Ben Greenfield - Navigating the Frontier of Superhuman Optimisation

Full transcript: Ben Greenfield on London Real

4:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Greenfield, who is an Ironman triathlete, obstacle course racer, human performance consultant, speaker and author of the New York Times bestseller Beyond Training, Mastering Endurance Health and Life. In 2013 and 14, you were named as one of the top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. You live in a custom built biohacked ranch with your wife and twin boys complete with spear throwing obstacle course where you bow hunt wild animals while running naked. Ben, welcome back to London Real.

5:12 What’s up, man? And you have me drinking coffee at night, you devil. Kind of late afternoon, but yeah. I’m a fast coffee oxidizer though. There’s the rule that you’re not supposed to drink coffee within like four hours of bedtime because it disrupts your melatonin production, your sleep cycles. But you can get like a salivary test and you can find out if you’re a fast or a slow caffeine oxidizer and I’m a fast oxidizer, which is good and bad, right? It means that if I have a cup of coffee, I go, go, go, but then it wears off.

5:42 So you’re known for so many things because you could deep dive into all those nuances of what’s in that cup right now, which is you’ve got all those biohashes. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what you put in that cup. Yeah, that’s true. It’s mostly good. But then also you’ve got another foot in this natural living camp where you don’t quantify everything. And I was wondering if you could, for people that don’t know you that well, if you could describe kind of the natural living half of Ben and then the biohacking side of Ben, because they’re very different, but you kind of live them both, right? I have nothing against better living through science, right? So I look at everything through the lens of whether it increases mental and physical performance, but whether it also does or does not fly in the face of longevity and anti-aging or just overall health. So yeah, when it comes to ancestral living, like you mentioned, you called it a ranch. I don’t really live. I’ve got a bunch of chickens and goats, but it’s not like I’m out there. I’m not quarreling cattle, writing a stallion.

6:43 You have an obstacle course. You’ve got a house you designed with- And I don’t own any leather riding chaps or spurs. But yeah, the home is out in the middle of the forest, right? So I’ll wander naked through the forest in the morning and find something to eat for breakfast and pick some nettles and some wild mint and go to our raised garden beds and collect some kale and cilantro and go inside and make myself a smoothie. And that’s certainly a component of ancestral living. And I’ll shoot the wild turkey with my bow, and I’m an avid deer hunter and I’ll hunt elk. And I’ll be going on a moose and a bear hunt in a couple of months. And so I love that side of connecting with your primal man or woman.

7:25 But at the same time, I’ll take all those weeds from outside indoors and I’ll put things like ant extract and C8 brain octane and things that you might not consider to be ancestral, but that might be more biohacky. And I’m doing so under the lights in my office, which are hacked for enhanced blue light production versus the lights in my bedroom, which are hacked for enhanced red light production or the absence of blue light. And so I think that really what it comes down to is when you are making a decision about whether you’re going to use, say, like a biohack, for example, you simply need to look at the research and see whether or not it would be something that actually has good long-term research behind it. Like I’ve been experimenting lately with pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, which is actually what cell phones produce. And you’ll see the warning, they talk about now that you’ve seen the warning label on cell phones, right? It’s there. It’s not as bad as the one on cigarettes, but the idea is you’re supposed to keep your cell phone if it’s not in airplane mode away from your body. It’s something like an inch. I don’t remember the exact distance, but the idea behind that is that it produced this pulsed electromagnetic frequency that could potentially be associated with things like cancer or leakage in your blood brain barrier, which can cause toxins and things like that to wind up in neural tissue.

8:54 But the idea is that you can also get pulsed electromagnetic field devices that don’t produce the same frequency as a cell phone. And if you look at the research behind those, they do things like simulate the type of frequency that the earth might emit. Like if you’re grounding or earthing, like people using grounding mats or earthing mats. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Like Tour de France cyclists use them for a long time and now they sell them for people to use in their homes. But there’s devices too, like I use one that I put on my collarbone and it sends this very, very light frequency signal through what’s called my brachial plexus, which is up in the shoulder. And that basically travels up into the brain and causes your brain to release delta waves. And your house is actually hacked to block out electromagnetic waves, right? Or you don’t have wifi. You have to be careful. People, people have asked about that.

