or one of the I don't know, came out in some journal. But it was basically saying like, the title was like this targeting the microbiome fixes, food allergies, and sensitivities, whatever. I was like what, you know, I have a lot of food sensitivities. I'm like, What is this thing? Right? So I look at the article. And, you know, they're talking about butyrate, I'm like, shit, this is the - this is the thing that makes the biggest impact on my food sensitivities. Right? And then they're saying that, you know, butyrate is traditionally very hard to take, because it tastes like shit. And you get nauseous from it. Right? And different words they use and I was like, yeah, 100%. I agree. So they have this formula that it doesn't taste bad, right? That's why they have this, you know, this new formula, they're going to try to take it through FDA trials, whatever it is. I'm like, thinking, what, what do you need this formula, when butyrate is when you take resistant starch, your, your gut already has a butyrate factory in it. All you need is resistant starch. That's it. And it makes your butyrate factory like, you can create as much butyrate as you want from that resistant starch. And what I do is I - I've taken pills, and try to, you know, see what - how does that relate to like the powder. I literally had to take, like 18 pills, to get, to get like an equivalent of like, 40 grams, 40 grams of powder is just the starch, you can either take it in one shake, perfect. And I'm like, you know, I'm taking and I was like getting like, the backdrop from all these pills. I've literally, I've taken 1000s of pills, though, because I wanted the butyrate but then I just stopped and I said, screw this, I'm just gonna, you know, this resistant starch way better without the nausea and creating the butyrate in your, your colon. And that gets through to the bloodstream across the blood brain barrier. So you get all the butyrate you need. And way more like you really you got this butyrate factory in your colon. Whereas if you're, yeah, there's no need to swallow it. So I think butyrate is like the number one thing, the only way to really get it into your system in quantities that have a big impact is through - without getting super nauseous, and without spending a ton of money because the butyrate supplements are also very expensive, is through the resistant starch. That's that's the only other supplement I have.

Matthew Blackburn 1:34:25
That's awesome. Isn't there like a MCT oil connection to butyrate? Or am I thinking of something else?

Joe Cohen 1:34:35
Not really no. So-

Matthew Blackburn 1:34:38
You didn't change your - I thought that increased in butyrate production or something, but maybe I'm mixing up something I read.

Joe Cohen 1:34:46
I don't think so no, it's increased ketones. But I mean the ketones and butyrate are actually quite similar. So meaning like they have very similar health benefits. So like any benefit that you think about ketosis, now the thing is, is in order to get into ketosis in a big way, and get like deep into ketosis, where you're getting a ton of ketones, you need to, like, never eat any carbs, which is not the healthiest thing. And even you got to be low and put, like, you got to do a crazy diet of like, 80% fat, you know, and it's just too crazy. But even then you're not getting the same level of ketones as you as you are butyrate. Like you can really ramp up butyrate and have like a massive butyrate factory, whereas the ketones - to get into ketosis, there's a limit. You're never gonna get hypoglycemic. It's the same impact. So these things, these molecules feed the brain and their backup energy source. So if you take MCT oil, you got these ketones. I've taken a ton of MCT oil, I like ketones, I like butyrate. I've taken a ton of MCT oil, it causes my stools to become blurry. I used to have that predisposition for gut inflammation. The like, it just like triggers Crohn's disease in me or something. I don't know what the hell's going on. But it like if I especially if I like, bring up the Octane Oil, the C8 Oh, it's terrible. Right and then it also it's nausea and bloody stool. So I stopped taking that stuff.

Matthew Blackburn 1:36:44
Yeah, I think it was my first or second Bulletproof Conference. I don't go to them anymore. But years ago that I was drinking like that fat water. I think it had like MCT in it. And that was like combining that like keto prime and I was just popping things like candy walking around, Unfair Advantage, whatever. And I was like, felt like I was on crack. It's like, alright, this is not a good feeling and my stomach's feeling weird.

Joe Cohen 1:37:11
Diarrhea, seriously, you get diarrhea. I got diarrhea, bloody stools, and nausea. And then I just felt a little weird, like getting increased my body temperature too much. I was like, "What's going on here? I can't do this anymore." But butyrate has all the same benefits without any of those negative effects. So yeah, it's a backup energy source. You won't get hypoglycemic. If you've take it - if you get that butyrate. That resistant starch.

Matthew Blackburn 1:37:47
Awesome. Yeah, I'll put a link below so people can check that out. So another iron question. I don't know if you've looked into this, but is there genetic causes for anemia, like there is for iron overload? So I guess like-

Joe Cohen 1:38:04
Oh, yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 1:38:05
Is there the reverse of hereditary hemochromatosis?

Joe Cohen 1:38:08
Everything that you can think of, pretty much. If some people have it in the population and some people don't? It's genetic. Right? I mean, almost everything is genetic to some degree or another. It's just the question is what degree and you know, but yeah, it's definitely the predispositions for lower iron. We have a report on that too. Click on iron.

Matthew Blackburn 1:38:35
Oh, I didn't see that. Lower iron, because that's interesting. Iron.

Joe Cohen 1:38:42
Yeah. If you type iron, they'll say if you have a typical need or higher need.

Matthew Blackburn 1:38:47
Okay, yeah, mines. Typical.

Joe Cohen 1:38:50
Mine's also typical.

Matthew Blackburn 1:38:51
Interesting. Nice. So the one of the most common questions, I think this was the number one asked question, "Is our genetic information safely stored?" So people hear, you know, artificial intelligence and freak out and I think, you know, they're concerned that they're going to have a clone made of them. And my personal belief is they already have all of over information. And you know, there's nothing really we can hide, but maybe some people are like, why make it easy? I don't know, what are your thoughts on all that?

Joe Cohen 1:39:27
Well, we're very careful about that stuff. So we - that's one of the things you need to be careful about, though, in the sense that if you want your information to be secure, so a lot of these pop up companies, the small companies, they don't do any security stuff. And we know it's very easy to see if they're doing it. We have a business to business thing where we allow other companies to license our technologies. So not only do we have a duty to the consumer, we also have to worry about the other companies. So we take a lot of security steps, we've had a lot - we've had a some companies do penetration tests and security audits on our stuff, like some very anal companies and we pass, right, like, it's not a it's not a simple thing. But so that security is very important. Privacy, we are HIPAA and GDPR compliant. The other companies are not HIPAA, GDPR compliant, tell you that much. But also, we don't sell the data. I mean, there's some companies have that as a business model, like 23andMe. And then other companies don't necessarily have it as a business model, but they still they send the data goes to China, they don't tell you that. But it's kind of like you buy a you know, you buy some - a phone, where does it come from? China, you buy whatever, genetics is also cheaper to do in China. So a lot of companies do it in China. But they don't tell you that, of course, because you'll never send your data to China. But ours is in the United States or Europe. So we don't send any data to China. But so that's kind of some of the big problems is either sending the data to China. Not having good security, or privacy, and, or as a business model selling the data. But I think people need to understand that yeah, even selling, selling the data is not a big thing, if you're not a huge company, because very few - nobody really gives a shit about - even like, it wouldn't even be a business model if we wanted it to be, which we don't. But just because you need like, I don't know, a million people just to even start getting, like, into that territory. Because again, 23andMe is already selling it. So they got a market they got 13 - 50 million files. You know, it's like, what your if they they need to sell somebody, you're gonna go to 23andMe. Right, what are they like? We have 100,000 customers, which is what we have. It's not even like something that we think about. But again, we in our terms of service, we don't do that. We say that we don't do that. So we're not allowed to do that. And I'm against as well, I don't think that should be the business model. I, you know, I think giving people good information. And, you know, making sure we're profitable is without selling data is the main thing.

Matthew Blackburn 1:43:01
Yeah, one of the more interesting points that I've heard about this is, you know, that they could - people could potentially create a bio weapon that's tailored to people's genetics, but I kind of feel like they've already done that. Right?

Joe Cohen 1:43:19
I think that is possible in the future. I don't. I don't think that they have that now. But it is possible in the future, I think because they need to do a study on that. I don't think they've done a study on you know, who's more sensitive to novichok or sarin gas. But if you technically, just like you could see if you're more likely to be deficient in vitamin A, you could see if you're more you know which chemical agent you're more sensitive to now, I don't know if that's a problem. Unless you're Kim Jong Un's brother, right. So yeah, Kim Jong Un's brother, don't get any genetic tests. Right. I don't know what to tell you.

