600 Nervous System Scans Later w/ Ben Lee

Ben Lee

is a lot healthier for me. It's a lot better for me. It's better for my masculine. It's better for me as a future father. It's better for me as a partner. It's better for me as a leader. And it's one that requires slowing down and stillness, which is something we struggle with a lot as founders. And this is something that I've noticed, you know, scanning, doing over 600 nervous system scans.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

in the last year on mostly high performers, several billionaires, and this kind of epidemic of burnout and dysregulation and chasing, seeking, building, and all that stuff.

And yeah, I, you know, so I'm, I'm asking myself a lot of questions right now, especially the last couple of weeks. The AI stuff takes over most of my attention right now, whether me wanting to be a builder and get into Claude or just thinking about like, holy shit, like we may not be around in six years. And I don't know if my parents really understand the scope of that, you know, totally.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, yeah, and you kind of oscillate between the two.

Ben Lee

Yeah.

Jeff Albaum

So what are those questions that you're thinking about? Like when you said, I'm thinking about a lot of stuff, what are those questions?

Ben Lee

Well, I mean, I think for one is I think that we were heading we're heading into trouble. That's for sure. And it's just to what degree and what's the scope of that trouble look like? And. Can there be sort of a conscious collective awakening that happens prior to take certain decisions, namely around speed?

And I don't know, or I don't think there will be. And I instead think we're going to, something's going to happen. And then that potentially, hopefully will create more awareness, more whatever needs to happen, more legislation, more.

more, more, more unplugging certain things. And I, and so I, yeah. So I think every day lately has been like, why am I struggling for this when the future money is really not going to be that important land, water, community, family education, being able to homeschool, being able to create ecosystems that that's, that's the business to be.

Jeff Albaum

Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. When you're talking to all these people and you see so many different types of people who have the quote unquote strappings of success, like at least externally from what our society values, like high net worth individuals, high performers, et cetera, has there been anyone, and you don't have to names, but anyone that you've identified as like, that's it, they've made it, like holistically. You look at them you're like, I wanna be more like you than not like you.

Ben Lee

Yeah. so that it's only happened once with like billionaire or someone worth a couple hundred million who playing at, you know, highest of highest levels. and I was surprised how well he scanned because most of the people at his level look like they need to go to the hospital despite their peptide protocols, how big their sauna is, how many, you know,

Jeff Albaum

And if so, does that look like? What are the traits and attributes that they have?

Ben Lee

times they do breath work per day. those guys are some of the most dysregulated people actually. And it shows up entirely on their nervous system scans. this guy just had a different aura and that's, that's one of the things that my team and I have just become really intuitively connected to this work.

is we just kind of know, we know, we know who's going to scan bad. We're like, this guy's going to get his brain's going to be black. So we're probably right. we, so we do, we do a nervous system scans. use, we, we use, technology that's called ECG that's sensory based. All it's doing is it's giving you a much longer, more robust, read out.

Jeff Albaum

Dude, wait, so. So.

Yeah, what does that mean?

Ben Lee

of what's happening to your heartbeat and the variability of your heartbeat, which shows your stress, how close to your, you are to burnout, things of that need your biological age, actual age, lots of really, really interesting actionable data points. And so how this differs from, aura or whoop or biometrics on the market is those do a quick scan.

And it's mostly passive. Like your score was 59 last night. You're like, what the fuck does that matter? What, what do I, what is that? that good? Is it bad? It actually creates another thing to worry about because people are now running around my HRV score, right? It's high, low, you know, sideways. And so it's really not useful. We have a, like a 11 page report. have, we have programming, we have a schedule. have all these things that are actionable for you to,

modified. And this becomes especially useful for women who have, you know, two weeks of their cycles probably shouldn't be doing any ice plunger, maybe very little. And so this tool helps them, understand what interventions might be really regulating for the nervous systems. So the back to this gentleman, yeah, I just felt his aura and I was like, guy's, this guy's doing something right. And so

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Got it.