9:48 It’s called, it’s basically like a Faraday cage, right? Like you can line your, your home with, with the special, it’s like a sheet basically that will block out. But yours isn’t like that. The problem is if you make a, if you make a phone call inside that you’re essentially you’ve built your, a giant microwave, right? So I, my, my home is not shielded, but it has certain things that reduce my exposure to dirty electricity or what might be called electrical pollution. So for example, there is no wifi in my home. It pisses off people when they come over because they can’t get a signal because the entire home is, it’s hard wired with cat five shielded ethernet cable. So if you go into a room and you want to access the internet rather than having a wifi signal bouncing around the room, you just plug plug the cable into the wall. And I mean, if there’s obviously a lot of people can’t just go build a home and put cable through the walls or rip out their walls and put cable in, but there are little things you can do, right? Like you can buy for 20 or 30 bucks off Amazon, a digital wall timer, which means that you plug it into any outlet in your home and then you set it on a timing. So you can say, I want this particular, whatever’s plugged into this outlet, I want it to turn off at 10 PM and then turn on again at 6 AM. So at least your wifi’s off when you’re sleeping. But yeah, like when I check into a hotel room, like, you know, I’m here in London, you know, I go through

11:11 The entire hotel room and just unplug as many things as possible. And I tried to find the wifi and unplug that before I, I fall asleep just because yeah, it does, it does affect you. I’m, you know, so to return to your original question, yeah, like I like the biohacking type of stuff, but I’m careful with especially like the, the electrical wifi and Bluetooth components, you know, I’m not wearing an Apple watch, for example. Yeah. And I go on airplane mode at night now for a variety of reasons. I think your brain, the phone shouldn’t be really in the room and on because your brain thinks it’s on and the whole red light, blue light stuff. It’s definitely something people should explore.

11:46 The light around them at all times, I use flux on my max. Now the Apple iPhone now has. Yeah. They added that to the iOS. Although I do sleep with my phone right next to me.

11:56 It’s an airplane mode, but I use a binaural beats when I sleep. Have you heard of these? Yeah. Yeah. It plays one frequency in one ear while you sleep in the other. And I use them while I sleep, you know, you can use them for, for focus and, you know, like when I’m writing like fiction, for example, I like to have like just everything blocked out, but you can put them in when you sleep. I’m a side sleeper. So I use these, there’s a company called sleep phones. They make like a, like a very soft headset that wraps around your ears. So the bud isn’t like poking into your ears as you sleep. Okay. Have this whole system. And then I have this, this sleep master sleep mask. It’s like this wraps around and envelops your whole head and blocks out all the light. And then I plug it into, uh, so this, just this cheap ass, uh, iPhone app that pumps out binaural beats. It’s called a sleep stream. Okay. All night long.

12:43 I just, it’s really light. It’d be like, it’s very light. It’s like a DJ for sleep, right? You can, you can have like soft piano pieces come on or you can do like, uh, uh, white noise, rain, thunder fan. And that sleep mask, I know Tim Ferriss was like recommending one at a point that kind of goes all the way around your head. I’ve got one of those and when I put it on my head and go to the bathroom, I look like I have a turban on.

13:08 My daughter finds that kind of funny. I think we probably have the same one because it’s huge. Like when you’re on the airplane and you use on the, and you walk to the back of me, it’s like you have a giant hat on. I love it though. It’s very therapeutic.

13:20 You feel like you’re just cradled in a giant silk mask. Yeah. And it’s whole with sleep masks. Normally, especially once you get on the plane, they go over your ears and they just, they don’t work through the night. Oh, they’re crap. They’re both people with very small, small heads.