Matthew Blackburn 1:44:14
That's funny. Yeah, the whole the AI aspect to it's interesting to me because I had been, you know, watching like transhumanism documentaries - actually went to one of the rallies with what's his name? He has a crazy name Zoltov or something like that. Think he ran for president in the Transhumanism Party. Zoltan. Yeah, I had pizza with him after like a transhumanism rally. Just like this would be an interesting, you know, conversation. It was just a small group of like, eight of us. And here's an interesting guy. They were all about, you know, extreme biohacking to where, you know, bionic organs was an interesting conversation I was having with them but they were all, everyone I was eating with, they were like, yeah, I would switch out my, you know, my heart to just have it never stop.

Joe Cohen 1:45:07
Yeah, I think that's, that's too extreme from my. fpr my pace. I mean, I don't know. I mean what I don't think the technologies are there that justify the risk, right? If it were the case then I'd say yeah, but I think that, you know, the soft stuff, the biohacking changing some gene expression with some good lifestyle supplements, diet, that's where I'm at.

Matthew Blackburn 1:45:39
Yeah, yeah. Once you start switching parts out and planning stuff, the neuro link thing is really interesting. I can't tell if that's real or just a big marketing thing.

Joe Cohen 1:45:51
It's a big marketing hype. How many times have you seen them say that self driving is out? It's here, it's here we need a software rewrite. Just no, no, it's here, I'm 100% certain 100%. It's here. Doesn't have a filling butt it's like level two, autonomy.

Matthew Blackburn 1:46:19
Yeah, I was watching a video, Elon last week. And he's like, I think he was talking to Joe Rogan. He's like, "Yeah, we just take out a piece of the skull, and then just replace it and these wires go very carefully into your brain." Just like, Is that really possible?

Joe Cohen 1:46:34
I don't trust anything that Elon says, in terms of like, what's like the timelines, or anything. I don't know. It's like, he's always way too optimistic. I think it could be possible, but they don't - I don't think we're very close to that. Right?

Matthew Blackburn 1:46:58
Yeah. Let's see, someone asked, "Top things you can do to support MTHFR mutations." That's the first one I heard about and then the COMT learned about from Tyler and then, get into all the other ones, but.

Joe Cohen 1:47:13
I think, I think people are a little too focused on the MTHFR. To be honest, I do have that variant, by the way. And so, but I think people are a little too focused on it. Right? Especially if they have like one variant, I have 2 of the varients. What do - what do I do for it? I just take methylfolate, end of story. It's not rocket science. It's just there - there's like, there's other information on it but it's a lot of hypothesis stuff. Like riboflavin. I mean, riboflavin has some good information, I would say just - so there's two different things with MTHFR. Right? One is that as long as your homocysteine is not high, there hasn't been any studies that showed that it's negative. So everything and beyond the if you have low, if you have you know, good range of homocysteine is hypothesis space. Now, some of that could be correct. Some of that can be wrong. The only two things that, you know, really have some kind of evidence are riboflavin and methacholine. And I think those two things, some people have said other things. Again, the other stuff is more hypothesis driven. And could be interesting to read about but I think you know, methylfolate is, is good enough.

Matthew Blackburn 1:48:53
Awesome. Getting back to controversial territory. I saw recently you posted some interesting stuff about seed oils. I know the last couple years, I think in the last like year especially there's been just a huge campaign against seed oils. And I think you pointed out that the fatty acid composition of canola oil is actually better or the same as olive oil. Just interesting.

Joe Cohen 1:49:27
It's very similar actually. No, that's a fact you can look it up anyone can look it up. Because people are so it's a complex topic, but people are ragging on like no oil. Like I always thought canola oil was the worst thing. And then I looked, I looked it up. I was like what the canola oil was probably like 90%, linoleic acid. Based on like what everyone else thinks. Like whatn no can't be right. It's like 50% oleic acid, which is it's not too different from olive oil, or it's 60% or something. It was - let me see exactly what percentage it is canola oil.

Matthew Blackburn 1:50:15
Yeah, oleic acid is founded in olives, largely.

Joe Cohen 1:50:19
Yeah, and avocado. So it's about 60% oleic acid. Seriously, and then 10% is ALA and that's like a healthy one. That's what's found in flax and chia seeds, the omega3. So 10% of it is omega3, 60% is oleic acid, which is found in the avocado oil and olive oil. So the actual - actually the percentage of fatty acids is not very different from, with canola oil. I was just always like, I don't understand. I mean, okay, here - here's a trick question. Grapeseed oil, and I didn't know this before, so grapeseed oil, would you say it's better or worse than canola oil?

Matthew Blackburn 1:51:09
Better?

Joe Cohen 1:51:11
Better. Why? Because you've heard so much bad stuff about canola oil. Grapeseed oil is the worst one. By far, not even close. It's like, okay, sunflower oil or canola oil.

Matthew Blackburn 1:51:26
Sunflower.

Joe Cohen 1:51:28
Is better or worse, better?

Matthew Blackburn 1:51:30
Better.

Joe Cohen 1:51:31
Sunflower oil is the second worst. Yeah, it's like you look, I remember like looking at the ingredients, sunflower oil - okay, this is not too bad. Grapeseed oil. They don't they- they don't want to say canola oil because it got so much bad press. But actually, those are much worse. Grapeseed and sunflower.

Matthew Blackburn 1:51:54
Wow. I have a bunch of you probably seen this, kava tinctures. And these companies are using sunflower oil as the base. It's interesting.

Joe Cohen 1:52:03
Right. Because they would never used to know oil because of how much bad press it got. But it's just bullshit. It's it - canola oil, I would take no oil any day of the week over grapeseed oil or sunflower oil. Right? I mean, it's just facts you look at the facts. What are the facts? The facts are that canola oil is 60% oleic acid and oleic acid is better than the linoleic acid, which is found in grapeseed. And also I looked at studies showing how easy it was to oxidize. And grapeseed oil and sunflower oil are oxidized easier than the canola oil because because canola oil has higher levels of oleic acid.

Matthew Blackburn 1:52:54
Wow, yeah, the oxidation of fatty acids is a really interesting rabbit hole. Because they each have different temperatures right in which they oxidize. But a lot of them are like over 200 degrees fahrenheit, right?

Joe Cohen 1:53:10
Yeah, there's different temperatures, there's a bunch of different factors. But olive oil is better than canola oil. It is healthier. There's no question about that, especially the extra virgin olive oil. But it was just interesting to see that the fatty acids are actually very similar between olive oil and canola. There's some misconceptions, I think about canola oil. But I think it's it's way overblown, right. Now again, I think if you olive oil is going to be much healthier. And I would choose olive oil, but I think canola oil was overblown. I don't, it's hard to know. So I'll tell you the thing with vegetable oils. When you look at the research, you don't come to a conclusion that vegetable oils are that bad. Any of them really, right? But I spoke to Mercola he was telling me some stuff. A lot of it. It's hypothesis stuff and it could be right. It could not be, we don't know. It's just like, hypothesis, right? So - God damnit, all these articles that I read saying that you know how bad it was, would start talking about a high - like you could see when somebody's already talking about hypothesis. They're just like, the whole evidence was, here's a graph of disease. Here's a graph of vegetable oil consumption, and it's going up. But what they don't like basically vegetable oil consumption is also you could use the same graph with anything. There's -

Matthew Blackburn 1:54:47
Air pollution.

Joe Cohen 1:54:47
Something - air pollution, right. Carbon dioxide, the amount of methane from cows. I mean, you know, heavy metals in the environment. You know, what the hell's going on? Probably a little bit of everything.

Matthew Blackburn 1:55:10
Yeah, cuz I sell vitamin E Joe and like, for the last two years, two and a half, whatever. One of the things I've been educating people on is like, there's that vitamin E and PUFA relationship. And that seems pretty well established in the literature where your requirement for vitamin E goes up with the amount of omega3's you consume, or, you know, omega3's and omega6's. And so if someone is consuming a lot of omega3's, I think it's smart to supplement vitamin E. They're gonna do that.

