Ben Greenfield - Pioneering Biohacker, Fitness Trailblazer and Extreme Endurance Visionary

Full transcript: Ben Greenfield on London Real

8:55 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr Ben Greenfield, who is an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach, speaker and author of The New York Times bestseller Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health and Life. In 2008, Ben was voted the NCA’s personal trainer of the year, and in 2013 you were named as one of the top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. Ben, welcome to London Real.

9:24 Hey, thanks, man. Thanks, I’m digging the city. I literally just was over in Hyde Park. You have awesome parks here. Yeah, and I ran over there and they’re green as hell.

9:34 Did my body weight workout. So I have this little app on my phone. It’s this, I I’ve never read about it. I don’t know how it wound up on my phone, but it’s called a Safari Fit app, and it’s just a bunch of body weight moves that you do. So when I go to a new town I find the nearest park, and I just open up a workout on that app, and it’s like cheetah leaps and bird crawls, and you know, leopards, and just a bunch of exercises named after animals with an ungodly amount of repetitions, which is why I like it.

10:05 You, it’s just body weight exercise to complete failure, and then you run back to your hotel room. There you go. A good way to go. The parks here are amazing. You get a chance to see them all.

10:13 You know, when whenever we have kind of fitness and nutrition experts come through, like we had Kelly Starrett at here and Mike Dolce. I always ask them the same question when they first get here. You know, when you think of the UK, or when you come to the UK, you, how do you rate us, or what do you think when you think of fit and nutrition, and you can be, you can be brutally honest. I can. Yeah, like I spoke this morning to a group of execs at a hotel, and man, there is a lot of sugar here.

10:41 Like there’s a lot of starches. There’s a lot of sugar. There seems to be an awareness of like the whole gluten-free thing, but there’s still just, I mean, I would say that, you know, if the American diet is based off of government subsidy of corn and grain and a food pyramid, or what’s now a food plate that’s based off of like a 50 to 60% carbohydrate-based diet. I think you guys may have us edged out as far as that carbohydrate percentage goes. Okay, I thought with all the, you know, high-fructose corn syrup in the US, it might be edging us out.

11:14 But no, yeah, I mean, like, honestly, high-fructose corn syrup, white rice, fruit smoothies made with apples and pears, like all that stuff is going to spike your blood sugar the same. So it’s just a different kind of carb. I would say that is, that’s the major thing that I’ve noticed, just cuz I’ve been trying to hit a lot of the healthy little food stores here, like avocado and Pret, and you know, like these little one-stop shops, and it’s cool that they’ve got a lot of these healthy foods available, but they’re still kind of fat phobic, right?

11:43 Like you still see low fat, fat free, right? Okay, you know, and I am, you obviously, you’re drinking the coffee with the fats in it. I’m a huge fan of basically traveling with MCT oil and just drenching what you’re eating in fats. Just, I think that movement is coming slow over here. Obviously, we’re leading the charge.

12:00 I’m, I’m drinking some Bulletproof Coffee here. It’s a little late in the evening, so I’ve been passed, but yeah. I mean, I’ve obviously have my MCT and brain Octane oil and butter every morning. I would actually, I would take it if I had theanine capsules, cuz theanine will balance out the caffeine and allow you to sleep if you take theanine at the same time. Okay, so that’s something you can add in, or you should add in to your Bulletproof Coffee, or you could do Bulletproof green tea.

12:21 That’s another way to get theanine and caffeine combined. Okay, so when it comes to the UK, you still see some diet choices that are like, not quite sure about that, and with you, you know, they typically go with the bacon roll. The bacon roll is kind of the UK go-to. You know, there’s still the quants that are around, that kind of thing. I would say that the portion sizes seem smaller to me than, say, in America, but you know, yeah, see, portion sizes don’t get to me, cuz I like my portion size as big for me.

12:47 It’s just about the macros, right? You know, if I’m having a big plate, you know, at my hotel room every morning the past few days, I order up an omelette, like a three-egg omelette, but I have them leave the bread off the side, leave the jam, leave the juice and I get smoked salmon on the side of the omelette. Okay, and then I can drench that in MCT or olive oil, and it’s a pretty good meal. Okay, and as far as London, I mean, are we aware of fitness here or are you kind of more of a novelty?

13:10 You know, when people are like, oh, oh yeah, I mean, it’s super super fit city. I mean, people are walking. I was at the park, and people were like, I assume I was in the park yesterday morning doing yoga, and people were like running all over the place with backpacks on, and I assume they’re running to work. Yeah, that’s a British thing. Yeah, yeah, and that they somehow are taking a shower when they get there, and I don’t know, running home.

13:31 Lots of bicyclists. A lot of gyms, like I’ve been going to this box that was next door to my hotel called Gymbox. Really crazy. They’ve got like a DJ there, so you’re working out. A lot of CrossFitters, a lot of kettlebells.

13:46 They’ve got a ring there for fighting. You know, a couple racks. Some good platforms for powerlifting. But yeah, really, really weird, cuz it’s like you’re in a nightclub lifting weights, and it’s loud, like you can’t hear yourself think, cuz this DJ is spinning tunes. It’s kind of a strange.

14:02 Is that the one in Covent Garden or not? It was near Covent Garden. Yeah, I think he used to be in a movie theater or something. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, it felt like a nightclub movie. Yeah, that’s a kind of an anomaly for the UK, but you know, there’s still, there’s a lot of gyms here.

14:13 People do think about it. They are. This is a huge walking city, so you don’t get that whole stuck-in-the-car thing, you know, for a few hours. So, you know, for people that don’t know much about you, I just kind of want to go through your specialties, so they kind of know who they’re talking to. I believe your specialties are achieving grueling feats of performance while still maintaining optimized hormones and biomarkers, marrying ancestral living to modern biohacking, and maximizing digestion, brain and sleep quality, because you do a lot of things.

14:39 You do some ultra-serious endurance training, and you also are, you know, hugely into biohacking. I know you just spoke at the Bulletproof biohacking conference, and you had like five, five tips, I think that you were talking about, or five concepts that kind of turned you into a beast. You know, I don’t, I want to talk about some of your endurance stuff. I know also that you did an Ironman with like two weeks’ notice without training. Actually, I want to hear about that first.

15:01 Couple weeks ago, that was interesting. Was it really so tell me about the Ironman. You didn’t have much time to prepare, and then this was one of those hardcore Ironmans, right? Yeah. So this was the Ironman World Championships, right?

15:12 Like this was the Super Bowl of triathlon, the one that you see on NBC every year, the Kona, on the lava fields of Hawaii, just the one of the most brutal courses on the face of the planet, one of the most grueling Ironman triathlons that you can do. And up until last year, I was pretty hardcore into triathlon. Like I’ve done Ironman triathlons, and was like a top-ranked amateur triathlete, and was just big time into triathlon coaching, triathletes, using, you know, my exercise physiology geekery to figure out how to get the most out of triathlon, how to do it in a healthy way, like you just alluded to.

15:48 I stopped. Okay, the Ironman is the hardest of the triathlons. The Ironman is a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and then a marathon for dessert. Okay, so with the marathon, so you’ll you’ll see the really, really fast guys, like the pros who are winning it, go anywhere from like 8:20 to 8:45, sometimes 9 hours. Okay.

16:10 When I was competing, I was generally between about a 9:25 and a 9:45, so I was I was moving along pretty fast, but then I just quit. Like I did my 10th race, Ironman Hawaii, and I was done, and didn’t really want to do triathlon anymore, didn’t want to stare at the black line at the bottom of the pool and ride my bike for hours every weekend, and you know, felt like, or feel pressured, right, to maintain enough fitness to run a marathon at the drop of a hat, right? You know, cuz that gets draining after a while, chronic repetitive motion, man.

16:44 Right. How many years had you been preparing for Ironman? Oh, I raced for eight years. I raced hardcore, and I’m actually still on Team Timex, which is a global elite triathlon team, and so I’m actually, I’m contracted to do a certain amount of racing each year, but as far as like the big long Ironman stuff. I was done.

17:00 It just got to you, and there are other things I wanted to do. So I got into obstacle racing. I want to be one of the top Spartan and obstacle racing athletes on the planet before I’m 40. So I decided I wanted to take a few years to really focus on the fact that I don’t have the slow-twitch muscle capacity to be a pro Ironman triathlete, like a really good one. But this whole obstacle racing thing, where you’ve got power, speed, endurance, balance, flexibility, coordination.

17:29 You get muddy and dirty, and you’re carrying heavy things and then running, and then, you know, crawling under barbed wire and swimming through muddy ponds. I love it, and I got into that as soon as I dropped out of Ironman. You know, in the past eight months, I’ve done, I think, 11 Spartan races. Okay, so, and the Ironman, I’m curious, you finished that 10th one, and you were just like, I’m done. Your brain was just like, I don’t want to do this anymore.

17:56 Maybe that wasn’t the challenge anymore. And yeah, it must be pretty monotonous, but that also is part of the brain game, right? It’s that, and also, like, so you’ve got your athletic career, right? And generally, for endurance, you look at the best endurance athletes in the world. They’re topping out anywhere from like 36 to 40 years old, right?

18:15 Like Lance Armstrong, and you know, if you’re looking at Ironman guys like Craig Alexander and Chris McCormack, and any of these guys that are doing grueling feats of endurance, you get to a point where you’ve got that ultimate combination of slow-twitch muscle capacity, knowledge about how to fuel, knowledge about how to pace, knowledge of your own body, and you generally see a peak in those sports that comes later than the peak that you see in things like MMA, jiu-jitsu, football, you know, power and explosive sports that rely on fast-twitch muscle and high levels of testosterone. So, in stepping back and looking at my own athletic career, I decided that I wanted to choose a sport where I could still be really good, like be one of the top dogs. And I didn’t see myself getting there with triathlon, just with my body type.

19:02 Fair enough. How old are you, kind of? I’m 32. 32, okay. Now that’s an intelligent choice.

19:07 Yeah. So I moved so I got this text message two weeks before Ironman Triathlon from Team Timex, and it was basically a text message that said, do you want to race Ironman? And I didn’t know this, but Timex, because it’s the oldest running sponsor of the Ironman race in Hawaii, they’re given like this slot that they can give away, and people try for years to get to this race. People bid $30,000 to $40,000 on eBay to even be able to get into this race as a non-qualifier.

19:39 It’s a very, very tough race to get into, so getting a text message offering you a slot into the race was kind of a big deal. And I had just finished racing Spartan World Championships, literally the day before. So I felt like invincible, right? I just finished this super duper tough race, and I was like, sure, let’s do it, throw it at me. Right?

19:55 So I had two weeks to prepare for an Ironman, and my original goal was to just swim, bike and run a lot, right? And just rebuild those nervous system pathways as quickly as possible. And I realized, so I track my nervous system every morning. Okay, so I measure what’s called heart rate variability. Yeah, Dave’s a big fan of that.

20:13 If you could measure anything, like if you could self-quantify with any one variable, and you’re going to skip the blood test, you’re going to skip the gut test, you’ve got whatever limited resources, limited time, and you’re just like, I want to know one thing about my body every day. Heart rate variability is the way to do it. Okay, so I wake up every morning. I put on a little Bluetooth chest strap. It’s the only time that I’ll wear Bluetooth and self-quantification devices all day, just cuz I’m not a fan of having like low-level electrical signals, or high-level signals like Wi-Fi routers and cell phones and stuff like that, constantly on my body or on around me during the day.

20:48 But this one time, when I wake up, and this is the time that you’re supposed to do it, I do this heart rate variability measurement. So I put on the chest strap, turn on my phone, I use an app called SweetBeat, and it measures the strength of your sympathetic, your fight-or-flight nervous system, right? How beat up that is, or how primed and prepared it is, and then your parasympathetic nervous system, and it does that just by monitoring rest and digest.