13:31 Yeah, it doesn’t work. And you can get all this biohacking stuff. By the way, Ben has an amazing podcast. You’ve written so much, so many articles, so much evergreen content over the years, as far as all this biohacking stuff. And I want to get into your morning routine a little bit later, but I also want to find out about your journey because you started off as a bodybuilder and you started off as a guy that was then the Ironman, a guy who was doing the usual thing, eating all the carbs and doing all that stuff.

13:55 You weren’t always biohacker Ben and natural living Ben. Can you tell me about kind of that, that guy and some of the things you learned over the years to make you who you are now? You could make an argument that I’ve been a biohacker for a while because look at bodybuilding, right? It’s like the most bro sciencey sport that there is. I mean, I just wrote, I’ve been injecting myself with peptides, like doing self injections with them. And most of what I learned, I had to learn on bodybuilding forums because it’s this complete underground science.

14:22 It is subcutaneously with peptides. Okay. So like the, I use something called VPC 157. Okay. It’s not, it’s not sold for human consumption or human use.

14:32 You can only get it from research laboratory websites, but you can inject like, like I inject my hamstring intermuscularly. And it was like healed and you got that info off the bodybuilding site. You get it, you get bacteriostatic water, you recon it’s crazy. Just something on bro science really quick. I had Mike Dolce here last week.

14:48 And we were talking about bro science because he gets accused of bro science all the time. And he’s like, you know, bodybuilders with the original bro science. And I had Dorian Yates in here and he was six time Mr. Olympia. You want to stretch that off your body, right? As low as you need to go, which is far lower than what I would ever argue would be healthy.

15:08 Right. And we’re talking about like health versus performance. That’s performance at the cost of health. Like when I was bodybuilding, I was just a giant piece of muscle with no sex drive and low testosterone, 3% body fat, you know, I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am now. And we’ll just lay on the couch, hit the gym in the morning, hit the gym in the evening. This was during my last year of college.

15:27 So I would study during the day. And you learned all that from the bro science, which is just what was passed down through the gym, right? Already tapping into, you know, some creatine and, and, you know, what kind of, what kind of sets and reps work best for lowering body fat and intermittent fasting and all, you know, and this was 10 years ago. And then I pivoted and I’ve always been someone who, who, uh, excels at absolutely nothing, right? But I like to dabble in a lot of things.

15:55 I’ve, I’ve always, I’ve always loved to just, just pick up and try new things. So I wanted to try triathlon. I went to an Ironman triathlon and I watched it and I was like, dude, I have to try. This is when you were still bodybuilding. I was still bodybuilding. So I, so I actually entered into an, uh, uh, an Olympic distance track when I was still bodybuilding. It was like the most painful run of my life during that race because my tits were bouncing up and down. It would just, because I still had all that, that bodybuilding muscle. There’s a picture somewhere that way, way back, um, on, on my computer, it was even before Facebook, uh, that long ago. Um, but anyways, it, it, it was very, very painful body type transition from bodybuilding and Ironman, but both are like bodybuilding is the extreme of nutrition and muscle building and fat loss and Ironman is the extreme of endurance performance and nutrition.

16:43 And so I was very interested in science and my master’s degree is in biomechanics and exercise physiology. So you’ve been picking up little bits of this science over the years when you’re, when you’re weight lifting, you picked that up from the guys in the gym. And my point about bro science was Dorian Yates was in the eighties in this dark gym in Birmingham. And he hacked himself into be the greatest human specimen for six years in a row. And he did it all through trial and error on his own, right? Just kind of I actually wish that I could, and I’ve thought about it before, right? Like, like dial back the clock with what I know now and actually go back and try to pack on as much muscle as possible because back then it was just like lift heavy shit and take creatine and drink the protein shakes that come in the can. Yeah. And a little bit of that’s it. So, and then, and then I did, did iron man. And, you know, as you alluded to neither sport is necessarily healthy. And for me, it was five, six years ago when I started to discover that there is a big distinction between performance and health, right? Like carbohydrates, for example, they are, they definitely enhance endurance performance and they enhance glycolytic performance overall, but at what cost? Like when you frequently spike blood glucose or you’re eating the 50 to 70% carbohydrate based diet recommended to eat, you know, healthy whole grains and whole wheat bread,