Joe Cohen 1:55:40
Correct. So it's part of the argument is that these vegetables stay into your - in your lipids for years, and they can oxidize there as well. And, you know, taking more antioxidants could theoretically help that. But I mean, what we do know is I think what everybody agrees on is, eating a ton of packaged foods is not a good idea. Everyone is like no packaged foods, packed with sugar and vegetable oil was a great idea. Very healthy. If you're eating, like, if you're eating donuts, Entenmann's donuts, not a good idea, I don't think anyone's going to tell you that that's healthy. And just too much packaged foods with too much crap or whatever it is. Vegetables, staying, you know, staying, staying in shelves for who knows how long and you know, then from the shelf, like, it's just, they also cook it with high heat. It's not a good idea, right? I'm not taking - I think it's probably overblown still. And I think there's come misconceptions there. Like you would like read about grapeseed oil and be like, Oh, it's probably better than canola oil. Like, no, it's not.

Matthew Blackburn 1:57:02
I just looked up the smoke point it can oil it's 400 degrees fahrenheit. Says good - you know Dr. Google, good for high heat purposes like deep frying. (unintelligible) Really?

Joe Cohen 1:57:22
Yeah, the smoke point has nothing to do with how easy it oxidizes. So they've done studies on how easy it oxidizes like a lot of - there's a couple of factors with the oxidation. It's the fatty acid profile. But it's also how many antioxidants it has. So canola oil doesn't have a lot of antioxidants, whereas olive oil does, especially extra virgin olive oil. So that's kind of where the big advantage is, it has like healthy polyphenols. Right? Technically, theoretically, if you add in like a bunch of antioxidants to canola oil, or you cold press it and add in antioxidants, then it's just cold pressed that in canola oil is not very common.

Matthew Blackburn 1:58:09
Yeah, so I thought canola has some vitamin E in it, right? A lot of them do.

Joe Cohen 1:58:15
Yeah, a lot of the oils have vitamin E, just because fat soluble in these oils or concentrations. But I think that, you know, if you cold press it, canola oil, and you would add in as much antioxidants or polyphenols that olive oil has, canola oil would be just as healthy as olive oil. Now, those are big caveats.

Matthew Blackburn 1:58:37
Sounds like a new potential health brand someone could make.

Joe Cohen 1:58:42
Exactly.

Matthew Blackburn 1:58:44
Trigger everyone. Yeah, I know, there are a lot of carnivores right now that are, you know, hinging their entire marketing thing around, seed oils are gonna kill you immediately, you know, eat all saturated fats. And I think it's an individual thing right? With the fatty acids that someone consumes based on their genetics and a lot of factors.

Joe Cohen 1:59:07
Yeah, something good has to do with. So I personally think, and I think it's extremely clear that LDL cholesterol contributes to heart disease, or cardiovascular disease, right? Now. I think the oxidized LDL is more important and there's a lot of other factors that that are quite important. So when I look at my risk, it's not high given that I do a lot of things right. You know, my blood pressure, my blood glucose, my HRV. There's a lot of stuff that's related to heart disease and the only risk factor I have is LDL, right, Max (unintelligble) LDL was good. The main one I have are the lipids. And that's pretty much from the saturated fat. There's some genetic predisposition for sure. but it's also the saturated fat. So for me, I don't think saturated fat is very healthy for that reason number one, let's look at saturated fat. Okay. Number one is we can look at my, we can look at my biomarkers, my LDL shoots up to the roof, right. Number two is how I feel. I was so - I bought into the whole saturated fat thing. And I was like, okay, everybody's saying coconut oil is a superfood. So I literally took coconut oil, I took like, a tablespoon of coconut oil. I'm like this is - this is the best thing ever. I've never been, I was never so sick in my life. And like brain inflammation, everything that you read about on these animal studies about what happens when you feed them high fat diets, I had all that, gut problem, brain inflammation like I was winded after like, you know, 10 minutes of walking. It was just the worst thing ever for me. And then I was like, okay, like, let me try four tablespoons a day. I, I felt better, but still not very - what the optimal levels zero tablespoons of coconut oil, it turns out, right? For some reason ghee was better for me. But even then, not optimal. I don't know what out like. So based on my experiments based on my biomarkers, not very optimal for me. And what does my genetics say?

Matthew Blackburn 2:01:37
Yes, I was cooking in like duck fat and camel fat for a while. There's a lot of different fats people could use for cooking eggs or whatever.

Joe Cohen 2:01:47
Yeah, but I just decided that all that stuff is not right. Like, all that all those arguments about saturated fat and it's good for you. I don't buy it, not for me. Right. Yeah, so I. I'm not I'm not a fan.

Matthew Blackburn 2:02:10
Yeah. Interesting. What are your thoughts on like total cholesterol because the late the wild oregano guy, Dr. Cass Ingram that I had on my show before. He was saying when people got below a certain number of cholesterol he like, like vegans or vegetarians, he was afraid of them having a myocardial infarction, you know?

Joe Cohen 2:02:31
I don't buy it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:02:33
Really? Wow.

Joe Cohen 2:02:34
No, it's bullshit. No, I mean, look, you gotta really - like veganism, I don't think it's a healthy diet, right? However, the whole colon cancer movement, and like Forks Over Knives, and China Study and all that stuff. I do think if you ask me my opinion, I do think that these vegans have lower cardiovascular disease. And again, that there's studies to back it up. And I think that that has to do, there's a lot of like, especially if they have like a whole foods plant based diet. I do think they have lower cardiovascular disease. There's a lot of anecdotes, there's a lot of things. But there's not only cardiovascular disease, number one, and I think there's also ways to have low risk of cardiovascular disease while still consuming animal foods. And you know, the vegans will say no, that's not possible. So I'm definitely - don't buy into veganism. But whenever there's too many absolutes of like, no, they're the veganism is terrible in every way, and there's no benefits, and nobody does well in it, and 100% of people are going to be sick on it. Like that's too absolute, right? If it was really that absolute then nobody would be doing it, except the diehard animal rights people, but it's pretty much, I do think there's some merits probably cardiovascular disease would be that, and they've done studies on it, right? And, but I think there's other problems with it. And you know, I, it doesn't work for me, I'll tell you that much. I would be very, in avery bad shape - I tried it out. I have a fruitarian friend, Joe. He's really smart, especially with genetics, but I haven't seen his teeth in years. I don't know how his dental health is going. But he's very smart. He's fruitarian. So it's interesting. Interesting. No, I think - I don't think he can be too healthy on a fruitarian diet, though. That's that's way too wacky. I mean, but that's not a real thing. Nobody's really - I haven't seen anyone really advocating for fruitarian diet. Except, like, really wacky people.

Matthew Blackburn 2:04:55
You're in therapy people.

Joe Cohen 2:04:58
I don't know. I mean, there might be something through the urine stuff. I wouldn't dismiss that.

Matthew Blackburn 2:05:05
They're used in cosmetics, urea. Yeah.

Joe Cohen 2:05:08
Yeah as long as it has some antibacteria probably, who knows. But there's, oh, I had colon cancer on my past podcast. All the vegans - like that was the worst rated show ever because all the vegans were like, "This is the worst thing I've ever seen." Like, I was the only guy that brought him on and started like, chart, you know, challenging and I'm like, he's like, you know, whole foods is a plant based diet. I'm like, Dude, I did a whole food plant based diet exactly how you said, and I felt sick and worse. Never. He's like, No, it can't be -- and I know a lot of people like that.

Matthew Blackburn 2:05:52
Were you eating a lot of beans at what point, Joe? Because I feel amazing eating beans. Not all day long, but just once a day or twice a day.

Joe Cohen 2:05:59
You're not lectin sensitive, that's why. Of course you do. No - I, yeah, I tried beans. I tried no beans. I tried everything. I've megadosed on every type of bean you could think about.

Matthew Blackburn 2:06:15
Yeah, because the soluble fiber things interesting. There's like a bean diet woman out there that's saying it lowers adrenaline, you know, otherwise just recirculates if you're deficient in fiber, it's fascinating.

Joe Cohen 2:06:29
I mean, yeah. I don't know, man. Bean diet person should meet the fruitarian, should meet the carnivore, we should have them all in one room.