21:13 Well, it’s monitoring your heartbeat, but more specifically, it’s monitoring the amount of time that’s spent between each heartbeat, right? Like the delta in your heart rate, or your heart rate variability, and what should happen is that should fluctuate, like tiny, tiny millisecond fluctuations from beat to beat, and if it does that, it shows that there’s good robustness in your nervous system, good interplay between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. So it’s a very, very good way to not only get like green light, yellow light, red light, right?

21:41 Like, train today, go easy today, kind of hold back today, but it’s also a good way to see how the previous day’s training, or your previous day’s diet, or maybe some kind of nutrient or supplement you took that night to help you get to sleep, like how that is affecting your nervous system the next day. Okay, do you do anything? Do you try to concentrate or calm yourself down while you’re doing it, or do you just lay down and let it run for a few minutes?

22:04 I generally don’t. I don’t try and hack it to get it higher, because I want a true measurement of where it’s at. There are things that you can do. As a matter of fact, the number one thing that you can do from a breathing standpoint is alternate left-right nostril breathing, like if you want to increase your heart rate. That’s where you breathe in, you plug your right nostril, and you breathe in through your left nostril, and then you move over and you plug your left nostril, and you breathe out through your right nostril.

22:27 Okay, it’s a very, very good way to calm yourself. You can’t do it without your finger, though, right? You’re not. I thought you were about to do it. Like, you can, if you’re like a freediver or something like that, you could probably figure it out without your finger, but it’s a very, very good way to calm yourself.

22:40 There are other things that you can do, like what’s called quick coherence technique, which is where you think of something that’s really meaningful to you, right? Like your kids, or your pet, or your lover, or something that’s very meaningful, and you close your eyes and you imagine that being in your heart. Like you, you visualize that and place it into your heart and breathe as you do it, and it sounds really woo-woo and airy-fairy, and but if you watch your heart rate variability as you do that while you’re hooked up to a device like this, you can see it go up.

23:09 Okay, and going up is good. Going up is good. You want your heart rate variability to be high. All right, so you want to kind of do a short beat, a long… Yeah.

23:17 You’re resting heart rate, in most cases, should be low. If it drops really low, that usually means you’re overtrained, but in most cases, like, the lower that it gets, the fitter that you are, and the higher that it gets, usually that’s a sign that you might be overtraining, or digging yourself into a training hole, or stressed out, or something like that, or maybe just not fit. Right? You have enough blood volume, but I started doing the swimming and the biking and the running to get myself ready.

23:38 Right, like I got total panic training, right? I got to swim, I got a bike, got run, and my heart rate variability was just plummeting, you know. And what happens is when it plummets, if it stays low for several days, you can guarantee you’re going to get injured during that day’s workout, or you’re going to get sick, or both, and that happens with a high correlation. That you found? Oh yeah.

23:57 It’s like the athletes, the clients that I coach, they send me that data every day. There’s an export feature on the app that they use, and I literally have an email inbox set up for each client, and that comes in as, it’s basically like an Excel spreadsheet, so you can pull it up, you can look at low frequency, high frequency, and those are measurements of the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system, and then overall heart rate variability. So if you see that coming, you should, uh, get some sleep, get some rest, eat, eat, watch your diet, and not train.

24:24 Sleep, rest. Yeah, like omission and commission. Like the number one thing I’ve tested, a lot of things. You know, sex the night before definitely increases it. That’s a great hormonal and nervous system stabilizer.

24:36 One thing that I found to vastly decrease it, it just plummets, is antihistamines. A lot of people use things like Benadryl, and like that just plummets heart rate variability. So you start to figure out the things that your nervous system really responds well to and responds poorly to, and it helps advise you on your training too, cuz you can see, okay, I do really good with heavy lifting, right? Like three days a week, but once I start to go four or five, my heart rate variability stays consistently low.

25:01 Okay, so that’s the one metric if people can do It’s a really good metric, and it’s easy, right? It’s like you’ve got to buy whatever a Bluetooth heart rate monitor chest strap is like 50 to 70 bucks in the US, and then the apps, it’s like 10 bucks, and set it up for a couple minutes and just kind of lay down. Three to five minutes, five minutes is ideal if you can make it five minutes. That’s so it takes three minutes to get a good heart rate variability score.

25:26 It takes five minutes for that parasympathetic-sympathetic nervous system to actually stabilize, right, where it’s not bouncing around. So five minutes is good. Okay, so what happened with the training? What did you do? So I was like, well, crap, this is this is not going to work.

25:41 I can’t do this. So I just shifted into full-on, what I call putting work into the body without actually working the body. So every morning, yoga, right? Like deep breathing, movement, opening up the hips. Did a lot of stuff.

25:56 You know, I know you’ve had Starrett on the show, so like foam roller and lacrosse ball and like a lot of the stuff that he talks about in his Supple Leopard book. I think he calls it goat hurting, right, where you just find all these little spots on your body that are tight or painful, and I would literally just put a podcast or some music on. Just go to town on my body. So I do yoga, I did soft tissue work, and that was how I’d start my morning, and in the afternoon I’d do things that would get blood flowing but that weren’t damaging to the body.

26:25 Sauna is a really good one. Just basically sitting in a sauna, you get production of heat shock proteins. You get a really, really good cardiovascular response. It moves lymph fluid around, it moves blood flow around, but you’re, but you know, there’s no joint impact, right? So you’re not really draining your nervous system that dramatically.

26:41 Cold exposure, same thing. I’m a big fan of cold thermogenesis, so I do long cold showers. I’ll sit in a cold bath, do cold soaks at my house, and I actually had a crane come up and deliver this big long 19-foot endless swimming pool, right? So it’s got these jets that push against you as you’re swimming or moving or walking or floating in the water, and I’ve got that set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So really, really cold pool that I can just sit in and float in or tread water in, but that’s a great way to get blood flowing, and it’s a great way to improve your cardiovascular capacity and put work into your body.

27:19 You can combine that with the heat as well if you want to go back and forth. Okay, but these type of things are things that you can do to train your body without actually training. And can I, I mean, how well does that work? Cuz you’d think okay, if you’re not actually biking or swimming or running or getting the heart rate up really high, I mean, can you get 50% of the effect, or do you get what’s called mitochondrial biogenesis? All right, so anytime that you’re doing something that causes your body to, for example, produce nitric oxide, which is what cold exposure and heat exposure do, like that produces what’s called endothelial nitric oxide.

27:52 It opens up capillaries, it opens up vessels, it causes vasodilation, increased glucose and oxygen delivery to muscle tissue. When you do that, you drive a genetic response to make more mitochondria, which is what you’re going to actually rely upon, the mitochondria, your cell’s powerhouses that produce ATP. If you’ve got increased density of your mitochondria, that enables you to go longer, to go harder, to go faster. There are different ways you can hack that pathway.

28:21 You can go out and do voluminous exercise at low intensities for long periods of time. That’s like the Kenyan marathoner approach, and that approach works as long as you’re not, um, as long as you’re not pushing yourself too hard during those long slow sessions. That’s called polarized training. You see a lot of people like cross-country skiers, tor-to-front cyclists, Kenyan marathoners like they use that style of training. It’s 80% very, very low aerobic training, and then 20% super short bursts of high-intensity training, and almost no in-between training, right?

28:53 Almost no, I’m going to go out for a one-hour lunchtime run that sets 70% kind of hard, kind of not hard. There’s none of that. It’s either easy or super hard. So how was the, how did the triathlon go? So, uh, anyway, were you nervous going in, because you probably never trained like this before?

29:12 Yeah, well, I’d use this type of training for recovery, right? Like a typical recovery day for me is heat, cold, yoga, foam roller, all these things that increase mitochondrial biogenesis and recovery and blood flow without actually beating up the body, and I think that more people should use those types of things for recovery. It’s very very good for athletes to get blood flowing in that way. You see a lot of the UFC fighters doing the ice baths. I know a few people are doing these cold gas chambers now in LA, cryotherapy, but you know, I see it kind of few and far between.

29:44 People don’t talk about it too much. Yeah, and the research on cold soaks, when you look at fighting inflammation, when you look at post-cold-soak performance, like the next day’s performance, soreness, it goes back and forth. There’s no conclusive research that shows that when you jump into a cold bath after workout, right, it’s going to help you bounce back faster or help your recovery the next day. Okay, but what they haven’t looked at in these studies is mitochondria.

30:10 That actually takes a muscle biopsy. You go in and you get your muscle. You, it hurts. I’ve done it before. They take a piece out of your muscle.

30:18 I did a study at University of Connecticut last year, where they had me follow a high-fat diet for 12 months, and then we did a muscle biopsy to see what happened to my muscle tissue, right? Like what the carbohydrate and fat composition of my muscle tissue was. It hurts like a mother where they take from it. It was both thighs, really, but it was three times, right? So, and one time was before a 3-hour treadmill run, and then right after the 3-hour treadmill run, and then you eat, and then after that to see what happens to the tissue, and then they also did fat biopsies off of the off the butt cheek.

30:49 I can tell you more about that study later if you want. If you want to hear cuz we literally rewrote the textbooks as far as how much fat you can burn during exercise, cuz there was a very special diet they had me follow for that protocol. Okay, yeah, we’ll talk about that later. Um, so, anyways, I get into Ironman, and so I’m out there. It’s surreal.

31:05 Like I’m treading water, total, like I have no clue what my body’s capable of at this point. Um, and so I’m out there treading water, and I didn’t have a triathlon bike, right? So I shipped all the little parts that were in a box in my garage down to Hawaii, to my team that was down there, Team Timex, and they have like a tent set up and like a bike shop and a bike mechanic, so they built me a bike and gave me a bike, basically the day before the race. Okay, and which isn’t smart.

31:32 Yeah, and any cyclists who are listening are going to kind of kind of know this, but Tor-to-front cyclists, if you watch them doing like their 40K time trial, right? Like Lance Armstrong on the day where they’re wearing the pointy helmet and the bodysuit, and it’s one guy, right? Like going as fast as they can for typically a 40K, and they’re bent way over in this super aggressive position, and their head’s like literally lower than their butt, and they’re bent over the bike like this, just super aggressive position, not designed to ride 112 miles, definitely not designed as a position to be in for a guy who hasn’t been riding his bicycle well.

32:09 That’s the position that I had on the bike. Okay, so I just basically rode as hard as I could on the bike. I’ll tell you what happened in a second, but basically the swim felt great. Okay, I don’t know if it was the weightlifting, if it was because I’d spent barely any time in the water, but I was five minutes slower than what I would typically swim 2.4 miles in. So usually I’d swim like around an hour or so.

32:30 I was like an hour and five minutes. Okay, so it turns out that you can swim for long periods of time just by lifting weights and then using muscle memory of having swum before. That’s interesting. Um, so the swim wasn’t that bad. The bike, uh, like I said, I rode 12 miles as hard as I could, then everything locked up.

32:46 Back locked, the hip flexors locked, just the biomechanics were completely off. So I spent the rest of the ride just sitting up like a grandma with a pink basket on the front of my bike, literally just sitting up and and riding. So okay, my bike ride was almost an hour and a half slower than what it would normally take me to ride, and I was like stopping at aid stations and visiting with volunteers, and at one point I rode up to a volunteer aid station and was just basically chatting them up as I stretched my hip flexors so I could at least get back on my bike and pedal, and they invited me into their truck to smoke their bong, and they offered me like a little Ziploc bag full of weed before I wrote off, and I’m like, they, they do blood testing at the finish line, and I can’t do that, but it was funny to be in the world championship of our sport and get offered marijuana halfway through the bike ride.

33:33 That is funny, and then the run was not bad. I ran the marathon, but my legs were all kind of locked up from the bike ride, but ultimately I finished it kind of in the middle of the field, with almost zero amount of time spent doing actual triathlon training. The lesson that I learned from it is that the human body is capable of these big feats of endurance without a lot of training. We are innate endurance animals, right? Like the fact that we’re upright and we’ve got lots of surface area for cooling, the fact that we can sweat instead of pant, so we’re able to cool ourselves much more efficiently than a lot of other animals, the fact that we’re intelligent enough to be able to carry fuel with us for long periods of time, the way that our butts are built, we actually get really, really good hip extension and push off the ground with each foot strike.