Ben Lee

scanned them. He was almost perfect. 100 percentile, everything. Went, you know, I was like, like, I don't even know who he was. Like he'd sold some business for a couple hundred million dollars. I wasn't familiar with the company. Looked him up on LinkedIn, saw he was a complete legend. So I was like, I got to some time with you. Like, what are you doing? Why are you? I'm the owner of this place. I'm way more stressed than you. And so.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Ben Lee

He had all the success. He'd got divorced, lost half of his wealth and had been on sort of an eat, pray, love sabbatical. know, like my understanding was he had some real estate, but he was very not like kind of agile, had an apartment in Miami and otherwise would like, I think I want to be in Switzerland for a month or two. I want to be here. I want to be in Estonia. I want to be there. And he had a

you know, very good looking young partner too. think that helped, you know, that, that, always is a nice motivator. but I think more than anything, he, he had kind of gone through a phase of losing half his money, realizing like, it's not.

Jeff Albaum

you

Ben Lee

It's not, can't be the only thing. It can't be the only driver, um, going on his own spiritual journey, like spending time in places like India. Um, and. You know, having the resources now to carve his next journey in a, a, in a way that supports him and in his case, he's still kind of figuring it out and he's still, um, just enjoying the fuck out of his life. And I think that, uh,

was getting some water, sorry. And I thought that was, yeah, something to take note about. On the other hand, I've scanned people that are like totally dysregulated or they should be and burnt out and scan like 20 to 30 years younger. And I'm like, how's that happening? And I had a conversation with someone, think Mawn might be associated with that. And so I wonder if that affects you. I have to look into that or ask Chachi BT.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, you're good.

Ben Lee

But sometimes we do get surprises. We do get surprises. One of the things that's common, not that common, you know, maybe one in every five women who come leave, leave older or more stressed out. And that's because they're going through an emotional process. And so something comes up at this retreat or at the stay that

Jeff Albaum

Okay?

Ben Lee

has kind of pushed them to have to deal with it, and make decisions and make certain changes. And so it's actually a good thing because it brought something to the surface that had been delayed for too long. And through the work that these women do and the somatic work, energy comes up and that energy is what pushes action. It's what allows us to...

kind of re-imagine what our life looks like when we actually feel good and happy and healthy and, you know, have...

have have done the things to enrich in the quality of our lives.

Jeff Albaum

Sure. And you've kind of described yourself as a CEO who experienced burnout. And so you decided to make a business about burnout, right? that's so, so how did, you know, walk us through recent or a little bit, like what was the concept? How did you come up with it? And then like, because it's insane what you built.

Ben Lee

Yeah.

like I said I'm it's it's it's pretty cool I mean I think what

Jeff Albaum

You

Ben Lee

Yeah. mean, I'm one, what I'm most proud of is how adaptable and, and, and scrappy and startup as we are, like we actually are what we preach. And so the origins of it was I wanted to build a small house for myself in Costa Rica. being a, you know, scope changing maniac that I am, and just super severely ADD. I,

had the idea to create a space for men's retreats. And I had done a couple of men's retreats and my hypothesis was there are all these high achieving men who really are burnt out and need help. so.

I sort of validated that assumption to some extent with the men's retreats that I did at different locations. But I thought, well, you if you build the temple, they will come. And I think now the next step of that is actually building real estate and a dedicated space. so we're heavily focused on men when we were just starting out, like we even had a reputation. the re-center is just a men's retreat place.

I tried to bring in my peers and tried to really connect with the concept and it wasn't really working with men. Men are super challenging customers with wellness, I think in general, but wellness for sure.

and so there's not a growth loop that exists with men. If they go and have a transformational experience, they're not going to tell 10 or 15 men. Maybe they'll tell their brother or their mom or dad, keep their circle tight, but they're not going to talk about it they don't want to be perceived as a soft or weak or vulnerable or being in competition with other men, which is obviously a big one. And so, they weren't really like doing the work. They were just like, I was like, fuck, I think I failed. I'm like, I thought for sure.