Matthew Blackburn 2:06:45
Oh, this is a good question, Joe. And we kind of touched on it but your thoughts on epigenetics? And can we heal our DNA? So in other words, can we just drink Ayahuasca and heal our mutations - no, I'm just kidding.

Joe Cohen 2:07:02
Exactly, no, I rephrase it slightly differently. But yes, the answer is you can counteract your genetic weaknesses through epigenetics. But everything you do is changing your gene expression.

Matthew Blackburn 2:07:19
Okay, awesome. Yeah, cuz I think there was like, when I was heavy into the new age, there is this idea that you could like, actually change your DNA with like meditation and visualization and stuff.

Joe Cohen 2:07:34
The DNA itself?

Matthew Blackburn 2:07:36
Yeah.

Joe Cohen 2:07:38
Only vaccines can do that. No. I don't know of any other way. Vaccines and CRISPR.

Matthew Blackburn 2:07:48
Right.

Joe Cohen 2:07:50
The vaccine part is a joke.

Matthew Blackburn 2:07:53
Yeah. Yeah, I had COVID twice. I'm curious, your thoughts in this Joe. Like, I was kind of self conscious because I, you know, the first time I got it earlier this year, I was down and out for three days. And the second time I got it was like a month later, I was down and out for about five, six days. And just like full body fatigue, like, never felt that way ever, with the cold or flu. So it was something new. But it made me look at myself, like self reflect, not like an overly judgmental way, but like, doing all this stuff. What's the deal? Is it vitamin D deficiency? And, you know.

Joe Cohen 2:08:31
I wouldn't reflect too hard on COVID because, I mean, there's a lot of certain - there's a lot of things that can make you more vulnerable, based on your genetics, we can't have a COVID report, because the FDA would come down on ass, but we had one, and we got rid of it just because it's too high risk. And yeah, we just but so we can't do COVID report even though that would be a good one. But we did - you can look up individual snips. Right, this is a good place to look up individual snips. And that's exactly what I did. And I was like high risk for pretty much everyone I looked up like 80% of them. And I like I'm very high risk for COVID I don't know, based on my genetics, it's very clear based on my blood type too, O has low risk, A+ has the highest risk, so I'm A+ and so yeah, I was coming into it and you know, I'm gonna be high risk for COVID here. I already knew that. So I you know, I have a pharmacy in my house already with all this stuff. And I just I just was like throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it. And I actually came out fine. So meaning like I didn't really, it wasn't that bad. But I know I would have been hit hard as hell if I, if I didn't really do a lot of stuff that, you know that I did. And there's a couple of good things like acetyl carnitine is really good for it. Thiamine is actually good for too if you type in thiamine and COVID, you'll see, I actually recommended thiamine to someone who had long COVID and they said, it's really, really important. But they want to - they want to do some trials on that. And I'm happy I got my thiamine. Like, I did some research on it before. I'm happy I did that, because I think I would have been knocked out really hard.

Matthew Blackburn 2:10:49
Yeah, the hyperbaric oxygen really helped me because I think I had the long COVID thing, and just the two atmosphere pressure of hyperbaric. And I was doing rectal ozone and methylene blue with everything I possibly could, at once.

Joe Cohen 2:11:07
I was doing methylene blue too. Hyperbaric would have been a good one. If I had access to it. That's a good one, I like that. It's probably one of the best things you could do for COVID.

Matthew Blackburn 2:11:19
Yeah, yeah. I just learned about like, like Doris Loh's really big in like high dose ascorbic acid, or just consistent ascorbic acid use and melatonin for COVID. And I guess they work together. Just kind of interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:11:34
Yeah, I took everything when I had COVID. Like, I was, I literally was taking this like whole bunch of stuff. Boom, boom. And I'm happy that I got it like later. I only got it like three months ago. So you know, because if I would've got in the beginning or I wouldn't, you know, it wasn't - it wasn't the same. I don't know. I just wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have known what to do as well.

Matthew Blackburn 2:12:03
Yeah. I don't want to keep you too long Joe, but just a few more if it's that's cool with you.

Joe Cohen 2:12:09
Sure, yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 2:12:12
Want to ask you one more like controversial thing. I don't know if you've been hearing about this, but the terrain verse germ theory, like battle that's been going on. And it's getting to the point where like, certain doctors are saying cells don't exist, DNA doesn't exist, never.

Joe Cohen 2:12:26
Wait what's the battle?

Matthew Blackburn 2:12:27
The battles versus was it Pasteur and Bechamp like terrain theory verse germ theory. Because the last two years, you know, with all these restrictions and mandates and you know, quarantines, I think people in the health community are getting so frustrated that they're just saying, this is all made up, you know, basically COVID is not real, it doesn't exist. They've never isolated a virus. Viruses aren't real, you know, but they're just taking it to such an extreme level to where, I don't know if you heard of this, but I'm just like, everything is not a conspiracy. Like, I don't know.

Joe Cohen 2:12:28
I don't know. I mean, you got to understand the way I think about it, I'm very skeptical of alternative stuff, and very skeptical mainstream stuff. I just I kind of just a very skeptical person. And so, you know, you look at me, you might be like, he's taking 100 supplements, he's like looking at all these things. You might, you might think I'm like, okay, not in the mainstream camp, but in certain things, I'm very skeptical of the alternative, right? I think both of them can go too far or be too dogmatic. So I tend to, I tend to not believe in, I tend to not believe in a lot of this stuff. In terms of COVID is not real. I mean, I look at if I'm not sure I just, I more like lean on my observations. And it's really clear that out of the people I know, I know, you know, everybody know, got COVID, It's a very different virus than a flu. I don't think you can, I don't see how you would deny that. It's very different. And it's - it's more harmful. It's just based on all my observations. So I'm not sure where people are coming from but based on my observations, I use the same approach with the vaccines like I look at the people I know who got vaccinated. And I see, you know, what are the negative effects from it? And I think it's blown out of proportion because I you know, what, I know 500 people have gotten vaccinated. I don't know anybody who had side effects after like two or three days, not a single person. Now I've heard stories from, you know, some brothers mothers or sisters who read on the internet that, you know, this person got a vaccine and they died six months later. I don't know. I don't have the medical charts, I don't know what else they had. Right?

Matthew Blackburn 2:15:24
Yeah. Yeah. Like my close friends, parents, they got the vaccine and they were saying that. Like, their dad was sick for like, a week. And, and he was fine before that. So it's interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:15:37
So a week. Okay, fine and then after a week? Was he sick from it? Three months? Six months later?

Matthew Blackburn 2:15:47
Yeah, yeah, I think it was fine. But yeah, it's interesting to hear like anecdotal stories of people close to you, that's gonna, I know.

Joe Cohen 2:15:54
But all you got to look at the people who you know, because if you look at, like, if you just hear stories, you don't know what the medical records are. I just so like, a lot of in these situations where I just don't know about or, you know, I'm skeptical of like, both, you know, obviously, the mainstream was too much of, you know, there's no absolute zero problems with the vaccines, or like, no side effects. And it's this miracle cure for everything and then the other side is like, everybody's dying, we're gonna, you know, half the population is gonna die in like six months. Now, you just got to, I know you gotta - I just look at, you know, what a facts here?

Matthew Blackburn 2:16:39
Right, yeah. How to prevent passing a gene you don't want to your children, that possible.

Joe Cohen 2:16:50
CRISPR. The only way.

Matthew Blackburn 2:16:56
I mean, if the parents like, optimize before they, you know, conceive, that's like, like, get labs done and, you know, do all the stuff and take-

Joe Cohen 2:17:09
I don't think that helps. No, but no, it doesn't help with the, in hurting the gene. But they - they've done genetic engineering, in embryos, it's a thing, they could do it. I don't think they're going to do it for something like MTHFR but they can be done right? No, I mean, they don't, I don't think they do genetic engineering. So what you can do, if somebody's like, really into this stuff, you can like you can have multiple, you know, multiple successful embryos or sperm whatever. And you can test the DNA at that point and see which, of those has DNA of whatever it is, and then not use that if it comes out now. They typically do that for like stuff like I don't know, eye color or something like that. You know, that would be interesting if somebody did it for like MTHFR

Matthew Blackburn 2:18:18
Yeah, designer babies is like the term right?