34:23 What this comes down to is that, like, if you want to go out and run a marathon, or you want to go out and ride a bike 112 miles, you want to do anything that involves long periods of time moving the human body, it is pretty good at that. What it tends to be weaker in is strength, power, injury prevention, flexibility, coordination. A lot of those things need to be trained. If you train those things, you can go out and you can do some pretty cool feats of endurance without the traditional, you know, like an Ironman triathlete is going to, you know, run 60 miles a week and ride their bike 200 miles a week and, you know, swim four or five days a week for 45 minutes to an hour.

34:59 You don’t have to do that stuff, right? If you just want to say, go out and do an Ironman, it turns out that if you’re a relatively fit person, you can just go out and do one. Okay, that’s a good observation. We’ll keep going. That’s interesting.

35:09 No, it’s interesting how you say, I guess it is true the human body is kind of subject to some of those things you said, like injury and things like that. Can you tell me about the Spartan Race? I actually did a Tough Mudder about four months ago, and, uh, it was tougher than I thought, and, uh, you know, it was, and I told people it was actually 12 miles, and we were up and down these f***ing hills in Britain, and, uh, we couldn’t really dress for it, because you can’t, you know, you can’t wear like weatherproof stuff, because you get soaked, and so stuck in barbed wire, or, yeah.

35:36 And by the end, like, I couldn’t even like hang on a ring. I was just falling into things, and it was like four hours, and I was like, people, like, what was it like? I was like, it was tough, you know? And I know the Spartan is very different. So what’s a Spartan Race like?

35:49 Well, I mean, the original Spartan Race was the Death Race in Vermont on this guy’s farm, like this 100-acre farm. Joe De Sena, who actually spoke at Bulletproof, it was kind of funny, cuz he and I were scheduled to be on stage on the two different stages, uh, at two different times, and we actually went out and grabbed a taco beforehand and called an audible and walked onto the main stage both at the same time and gave our talks together. It was really interesting.

36:12 Like, he pulled the whole like Flintstones, flipping tires, crawling under barbed wire thing, and then I took on the whole biohacking approach, and I was talking about infrared light therapy and cold thermogenesis and supplements and hypoxia, and we just combined it into one talk, and it actually turned out to be really interesting, because by the end we were kind of tongue-in-cheek, like having people do burpees out in the audience, they run back to their cell phones to check their heart rates and see how many burpees they’ve done and download their Fitbit data. So it was. It was kind of an interesting mashup of biohacking and then just, like, ancestral moving heavy stuff and flipping tires.

36:46 That’s fantastic. He was, I know someone who was at the conference. Actually, I just spent a week up in Scotland with a guy by the name of Dan Peña. You might have seen him. He’s a 7-year-old guy.

36:54 He wears three-piece suits with ties, and he was out there, but he was really impressed with, uh, you know, the Spartan guy and the whole thing. So yeah, so Joe’s cool. Um and this was Joe’s farm that the original Death Race was at, and honestly, I think that a big part of it was just him figuring out a way to get people to come to his farm and do chores, cuz you’d, like, start off the race with like five hours of wood chopping, and I was actually at his farm last month speaking at an event that he had there, and, like, there’s a whole mile in the hills back behind his house, and it’s literally like big heavy stepping stones going up this entire hill for a full mile, and I’m thinking, how did all these stones well, that was part of the Death Race.

37:30 People just had to carry these huge stones up the side of the hill out. So I heard talk about, he just was like, dare, the craziest thing, and you, like, dive down and get a cinder block from the bottom of a pond, then memorize a Bible verse and go to the top of a mountain holding an egg that you couldn’t break, and you had to recite the Bible verse, and then come back down, and if you didn’t do it, you had to go back down. And I’m actually signed, or I’m not signed up, but I am signing up for what’s supposed to be the last Death Race, which is in, uh, in June, so I’m going to do one of these races, but I’ve done the equivalent of the Navy SEAL hell week for civilians in Inus, California.

38:07 Okay, that’s like seven days of sleep deprivation, and you’re literally working out for seven days. It’s crazy. How was it, and how much sleep dep, and what are they, are you staying in the barracks, or like, what do they do to you? Yeah, I’ll tell you about that. Give, let’s talk.

38:22 I’ll tell you about the Death Race that that thing was called Kokoro. It was nuts. Okay, absolutely nuts. It changed my life. Good, I want to hear about that.

38:28 I felt like a God among men when I finished that. Nuts. So the Spartan Race put the current version out, though, for normal people. People wanted to do the Death Race, and it was too dangerous, right? They had to, like, make it palatable for the general population, and probably from a business standpoint they realized also that if you made it palatable for the general population, you’d get a lot of people signing up, and that has happened, right?

38:47 It’s like outgrown triathlon and marathoning by leaps and bounds. Very fast-growing sport. It’s a good business. Um, a couple of guys run a different obstacle race. They’re on Shark Tank, and I think Mark Cuban gave them a loan on Shark Tank, just because their business model, it was like no-brainer.

39:03 I mean, the margins are huge. It’s like old pieces of wood and barbed wire, and people are running around the forest, and you’re charging them, you know, 150 bucks to, and Tough Mudder is doing very well as well, and they really have a good vibe and a good community. I don’t know what it’s like with Spartan, but the Tough Mudder, you know, they don’t have times. Everyone finishes or no one finishes, and it’s this whole vibe that they do really well. Yeah, and the Spartan, it’s an actual, it’s a race race.

39:27 Um, and it’s a freaking blast. I mean, you’re carrying cinder blocks with chains and crawling under barbed wire and leaping over 8-foot and 12-foot tall walls, and they use nature to create the course. Okay, so whatever happens to be in nature in that particular, whether whether it’s a desert with hills, or whether it’s a freaking, like, I did one in a baseball stadium. It was AT&T Stadium in San Francisco, where they’re like tying your feet together with elastic bands, and you’re jumping up and down the stairs and, you know, you’ll carry two 60-pound water jugs at a time up and down the stairs.

40:03 Rope climbs, cargo nets. Really, really fantastic test of human stamina, strength, skill, anticipation. Um, how long does it take, and willingness to get dirty and cold? Right? Like you get dirty and cold.

40:14 How long does it take? Like, they’ve got, it’s just like triathlon, right? So you’ve got like Sprints that take 30 to 50 minutes. You’ve got what are called Supers that take anywhere from like an hour to two hours. You’ve got Beasts.

40:26 The first Beast that I did took me two hours. The second one took me four and a half hours, just cuz it was two different courses. So really depends. And then they’ve got the Ultra Beast, which is like a full marathon of obstacle racing. Um, they’re a blast, though, and I live on 10 acres of wooded forest out in Washington state, and just to help me in my preparation I’ve turned my entire acreage into one giant obstacle course.

40:52 So I’ve got walls and ropes, and, like, I’ve got hay bales attached to the trees, cuz the spear throw is part of the Spartan Race. So basically you’ll be running through the forest and you’ll come up on a hay bale with the spear sticking out of it. You’ve got to take the spear out and back off 25 feet and throw the spear, and then you’ll run up, and I’ve got like upside-down ropes that you climb, attached from one tree to the next, where you’re just climbing upside down like a monkey for 30 feet.

41:15 Sounds like no comparison to an Ironman. I mean, as far as the fun, creativity, different, and honestly, like I’m as fit as I’ve ever been in my whole life, from bodybuilding, and I played collegiate tennis. I played for the water polo team in college. I did sprint triathlon all the way up to Ironman triathlon, and now I’m in obstacle racing, and I’m in the best shape of my life, just because it is, you know, even when you look at CrossFit, right? CrossFit has all those components, strength, speed, power, but they don’t have the stamina and the endurance component, at least not much of it in traditional CrossFit.

41:52 If you look at CrossFit Endurance, sure, they include that in something like that, but basic CrossFit, I mean, even that I can go in and powerlift with a CrossFitter, but then, you know, be able to ditch them in a six-mile run just from the mud running training. So did the CrossFit Games ever appeal to you, or any of those? They appeal to me, but like, I’ve got to choose my battles, and right now I’m digging the Spartan Racing, and it’s just like, even when I was bodybuilding, so right now I weigh 185.

42:21 When I was doing triathlon I weighed about 175. Um, when I was bodybuilding I was at 210, and that was a hard weight for me to stay at, but that was the weight I needed to be at to move heavy things, and I think getting up to that level again to do something like the CrossFit Games, it’s just you need to be a big f***ing ton of protein and crap through a straw, and you need to be big for the deadlifts and things like that. But there’s a lot of bodyweight stuff too.

42:45 Pull-ups. Yeah, there there is. But I mean, if you look at guys like Rich Froning, you know, they’re big guys. I mean, they don’t weigh a lot, but they’re also pretty built, like they’ve got a good amount of muscle, and when you get up to that amount of muscle, it does get hard to do something like a six-mile run, or an 8-mile run, or a Beast, 13 miles. And I do, I’ve got one thing I have is like perseverance and endurance, right?

43:12 Like, I’m not, you have to have that in the Ironman. I’m very stubborn, right? I’ll you have to be, you have to be a little insane to go that long, because that plays on your mind. You can get genetically tested too. So I’ve done 23andMe genetic testing, and even though the FDA does not at this point allow 23andMe to publish things like, like your risk for type 2 diabetes, or your prostate cancer risk, things like that, they used to be able to do that, and I got that data from them when I when I did the original testing, but now when you log into 23andMe, you can’t get that data.

43:42 They’re not allowed to give it to you, but you can export their data and then have another company import it, and I actually used a company from here in the UK called DNAfit, and they imported my data, and one of the things that that they gave me on my chart was what kind of a power, SL, endurance animal I am, based off of my gene, my gene markers for slow-twitch and my gene markers for fast-twitch, and it turns out I’ve got this really really even blend, and I would say that, like, the ultimate CrossFitter, for example, would be skewed a little bit more towards the power side of that blend, right? Like a little bit more the fast, like the type 2A and type 2B fast-twitch muscle fibers, whereas somebody who is just like a pure Ironman animal would probably be pretty good towards the endurance side and away from the power side, but with a 50/50 mix of power and endurance, I think I’ve chosen the right sport to go after.

44:33 You know, before we get into this, this hell week that you did with the SEALs, do you ever think to yourself, like, what makes me want to do this stuff, because you’re 32 and you’re like doing these obstacle courses, before that you were doing endurance stuff? Like, why are you driven to these things? Do you ever ask yourself that? You know, part of it is that, is that they’re fun, that you feel alive? Like, I don’t want to be that guy who is, um, who’s just like uber successful, who has a lot of nice suits but who’s just like, cuz I work with these guys, these guys who made it, right, when they were 30 and 40, and now they’re like 45 years old, and they’re sick, and their biomarkers are off, and they’ve got hypogonadism, they aren’t producing any testosterone, they’ve got 20 extra pounds of body fat to lose, that, frankly, it’s going to take years and years to get back off their body, cuz they spent time from 35 to 45 years old at steakhouses, drinking wine and eating too much food and sitting in airplanes, bad habits.

45:27 It’s like, I want to be successful, but I also don’t want that life, right? I want to, I want to have a human body that is primed, that’s optimized for performance and recovery and fat loss and digestion and sleep and brain and hormone optimization, right? Like, I want my body to perform at peak potential, and I want to be able to experience what that feels like, and for me, part of that is going out and testing the body, right? Like having some kind of a crucible that you put your body through each year that allows you to live that, allows you to test the limits of the human body, and the pressure of having that kind of keeps you dialed in with all these other things, like taking care of your brain, taking care of your blood sugar management, taking care of your body fat levels, staying strong, making that decision to not sit for 8 hours a day.

