10 takeaways from Ben Greenfield on The James Altucher Show

Increases dopamine but doesn't block your sleep like coffee does.

I want to be more proactive and try things right away, so I bought chocolate tea as I was listening to the podcast. I had tried it once or twice before. It's not bad.

I remember trying this for a few days a while back. Inconvenient indeed. Apparently a smoothie works as a shortcut but I'm not gonna consume all my food through smoothies. I'll try the chewing thing again, why not.

Let's remember that doing absolutely everything Ben recommends is near-impossible and would probably just be a hassle. As was said in the interview, just doing a few of these things is already pretty good.

Recently on The Joe Rogan Experience, Louis CK said that these conversations are ridiculous and that it's for people "with no real problems". Cold plunges, saunas, etc. It was funny to sense the tension, since it came across as a bit insulting towards Joe Rogan who's really into all this stuff. I thought Louis CK had a point: at the end of the day, we're privileged to even ponder these life optimization tricks. This isn't to say we shouldn't take advantage of them (I find them interesting myself), but let's remember that if we're having these conversations, we're already doing pretty well.

Coffee raises your glycemic levels (is that what it's called? or is it just glucose levels?), but there's a way to minimize it. I forgot what it was. I also remember he said that once a month, you should switch to decaf or a non-coffee hot drink, but I didn't get for how long you're supposed to do that. A few days?

Second time I hear this. Andrew Huberman also eats carbs at night. This goes counter to what I've always heard. Interestingly, Ben says it can give you energy for your workout the next morning. There was also a good reminder about the fact that carbs increase serotonin levels.

Ben has a smoothie in the morning full of fruits and other things, but they're in powder form, which means almost no carbs for some reason. Weird. He says it's tasty.

Glucose levels increase by a lot after eating. He says one way to minimize this is to take a walk after eating.

If I understood correctly, this is the best way to keep glucose levels stable throughout the day.

He says the point of not having too much glycemic variability (which I guess means having glucose spikes throughout the day) is that stable levels increase longevity.

I had just stumbled upon another article saying that we shouldn't obsess over step count, and now this guy says it should be a bare minimum of 12000!