I just sell a project and it's just not working. And so I couldn't figure out how to like, get the book prisons to a point where it could break even and then grow and what, what was product market fit. And so I did what every startup founder is supposed to do. And I just, I just took a step back and we just started to listen.

And I really just embedded myself in all aspects of the business at this point, in terms of the customer interactions and speaking and asking questions. And suddenly women just started showing up and the women who started showing up all were let's say late thirties, early forties, single C suites, high performers, lawyers, VCs, doctors.

and they were all burnt out and they're all looking for a major life change. And I think that women are the ones that are leading this. need to learn from them, but learning how to reorient life in this new chapter we're all in and what is important and prioritizing our emotional systems and mental health. And

I spoke with a few women, what would be their dream place? Took notes, built a type form, got 87 replies to our offer, which was a combination of personalized, cycle synced, movement, community, food, space for high achieving women. And yeah, was that feeling.

this intuitive feeling I was like, holy shit, I think I struck a nerve because I built, you know, 500 products in my career apps mostly. personally have never really seen product market fit like this way. And it wasn't so much that how much they were willing to spend or how big the market was. We all know they're, you know, 50 % of the population is women and they spend a lot more money than mental wellness. So those two things aside,

the speed at which they filled out the form, that was the most unbelievably impressive, data point that I was tracking. Like a multimillionaire woman would fill out a form at like 10 PM on Tuesday about nervous system resets and cycle syncing. Like the point is the intent and the energy was so strong that you send that same link to a man, it would take him a month to fill it out. He would have, he'd send it to

Jeff Albaum

Well, but so so you were you going through you were having these challenges. You're like, OK, I want to do a men's retreat. It's not working. And then what what what did you do? Because you said I just took a step back and suddenly women's are showing up. But like you were doing something. So what what were you doing when you took a step back and you did you change anything like what?

Ben Lee

Yeah. Yeah.

No, I just took a step back and I started to like, see what was going on. And it was women who were coming to the place, either booking through Airbnb or a website and we're looking for something. They were looking for something that was different than what we had thought the business was. Obviously it was a wellness place, a place for health and recovery and all these things, but women

were asking for very specific things, namely cycle education and how to structure a vacation or a retreat around their cycles, which prompted a whole new deep dive in discovery for me spending, you know, the next hundred hours reading every single women's health book, every single women's podcast, tons of conversations with Claude about it.

And then of course, talking to more women building, doing customer development, building, and maybe this is the part I didn't explain correctly, building a type form and just asking questions. The questions were, what, would be a dream retreat for you? What are you currently struggling with? what's lacking in the market? You know, what, what's causing your burnout and.

Jeff Albaum

Okay. And so what we're.

Ben Lee

What we realized was...

I think 80 % of the women we pulled were burnt out.

Jeff Albaum

That's a do you and do you think that's some sort of a self selecting bias though because you're sending it to probably super successful high net worth individuals and so they're more likely to be burnt out or not necessarily.

Ben Lee

you

I don't know. I, it's hard for me to be able to say that for sure. But what I'm noticing is burnout is much more severe for women right now than it is for men. And the main difference is there's intent and interest and energy and wanting to change that and fix that. Whereas I think men just accept it as their baseline or maybe become crazy incels or something else. But they, they,

Jeff Albaum

you

Ben Lee

They let that energy metabolize onto them where women don't. They they were like, I don't want to live this way anymore. This fucking sucks.

Jeff Albaum

Interesting.

Right, right.

Huh, okay, so once you started getting those type forms back, okay, that's when you notice, okay, there's a lot more women coming than men. Let's lean into this.

Ben Lee

So.