46:16 It’s like, it’s a lot easier to stay motivated to do that stuff when it’s not for health, and let’s face it, even the goal of being around to see your grandkid hit a home run, like the whole anti-aging component, that can seem kind of far off, that can seem kind of woo, and it’s hard to convince somebody to get a standing workstation instead of a sitting workstation, or to go sign up for, you know, a 5K or something like that, and to tell them, well, this is because, you know, little Billy, your 10-year-old boy, is going to have kids someday, and you want to be able to see them, you know, score a soccer goal. It’s not real enough. Yeah, exactly.

46:49 It’s easier to say, cuz you want to kick ass in this Spartan that you’re going to do and cross that finish line with a big smile on your face and just go out and get dirty and do something cool. So for me, I know that that’s how I’m motivated. Um, no, it’s, I’m thinking about my Tough Mudder experience, and, like, I knew it was coming up for four or five months. My one of the guys I trained with, I just signed both of us up, and he was like, what are you doing?

47:10 And I was like, we’re going now. And so, but leading up to it, I was like, you know, I was I knew in the back of my mind that every training session I had to be thinking about it and thinking about what I was going to do, and I was anticipating it. It does push me out of bed. Yeah, and then when I got there, um, I had a [expletive]. I felt awesome afterwards.

47:26 I must say it was like no feeling ever felt. You know, I’ve trained Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Brazil and trained Muay Thai boxing as I was telling you, in Thailand, and done all these other things, but there was something about that endurance piece, and it was in the elements, and I was freezing, and I was muddy, and there was like everything in my hair, and I was underwater, and you know, this one girl, like, jacked her ankle, and somebody, I think, broke their back, and the helicopter was coming in, and it’s not the safest thing. It’s like a fight.

47:51 Yeah, it is like a fight, and it’s something a little bit like, it’s not a padded gym. There’s, you can mess yourself up out there, and so yeah, it was something cool about it. I think that some people don’t like that. Yeah, carnal is a great word for it, but some people, and I think that I might fall into this category, they’re just born a little bit competitive, a little bit, just wanting to win, wanting to beat somebody else, almost like with this bloodthirst, but not in a violent way, like in a way that drives you to want to win.

48:23 And I think some people take that and channel it into business success, and some people take that and twist it into personal success on another level. Like, I think just based off of the cards I’ve been dealt in life, I have twisted that towards exercise. Right? Okay, and when you go in, do you try to win that race? Are you like, I’m going to win it?

48:41 Are you scoping that? That’s why, that’s why I’m afraid of what happens when I’m after 40. Right? Cuz, cuz the only thing that gets me toeing the line is not health and anti-aging. It’s, it’s beating people.

48:52 Right? It’s winning. That’s what I want is to win when I toe the starting line. So I’m probably going to have to start golfing, or something when I’m, cuz once I know I can’t win or once I know the chance isn’t out there for me to win or be one of the top guys. It’s like I lose a lot of my motivation, so I’ll probably, I’ll probably have to figure that out at some point in the next eight years.

49:13 And what’s a peer group like? What is the guys that finish in the top 10 at these Spartan races? What are they like? Are they like you? They look like you?

49:20 Are they your age? Um, they range. It’s the Wild Wild West. This whole Spartan Racing thing is new, right? It’s new.

49:26 Half the people don’t know the rules, you know? There’s things like burpee penalties when you fail an obstacle, and everybody’s got their own version of a burpee, and there’s no standardization. It’s just like it’s the Wild Wild West. And the same thing with the racers, there’s like, my buddy Hunter, who I do a podcast with right now, called the Obstacle Dominator, where we sit down every two weeks and just give out obstacle racing tips. He’s, I mean, he’s built thick, right?

49:53 He’s the kind of guy who, if he wanted to, could probably go and do really, really well in the CrossFit Games. He’s just big. Um, and then there’s Matt Novakovich. So Hunter’s like 25, Matt Novakovich is like 39 or 40, and he’s an ex-competitive cyclist who’s like this little skinny toothpick guy who’s put on some muscle and who’s killing it at these things. And these guys are on two opposite ends of the spectrum.

50:17 So some guys are built like fast, slightly small linebackers. Some guys are just thin and wispy, and they do good on like runners courses that don’t require a lot of strength. And that’s really interesting too, because you can go to battle on different courses, and you can almost predict how certain guys are going to do on certain courses based off of how much strength there is versus how much running versus how much, you know, hills versus unbroken flat spaces.

50:43 So, um, it’s kind of a total mashup of body types right now. So I think that there has yet to be discovered the ultimate body type for something like this. It’s exciting times. It’s kind of like the early days of UFC, where no one would know which martial art was going to win. No one had ever trained for the UFC, so like no one had ever actually trained for an event like this.

51:03 So, and for me, like, I’ve had a lot of my success as a coach and, um, doing a lot online as well in the triathlon market, right? Like that was kind of my niche market for a long time. Um, and frankly, from a business standpoint, you know, I’m looking at this as an opportunity also to help people, you know, supply them with training plans and coaching, consulting, and all the things that, you know, I did with triathlon. That’s one thing I do like about my job.

51:32 What I do is help people achieve their goals, but typically I like to be achieving those goals myself simultaneously. Yeah, it helps when your training does that. You know, we have like a 90% male audience. Obviously, like I said, we’ve had guys like Starrett and, you know, fighters and Dolce and people like that, so they probably want to know, when it comes to the things you teach and your fitness, you know, regimen and your ideas about nutrition, I mean, if you had to sum it up, you know, in like kind of the one minute, you know, what’s different about the, you know, Ben Greenfield approach?

51:59 How do you describe it to people? Well, it really is getting the ultimate marriage of health and performance, rather than the traditional approach of beating yourself up with an exercise session or taking a bunch of athletes and throwing them like a bunch of eggs against the wall and keeping the ones that don’t crack. Um, right. I think there’s a cool, from me, you said, rather than just work out like a mad man and eat boring food. Like you try to show an alternative to that, right?

52:25 And a big part of what I do is I find out how healthy you are. For me, the reason that I did this was several years ago, when I was in the throes of Ironman training. I started to test blood and biomarkers, and I saw high cortisol and low total testosterone, low free testosterone, high sex hormone binding globulin, disregulated thyroid, high levels of inflammation and oxidized cholesterol particles, all these things that people who are fit on the outside and look really good in spandex or Speedo or whatever, ever on the outside, they’re dying on the inside, right?

52:57 So that’s a big part of what I do is I look not just at some of those nervous system components that we talked about, to make sure that that people’s nervous systems are primed, but I take advantage of a lot of the biohacks that help you get fitter like we discussed, without actually going out and putting a lot of impact on the joints or doing a lot of hormone depleting activities. And then I’m a big fan of testing. It, we live in an era where testing is so, it’s not inexpensive, but it’s getting less expensive, right?

53:26 The whole lab-on-a-chip technology is not quite here yet, but a bit like the technology exists in the US. It’s the FDA that’s keeping that technology from actually being applicable to the general population. Like, I had on my podcast some folks from Talking 20 last year on my show, and they were literally doing one drop of blood. You send it in, they’ve got this mass spectrometer in their lab, they do a full range of tests on that one drop of blood and send you back all the results that you’d get from, like, an executive lab test.

53:56 The FDA shut them down, cuz they didn’t want people sending in their blood spots around the country, or I don’t know what the exact reason was, but the technology is there to get this testing done very inexpensively at this point. It is a little bit more spendy. You got to go to, like, I work with a company called WellnessFX, for example, and you order your test on their website. They send you what’s called a requisition form. You print that off, you do a little search for the lab that’s nearest to your home, so I’ve got a lab that’s like a mile from my house, so I drive in, I hand them my form, they take my blood, they fill the tubes, I leave, and within about a week I get a PDF report of my results.

54:33 Okay, and I can look at, and I have a lot of my athletes, and I encourage a lot of people who are listening in who want to strike that ideal balance between health and performance to do this same thing. You can look at what’s going on with your body, what you’re deficient in. And it’s really cool from, like, a supplementation standpoint too. You know, I know, cuz you’re drinking Bulletproof Coffee that you probably have looked into vitamins and supplements, and you know, I know Dave has things like, you know, the liposomal glutathione and, um, you know, smart drugs and stuff like that.

55:04 Yeah, and there’s multivitamins, and there’s fish oil, and there’s vitamin D and vitamin K and antioxidants. You could take all this stuff, or you could go test and see what you’re actually deficient in. I had a consult with an athlete literally from my hotel room yesterday. I was Skyping with a guy, and he had sent me all his bloods, and after looking through all his bloods, we determined about all he needed was a fish oil and a vitamin D. That was it.

55:28 The guy’s vitamins were good. His minerals were good, his antioxidant status was good. Like almost everything was good. He needed a little bit better, what’s called omega-3, omega-6 fatty acid index, and his vitamin D was a little bit low. Can you see that from one test, or do you need a comparison test?

55:42 You can see that from one test. And can you read it? Can a normal person read it, or do you, a normal person can. Well, I mean, like, let me put it this way. If you’re willing to do your research and you’re pretty self-educated, you can use Dr Google, and you can use, like, there’s a sit like LabTestsOnline.com or .org or something like that.

55:59 Like you can dig through some of the data yourself if you are comfortable with that. I mean, in some cases that can be plain with fire. If you, you know, whatever, you could like see that you’re low in iron, for example, and take too much iron and get hemochromatosis and iron toxicity, and that’s very easy to do. Things like that. So you need to be kind of careful, but at the same time this type of testing is something that is available to people that aren’t just, like, you know, jet-setting executives.

56:27 Who originally, you know, 10 years ago, you paid 10,000 bucks at Princeton Longevity Institute to get blood testing like this, and now you can do it online, so there’s no excuse. Anyone listening to us right now, including me, we should go get our blood tested. Right, you should get your blood tested, and there are a lot of, there are a lot of comp, you know, there’s like nutritionists and physicians that partner with these companies who go through your labs for you.

56:45 So same thing with the gut. Um, and this is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, but you have to figure out what’s going on in your colon, in your small intestine, in your stomach, what your pancreatic enzyme production looks like to find out if, like, athletes, for example, almost every athlete, they wind up having enzyme deficiencies just cuz they’re burning through so many calories And they’re asking their digestive system to pump out so many enzymes, so they’re supposed to be in a digestive enzyme complex. But that’s something you can test.

57:12 You can test pancreatic enzyme production. You can test bacteria, yeast, fungus, parasites. How do you test that? That’s not a blood test. That’s a poop test.

57:19 Poop test. So you typically would order something like this to your home, right? The best ones, it’s three days, right? Right, so you poo in this little pan one day, scoop it into a tube, you put that in the fridge. Okay, usually your partner loves this, cuz he poops in the fridge, little FedEx bag or whatever, and then you do it the next day, and then you do it the next day, and on that final day you send it off to the lab.

57:38 So they want a ni, they want a good, a mi, a mean, cuz your microbiome fluctuates all the time. That’s the whole deal with these, like, whole, like You’ve probably heard of fecal transplants, or like this whole new trend about poop pills? No, I haven’t. And is now, yeah, where have you been with the poop pills? So what they’re doing now is they’re doing fecal transplants in people whose microbiomes are completely messed up from heavy antibiotic use or some kind of a bacterial infection that wiped out the good bacteria in their gut.

58:07 People who have, like, inflammation of the colon, like colitis, a lot of things that reflect completely damaged bacterial balance in the gut. They’re now giving them fecal transplants to repopulate their gut with good bacteria. These are literally take those orally. You could goou them. They’re called poop pills.

58:22 Yeah, you take them. You can take them orally or rectally, and they literally repopulate your gut. I was, I was actually in for, done this? Uh, no, I haven’t done it, cuz I don’t think I need to. I think so.

58:32 It’s kind of gross to think about, but when you first pass through Mom’s birth canal, right? You are as a baby picking up tiny little pieces of her poop and swallowing them, like, as you go through her canal. Completely clean birth via C-section in a hospital, you’re not getting any of that, so you’re not getting prepopulated with a lot of this good bacteria. Now, fortunately, mom’s breast milk also has that, so even if a kid is born via C-section, if they’re breastfed, they’re still getting exposed to a lot of that bacteria early on in life.