18:06 Which can spike your insulin levels higher than a candy bar and, you know, frequent spikes in blood glucose. So you’re dumping a bunch of sugar into your bloodstream along with cholesterol and the sugar sticks to the cholesterol, which becomes atherosclerotic. And there’s, there’s all these issues and we can talk for hours about the, all the studies that have been done on the chronic health disease risks of not processed sugar alone, but just high carbohydrate period of fluctuations in blood glucose, fluctuations in blood glucose from carbohydrates, or even from, from protein becoming gluconeogenic or turning into glucose. And this is clean carbs as you would.

18:43 Yeah. And so, you know, when I was doing bodybuilding, I didn’t know about any of this, but I was unhealthy. You know, I would go to these conventions and the people look really good in spandex and you get up close and there’s like wrinkles and there’s all these signs of, of advanced glycation end products, which can cause connective tissue damages as sugar stick to proteins and they’re heated during metabolic activity. And yeah, they don’t look great a lot of times. Not close up, not close up.

19:09 But neither do triathletes, right? Like you look at triathletes close up, they look a little far away, right? And they’re, they’re emaciated and a lot of the muscle is lost. And, and a big part of it is just inflammation. Big part of it is hyper cortisolism. You know, I began to, began to study my own body, you know, as blood and biomarker testing became more readily available. You know, there, there’s companies now that will do, you know, everything from blood drop testing to, to home test kits for blood.

19:37 Yeah. Well, you got me to test my blood. And stool. Did you test? Yeah, I did test and I got your doctor friend, Tamsen.

19:44 Tamsen, Lou here in the UK. Yeah. So she did my whole thing. She’s speaking with me. We’re, we’re on a panel at the biohacking summit this weekend. Okay. That’s why you’re here, right? Yeah. So thanks for that, by the way. It took me like a year to finally get around to it, but it was a Did you find out? Are you pregnant?

19:58 Yeah, I’m pregnant. I’m old. But like, it was very thorough. And like, I’ve seen a lot of, not bro science, but I think I’ve seen a lot of science and I know my science pretty well just from being an engineer that doesn’t look like science. But this was a very comprehensive piece where even I was like, okay, I buy this stuff. And it was, you know, eight different levels of looking at my blood. And a lot of it seemed to make sense. And I felt like I knew a lot more. Right. And I was only one test. One test, right? Yeah. And so I test my blood now four to six times a year, you know, starting off, you know, to return back to the like the triathlon and pivoting from performance into health. Yeah, you know, I found out high HSCRP, a sign of muscle inflammation, high homocysteine, a sign of vascular inflammation, high cortisol, low thyroid, low T3, showing like that that any thyroid your body is making isn’t getting converted into its active form, high sex hormone binding globulin, which basically is how your body shuts down fertility and libido because that binds to any testosterone that you might be making, rendering you less fertile, all the things that your body does when you are a eating inflammatory foods, and be training improperly, right? Like not recovering the right way, etc. And so you put that stuff together and you can have somebody who looks good with their shirt off or in spandex or somebody who’s like, you know, doing a whatever an eight and a

21:18 Half or a nine hour Ironman triathlon, but who isn’t really healthy. Okay. And you’ve got that point. So that’s when I got to that point. That’s when I started researching more of the biohacking, more of the supplementation, more of how to shut down inflammation, more of ketosis, right? And and keeping the body in a state of ketone utilization rather than glucose utilization. That’s when I wrote my book about, you know, all these these things that go beyond training. That’s when I really started to delve into how do you feel about carbs. Now, if like if you had to give someone the two minute Ben Greenfield take on carbs, I’m sure it’s changed. Well, obviously it’s changed since the triathlon days and the bodybuilding days. How do you feel in general now? I know it’s a very general question. Yeah. Well, that’s why I’ll probably never write a diet book because when people ask me that, the answer is it completely depends. For example, it depends on your production of salivary amylase, meaning how well you’re able to begin carbohydrate digestion in your mouth, which influences how much insulin your pancreas creates in response to that carbohydrate that you consume.