Yeah. Um, you know, getting over my own limiting beliefs, like what the hell's a straight man doing, running a women's health business and how, how are women going to trust, how are women going to trust that person? Um, that lasted for like a couple of months because the reality is I got on all these sales calls and I realized like 95 % of women don't actually care.

think they're totally comfortable sharing. So long as they have specific facilitators that are women or other women on the property, they have community, they feel safety. They're working with professionals. There's people they can relate to their age groups. And so long as your container has a doesn't matter, you know, and so I got over that pretty quickly started bringing in

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

the best women that I could find in somatic work, embodiment, nervous system, creating this category of what a nervous system coach is. It's like your own personal wellness concierge. And that's a whole other business down the road that we're, you know, we're contemplating. And, and yeah, and so the business itself,

is kind of modeled after a rehab center. You know, it's like a high functioning rehab center. So it feels much more like a home than a hotel. It feels like a high-end curated home. And there's little details from the dog to the fragrances in the rooms to our bedding. it's just, it doesn't feel like your typical hotel. And for that, we call it a residency. People stay seven, 14 or 21 days.

the longest guests to stay two months and everything is personalized to you. And so you learn about what you need based off your energy, your hormones, your desires, your goals. And that covers the entire span of your community or social circle aspects during that trip.

your movement practices and types of movement practices, obviously the wellness club and how to use the equipment, the order at which you use that equipment. So basically these protocols and obviously just like plenty of time for beautiful spontaneity and adventure and just like

I don't want to do anything today. I want to just sleep or I want to take Pacha to the beach and walk with her because I miss my dog or I want to do a last minute juice cleanse, you know? And so it's very much build your own adventure, obviously with our guidance, but you being much more in control and having agency over your time than like...

an overly structured retreat that counts your calories and takes your phone away, you know, Friday at 2 PM. Like we want to be with people and people who come to our property. Like they know they need to get off their phone. Like they're, know, like we don't need to sell them this. There are plenty of people who still struggle. There's including myself. I built this place cause I'm, I would be the best customer and I still am. And so

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Ben Lee

there's, there's a, there's always an accountability aspect for me to be able to practice what I preach and believe it or not, my nervous system is actually pretty good. despite how crazy it is running this place, at least the last year it's been for me. but I think that's because I've really had to, what I was talking in the beginning of the call, like remember to slow down. Remember that

your health and your nervous system is so much more important than anything else, any deal, any opportunity. And that's the brand now. So like kind of have to practice that and live it and believe in it. So yeah.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

So how is it different? Like how do you find yourself? What do you do like day to day if you're like, I'm just, I'm not feeling it. I feel, I can feel it like that, that, cause I'm sure by now you can feel when your nervous system is starting to get deregulated or dysregulated. So like when you feel that, what do you do?

Ben Lee

I mean, I have a notion doc I'm gonna share with you. This is a buddy of mine, Johnny Miller, who's like one of the leading experts on nervous system. And he built these protocol cards that are great and exactly for what you're describing. I'm gonna send it to you here. And so,

I don't know if I go and open an ocean dock every time I feel dysregulated. Mostly it's my sister who's dysregulated by more than anyone.

I mean, if I'm home and if I'm in Costa Rica, sauna, sauna is my number one favorite. Sauna and ice is just amazing. And I measured that. So I've seen the, the massive reset that comes from sauna ice and also just people with inflammation, Lyme disease. Sauna and ice is probably one of the best things out there, you know, with red light.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Thank

But so, you get into the trap then of like, cause you were saying before, it's like, you don't wanna be the person who's always checking things like whoop and all this stuff. like makes you more stressed than, it's like another thing to stress about. So how do you balance like not stressing yourself out more?

Ben Lee

Yeah.

I don't track anything. mean, I don't wear an aura ring. I don't, I'm gonna have a Garmin for, for just tracking workouts. I did the nervous system scan.

maybe once a quarter. How I avoid falling in the trap of over optimization is feeling, learning how your body feels, which is very hard for men, much easier for women, but starting to be more intuitive with yourself and with your body so that hopefully you don't need to have check engine lights. When I go to the doctor, I'm

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Ben Lee

90 % diagnosing myself, knowing what I have, knowing my things, ordering my own lab kit, my own, like I'm completely driving it. And I was doing this before TractGBT. I just had a different relationship with my health than most people. And now with the tools, it's like I'm like a UCLA hospital in my pocket, you know? And so I have all the fricking doctors and experts and literally in my, in my intelligent box. And so