Joe Cohen 2:18:22
Yeah. It's probably going to be more common over time. I just right now - They're not I don't know unless you want to. I mean, they did it they use CRISPR on those those Chinese kids and that guy got arrested. So if you they do want to do that. That's also an option. But I think that's illegal anyway.

Matthew Blackburn 2:18:46
When I used to teach at juvenile hall I would bring in cool like NOVA documentaries for the kids or specials and Michio Kaku always had fun stuff. And there was one where he was talking about in the future, we'll be able to have like reptile skin, like changing genetics with like a CRISPR machine. And people could have like horns or anything they want in their body.

Joe Cohen 2:19:11
Yeah, might be true. I don't know. Yeah, no, I do think at some point that could be done. It's just that it's gonna take a long time because for every gene, they change, they have to do a bunch of safety testing, and it takes a really long time. They're not gonna like do that safety testing. If it's something like growing horns.

Matthew Blackburn 2:19:36
Did you ever see the movie, The Island of Dr. Moreau? That's one of my family favorites.

Joe Cohen 2:19:42
No, I haven't seen it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:19:44
This doctor is like, it's a really old movie they're creating like chimeras, like human animal hybrids on an island. And then the experiment goes wrong and they start being violent.

Joe Cohen 2:19:57
Sounds like an interesting movie.

Matthew Blackburn 2:20:01
Yeah, Marlon Brando that was a remake that was the good one.

Joe Cohen 2:20:05
Marlon Brando

Matthew Blackburn 2:20:06
Like a 90s movie.

Joe Cohen 2:20:10
Interesting. It's also the name of Mike Pence's pet rabbit, I think. Not even kidding.

Matthew Blackburn 2:20:22
This might be the last one, androgenic alopecia this is a bit - I get asked about this all the time, like, male baldness. You ever looked into that - have you ever looked into like solutions like I know theres like red light therapy and all these different things.

Joe Cohen 2:20:40
Yeah, there's, well, there's propecia in hair trends. No, I'm kidding, there's, there's definitely a lot of, so I actually just did a post on this, I do think that hair loss is one of those things that is a sign of, of not optimal health. Early hair loss especially. And, you know, cardiovascular disease, like you can look it up, all these different conditions that are insulin resistance, blood pressure, because when you have blood flow to the scalp, that nutrients they're much less likely you're gonna go bald. So there is a genetic predisposition. That's for sure. We had a report on SelfDecode, it didn't pass our quality assurance. So we took it off, but we might put it back on if we could find a better model. But there's definitely a genetic predisposition there. I think there's and it's definitely a lifestyle. So you know, being healthy, like having good blood pressure, good circulation. You know, there's certain herbs too, that are, you know, having anti, like, low inflammation, good blood sugar profile. You could you could delay it, right? I mean, are you going to delay to your 100? Probably not. But you can delay. Obviously, DHT has an impact. There are some herbs that are DHT inhibitors, like EGCG, green tea, stuff like that. I was talking to a friend yesterday, and they were saying usually the teeth, gums, eyes, hairs nails. These are the things that go first, usually south, like when you're when you're dealing with a health condition. Thought that was an interesting theory. That is I mean, that is a good yeah, that's definitely true, skin, teeth, nails. gums, all that stuff is it could be proxies for. Let's put it this way. Anything that somebody finds unattractive is a proxy for negative health.

Matthew Blackburn 2:23:15
That yes, I just saw your post on that.

Joe Cohen 2:23:18
Bad breath, exactly. If white hairs I mean, if you see a girl with white hairs, are you like, I'm very attracted to that. At best, you're just not. It's not attractive. It's a sign of aging, right? And people who have these signs earlier are you know, it's it's a sign of not being optimal. Right? So anything you're not attracted to? It's kind of like a good rule, overweight, not attractive, right? I don't know if you could say that these days, but it's just that that's where that's the fact. Not attractive, not healthy. I mean, anything that you find not attractive. Like, let's say if somebody even if a girl's not overweight. You know, if I find that there's too much flab, and they're not toned, unattractive, and guess what, that's not healthy either, right? Cellulite, not attractive, not healthy. All right, or from a girl's perspective, if they see a guy that is built, and it's carved and looks healthy. If someone's too pale, does that is that healthy looking? Not usually no, right? You know, people like a tan. Again, somebody's getting more sun. All these things are - you know, wrinkles. If it's a good sign, if you're not like if you have less wrinkles, you're more likely to be healthy, right? Optimally healthy. So all these signs of aging. Yes, they're gonna eventually happen if you're, you know, 100 or are just over time, right? Like, nobody is 100 and doesn't have any wrinkles and no white hair. They haven't had all their hair. But if you're 30, and you're getting a bunch of white hairs, and you're overweight, right? I mean, that's a sign of non optimal health.

Matthew Blackburn 2:25:27
That's awesome. Well, this was a lot of fun. Joe, I think that's a good place to wrap it up. And so you have getjo.co, your supplements, you have selfdecode.com. And are you planning on opening up the, like, if someone wants to do what I'm doing, and speak with a practitioner and really dial stuff in? Is that going to open up at some point this year?

Joe Cohen 2:25:53
It is yeah, people, people can already do that. And we're gonna we're gonna expand that more. And, yeah, I think it really it goes well, with, you know, with, I think the personalized stuff, the personalized health with DNA is going to start taking off in a much bigger way. Because I think it's, it's just too significant to ignore. And I, you know, right now, it's still something like early adopters, but I think it's, it's taking off more and more. Right. And I do think it's, some people need help, that's where the consults come in. And, you know, we don't - you know, whether I think with, you know, if you're selling good quality supplements, right, I don't see people can still buy those individual ingredients and look at what they need more of right? And it's like, hey, if I need more vitamin D, I should, you know, you could tell your audience check out if you have this variant, if you have it, you should get this vitamin D. Right?

Matthew Blackburn 2:27:06
Yeah, that's what - I need an in depth read of the VDR and all the blogs you have, because I'm trying to, I guess it's not black and white, but the whole VDR mutation thing is like, it can either increase or decrease your need for vitamin D and kind of blurry on that right now.

Joe Cohen 2:27:22
But we do have a vitamin D report and in general, so I mean, you could, you could go deeper and like link to a specific post and be like, if you have this variant then means you need to take this, you know, check your vitamin D levels, or, and you know, it's not this level, you need to buy the supplement, right? You can do that with with a bunch of stuff. How does this relate to, especially once you can easily search for whatever it is, you're like, okay, what is this related to? And that's going to come out in like two weeks? Probably when this podcast can be out. I don't know how long this takes. But.

Matthew Blackburn 2:28:01
Next Friday, actually no this Friday. Yeah, yeah, this Friday.

Joe Cohen 2:28:06
It'll be out you know, exactly when, I'm not sure. But it'll be out in within a few weeks. And yeah, so I think that it's just people will - I think people need to shift in how they're thinking to do stuff in a personalized way and track the results of lab tests. Rather than just you know, like, every week, follow a new guru who's gonna tell you something else, like vegetable oils, you know, there's nothing worse than that in the world. Or, and with the vegetable oils too you can look at if you have higher levels of different fatty acids. So we tell you what levels you have for all the different kinds of fatty acids. So I actually have higher arachidonic acid and omega6, which is why I actually scrutinized my omega6's more after reading that, but you know, it's - it's just, again, it's like, I learned things every week, right? It's really cool. I think. I mean, I'm a huge fan. That's how I got into this.

Matthew Blackburn 2:29:14
It's really fun. Yeah, and especially if you're into biohacking. I mean, if you're dealing with a serious thing, then you probably want to work one on one with someone, but for someone like us, I think it's just like Disneyland.

Joe Cohen 2:29:31
Like, exactly, you're like, oh, what's going on here? I could do this experiment, or I should try this supplement that came up with, you know, I need more of it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:29:40
So one thing I just realized, and I just I just did it. You can upload your labs.

Joe Cohen 2:29:47
Correct.

Matthew Blackburn 2:29:48
And what - does that change the blogs or what does that do? Or?

Joe Cohen 2:29:53
It changes the reports a bit so it'll show you what your labs are in variant reports.

Matthew Blackburn 2:29:58
Oh, cool. Wow. Yeah, my hematocrit is slightly out of range it looks like it's like it's higher than normal. Yeah.

Joe Cohen 2:30:12
So we'll have a, we have that as a lab test. But we'll release them as a report in the next month.