59:00 Okay. Um, but in an era of antibiotics and hand washing and bottle boiling and soy formula instead of breast milk and antibacterial hand soap, like we’re almost too clean, and that’s affected a lot of people’s guts, and some people to the point where they actually benefit from eating poop, like, like doing a fecal transplant. The new human race is coming to a new level. The aliens can see us now. So how often would you say, having a blood test and having a, a fecal.

59:25 So what I do is a blood test every quarter, right? Okay, so every three months I go in and I do one of the WellnessFX panels, just their full, like, get the hormones, the lipid panel, the thyroid, like the full meal deal. Okay, once a year, and I’ve done this more often than once a year if I come down with something. Like, I competed in Thailand a couple of years ago in a triathlon, and I came back with just, like, gut distress, and something wasn’t right, and, like, every two weeks I was waking up like clockwork.

59:54 It is really weird. Like, on the weekends I would just wake up and I’d be wide awake from, like, midnight to 4:00 a.m., and I could just tell something wasn’t right, and I went in and got a gut test, and I had a parasite, like the type of parasite that you get from stagnant water in Asia, and these things hatch every couple of weeks. It’s really nasty to think about, and so that’s why I wasn’t sleeping every couple of weeks, cuz these things would hatch.

1:00:15 It’s just, it’s nasty, but you don’t know a lot of times if you have something like that going on in your body unless you test. So I’m a fan of a test once a year to just see if you need to hit the reboot button on your gut. I’m a fan of a blood test every quarter, and then there’s another test if you’ve got a little bit more money to spend, um, if you want even a deeper dive into full vitamin status, mineral status, heavy metals, like all the all the smaller things, and that’s called an ion panel.

1:00:44 It’s also known as a SpectraCell analysis, and this is one where you can find out. Usually it’s like a $1,000 to $1,500 panel, but you can find out every little thing that’s that blood. That’s a blood. And is there hair analysis? Is that relevant?

1:00:58 A hair analysis, you can do. Um, it’s funny you should ask, cuz I haven’t done that, but I have shipped off my hair. I actually got a haircut before I started on my last bout of travel, and I took some of the hair and sent it off to a lab just cuz I was curious. But that hair test is somewhat similar to the SpectraCell. You get minerals, you get metals.

1:01:15 Um, it’s, it’s just basically a look at what’s happening, but they’re looking at the root of your hair over the last few months of growth. Okay, so basic takeaways from this should be really checking out their heart variability in the morning, and at least if you’ve never had your blood test, get your blood tested, get it done, right? Get a poop test. Um, do the heart rate variability testing. Opt for a SpectraCell if you want, if you wanted to do the full meal deal.

1:01:39 Um, those are most the biggies from an analysis standpoint, but returning full circle to the to how we got on this topic in the first place, like, that’s what I focus on. That’s different, right? Like, you don’t just exercise, like, the name of my book right now that you talked about earlier. It’s Beyond Training, and the reason that I titled it Beyond Training is because it goes into all the stuff that athletes forget to do, or that the general exercise enthusiast forgets to do, that goes way above and beyond the workout: the recovery parameters, optimizing your brain and your nervous system, the supplement component, the testing component, basically taking care of your body and getting it to be an optimized human machine rather than just throwing workouts at it and keeping your fingers crossed that it bounces back.

1:02:24 UFC is like littered with examples of that. Only recently, in the last year or two, some of the champions have actually shipped in nutritionists, and you hear their diets beforehand, and it was basically hard sparring sessions and pizza, like, and you’re like, how did you ever get to the elite? But now the elite are competing with the elite, and you can’t do that anymore. You be fast and you can be good on pizza, but part of this comes down to the health portion too, like when you look at, like, the study that they did.

1:02:49 I think this one was on marathoners. It may have been runners in general, but they found that they had increased risk of heart issues. But if you go and you look at the diet of a marathoner, they’re eating a high amount of carbohydrate that has potential to create oxidation of cholesterol. What happens is when you have a combination of high… this is why you shouldn’t have, like, a scone with a Bulletproof coffee. When you combine cholesterol with chronically elevated blood sugar levels, the sugar does what’s called glycation.

1:03:16 It glycates the cholesterol particle, or it glycates protein, and it can oxidize the cholesterol, which makes the cholesterol very likely to dig into an endothelial cell wall and cause something like atherosclerotic or plaque buildup. When it combines with proteins, it can cause, like, neurofibrillary tangles on the brain level. It can cause damage to connective tissue. This is called advanced glycation end products, where you get joint pain, and your skin starts to wrinkle a little bit faster than usual, and your muscles don’t recover.

1:03:43 That’s just glycation. It’s just attached. Same thing happens when you bake sugar with protein. Um, how did you learn all this stuff, like, like a Honey Baked Ham is like the worst thing that you could eat, tast good to hum. How did you learn all this stuff?

1:03:55 You don’t have a degree in this. I have a master’s degree in nutrition and physiology, and, um, did you learn all this then, or not, or did it just tee you up? Honestly, like, on the University level, the biomechanics and the physiology component is pretty sound. I mean, yeah. The nutrition is crap, though.

1:04:12 I mean, it’s just died in the wool, you know, 20 years ago, thinking nothing. Exactly. Um, but I did take a lot of higher level biochemistry. I did 400- and 500-level biochemistry and organic chemistry courses. I did a lot of human physiology courses, so I studied this stuff and had a general knowledge of the chemistry back in college.

1:04:30 Do you, like, do you like the term biohacking, or do you think it’s overused too much these days? And I might have hit a nerve here, or do you think some people use it in the wrong way? I think it’s a cool phrase, honestly. Like, it sounds cool. Um, it does.

1:04:42 I mean, you’re hacking your biology, right? You’re taking the, the, the, you know, I was big into World of Warcraft, and I bought the computer program, and I was a kid where it was similar to Doom, where you could make your own first-person player game, but you were just programming Doom, and in a way hacking computer games and figuring out how to make them more efficient, or how to figure out how to make them do something they wouldn’t normally do, or do something they would normally do faster or more efficiently. Okay, and I mean, really that’s That’s all you’re doing.

1:05:11 Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, biohacking, I mean, you know, drinking a glass of wine is biohacking in a way, and drinking caffeine is biohacking. So we’ve been doing it for a long time. I think that probably the super serious biohackers, on, like, LongeCity.com, is a really popular forum for biohackers, and you know, there are some more serious people, like, associated with, like, the Bulletproof biohacking, that are doing, like, the transcranial direct stimulation, or the tDCS.

1:05:37 And you know, like, the light sound stimulation, and the, uh, what’s the one called Upgraded Focus, where you’re literally wearing electrodes and staring at a computer as it’s causing static within your brain when you lose focus. I think some people do consider that to be true biohacking, whereas whatever, sitting in a cold pool is just sitting in a cold pool. But I consider anything that hacks you into a more efficient exercise environment to be really whatever you want to call it, you know, a biohack, a trick.

1:06:07 Okay, can you take strategy, a technique? Can you take it too far? Is it like when you’re walking around with electrodes on your head all the time? Is that too far, or is there any too far in your opinion when it comes to biohacking? Can you overanalyze?

1:06:18 So I wrote an article about this a while back, like how I got to a point in my exercise career where I was like, screw the heart rate monitors, screw the power meters, screw the GPS. I just want to go out and run in the forest, right? I just want to go out and get in touch with nature. And this was, this was, I wrote this to the point where I had become a blogger and a podcaster and a freelancer and was spending time in front of the computer, and when I got outside I just wanted to be outside and just play, and not in a laboratory, which you are.

1:06:48 I didn’t want to have stuff attached to me, right? Cuz you’re running experiments on your body. I think you get to a certain point where you can start to suck the enjoyment out of life when you’re attached to something too long, like the heart rate variability that I talked about. Um, they do have something called a health patch that you can wear 24/7 that monitors you via Bluetooth: perspiration, skin temp, heart rate, heart rate variability, movement, steps, everything.

1:07:11 It feeds that into your phone, but you’re carrying your phone around all day, and you’ve got a Bluetooth signal coming out of your chest all day, and I I have yet to be convinced that there’s not some kind of a biological cost to that. Like, I just, you know, I hardwire into my Wi-Fi router when I’m working on my computer. My whole house is like metal-shielded wiring, you know, everything’s designed with low volatile organic compounds. It’s just like, I try and be as healthy as possible, and I think that some of this stuff, the health benefits, have yet to be proven.

1:07:43 Okay, so no, I think that’s smart. I mean, it could be like smoking in the 60s. You have to have, you have to have like a mashup of ancestral living, right, where you’re eating organically and, like, delving into the food that your grandparents would have recognized, versus eating, you know, Soylent or whatever, these, you know, these bottled compounds, or what Michael Pollan calls, uh, EDI like food stuff, right, where it’s, where it’s like, you know, these packaged foods that technically supply all your multivitamin mineral needs, but it’s not like sitting down to a nice omelet with some pastured bacon and, you know, maybe a kale smoothie or something like that, right?

1:08:19 Um, you have to kind of find that ultimate marriage between ancestral living and biohacking, and I think that you do have to be careful. Um, ultimately, though, from an ethical standpoint, I mean, really it’s not hurting anybody for you to have direct cranial stimulation on your head. So it’s kind of like, if that makes you happy and more efficient, go for it. You know, you told me about your home in Washington, and how it’s just completely like, when you’re out, when you’re out traveling, you’re speaking, you’re in London, you know, you’re active, but when you go home, you’re really isolated.

1:08:48 You know, you’re at home with total introvert, with your family. You’re introverted. Are you unplugged from the web as well? And like, how much of that getting back to basics, getting back to ancestral living, is important to you? Just as an aside, I spent last week up in Scotland, you know, at a seminar, and we didn’t have Wi-Fi access, and so when I was in my room at nights I couldn’t do what I might do, which is check the MMA website.

1:09:13 And I was like, I noticed that, Jesus Christ, what I’ve been using the web for is a distraction from my own life to a certain extent, and I plug in, so I don’t have to deal with myself. It’s almost like an addiction. That’s why, up until the advent of Wi-Fi, people were super duper efficient on airplanes, right? Cuz that’s when you’re disconnected. That’s when you do your best writing and everything.

1:09:34 Um, yeah, when I travel, like, I travel a lot. I’m traveling about two weeks out of every month right now during the year, so when I’m gone, I’m just like, gone, and that’s business for you, or it’s speaking, it’s racing. Um, okay, you know, a lot. Yeah, I speak at some private events, some conferences. Um, you know, when I travel, usually I’m throwing down some races.

1:09:55 Um, you know, so it’s a mashup of things that I’m traveling for, but when I’m home, I’m home. Like, I don’t go into town, I don’t go to restaurants, I don’t get out. Like I literally just sit at home. I’ve got this big kitchen table carved out of an old oak tree. I’m either there or downstairs in my office, and I have that home just to use the phrase again, biohacked, to create the ultimate kind of ancestral living environment.

1:10:23 So there are no Wi-Fi signals. Every room has special light bulbs in it that are either blue light bulbs or red light bulbs designed to simulate either night or day, so, like, all the bedrooms have no bulbs with actual blue light in them. Um, you know, it’s a HEPA and a UV air filter to filter out any mold or mycotoxins or fungus or things like that that might get into the house. Nice. Um, there’s, uh, uh, you know, the entire thing is metal-shielded wiring.

1:10:52 There’s kill switches in every bedroom, so when you go to bed, boom, electricity completely off in the room. Um, you know, blackout curtains. It’s, you know, so it’s pretty, and we’re adding goats and chickens right now. We have a huge vegetable garden. We’re building up a farm.

1:11:07 Um, buried propane tank, we’re adding solar panels to the roof so that we can be completely off the grid. Right now we do have, like, a, like a, a power in from the local power facility. Okay, um, but yeah, like, it is a really, really ancestral place to be, and I’ve got what’s called a Lapka device. It’s this little device that measures electromagnetic fields that you can attach to an iPhone, and you can walk around your house. Usually you’d have to buy a super expensive meter off the internet to do this, but this one’s cool.