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm

Ben Lee

I just, some, something feels off. My body starts sending check-ins, check engine lights. And that that's, and I just learned to trust it. You know, I was in LA doing parasites, a parasite detox, very common in Costa Rica. I knew it would be a mistake to go to the GI doctor here. I've been dealing with, I know how to treat parasite and gut health issues for the last 10 years.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Ben Lee

Um, my mom made me go, forced me to go, blah, blah, spend $900. The guy didn't help me at all. I go do my own work, get my, you know, check my own labs, work on it with Claude. And I do a combo this morning in a Topanga with a, with a shamanic healer. And, you know, in 25 minutes I purged out stuff that.

is way more deeper and probably a lot more.

Poisonous than than antibiotics and long courses of antibiotics and that things that that introduces and so just being much more natural And being much more connected to my body knowing what I need building my own protocols saying okay I don't want to I don't want to do three courses of antibiotics and spend a thousand dollars I can go to Topanga spend three two hundred and eighty dollars do twenty minutes and that's a scary thing for a lot of people There's still a stigma around my mom for example

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

You're going to paying it to put frog poison in your arm. What the hell's wrong with you? The reality is this is a peptide that's going to be legal within the next two years. But it's still stigmatized. It's still like, what the hell is this guy doing? But it's just as it becomes more acceptable and more mainstream and we see people doing alternative treatments and having better results, paying a lot less money. It's just it's going to happen.

Jeff Albaum

you

Right?

Yeah. When you're thinking about like, because you said you think about like a lot of questions recently. When you think about goal, but like, do you think about your success and your career in terms of like, there's a goal that you want to get to? And if so, what is it? Or is it more day to day than that?

Ben Lee

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's definitely a monetary goal that I haven't hit. I still have a little bit of time, but I haven't hit it. that there is that I wonder if I did that, that would have satisfied me or the post would have just changed again. I don't know. I don't have the answer to that, but yeah, I would say I'm, I'm, working towards. I'm working towards a goal for sure.

Jeff Albaum

What would you do? Let's say you hit that goal on a Tuesday and you wake up, you go to bed, you find out, like you check your bank account that night before you go to you're like, wire hit. You wake up, it's Wednesday. What do you do?

Ben Lee

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I think the first thing I would probably do is...

you know, commit to a strategy of what I actually want in my life. And that might be a one month. It might be a two month. There might be a traveling component where I do some inspirational creative idea, brainstorm stuff. I start working on my life plan, you know, what that life plan looks like without the constraints of, I have to do this because I have to, I have to pay the bills and I have to, you know, get that thing. know, if those things were answered for

What does that life plan really look like? And what does that Iki guy look like? Going much more beyond just commercial aspects.

I think for me too, there's like definitely like a teaching component. There's an art component. There's a music component. There's certain things that I feel like I've been a little bit self-deprived of because I've been so focused on this hustle train and wagon. so I do think there's a major component of being able to invest more time and space into arts education.

things that are getting a totally different, you know, creative mojo going for me.

I probably would-

relocate my family outside of the U.S. I mean, you know, we're still here because we're American and, you know, we're proud Californians, but it's like, it's just life is just so challenging here and cost of living is so high. And I think that with resources, there's so much better places and environments in the world that are.

healing that check the community bucket that are good for old people and good for young people and, you know, and so forth. so environment, you know, where do we want to live would be something part of that life map, you know, strategy.

You know, I'd want to, I'd want to really do an inventory of my life, you know, who who's been in it.

Who do I want to have in this next chapter? Who is in there that might need a little extra support right now and I'm now in a better position that I could be there for them. I think that would be nice. An audit of, you reached this goal. Now how could you give back? How could you show up? How could you be in service, especially to the people who had been there the last 20, 30 years, whatever.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like a kick-ass Wednesday.

Ben Lee

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Albaum

What's something you've changed your mind about recently?