22:21 That’s all genetic. You can do a salivary DNA profile through, you know, here in the UK, it’s DNA fit in the US. It’s 23 and me, but you can get a salivary genetic sample. You can see what your ancestors ate. You can see what type of genes you have that are responsible for things like increased type two diabetes risk or salivary amylase production. And you can tweak your diet or your macronutrient ratios, your carb fat protein ratios accordingly. And we’re all that different. Like people have that much of a variation. We’re extremely different. Now, when, you know, we look at and say you and me, you know, we’re probably, I don’t think either of us are Kenyan or Ethiopian or sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian. Right. Looking at us. Okay. I doubt it. Right. So, so we’re going to respond differently to rice and bananas, right? Okay. And you tend to see from an ancestral standpoint, somewhere in the range of like 50 to 60% fats around 20 to 30% protein. And depending on the day’s level of physical activity, somewhere in the range of like 10 to 30% carbohydrate. Now, I don’t completely eschew carbohydrates. My wife makes a fantastic slow fermented sourdough bread from a local like non-GMO wheat that grows on the Palouse in the Northwest. And it’s fantastic. How dare you beg Greenfield. And I do that and I do, I do rice. So I have bread every day. I have rice, I’m a paleo. Okay. That’s blue goats. We do goat milk. Yeah. All, all this stuff. Okay.

23:43 But the idea is it’s all about when you put it into your body. So my personal diet is cyclic ketosis. Okay. What I mean by that is I keep my body in a state of full ketone utilization. For people that don’t know what ketosis is, can you give me a general quick? Sure. It’s just a molecule that your body naturally produces when it burns fatty acids. When it goes through a process called beta oxidation, which is the burning of fatty acids, a byproduct of that, dumped out during the cycle of burning fats is what are called ketones. Okay. Your liver, your heart, your diaphragm, your brain, they can only use ketones very effectively as a fuel without creating the same type of inflammation as glucose can. So I try to keep myself in that state because it’s advantageous, not just for cognitive performance, but also, you know, I’m, I’m still competing professionally in obstacle course racing, for example. So for me to be able to go for long periods of time burning my own fat, that’s advantageous. It’s advantageous when I’m hunting. It’s advantageous for, for a variety of purposes. You know, when you’re traveling, you know, like I do all the time and you don’t want to eat the airplane food or the airport food. And it’s better than carving up, having that ketosis state when you’re obstacle. So I carve up. I do carve up. You do carve up.

24:52 I do because almost everything I do is glycolytically demanding, right? Like I, I, I’m not doing Ironman anymore. I’m doing sports where you’re redline much of the time. Okay. My workout is more steady, steady, steady. Right.

25:03 Like a workout for me, I might be at a 10 by 500 meter row with deadlifts and squats in between each, you know, and so that’s glycolytically demanding. So what I do is high heart rate, short duration. And this is where the cyclic part of cyclic ketosis comes in. Okay. I’m burning ketones all day long, teaching my body how to be a fat burning machine. And then in the evening, and I work out in the evening. My, my primary workout is in the evening because that’s when testosterone peaks. It’s when reaction time peaks. It’s when what’s called your post workout protein synthesis peaks. It’s, it’s when the body is most primed for a hard workout. And I have a several hours after that workout during which these, these transporters called glute for transporters, these take carbohydrates that you eat and they allow those carbohydrates to be shoved into muscle tissue rather than partitioned into fat. And so I will time my wine intake and my rice intake and that really, really good sourdough bread intake and all that stuff in the evening, right? Somewhere, somewhere in the window of time after that workout, not pointing that, you know, I don’t go make myself a shake right after, but at some point, you know, within two or three hours after that workout. And that refuels my muscles, glycogen stores for the next day’s activity. Okay. So you have carbs every day, but it’s that cycle that you don’t have them in the morning. I have some clients. I coach