1:11:33 It’s got a little plug-in. You can plug it into vegetables to find out how many nitrates are in the vegetables, to figure out if they’re really organic or not, like, if that organic carrot that you bought actually was sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. Um, it measures radiation. It measures, like, humidity and temperature, and it measures EMF. So I walk around my house, and there’s, like, nothing.

1:11:54 There are no signals in my house. There’s a tiny signal when you get down to the office near the Ethernet switch, and it’s just very, very slight, so when I’m at home, I’m just like, I’m shielded from all this stuff, and it’s really cool. It’s like every time I return home, it’s like detoxing and cleansing, cuz you’re just, I’m just out in the forest. So now that’s really nice. How’s business?

1:12:14 What’s it like to be kind of out there and talking about fitness? I know you were at the Masterminds you know, this year and the year before, and I know a bunch of people that were there as well. Alex and Sully. And what’s it like turning what you love into a business, and also you’re in a really crowded field where everyone has their angle on fitness, the six-pack abs field? Yeah, well, there’s that, there’s like, there’s so many different things, you know, there’s the CrossFit people, there’s the six-pack abs, there’s the how, how do you find it?

1:12:42 Um, I’ve, I’ve never had a problem from a business standpoint. You know, I, when I was 15 years old, I started my own private tennis coaching business and used that as a way to save up money for college. When I got to college I had four jobs. You know, I was working at a coffee shop, I was working at a bakery, I was a personal trainer, and then I was taking at the school and taking massive loads of credits at the same time. Like, I’ve always I’ve always been driven, and, um, I’ve always been willing to get up and work and work hard, and I spent a long time just hustling in the fitness environment, starting personal training studios and gyms in both Washington State and Idaho.

1:13:21 I partnered with a lot of physicians. That was kind of like my thing, the whole exercise medicine approach, so they’d send me their patients to work with, and that was just an approach that worked really well for me. That was my niche. I’d reach out to physicians in the community, they’d hook me up with their patients, and I’d I’d coach them for weight loss and things like that, and then simultaneously I was doing triathlons. That was my other niche was endurance sports.

1:13:44 Um, I spent a good deal of time doing that and getting good at it, and that’s when I was nominated as the top personal TR trainer of the year, and things kind of started to blow up after that, right? Just cuz, I, you know, that it was kind of a lucky break for me, and also kind of a consequence of me spending six years, you know, with my nose to the grindstone, and I’d stay up till 2 to 3:00 a.m. in my apartment at night trying to build myself a website, right? Like trying to figure out how to do HTML and how to take client forms and how to send workouts back and forth.

1:14:15 Um, you know, seven years ago figuring out how to podcast and how to record audios and videos and put them out on the internet, and I’ve been doing that literally every week since, like, without stopping for the past six years. Yeah, that’s hard to do. Yeah, I mean, it’s just like consistency. Doing a little bit of work. I wake up every day.

1:14:32 I do the hard thing first, which for me is either writing or creating part of a program that I’m creating, or doing something that produces content, right? Like article, audio, or video content every cral single freaking day, every day, every day, working on an audio, video. Or I don’t, I don’t buy ads. I don’t do PPC. I don’t do any of that.

1:14:52 I just write content and put it out there and try and help people with the content that I create. I’m a big fan of like the Kevin Kelly’s thousand true fan approach, right? Where you help people, you’re nice to them, you provide them with direction, you help them to cross the finish line with a smile on their face, you put out content that actually allows them to do that. You get up and you work, and you do the hard thing, and you be willing to be uncomfortable to do, you know, the work equivalent of taking a cold shower instead of taking a hot shower, right?

1:15:21 Like you you do the stuff that maybe don’t really feel like doing. Um, and that’s pretty much the way that I’ve lived my life for the past more than a decade, and business is going well. Like, I don’t have to worry about money, but I really haven’t had to worry about money that much since college, you know, since I was working four jobs. The only difference now is I’m really kind of sort of working one, but yeah, I mean, there’s no replacement for hard work.

1:15:48 There really isn’t, and that’s like the one thing I tell people when they come to me and they’re like, fresh out of college or haven’t even started college, and they’re like, I want to do really well, you know, in the online fitness business, and I’m like, go out there and get your hands dirty for five to ten years, training people, seeing every single type of body type there is, you know, getting sweaty, getting dirty, putting people through workouts, seeing their face, checking their heart rate. Like, you know, you’ve got to put your time in the trenches. I think that’s really important.

1:16:15 Good advice. And if you go to your website, you can see all the content. I mean, the videos on YouTube and, I mean, podcasting, you know, it’s no walk in the park making one of those every week, you know, by any means. So just making that happen is, you know, it’s all very obvious. It’s fun, and I mean, like, once you systematize hard work, like, a lot of it’s fun.

1:16:33 Like, you know, you’ve got all these video cameras in your studio and fancy mic setup, and like, you know, even for me as, like, a podcaster and a video producer, when I walk into a situation like this, I’m like, wow, he’s managing all this all at once, somehow, and still podcasting. But for you, it’s just like a system, right? Like you’ve got it figured out. So for what seems like really, really hard work to a lot of people, because you’ve systematized it, it makes it a little bit easier, and that you know, I have, I use Evernote.

1:17:01 I’ve got an Evernote doc set up for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I have a specific task list associated with each of those days. Tuesdays are my video day. If somebody asks me for a video on Friday, or somebody talks to me about a video on Thursday, that’s completely off my brain and out of my head and onto the Tuesday Evernote doc, and that’s where it ends up, so I don’t have this long-running checklist, you know. Wednesdays are podcasting days.

1:17:26 Um, Fridays and Saturdays are the days that I review nutrition logs from clients, like, you know, you kind of partition stuff up. You create a system that works for you. Um, you can get a lot done. That’s a great takeaway from this, besides all the other knowledge and biohacking stuff, just the way you manage that work and get it done. And if people go to your website, they’ll be able to see, I mean, there’s deep, deep content there.

1:17:47 You put a lot of time into those videos and thoughts. So two questions for you. If I bring you that 48-year-old guy who’s made his millions and spent 10 years in the steakhouses and drinking the wine, and probably has some gout, and is probably not 20 but probably 40 pounds overweight, and, you know, hasn’t done anything, right? The big red inflamed face and the glasses. Yeah, yeah.

1:18:07 And maybe he’s in his late 40s, and I bring him to you on his doorstep. I mean, you know, what do you do sometimes when you’re like, I don’t know how to get him to motivate about himself. I don’t know how to get him to care about himself. I mean, is there things you’ve learned over the years where you know how to kind of get results out of people that might be result-oriented in a different arena, but when it comes to their body, you, I see it all the time.

1:18:30 A lot of people just say, oh, I don’t know how to do that. Yep. Yeah. Um, you can’t start with, you know, whatever the, the CrossFit workout and, you know, the huge dietary changes. Right?

1:18:43 It’s got to be little things. Like two things that I do right away is I get them moving, right? Like every morning we’re just going to do a light, easy walk, and that you don’t have to explain this to people, because they just automatically do it, but that engages you with morning sunlight, which jump-starts your circadian rhythm, which helps you to get to sleep later on at night, and it jump-starts fat oxidation when you’re doing it prior to breakfast.

1:19:05 You don’t have to tell them all that. You can just say, okay, we’re going to start with a nice 20-minute morning walk, but there are so many other biological implications that happen from that, that’s an enormously helpful place to start. Gluten-free is another big one, just because, I mean, it’s easy enough to do. Yeah, a lot of the gluten-free Frankenfoods that you see in the grocery store now are still pretty good at spiking your blood sugar, and they’re not that happy for you metabolically, but the cool thing is that when you eliminate gluten, you’re getting rid of a lot of the wheat germal gluten that can cause things like brain fog that can cause inflammation.

1:19:43 I mean, just because wheat that’s been bred for high-yield crops has such concentrated levels of gluten in it that that’s very, very tough for the body to handle from an immune system standpoint, both for nervous system tissue and gut tissue. And it’s kind of an easy concept. So rather than saying, go dairy-free, soy-free, follow a Paleo autoimmune diet, yada yada yada for four weeks or eight weeks, you just say, okay, we’re just going to go gluten-free.

1:20:06 We’re going to try gluten-free for a little while. So, move, go gluten-free. Um, I like that heart rate variability testing. I found most people to be really open to that, and, again, invasive, simple, just like that morning walk, all of a sudden, rather than getting up, jumping out of bed, and going and running away from the lion that’s jumping out from the email inbox in your computer, for five minutes, just five minutes, you’re lying in bed and you’re breathing and you’re getting in touch with your body, and just that slight change can change somebody’s stress levels the entire day, or, like, their frame set getting out of bed in the morning.

1:20:41 Um, it’s little things like that that you have people start with, versus a full-on structured routine, you know, gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, everything-free, eat cardboard, and work out every day hard. Yeah, you know, instead, you move, you measure your nervous system for a few minutes each morning, and you get rid of that one dietary trigger that I would say is one of the bigger culprits when it comes to brain and body: gluten over sugar, or gluten over glucose. Yeah, exactly.

1:21:07 Exactly, because anything that has gluten in it is generally going to be something that’s higher glycemic index, or that has a big enough glycemic index to spike your blood sugar. But you’re getting the double whammy, right, of the inflammation from the glucose and the chronic high blood sugar, at least with something like white rice or a corn tortilla instead of a flour tortilla, etc. You’re just getting the blood sugar spike and not some of those other deleterious side effects.

1:21:29 Okay, good tip. Let’s talk about mentors. We were talking about Tai Lopez earlier. He was here a few months ago. I’m a big fan of Tai.

1:21:35 He feels like a man that’s wise beyond his years. He feels like I like, he could be a 65-year-old guy telling you what he knows at kind of mid-40s. You know, he’s digested all that information in the books. Well, he did live with the Amish. I think that’s, yeah, you know, he’s got crazy stories.

1:21:48 Those are the best times of his life, you know, even though he loves his house in the wood hills and stuff. And, um, I know he had some backlash from our fans via his IASA opinions, and, uh, you know, I, I disagree with him, but, uh, I really liked him being here. How important is it for you to have, you know, mentors? Have you identified them over the years, or have there been kind of virtual guys that you were watching when you were in your 20s, and you were like, I like his work ethic?

1:22:12 Just like some guys will listen to you talk about creating content every day, and they’ll be like, I want to do that. What’s it been like, finding, first of all? Um, I’m really shitty at mentors. I don’t do mentors very well, as in mentoring people or getting mentors. Uh, getting mentors.

1:22:26 All right. I was homeschooled kindergarten through 12th grade. Um, starting in 8th grade, my parents would buy a bunch of books and stack them in the front of my room. I’d open my bedroom door, grab the books, and figure out how to get through them, and that, like, no teacher, just a book. Wow, like that was the way that I learned, for me, that worked.

1:22:45 I don’t think that that’s a very good approach to schooling. By the way, your son, are your sons, are my sons not on the pile-books-in-front-of-the-bedroom-door approach? But for some reason, because I was hardwired as an independent learner, complete nerd growing up, I would be happy, kind of like I am now, to sit at home in my underwear at the kitchen table. I would just lay in my room for hours reading books. We’d have company.

1:23:08 My parents got to the point where they had to force me out of my room to go out, look them in the eye, shake their hands, and then I’d be back in my room, like, reading my fantasy novel about knights and princesses. I’m surprised you can hold a conversation. Eventually, yeah, eventually playing World of Warcraft, and like that, that was me, right? Did you have to push yourself to be extroverted at some point? Um, I don’t think that I am EXT.

1:23:30 I think I still am introverted. I think that, um, I learned conversation, in some sense, through teaching, um, you know, once I started teaching tennis, for example, I had to express ideas to people. I was really into writing and still am, which helps your speaking tremendously, and I ended up teaching writing classes, and that helped me get in front of people. I started taking speech and debate, and I joined the speech and debate team in college, and was on the team for two years, and I was the impromptu speaker.