Ben Lee

I mean, I think.

being in sort of like a tech crypto, know, crypto anarchists type of environment, starting with my previous business and just being around guys that were always on zero hedge and wanting to build bunkers and regenerative farms. Zero hedge is like a trading website. It's like super red pill.

Jeff Albaum

What's zero hedge?

Ben Lee

that has a bunch of conspiracies and stuff like that. you know, hardcore Bitcoin heads. I thought there was some interesting stuff and I'd been in Bitcoin, you know, since like 2012, 2013. So definitely an early adopter. But I thought, you know, lot of these guys were lunatics for all the other shit.

Turns out they weren't, which is kind of crazy. Well, my business partner, my old business partner, he was talking to me about Jeffrey Epstein in 2015. He was talking about the plane and the plane logs. Guys on Reddit who are so-called conspiracy theorists have proven a lot of this stuff correctly.

Jeff Albaum

Wait, what do you mean? Say more.

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

also had foresight specifically with AGI and AI, because a lot of them are nerds, know, they're engineers, they're software guys. And so they have a very specific lens into the future that most people don't. And so thinking that, for example, my business partner was crazy about half his shit and then like being so right about pretty much 80, 90%. Sometimes I just write him a message like, dude, you were right about every.

Jeff Albaum

Right, right.

Ben Lee

And so we're now living in a reality where it's not kooky or weird to be prepping or building bunkers. All the billionaires are doing that. Every single one of them has multiple bunkers at this point and hideouts and regenerative sustainable systems in case they're in this location and they have need one tank of gas, know, Mad Max ship. And we're, and so that

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

changed for me in the last year.

Jeff Albaum

So are you prepping now?

Ben Lee

where like, I am thinking about a lot more. It's getting a lot more of like my, attention in my, in my brain. I wouldn't say it's got me, full on paranoid or anything like that, or storing rice in my garage, but it's, it's got me like thinking about it more.

And usually what that leads to is some kind of action or plan, you know?

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

So reading a lot more, watching a lot more YouTube on AI and the futurist, sci-fi audibles, know, stuff like that.

Jeff Albaum

Mm hmm. Yeah. So what what is the what is the stuff that you consume? Like, do you are you a big reader? Are you a big podcast listener?

Ben Lee

Um, I go through like very different seasons. I'm not really consistent with the medium and my habits are on that. when I'm reading, um, I usually like to read on a Kindle with the words and whisper sync, cause I have kind of ADD dyslexia. And so when I read the letters with the highlight, I can actually speed it up and like read at 1.5 or two X.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

And so I enjoy it and I read super fast with that method. I would say, right now I'm not really reading anything consistently. I'm doing mostly podcasts and then podcasts on YouTube. and then just some kind of like random YouTube. I, I know, I think Instagram is probably the most poisonous, like one of all I'm not on tick tock. That's been.

years. I don't want to be on TikTok. know how bad that is. Instagram I am because it's good for work too. But like I constantly delete it and I just, I don't even want it. I don't even want it on my phone. so that's kind of a one that I don't get too stuck in doom scrolling, but

You know, you could just be checking it all the time and checking your likes and this and that, and it just becomes this whole habit. It takes over you and I don't even want it. So I just delete it. And then when I need to use it, I'll reinstall it and then delete it again.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Ben Lee

Yeah. So like, like, YouTube podcast, Spotify podcasts as well, you know, different music, different kind of like. Thinker meditation people as well.

I'll see you right now.

Jeff Albaum

Very nice, Very nice. Where can people find out? Where can they learn more about ReCenter? What's the...

Ben Lee

So recent life.com is a website. The Instagram is Instagram.com slash recent life. And yeah, we've had our first location open in Santa Teresa for the last eight, yeah, 18 months. So if you find your way in Costa Rica, give us a, give us a shout, come by for a visit.

Jeff Albaum

Amazing man. You're the best. Thank you for doing this, man. I appreciate you.

Ben Lee

Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Bye, guys.

Jeff Albaum

All right. Bye everybody.