Matthew Blackburn 2:30:22
Oh, cool. Awesome.

Joe Cohen 2:30:24
All lab tests, we're releasing as reports so you're able, we already have like 20 over 20 - 25? I'm not sure exact number. But basically, the idea there is, you could see what your predisposition is and if you have, let's say your predisposition is low, but you have high levels, then that means that there's something in your environment that is causing it to be high. Right. So that's why it's, for me, I think it's super interesting to see what is my predisposition and what - what is my actual results. So I had - my blood urea nitrogen was always lower than my lab tests. When I when I first started taking, all of a sudden, I started to, you know, eat like a carnivore diet, my blood urea nitrogen went up, like crazy, right? And that's not necessarily such a bad thing. Right. I mean, there's some correlations, but I don't know if they're causal. But in my genetics, it says my blood urea nitrogen is is lower, which is true, before I started a carnivore diet. So that's kind of where it comes in that, you know, it's just an example I thought about where I have like a lower predisposition, but a much higher level. So you'll see that sometimes. So that's really cool to know what your genetic predisposition is, and where your actual levels are.

Matthew Blackburn 2:32:04
So are you eating mostly a carnivore diet now, Joe? Are you doing - like, how many meals a day? And steaks?

Joe Cohen 2:32:11
Yeah, I do mostly - I've been doing carnivore diet before carnivore came out, like, type, I still - so I don't find the whole vegetables are bad things. So I eat vegetables. I've been doing that I still do that. And I'm against doing the carnivore diet in the way that the the the zealots are promoting it. Meaning like, I've been doing this for the past seven years, or no longer now, eight years, right. And it's just that the way that they're promoting it is like, you know, you don't need vitamin C. You know, all you like, you know, stomach gut. Consume, like the gut of the animal and you'll get over but like, I don't know. You know? I think that it's not ideal for certain nutrients. Number one and I think we need to consume vegetables. It's just, I don't know.

Matthew Blackburn 2:33:22
I felt horrible not eating fiber. Because I did like a low fiber experiment. I felt really bad.

Joe Cohen 2:33:28
Yeah, it's, I mean, you need it. I mean, you could butyrate all these things is from fiber. I mean, technically, you could, you could do resistant starch and that will help out a lot. But I think you can, there's ways to do a carnivore diet without vegetable, but you really have to know what you're doing. And I don't think any of these people know what they're doing. It's just seriously, like, I've done all the research and experiments so I would know how to do it. And I would recommend it to certain people like Makayla Peterson, she needed, she needs a carnivore diet, right. And by the way, FYI, it was funny, she came on, I had her on as a guest on the podcast, before anyone really knew about her. Because, I mean, she started doing the carnivore diet. And I was like, I have to check one thing like, if you have the lectin sensitivity gene. And she had the same variant as me, which only had like 3% of the population had. So that was kind of like, okay, you know, like, I've looked at this with all my clients, and I've noticed - you know, I've noticed this and that was like, Okay, I could see this, right. So she's probably, she's definitely got a lot of things going on there. Right, more than just the lectin sensitivity. And I think she needs the diet, right? So medication for her, but other people don't. Like I would say that it's something that maybe 1% of the population should use as medication. Same with the ketogenic diet. Certain people that should use it as like a medical treatment, but you have to know what you're doing. You can't do a ketogenic diet and not know what you're doing, than with the carnivore diet - doesn't know you're doing.

Matthew Blackburn 2:35:30
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I have an increased need for methionine. I know that could potentially be inflammatory, but if I have an increased need for it then going to be-

Joe Cohen 2:35:40
I also have an increased need for it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:35:43
Oh really? Interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:35:45
Yeah, methionine the thing is that that would be a reason to consume more animal foods. I also have an increased need for leucine.

Matthew Blackburn 2:35:57
I have higher leucine. I don't know what that, what that means for-

Joe Cohen 2:36:02
Mine is also higher. (unintelligible) Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 2:36:08
That just means I don't need as much, right?

Joe Cohen 2:36:15
Correct. So you need more methionine, less leucine. So I get the same results. I was wondering what this meant also, so I read. No, I clicked on it. You gotta read it. So it says leucine, okay, leucine. Let's see. High leucine levels may result in well may result from--

Matthew Blackburn 2:36:46
BCAA, supplementation, obesity.

Joe Cohen 2:36:49
Oh, here are highly - here's why it comes up as a negative like a bad face. Sad face. So high leucine levels may increase inflammation and are linked to high risk of diabetes. That's why. Low leucine levels may contribute to poor muscle function. So now I've got really good muscles. I'm assuming the part of that has to do with high leucine. But it - it can deregulate sugar. So if I don't take care, like I don't pay attention to that my fasting blood glucose is higher, probably due to leucine. Yeah, I just learned something new now. I learn new stuff every week. Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 2:37:35
Yeah. I've done so many like veganism stints that I wasn't getting, like vitamin A, leucine or methionine, for like - like years periods of time.

Joe Cohen 2:37:49
So it turns out that you don't need as much leucine, but you do need the methionine, right. And, and like your report said you need the vitamin A. So yeah, you weren't getting probably enough vitamin A. I don't know what to think of vitamin A, though because it is hard to be deficient. Although you - you still could like you still could do better with higher vitamin A, which I think you're one of those people. Right? Do you notice an impact with - like you've taken a lot of cod liver and you felt good in it? Probably from the vitamin A.

Matthew Blackburn 2:38:29
So I found this company, Rosita, I think it's the best, they're in Norway. And they have like a special process of processing their cod liver oil and talk about-

Joe Cohen 2:38:42
It gets rancid, no but it gets rancid very quickly though. because you think Omega6 gets rancid. You know, Omega3 is the king of rancidity

Matthew Blackburn 2:38:54
They put like a little bit of rosemary in it and like I know the gel caps like when it's encapsulated it you know it's less prone because you know, oxygen is that hit it like the liquid version. So they sell both like capsules and liquid but I mean talk about megadosing Joe, like you said, I went crazy like people were afraid like, how much cod liver oil? I was just drinking from the bottle like swigs and I was probably going through a bottle of there's every like four days and but my body was just asking for more. I just felt incredible and I was taking vitamin E to balance it and K2, you know because it has-- So I go, okay I'm gonna take E and K2 to balance it but I just felt like my brain lit up it felt like a nootropic.

Joe Cohen 2:39:38
What did you get for DHA and EPA in itself because-

Matthew Blackburn 2:39:44
On the wellness report--

Joe Cohen 2:39:46
Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 2:39:54
Levels typical DHA, EPA.

Joe Cohen 2:39:59
Well mine is high levels of DHA. And I'll tell you - what did you get for EPA?

Matthew Blackburn 2:40:07
Typical, but my omega3 is increased need, and I have a higher omega6 to omega3 ratio.

Joe Cohen 2:40:15
Okay, so there you go, I have, let's see, I get higher levels of EPA and DHA. So I have typical need for omega3. So I take and I don't have any increased needs. So this is a great example of, you know, my genes versus your genes, right. I took a shit ton of cod liver. And I thought I was getting like, I like, if you just flick me, I'd get a bruise. I was - because my levels were just way too high. And I took a blood test, my platelets went down to 94. I was like, and I was like, I, you know, I felt like if anything, if somebody ever, like smacked me in the face, I would be dead. I don't know, it was just too much. So and I wasn't even taking cod liver oil, I was taking this it was cod liver, just cod liver wasn't the oil, like it was canned - I just liked the taste so I was eating a lot of it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:41:27
It's less concentrated is how I understand it's the same stuff.