1:23:58 So this was where they’d give you a few minutes, and you’d prep, and then you’d go on stage and speak. And like, all of these things have helped me, but I’m still introverted. Like, still, when I get on stage to speak, and even when you and I are sitting here, like, doing a podcast, whenever I’m in public, there’s still that sense that I have to consciously be Ben Greenfield the athlete or Ben Greenfield the biohacker, or whatever, um, you know, Ben Greenfield the, the, the teacher, the podcaster, whatever you want to call me, and I have to consciously act that role out, otherwise I would be happy to just, like, sit here and, you know, have a couple waters and listen to you talk for a while.

1:24:40 Right? Um, and, and when you read a book like The Power of Introverts, for example, uh, that whole concept of being a chameleon, or having that approach of acting when you’re speaking rather than just being yourself. You have to project that personality, and I’ve always been very good at acting. I did a lot of like stage theater and the impromptu speaking and stuff like that in college. Um, that’s okay, right?

1:25:04 Like if you’re introverted, that’s how you do things. Like when you get on stage, you’re acting, and when you’re speaking, you’re acting, even when you’re conversing. You’re doing a little bit, bit of like chameleon, and, um, what’s it called when you’re simulating someone else’s body position, that type of thing? Mirroring. Yeah, mirroring.

1:25:22 Like all of these things are really, really important for introverts to learn, and I’ve had to kind of pick a lot of those things up over the years, uh, but ultimately, to get back to your question about mentorship, I grew up not knowing how to have a mentor, not knowing how to listen to a teacher, not wanting a teacher, not wanting a boss, not wanting someone to tell me what to do. And so even still, right, like, literally, like, two decades later, I’m still at the point where listening to people and having a mentor is very difficult for me now. I have had a few people who either have writings that I read religiously, like there are certain blogs that I follow, and I kind of learn from those people through osmosis.

1:26:05 There are some people that I’ll talk to on the phone, and I’m getting better at this, for example. Um, you talked about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez has actually been mentoring me for a few months. Um, he and I talk on the phone. He gives me advice.

1:26:19 He’s a guy that, um, for some reason I’m able to take his advice, and I’m able to listen to him, but for the most part, um, I’m a really bad guy to ask about mentorship, cuz I don’t, I don’t do well with mentors. Doing it now, I haven’t really had many mentors, and, you know, like working with Tai has been one of my first experiences doing something like that. But yeah, it’s, but like books are my mentors, right? Like the internet is my mentor, which sounds really dumb, but it’s worked for me.

1:26:47 So no, I understand. It’s interesting, cuz Ryan Holiday was here. I know you know Ryan, and you know, he was Robert Greene’s mentor, right? But he even said he never had a formal relationship. Like, are you my mentor?

1:26:57 Yes, you are, now my mentee. You know, it’s more like, look, he helped him out with this, and every now and then he’d glean a piece of knowledge. But you know, a lot of mentorships aren’t formal relationships. You, they’re just people like Spartan Racing, for example, right? Like, like building my obstacles in my backyard, or even showing up for my first race and knowing what was going to be like for me.

1:27:16 I went to the YouTube channel, and I sat there for like two hours, like looking at every obstacle that there was, and watching the YouTubes of how to do them, and, like, I’m fine learning that way. A lot of people I know, they would be like, well, call up the top athlete on the phone and get with him on the phone and learn from him that way. And that’s just, I don’t know, that’s not the way my brain works. I just, you know, I read the book or I watch the video, and I go do it, and I’m just not into mentorship that much.

1:27:44 Enough. That’s a good, that’s a break. Break down the Navy SEAL training. You know, really quick, dude, it was a week. I’m from, you know, postraumatic stress disorder.

1:27:53 I’m in a similar area. What was the, what were the details of it? Did you stay on site? This is put on by Commander Mark Divine, in, uh, he runs SEALFIT, CrossFit in Ansanus, California, and he does this thing called the SEALFIT Academy, which is about five to seven hours a day of training, and what, what are called, they’re, they’re called the SEALFIT WODs. So they’re like the CrossFit WODs, but they’re like the CrossFit WODs, um, time 10.

1:28:19 I mean, these WODs take like three hours to do, and that’s just like part of your day, and a lot of times it’s a two-a-day of those WODs. If you’re not a CrossFitter, WOD stands for workout of the day, and they post them all the time, and you usually post your time to do it, but the normal ones are 30 minutes or 20 minutes or 40 minutes. Right? Yeah. For these, you start off with mobility, and like the first day we showed up for mobility, it took us two hours.

1:28:42 We were literally doing, like, every form of push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and lateral movements, and like it got into sandbags and Turkish get-ups with a kettlebell, and we finally got done, and everybody’s sweating, and we’re like, ready for breakfast, and then Commander Divine is like, okay, now we’re going to do the WOD, and it’s just like, it’s a crazy amount of volume, but these guys are SEALs, right? They’re used to just, like, suffering for days and days on end, carrying 100 lb packs around with weapons and having their lives on the line while they’re doing it. So, so he’s going light on you guys.

1:29:14 There’s no SEALs with you. Well, we don’t have, like, they actually, they put us through, cuz SEALs actually go to this camp. It’s called Kokoro, um, they go to it to either get ready for BUD/S training or to tune up on theirs afterwards, and so this is about everything that they experience without weapons and without boats. Like, they take away the things that could kill you, right? Okay, um, just because of the, of the liability risk, but they still, they beat you up mentally.

1:29:42 They, they fly in SEALs, and they actually, if you look at the photos from the event, a lot of the guys have their faces blurred out, cuz they’re still out in Afghanistan killing people, and so they can’t show them on the, on the photos, but they’re there, like, driving you on 26-mile night hikes, and, uh, they do, like, surf swim torture, where you’re lying in the ocean for five hours, from like 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., and the waves are just battering you and it’s super duper cold in San Diego once you’re in the water for that long, so you’re shivering, you’re hypothermic. You stand up every hour, and they have you put your hands above your head, and if you can’t put your hands above your head, that means you’re so hypothermic that you can’t move anymore.

1:30:18 So then you’ve got to go do burpees or push-ups or sprints to get your body warm enough so that you can go back in the water and get your face blasted with sand again, and lay in the surf and the dark and the seaweed, and you’re all like, everybody’s there linking arms and trying not to let each other float away. And then, for example, we did a 26-mile night hike. We got back to the facility, and this was just one day. We got back to the facility, and we had to do what’s called Murph, which is a CrossFit workout, a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, so it was Murph with a weighted pack.

1:30:51 Um, and then it was really, we finished that. This was, I think this was a day before it ended, and they took us out. Uh, one of the commanders, Coach Cummings, he’s like, congratulations, you guys, we’re taking you to a pancake breakfast. And so we’re all looking at each other, and, you know, this is after eating MREs for, like, the past two days, just, like, nasty, like tomato soup that’s supposed to last 10 years and just so many preservatives and just nasty stuff that gums you up.

1:31:21 So pancake breakfast sounds pretty good, so they marched like a half mile down the alley to this tiny little diner that they’d reserved a bunch of tables in, and it’s Coach Cummings, there were like six other of the SEALFIT guys there, like the commanders and the instructors, and they say, okay, what you’re going to do is go in there, you’re going to eat everything on your plate. You guys have one hour, then you’re going to march back out here. I want you to stay silent, eat your food, and come back out.

1:31:49 And so they bring us these huge buttermilk pancakes, like the really, really dense ones that are like bubblegum to chew. I mean, like, these things are just super duper dense, and syrup and coffee and peanut butter and eggs and bacon and hash browns and ketchup on these huge plates, right? Like these huge dinner plates, and we eat our breakfast. And there’s a few guys, and there’s a couple of girls there. There’s like a firefighter and a strength coach, so a couple of females, mostly dudes.

1:32:15 A few of the guys are turning a little bit pale. You can see that they’re pretty full, a little bit of a food coma, a little bit of food sickness, and then they bring out another plate, same thing, boom, got to eat it all. So they stuffed us, and stuffed us, and stuffed us, and we were literally sick, like guys were getting blue, guys were like starting to vomit there in the restaurant. It was really, really bad. So we came out, and like people are already, already throwing up as soon as they stumble out of the restaurant.

1:32:41 They’re like throwing up pancakes in the back alley, and they take us off running down the alley, and we spent the next two and a half hours working out on a hill in the sun in Ansanus. Uphill burpees, backwards bear crawls, partner carries, hill sprints, like everything. And this just went on for days and days and days, and you knew this was going to happen. Going in, you knew it was going to be seven days of this. You go in, well, the first, the last, it’s the last like 60 hours that are really, really hard.

1:33:07 The first few days you do get to sleep. Like, you get to some points where they, like, rip you out of bed and throw you in the ocean, and so you kind of get to the point where you’re sleeping, but you’re afraid to actually fall asleep, because you know somebody could be storming into your room and pushing you out onto the grinder and spraying cold in your face and telling you you suck and you need to go home, and, you know, blindfolding you and having you balance on a log and do overhead press, just like every single way they can beat you up mentally and physically. And you get to a certain point where, and this was like on a Sunday afternoon, after the week, where, there, Commander Mark Divine, he’s the guy who runs it, he just comes out.

1:33:42 And I, I did the 34th one, like the 34th time that they’ve run this, and he comes out, he’s just like, Kokoro 34 secured. This is at a point where we were all standing out in the grinder with 400-lb logs hoisted over our head, about to carry them down to the ocean, where we were told we were going to be doing sit-ups with the logs out in the ocean, and he just comes on, he’s like, boom, done, congratulations, no medals, no, we got a t-shirt. Okay, so they’re messing with you constantly, mentally.

1:34:05 You don’t know when it’s going to stop. I mean, did anybody ring the bell or leave? Or, uh, two people. We only lost two people, really good. Um, we had 19.

1:34:13 Okay, so we dropped on, so it was not, it was really not bad. Um, so we did well, but I left there and, you know, I told you earlier, like, I literally felt like a God among men, like flying home on the airplane and in the airport with all the people walking through in their, you know, jeans and plaid shirts and their suits, and I’ve just got, like, you know, my knees are all bloody, and I’ve got my, my pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body t-shirt on, and I’m just covered, and just like, you know, I’m still dirty. I’ve still got sand coming out my ears, and you’re walking through the airport full of people, and you’re just like, you do not understand.

1:34:51 I just got as close to death and to living, all at the same time, that you’re ever going to experience. And everything I’ve done since then, every workout I’ve done, every race I’ve done, everything I’ve done has been easy. Wow, like I can freaking just fall asleep in an airport, uh, you know, laying on the ground with no blanket, nothing, like, and it’s just like all of a sudden discomfort is not uncomfortable, so that it was worth it. Like, it was really hard, but totally reinvented my idea of discomfort and what the human body is capable of.

1:35:21 Fascinating. When did you do that? When was it? That was in August. Okay, and would you ever do it again?

1:35:26 I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it. Um, they’ve got another one. If you’ve been through that, they have another one that they do with hand-to-hand combat and weapons, and I’m tempted, it’s called Turning steel, and I’m tempted to do that version of it, just because I shoot and I hunt anyways, and I’d like to do the upgraded version that involves maybe dealing a little bit more closely with death. So you’re an interesting guy, Ben.

1:35:51 What’s, uh, what’s next for you for the next like five years? You know, if you’re thinking, why do I want to be in five, will you still be doing what you’re doing, will you still be doing the obstacle stuff, will you still be traveling to London to talk to people? Or is, I, I love, I love to travel the world. I love to speak. Sometimes I take my kids with me.

1:36:08 Um, I’ve been speaking more, um, and it’s just different than podcasting, right? Cuz, cuz with podcasting you’re just talking in front of a mic, and even though, like I mentioned, I am introverted when I speak, I’m acting anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Like, that’s my version of just being in theater, being on stage, so I get a kick out of speaking, and I’d love to continue to do that. Um, um, I really want to build up my homestead and learn a lot more about, um, raising and rotating chicken crops and goats and spending a lot more time out in our garden, cuz it’s gotten a lot bigger, and my wife is going to need a lot of help with it.

