Body · 14 episodes
Supplements & Biohacking for entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs looking for an edge inevitably end up asking about supplements, breathwork, sound frequencies, and biological testing, and the guests here converge on one uncomfortable point: most of what's marketed as a shortcut is either diluted, unregulated, or unnecessary once the basics are handled. Mushroom powders are frequently cut with starch and grain filler that a five-dollar iodine test can expose. Fish oil is redundant if you're already eating real food. Multivitamins are often a waste of money. The guests who actually build these products tend to be more skeptical of the industry than the guests who just take supplements.
Where the conversations really line up is on breath, inflammation, and nervous system state as the actual levers worth pulling. Breath holds, humming, paced breathing, and even sound at the right decibel range all show up independently as ways to shift the body out of chronic fight-or-flight and into a state where healing and energy production can happen. Chronic inflammation gets named again and again, by different guests with different specialties, as the hidden tax that quietly drains entrepreneurial energy, stiffens joints, and accelerates disease. Nobody disagrees that mitochondrial health, not willpower or caffeine, is the real energy currency.
The disagreement is about how much rigor the data deserves. Some guests lean on peer-reviewed studies, DEXA scans, and blood panels and are openly wary of TikTok-driven trends and unproven biological-age clocks. Others describe experiences with cymatics, qi, and consciousness that sit further from conventional science but still point back to the same physiological targets: the vagus nerve, cellular inflammation, oxygen delivery. Read across all of it, the practical takeaway is consistent even when the language isn't: test before you supplement, address stress and breath before you buy anything, and treat extreme biohacking as something to layer on top of sleep, movement, and diet, not a replacement for them.
What holds across every conversation
- •Run a home iodine test on mushroom powders — if it turns purple-black, you're paying for starch filler, not the active compound.
- •Skip the multivitamin and fish oil if your diet is already solid; several guests call both largely redundant for people eating real food.
- •Get baseline blood work and a DEXA scan (roughly $50-100 combined) before spending money on any longevity supplement or biohacking device.
- •Use a 60-90 second breath hold or a few minutes of paced breathing before reaching for a stimulant or anti-anxiety aid — the heart-rate drop is measurable within minutes.
- •Track cortisol timing, sleep latency, fasting glucose variability, and heart rate variability as early warning signs of burnout, not just annual physicals.
- •Treat alcohol as a net negative for sleep and metabolic health regardless of how 'fit' you otherwise are — none of the guests defend moderate drinking as beneficial.
Breathwork as a Legitimate Biohack
Controlled breath holds and paced breathing patterns produce measurable physiological shifts, from mitochondrial renewal to rapid drops in heart rate and stress hormones.
“So intermittent hypoxia is the magic of breathwork. When you hold your breath for 60 to 90 seconds, you invoke a positive state, a positive stress on the body, and it creates an adaptive change to having less oxygen in the body.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 9:45· listen →
“When you hold your breath, right, for a long enough time, we create intermittent hypoxia and you reduce the oxygen supply to that mitochondria. You will make that mitochondria wake up and go, oh my God, I'm running out of oxygen. I need to do a spring clean.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 13:00· listen →
“When you hold it to as long as I was saying, intermittent hypoxia, you produce ADOSE. ADOSE standing for anandamide, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. So this makes you feel naturally high.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 30:37· listen →
“You'll notice that your resting heart rate— it's measurable— your resting heart rate will drop by about 10 points after doing 2, 3 minutes of this breathing, which is like amazing if you think about it. It's faster than taking a Xanax.”
Dr. Mao Shing Ni on Energy, Qi, and Longevity Secrets · 33:53· listen →
Supplement Quality Is the Hidden Problem
Before optimizing dosage or timing, the more basic issue is that many supplement products aren't what the label claims, and simple home tests can catch it.
“A very easy scientific test you can do at home is put the powder on a plate and add some iodine to it. And if that powder turns black, purple-black, then that shows up for starch.”
Julian Mitchell on Functional Mushrooms & Biohacking · 8:16· listen →
“When you think you're buying a lion's mane capsule or powder, you're actually buying 68% of blended rice, blended grain. So that's almost criminal and it's really bad for the industry.”
Julian Mitchell on Functional Mushrooms & Biohacking · 22:52· listen →
“You can get rid of almost all your other supplements. Not all. But your multivitamin, you don't need that. Please stop taking fish oil. Where do you think the fish get the omega-3 from?”
Spirulina & Chlorella: The Science of Algae Nutrition · 46:50· listen →
“It is the most nutrient-dense food in the world. NASA feeds it to the astronauts. We have a quote from them saying 1 gram of algae has the same nutrition as 1,000 grams of fruits and vegetables. So 1 to 1,000.”
Spirulina & Chlorella: The Science of Algae Nutrition · 18:40· listen →
Inflammation as the Real Energy Drain
Multiple specialties independently identify chronic low-grade inflammation as the mechanism behind fatigue, joint decline, and disease risk, not just an isolated symptom.
“If you have inflammation in your body, you are consuming so much energy. I look at inflammation like a car sitting at an intersection. You've got your foot pedal to the metal. And then so you're revving up to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 RPMs, but you're not going anywhere. You're just burning fuel. That's what inflammation does.”