Joe Cohen 2:41:30
Yeah much less concentrated, exactly. But it was way too much omega3's. And like, I think part of that is because I have naturally high levels, like I do really well on omega3's. But I can't take more than a gram a day because I think I have naturally high levels. Whereas, and then my vitamin A, I didn't need it like, naturally, I think I have a good levels of vitamin A in that. But that can maybe cause me to have lower K2. Whereas you are having lower vitamin A and lower omega3's, and you're just taking this and it's like, oh, this is really good for me right? Now, I wouldn't do that forever. But, you know, for a time it was helping you. Whereas it had the opposite effect on me I was like this is you know, and so I looked at my lab markers, I looked at my symptoms I looked at you know, now I can look at my genetics. And so that's kind of how I see the future of health. You look at everything, the labmark or I think I looked at was platelets. My platelets were always at like 200, between a little less of an average 200, all of a sudden went to 90, which is like super low, or you don't want it at 90, dangerously low. Like the minimum level is 150. So they went down went from 200, which is an optimal level to 90. And so that's like you look at the labmarker, you looking at symptoms, look at your genetics that's that's the way to do it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:43:08
What's interesting, Joe, is I pulled up the - I searched in blogs for omega3's and there was one post the link between genetics and omega3 with the ELOVL2 gene. And then it has the personalized snip table and it says on all three of them with the - my genotypes that are associated with roughly average DHA levels. Which is why I wonder why it says increase.

Joe Cohen 2:43:36
Oh, so let me explain that to you, that's an important piece. When you look at the blog posts, they're looking at a specific gene. So reading the blog posts are to basically come up with hypotheses, right? It's not telling you what the overall result is. That's why we don't put an overall result there. We just give you content, we tell you what your snips are, and then you can come up with the conclusions. So we but again, that's why I'm telling you that like what these other companies are doing basically like that blog post, they're looking at a couple of snips, and they're making broad conclusions. We're not making broad conclusions. We're just saying, "Here's what the studies show, you could click on the references you'll see." That's the studies show, but if you want to look at conclusion, like genetic predisposition, you want to look through reports.

Matthew Blackburn 2:44:32
That makes sense. Okay, cool. Yeah. I sent a bunch of people to your website the other day, and I think everyone just like trying to learn how to do it on their own. So this, this podcast will be great. It's kind of an intro of how to - how to explore it.

Joe Cohen 2:44:50
Yeah, for sure.

Matthew Blackburn 2:44:54
Awesome. Well, yeah, this was fun. This was a lot of fun Joe. Appreciate you sharing your genetics, wisdom. And yeah, I look forward to more updates. I mean, you guys are constantly uploading new health reports right? Like almost every week.

Joe Cohen 2:45:13
Yeah, we got new stuff coming out all the time. Yeah, it was it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. I think it was my longest podcast.

Matthew Blackburn 2:45:27
We kept going on a lot of tangents, but it was great.

Joe Cohen 2:45:31
I think we should probably split this into like three episodes or something. Do you normally have like this long?

Matthew Blackburn 2:45:38
Yeah. I mean, I think my my record was like four hours, but I was pretty taxed after that. I needed to like eat a couple steaks.

Joe Cohen 2:45:47
And you released the whole thing in one shot? You're Joe Rogan now.

Matthew Blackburn 2:45:54
I love it. But yeah, I agree. I think this is going to blow up in popularity and people are going to be more interested in, you know, personalized health care. And I'm sure it's gonna get a lot of flack at the same same rate as growth where people are gonna say it's all BS, but I mean -

Joe Cohen 2:46:12
What's all BS? Genetics?

Matthew Blackburn 2:46:14
Genetics testing and like for personalized, like supplementation and dieting, but I think I was telling Tyler when I had him on the show, I have an increased tendency for hoarding, because you could search hoarding on this. What's funny is my girlfriend laughed at me, we'll go to the supplement store. I can't just buy one if I want to try it. I buy like three or six of like a bottle you know.

Joe Cohen 2:46:35
I know. I'm the same way. I also got high marks in hoarding. That's definitely genetic, my whole family's like hoarders.

Matthew Blackburn 2:46:46
I like to call it prepping. But yeah.

Joe Cohen 2:46:48
Right. When I buy supplements, I also buy like, Oh, I gotta I gotta buy the whole, you know, I gotta like three of them. I've got like a 360 day supply of every supplement.

Matthew Blackburn 2:47:03
I'm the same way I have a I have a supplement closet that my girlfriend organized for me. And it's all like, easy to see now. But we had to go and buy like the organizers.

Joe Cohen 2:47:15
So she's also into all this stuff?

Matthew Blackburn 2:47:17
Oh, yeah, we send each other studies and she's actually visiting again, she lives far, kind of far away, hours away. And she's we're probably going to go through her SelfDecode together when she visits it's going to be fun. And look at our - cuz I think we have a lot of things in common with our health reports, kind of interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:47:41
Right.

Matthew Blackburn 2:47:41
We go to the same restaurants.

Joe Cohen 2:47:45
Yeah, that's interesting. Some of the traits stuff could be fun.

Matthew Blackburn 2:48:03
Yeah. What did you get for aggression? Oh, I think mine was I think my irritability and aggression was high. Let me see. I've getting better. But-

Joe Cohen 2:48:18
My irritability and aggression is also high.

Matthew Blackburn 2:48:20
Oh, less likely to be aggressive. But I think irritability-

Joe Cohen 2:48:25
I was thinking I was like, you don't seem like an aggressive guy. I would have guessed lower but irritability you can't know based on a podcast.

Matthew Blackburn 2:48:33
Yeah, likely higher irritability. I think that's why I live away from people because I don't have to deal with them.

Joe Cohen 2:48:39
That make sense. That makes sense. Oh, for sure. I'm like you by the way. The only thing is that I've hacked it. So like, I when I was like, when I didn't hack my mood. I was like I wanted to live in middle of nowhere. So I lived in the middle of nowhere for a year. And I was like, Oh I gotta get out of a middle of nowhere.

Matthew Blackburn 2:48:58
Yeah, it can kind of make you crazy. Like there were times where I was living alone for long periods. And I've heard stories up here where I live to where, like, the first house I bought here. The guy who was telling me that lived around it. He's like, Yeah, I lived by myself up here for eight years and didn't have a woman and I was starting to go stir crazy and developed a lot of symptoms. And it's kind of like being an astronaut in space in a way. I mean, it's really sure it's not healthy or natural. It's interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:49:35
Interesting, what did he get for openness to experience?

Matthew Blackburn 2:49:39
Openness to experience, let's see. I got to look at all those categories. I didn't know this or - likely more open, likely more open to experience.

Joe Cohen 2:49:51
Same with me. I mean, I would guess that about you also trying out a whole bunch of supplements.

Matthew Blackburn 2:50:01
I mean, you name it. I think I saw you have lithium in your supplement I, you know, I kind of megadosed that for a while for, you know, several weeks. I think I was taking like 50 milligrams of lithium orotate. And it was interesting.

Joe Cohen 2:50:16
50 milligrams? How many?

Matthew Blackburn 2:50:18
Yeah, like 50 milligrams a day lithium.

Joe Cohen 2:50:21
Oh, that's a lot. I didn't even sell 50 - you had to like you took a bunch of pills?

Matthew Blackburn 2:50:29
Yeah, I think I bought the 10 milligram and I would just, you know take a bunch of those.

Joe Cohen 2:50:35
Wow, that's a lot.

Matthew Blackburn 2:50:37
So maybe, let me look up lithium. Oh, just the lithium tests. I don't think there's a wellness report on it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many supplements to experiment with, so.

Joe Cohen 2:50:55
How'd you do on the alcohol. Alcohol sensitivity, it's in the traits.

Matthew Blackburn 2:51:01
I'm gonna guess it's low search, alcohol sensitivity.

Joe Cohen 2:51:08
Well, it's kind of thoroughly, you might be surprised.

Matthew Blackburn 2:51:11
Likely, typical sensitivity.

Joe Cohen 2:51:15
Typical sensitivity. Okay, that makes sense.

Matthew Blackburn 2:51:21
Same as 93% of the users.

Joe Cohen 2:51:24
That's what I'm saying. It's hard to know, I have increased sensitivity and I'm pretty sure that I have increased sensitivity. But that's what I'm saying. It's hard to know, based on because, you know, if you don't do well on alcohol, welcome to the rest of the world. Right? Like, I mean, it's just most of the people it's just that you have more or less compared to some other people seems like you're typical.

Matthew Blackburn 2:51:51
Yeah, I wanted to pull up my I had a little genetics call with Tyler on the side, you say and I have something with my Endo - he said my endocannabinoid tone is lower. Reduce surface receptor expression. CB1 receptor I have reduced expression. It's funny because I used to be a delivery driver and I worked at a brick and mortar and I was never a stoner. I was more into the CBD. When people were doing like THC dabs in the back room at the dispensary. I was like, You got this CBD? Yeah. CBD, which is it's a ton of CBD at once. I don't think that's that would be my preferred way of ingestion. Now, but -

Joe Cohen 2:52:38
Yeah, are you are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?