1:36:44 Um, just like learning how to live and take care of the body, um, from a sustainable agriculture standpoint, that’s really important. Um, and then my kids, you know, my kids are kind of my life. You know, I’ve got, you know, every morning when I wake up and I do that heart rate variability measurement, and just I’m lying there in bed, you know, I say a prayer for my kids every single day, that somehow, you know, I get emotional just thinking about my kids, but, um, you know, I want them to be amazing human beings who can change the world, and, um, you know, for me to teach them to do that, I have to be the strongest version of me.

1:37:25 But it’s amazing, you know, once you have kids, um, it changes your life’s perspective. Like all of a sudden you have that ultimate responsibility to be able to create this vibrant, strong human being, um, and it’s amazing. Like that’s the most important thing for me, is taking my two little boys, River and Taran, and, um, just basically helping them to make the world a better place. Yeah, you’re kind of creating the next generation, aren’t you? Yeah, it’s a really weird feeling, you know.

1:37:58 It’s spiritual and physical and life-changing all at the same time. It has big consequences, doesn’t it? It does. It’s, um, and it’s fun too. I mean, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to just, you know, have these two little guys whose lives you can form and shape, and know that if you do that the right way, you know, whatever they might find, the cure for cancer, or, you know, what They might set the next Olympic record for cycling, or, you know, there are different things that are important, but either way it’s really cool to have kids.

1:38:31 It’s a challenge, right? Just when you think you figure it out, it’s a challenge, and you get something new, like a monke. Like when I had kids six years ago, my business exploded, and I think that part of that was, you know, me getting that status as the personal trainer of the year, and that helped, but having kids also gave me a huge, huge amount of purpose and direction in life. You know, I did everything from, like, starting a trust, to investing my money more wisely, to paying closer attention to finances, to, you know, I started drinking less and partying less.

1:39:02 Like, just all these things changed that really helped out. Right? So speaking of drinking, you drink wine every day? Is that true? I do have a glass of wine every day.

1:39:09 So I time it. So that’s the last thing I would ever expect from you. Yeah, I, I have wine, and I also have dark chocolate, um, almost every day. And so I’m, I’m a fan of putting those types of glucose-increasing foods into your body when your body is going to partition those into muscle tissue most effectively, when you’re most insulin sensitive, and when the activity of something called your GLUT4 transporter is most active, and that’s always post-physical activity.

1:39:39 So what I do, the way I structure my life, is morning is a time for parasympathetic nervous system movement, rest and digest. You take a crap, you do yoga, maybe you do some sauna, you go on a walk, you get some sunshine, you do everything that’s involved with easing the body into the day. So I don’t do a WOD or, like, a hard run or hard lifting or anything like that in the morning. But then in the afternoon, your body temperature peaks, your reaction time peaks, your post-workout protein synthesis peaks, meaning your ability to be anabolic and build muscle after workout, and your carbohydrate sensitivity peaks in terms of your ability to be able to do okay with carbohydrates.

1:40:18 So most of the time when I do my workout, I’ve worked out at some point between 4 and 6:00 p.m., and my wine is pre-, so I have a nice glass of wine, and it’s after you’ve finished a workout. You may have experienced this. It’s a lot easier to spin the dials in your brain with a glass of wine than it is after you’ve got a tummy full of food. So I have that glass of wine. I get nice and relaxed.

1:40:38 Sometimes I have a little bit of chocolate or dessert before dinner, cuz again I’m in that really insulin-sensitive state, and then at some point in the next 20 minutes to 2 hours we actually sit down to dinner. But I have a glass of wine every day. That’s wild, man. That’s fantastic. I just time it.

1:40:52 Yeah, and he sounds like you’ve got it down to a science, so that’s fantastic. Um, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end, so I’m going to ask you, uh, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ben and give that young man a bit of advice, uh, what would you tell him to do? That is a good question. I, I would almost say ski the last year of college, but I, I think the master’s degree, some of that education was useful, um, and came in handy from a science standpoint.

1:41:26 So, man, I married my college sweetheart. I traveled the world with her for a long time before we had kids. I, I was, I was pretty happy about most of the decisions that I made when I was 20, and I’m trying to think of any regrets or any advice that I would have given myself. Um, I would say, you know, returning to what we talked about with, like, biomarkers, with cortisol, with health. I wish I would have known about that stuff earlier, right?

1:41:51 That exercise goes way more than skin deep, and that taking care of your body goes way more, way beyond what you look like in the mirror. Right? Cuz when I was 20, I was bodybuilding. I was flexing in front of the mirror for 30 minutes every night, and my focus was on how good I looked in my underwear, right? And I didn’t have very good sex drive.

1:42:10 My body fat was at 3%, but there, there was something going on, right? Hormonally, when you, when you dip into that tank too many times from an exercise standpoint. So if anything, I think for my health, uh, for anti-aging, for my athletic career, um, I would tell myself to figure out how to relax, right? Sleep more, de-stress. Um, I don’t think they had heart rate variability measurement tools when I was 20, uh, which makes me feel really old, but I, I would say, you know, quantify, figure out a way, you know, whether it’s deep breathing or, you know, daily journaling or some kind of a way to actually keep your finger on the pulse of how you’re really doing from a recovery and a de-stressing standpoint.

1:42:52 I wish I’d have known that stuff earlier, cuz, you know, when you’re 20, you’re bulletproof. You can take a, you can handle a lot of exercise, right? Like, you can absorb a lot of weight and a lot of movement, but I think I would have accomplished more as an athlete and probably gone through a little bit less stress if I would have known at that point, you know, measure, relax, de-stress, focus on recovery, right? Like all the things that you learn as you get older and your body starts to fall apart.

1:43:20 Right, right. Now it’s good advice on that same note. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received over the years? I know you’ve, you said you’ve not been a mentor fan, but or something that you’ve heard, whether it was business or personal, or even from a training perspective, where it kind of resonated with you. How important is breath, not just to the activation of those components of your nervous system, but also just to saturating your body with oxygen, and also getting yourself into whatever state you want to be in?

1:43:52 So, um, breathing is a huge part of every week for me right now, and I don’t remember where I first heard or learned that breathing is so important. There’s a variety of books out there that I read, like Karate Kid, maybe. Yeah. Body Mind Sport by John Douillard. Um, Running on Air by Bud Coates.

1:44:09 Um, you know, yoga and the concept of deep breathing, and also Warrior breathing and yoga. But I do things like, I’ve got a power lung in the glove box of both my cars when I’m driving in traffic, or when I’m driving anywhere. I’ll do sets with the power lung, so 10 sets of 3 seconds in, 3 seconds out. This thing trains my lungs. Right?

1:44:29 When I go on walks, I do hypoxic sets, where I’ll hold my breath for as long as possible if I’m walking, say, like two miles, and I’ll try and repeat that two or three more times over the course of those couple of miles. Um, I do the deep, like, nasal breathing. I’ll use that alternate left-right nostril breathing sometimes when I’m stressed. I do hypoxic breathing underwater. I do in the morning, after my yoga session, that Warrior breathing, that power breathing, during that Kokoro camp that I talked about.

1:44:56 We did a full hour of that, of hyper-oxygenation, where we weren’t blowing off CO2, but we were breathing in a ton of oxygen, and we got into these, like, deep trance-like states. It was really amazing, by manipulating breath the state that we could get into. So I think getting in touch with your breath, and learning the importance of breathing, is super duper important. But I don’t remember where I first heard how important breathing is. That’s a very good one, that’s a very good one.

1:45:22 Last question: to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us, you know, from around the world, that, you know, wants to be like Ben, you know, or wants to do what you do, whether it means to make a business out of this. Um, what do you tell them? What kind of advice would you give them? We already went over some of that. Put the time in the trenches, right?

1:45:38 Um, be la, yeah, do the hard thing first. Um, produce every day. And you know, if I could rehash those things, when you begin to organize your life, and write down what it is that you’re going to accomplish each week, categorize those for each day, like I do, like I described, but when you do that, as you do that, you’ll begin to identify patterns. As you read through the day, you’ll see the things that you dread, the things that are tough for you. Don’t wait until after you’ve cognitively exhausted yourself with email and responding to other people’s problems and Facebook messaging, and even a hard workout, frankly, until you’ve gotten that thing out of the way, that thing that’s hard to produce, that thing that you dread.

1:46:24 You do that hard thing first, and then you do it consistently, right? A big, big part of my work, like this book that I wrote. It’s 470 pages long, but it doesn’t seem like it was that hard to write, cuz I wrote for, like, 30 minutes every morning, but I did that for a year. And I think that a lot of young people want stuff too fast. Again, I feel really old saying young people, but want stuff too fast and don’t realize the power of consistency.

1:46:51 Right? I figure that out for my body too. Like, I’m really good working out every single day. That’s another thing that DNA or that genetic testing found for me, was I’m a fast recoverer, right? Like I don’t do well with big blocks of training, three hours a day and pushing my body, and then doing the long rest periods, right?

1:47:08 Like 7 days off or 7 Days on, 3 days off. Right? My body does really, really well with 365 days a year, doing something every single day. And the same can be said from a productivity, work, and success standpoint. Right?

1:47:22 It’s not about these huge blocks of work followed by rest. I think a better approach is just consistently working every single day, doing the hard thing every day, and then just producing, producing with excellence, and putting the stuff out there that really benefits people. Yeah, create something every day. That’s a really good takeaway from this. Yeah, and do the hard thing first, create something.

1:47:44 Thank you for taking my last two minutes and putting it into four words: create something every day. Exactly. Ben, uh, you’re a really fascinating guy. There’s so many different holes we could just dive down for, even even further, so we’ll have to do that some of the time. How can people get a hold of you?

1:47:57 Is it straight to the website? Is that the best? Are you a Twitter guy? Facebook guy? BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

1:48:00 Okay, a good way to find me, and that’s got everything, right? Yeah. Okay, and you’d be traveling the world. Like, can people see you in different places? Find out where you’re going to be?

1:48:09 Yeah, exactly. I talk about that on my podcast. I’m headed to Tel Aviv after this. My wife will meet me over there on Sunday. We’re going to do like a bunch of videos and audios down there, looking at the nutrition and the wellness scene in Israel.

1:48:21 So, and then we’ll, we’ll hopefully, I don’t know, there’ll be something valuable for somebody about falafel or hummus or something, I’m sure. But yeah, BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Okay, fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming. Um, I appreciate it.

1:48:34 It’s been a very eye-opening, trying to think if I can make it through that Navy SEAL week, you can do it. Jesus, it’s all mental. It’s all mental, right? It’s all mental. It’s all mental.

1:48:43 There were some people that did it that were not incredibly fit, but there’s a team there to carry you, and when the going gets tough, like, they help you get through it. And, um, you don’t have to be the fittest. I was not the fittest guy there, but the mental strength really, really helps, right? And now that you know you’ve done that, everything else is easy. Everything is easy.

1:49:02 That’s crazy. Yeah, knock on wood. That’s shocking. Awesome, thanks so much for being here. Um, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey.

1:49:08 Uh, you’re on one right now, and you’re, you’re continuing. So, um, I wish you all the best. Cool, thanks for having me on, man. All right, man, take care. What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

1:49:25 This week on London Real we have movement artist Ido Portal. So people think it’s about handstands and, you know, jumping on the rings and doing flips or whatever, but actually our work is way, way beyond that. It’s a completely different and a huge paradigm shift in the way that you think about your practice and your movement in your body. We all have a body, and we all move. We have no choice.

1:50:04 The only question is how well are you doing it, and most people just don’t have the user manual for their own machinery. Changing your dogma takes guts. I don’t believe in planning. I believe in reacting. I’m not a messiah, I’m a thinker, I’m a teacher.

1:50:26 Um, I’m a mover. I’m being Ido. I’m, I’m just trying to handle myself in that way and be genuine. On Sunday, London Real presents Ido Portal. Just move.

1:50:40 Walk beside me, don’t walk behind me.