Dr. Mao Shing Ni on Energy, Qi, and Longevity Secrets · 17:22· listen →
“That inflammation, that baseline level inflammation, if you keep that at a minimum, at the end of the day, you end up remaining much more flexible... maintaining that flexibility, maintaining state and keeping that inflammation down at a reasonable level basically helps promote the ability to potentially live a lot longer and a lot more fruitful life.”
Dr. Mihir Patel: Muscle Strength, Longevity & Joint Health · 9:20· listen →
“Chronic inflammation is at the core of every degenerative condition that we can think of. You know, your autoimmune, your neurological, your cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, you know, all of them. What we're all dealing— and actually everybody every day deals with some runaway inflammatory component because of our environment and the food, our food choices.”
Sound Therapy & Cymatics for Entrepreneur Health · 38:07· listen →
“It's when stress and inflammation come that cell wall kind of clamps down and is hardened. And the cell gets so stressed out that it goes to sleep. So the sound, these sounds that are emitted, apparently massage the cell wall and wake it up, give it the kiss of life, and say, hey, come on back and do the rest of your life cycle.”
Sound Therapy & Cymatics for Entrepreneur Health · 42:34· listen →
Testing Before Optimizing
Rather than guessing which supplement or hack might help, guests push for objective baselines: blood work, DEXA scans, cortisol timing, and VO2 max, before spending money on interventions.
“The 2 things I think are most foundational are blood work and DEXA scan... they're not expensive, it's like $50 to $100.”
Longevity As a Competitive Edge: Jesse Levey on Health Strategy · 38:55· listen →
“You have 2 women who have 26% body fat. One might have 1 pound of visceral fat, one might have 3 pounds. They're the same weight, the same percent body fat, but the amount of visceral fat they have is dramatically different.”
Longevity As a Competitive Edge: Jesse Levey on Health Strategy · 18:09· listen →
“I always look for what I call the 4 Horsemen of executive burnout. So the first one is sleep latency extending beyond 25 minutes... The second one is cortisol staying elevated after 10... There's also how your fasting glucose is going to vary during the day... The last thing is your heart rate variability when you sleep.”
Dr. Emilie Laplagne: Functional Medicine for Entrepreneurs · 16:23· listen →
“Imagine you're driving down the road and your car check engine light comes on. That's an indication that something's broken, something's not right, but your car can still drive. It's still doing its job. But so your choice is take the fuse out so you don't see the check engine light anymore, or you take it to your mechanic to get evaluated. That's functional medicine. Functional medicine is looking for the check engine lights that are going on inside your body.”
Reversing Type 2 Diabetes: The Functional Medicine Approach · 0:00· listen →
Sound and Frequency as Emerging Tools
Cymatics research and sound-frequency devices are early-stage but show consistent, testable effects on inflammation, blood oxygenation, and cellular behavior worth watching.
“The essential aspect of how sound works in reality, in nature, is that all audible sounds are spherical in their space form. So right now I'm talking and there's a bubble of sound coming out of my mouth and a little bit out of my nose as well.”
Cymatics & Sound Healing: John Stuart Reid Explains · 1:38· listen →
“All of the music we tested created a significant increase in the viability, this ratio of dead to living red blood cells, within 20 minutes.”
Cymatics & Sound Healing: John Stuart Reid Explains · 39:03· listen →
“Anything below 70 decibels is really not optimal for this effect... once you get between the range of 70 and 85 decibels, that's the optimal range that we've come to call the Goldilocks zone... at 110 decibels, it killed all of the red blood cells within 20 minutes. Every single red blood cell was dead.”
Cymatics & Sound Healing: John Stuart Reid Explains · 43:48· listen →
“Yet here was this woman who said, hey, can it help these people, a real specific market? When those— when that study was released, that data came in, the product flew off the shelves to private owners. I suddenly pivoted from knocking on the doors of integrative medicine to the general public.”
Sound Therapy & Cymatics for Entrepreneur Health · 21:02· listen →
Skepticism Toward Fads and Extremes
Not every guest is a maximalist. Several push back directly against dogmatic diet claims, unproven biological-age tests, and social-media health trends.
“The number one thing I think that is maybe a misnomer in this space, I think personally, is that diet is 80%, 90%, the most important thing you can focus on... it's not to say diet isn't important because it is, but this sometimes becomes a limiting belief.”
Longevity As a Competitive Edge: Jesse Levey on Health Strategy · 24:45· listen →
“My fear with a biological clock is that you're doing things that may be making it look younger on the test that doesn't actually make you younger in reality.”
Longevity As a Competitive Edge: Jesse Levey on Health Strategy · 33:29· listen →
“TikTok makes me very nervous. There are people on there that are not qualified giving advice. It can be a starting point to say, wow, that sounds really interesting. Let me do some research on it. But it scares me. It's this big fad of putting castor oil on your belly button and everything's gonna be better.”
Integrative Medicine for Entrepreneurs with Carolyn McAuliffe · 40:22· listen →
“Why win one prize and then lose 3 others, whether it's your health, relationships, friendships? I'm more of a pro the balanced entrepreneur, not the extreme entrepreneur that burns other boats that are actually really valuable for a meaningful life.”
Julian Mitchell on Functional Mushrooms & Biohacking · 35:37· listen →
The companion guide
Reading about supplements & biohacking is one thing. Changing it is another.
John’s companion guide turns what these conversations cover into something you can actually work through.