Matthew Blackburn 2:52:43
Ah, I would say introvert but I think SelfDecode says I'm more extroverted. And that just, yeah, that genetic avatar says extrovert.

Joe Cohen 2:52:58
Oh, interesting. You seem more extroverted to me just based on what we're talking, you know how we're talking. But who knows? It's just tendency, so.

Matthew Blackburn 2:53:12
It might have been my old self because I used to be I it was hard to get into. I had to take like public speaking and drama and theater. Like I like forced myself to break at community college. It was just like, let me do all the uncomfortable classes and I think that helped just like getting in front of large groups of people. So I think I forced the shift because most of my life up until college. I was an introvert for sure.

Joe Cohen 2:53:40
But yeah, you can also just change over time, like based on I didn't most - you become more extrovert, like you can become more extroverted over time, like until college are not fully developed. I was different person before I fully developed. They do these studies on people who are like fully developed introverts and extroverts. Typically - like, that's a big thing like you could be, you know, kind of a different person before college. You're not fully developed.

Matthew Blackburn 2:54:23
Yeah, I was a late bloomer, for sure. Oh, I just realized you have the ancestry coming soon, too. I think that's fairly new.

Joe Cohen 2:54:31
Yeah, the ancestry is coming soon.

Matthew Blackburn 2:54:34
Okay, I have to stop going to other websites because I'm waiting to get my results from another one. I don't know if I should name them here. You have like a Viking DNA option, which I'm really curious about because cod liver oil was like a Viking thing largely. Like I bet I have a ton of Viking genetics.

Joe Cohen 2:54:54
I think I know you're talking about but

Matthew Blackburn 2:54:59
Yeah, probably sell the data.

Joe Cohen 2:55:04
I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But if it's who I think - I'm not sure, I don't know who it is, they probably don't. I don't think selling the data, like I said, is not as big of a problem. It's not the big companies as much as actually just having good security.

Matthew Blackburn 2:55:24
Okay, it's good to know. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because the ancestry thinks so interesting. Like I did 23andme and Ancestry, then this is the third one I did. I'll just say it's living DNA. And-

Joe Cohen 2:55:37
Okay. Living DNA. Okay. Yeah, I, I'm aware of them. Okay.

Matthew Blackburn 2:55:46
And I did it just to have three things to go off because that my Italian genetics differed by 10%, from 23andme, and Ancestry, which is kind of significant to me, that's a big change.

Joe Cohen 2:56:01
You should check ours out, because we're actually filing a patent on our ancestry, which is why we haven't released it yet. Because once you use something commercially, you can't file a patent on it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:56:13
Oh, cool. When's that expected to launch?

Joe Cohen 2:56:17
Once we file the patent, we'll be able to, it's probably going to file the patent in like a month, it could take like another month, maybe a half month? I don't know, probably one and a half months, maybe two months to launch? I'm not sure exactly. But maybe I don't know. But that depends exactly when we file the patent. But we have the best - we have the best algorithm out there. And you probably gonna get different results. Now the algorithm is not the only thing like the more data you have, the better - the better the end results will be in certain ways. But you will get like it will be interesting to see what our results are compared to the other ones.

Matthew Blackburn 2:57:07
Yeah, I bet that's going to open all sorts of doors too for all the other aspects to SelfDecode, right? Making things more accurate or?

Joe Cohen 2:57:16
Yeah, so we already use - that another thing we didn't discuss. But when you do polygenic risk scoring, using ancestry makes it more accurate. And that's why we did the ancestry to begin with besides people wanting it, we decided that it's actually important to make the health part more accurate. So that's why we used it. Why we did it.

Matthew Blackburn 2:57:41
That's awesome. Yeah, it'll be really interesting. Awesome, Joe, well, we'll end this marathon on here.

Joe Cohen 2:57:50
Sounds good. It was great talking.

Matthew Blackburn 2:57:51
Appreciate you coming on. That was a really fun show to record. I like how Joe is a fellow megadoser of supplements. That's not for everybody. But for people that can handle it, I think it can be helpful to share that data with others. I've been really geeking out on this genetic stuff. And the next day after I recorded this talk with Joe, I actually had a consultation with one of the doctors on the SelfDecode team. And it was really enlightening. It was really interesting to hear his perspective on my mutations. And he sent me over recommendations of different blood tests to get and different tests to see what's going on in different panels. And so I'll be sharing those results either here on the podcast, and or the Mito Life Academy and what I'm currently doing to rebalance. Whether people like to admit it or not, I think most of us are dealing with chronic imbalances. And dialing in the minerals, the vitamins specific supplements is fun for me. And I'm well aware of the balance in life to go out and unplug and just walk around in nature without listening to music. Really taking a break from studying and health optimizing. But it is important if we have specific goals and I like what Joe's strategy is to pick just one goal and just stick with that for several months. I think that's a really logical approach. I'll put the link below where you can check out SelfDecode I signed up for premium that's the membership tier that I definitely recommend. And like I said, the blogs are so fun, just endless things to learn. But the health reports where it just breaks down what you are more likely to be high in, or you have a decreased need for and increased need. That stuff is really interesting to me, because you can easily experiment with it with supplements and food. I'll put a link below as well to the previous show I did with Dr. Tyler Panzner. And he also provides genetics consultations. And like I said earlier, it's not the end all be all of health optimization. But it's just one more piece of information that can help us to move forward in our health journey and actually make some progress. If you want to save some money signing up for SelfDecode, you can use the discount code Blackburn to save a little bit. And you will not regret it. I have trouble not spending hours on that website, looking around. My website is matt-blackburn.com. I have my CLF protocol up there recipes. And all of my recommended products. If you click on shop, I want to make a shout out to BluShield they just released a new series called Phi series. And this is one of those technologies that gets a lot of flack because you can't measure anything with a meter. Therefore, you know, be skeptical about it. But what really sold me on BluShield years ago, I was at a health conference and I was really wiped out just overworked, taking on other people's work and just feeling tired and slammed from EMFs. And this guy Brian Miller walks over and hands me the BluShield Portable. And that was my first time experiencing it. It felt like an energetic shower. Like, I showered without getting wet. And I just felt immediately refreshed. And I went on my phone immediately and ordered one. So that I wouldn't forget. And I've been using them ever since. So that was about four to five years ago. And it absolutely changed my life. I'm one of those people that felt sick. The first couple days after plugging it in, I felt like I was coming down with a Cold Flu and then that passed and I felt amazing. And I've heard stories of people plugging them in, and their roommate or their family members didn't know. And they experienced those effects, which takes away the placebo, which means that it's actually real. And I've just heard too many testimonials from people like that, that makes me look at these as a real technology. So it doesn't block or cancel out or dampen EMF signals. All it does is provide your body and your nervous system, an anchor point that it could pay attention to instead of the stressful fields that you're exposed to. One of my first podcast episodes was with the US distributor, Brandon Amalani of BluShield, really knowledgeable guy, I love the tech and the gadgets. And there's not too many people that I trust in that space. Especially the technologies that aren't plug-in. I'm really, really skeptical of the devices that aren't powered by electricity. So these devices are not pyramids or cones or something that you just sit on your desk on its own, you actually keep these plugged in and they actually do something. If I was traveling frequently, I would definitely be using their portable plug-in whenever I went to a hotel in combination with Stetzerizer filters. So check that out. If you're interested in picking one of those up discount code Blackburn saves you 10%. And my brand is called Mito Life you can find that at mitolife.co. And we just released a new beef liver supplement. And it's actually spiked with my favorite form of copper, copper bisglycinate. So you get B complex vitamin to get zinc, iron, if you're dealing with iron deficiency, but it's balanced with copper and zinc. You have sodium, potassium, chromium, choline, CoQ10. So many nutrients in there. Beef liver was one of the things that helped me recover from several years of veganism and vegetarianism. And the capsules are just a really convenient and easy way to do it. And as I've teased before, by the end of the summer, we'll have a upgrade for the Mito Life products and one or two new products as well that are going to be released. So look forward to that. And I will see you guys next Friday. Stay supercharged.