26:18 Who aren’t as active as me that will be refeeds once a week sometimes in that case, but I do every day and and wine. You stuck wine in there. You like your wine. Oh, I’m on board with the wine glass, glass wine a day. Really interesting studies on, on coffee and wine. And I’ve become far more open to that over the years. Um, you know, wine, I, I drink a biodynamically farmed organic wine that passes through a very, uh, very strict filtration process. You know, grapes grown at high altitude for enhanced antioxidants. It ferments for longer, which is a big bonus because you not only get less sugar, but you also get more alcohol. And I don’t mind. I’m not drinking wine for anything except spinning the dials in my brain and decreasing stress at the end of the day. Okay. There, there’s some antioxidant benefits, but I can just take a resveratrol capsule, right? If I want that. And you’re drinking like a glass. Yeah. Like red wine. Yeah, red, big, big glass. I do that. So I open it up. I beat the shit out of it, which is, I think originally a Tim Ferriss trick where you take the latte frother and you, you froth the wine. So rather than having to decant it and leave it there all day, you, you froth it for about 60 and I don’t even do it. My air into it. I taught my kids when they were five, how to open a bottle of wine. So they, they open the wine, they get the latte frother, they froth it for me. They bring it to me

27:32 Because I usually froth up. Right. I write at the end of the day. So I’ll sit there and I’ll write this, this, this fiction book that I’m working on and I’ll sit my wine. And so I do a glass of wine every day and then coffee. There’s a Harvard medical researcher who I just interviewed for my podcast and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll have that one out soon. But we talk about the research that goes into the fact that four to six cups of coffee a day can decrease risk of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, enhanced neural function, lower blood glucose. There’s all sorts of effects. A lot of coffee.

28:05 So, so I do a couple of big ass cups of coffee. In the evening too. In the morning. In the morning. Okay. In the morning. Okay. I will do coffee afterwards, like in the evening, but I’ll use like a decaffeinated. So you’re still getting a lot of the antioxidants. You’re getting a lot of the tannins, but you won’t get the caffeine. Okay. And usually like if I were doing what I was doing right now, having a cup of coffee with you in the evening, even though, like I mentioned, I’m a fast coffee oxidizer, you can mix it with something called L-theanine. And L-theanine decreases the wakefulness enhancing properties of caffeine. So you can keep like L-theanine capsules handy, or a green tea is a perfect combination of a natural combination of theanine. Okay. Caffeine.

28:44 Yeah, I do coffee. I do wine. Okay. Back to the wine. Talk to me about it for cognitive enhancement, creativity. They say you should write drunk and edit sober. Is that how you do your creative writing? The problem.

28:57 So here’s the problem. Everything I’ve written when I’ve been drunk has been rubbish. I like to write fiction. So I do all of my left brain, because I write a lot. I’ve always written most of my writing, ever since I was a kid. I’ve written, like I do, you know, for our websites, and I do all the copywriting. I do all the article writing.

29:16 We don’t have any ghostwriters. I write every day. You have a great looking website, by the way. BenGreenfield.com. BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Yeah. It’s amazing. I love it. I show our business accelerator students. I’m like, this is what your website should look like.

29:30 Thank you. Yeah. It’s respect. Sorry, back to you for copywriting. So the idea with the writing is I’ll do the left brain stuff in the morning, just because I know how I’m wired. Some people are more creative in the morning. I’m more productive in the morning. I’m more creative in the evening. Okay. Your manager mode is in the morning. Exactly.

29:50 Exactly. And now I’ve been, because I can stand and I can pace, and I actually just put it up on Snapchat, how I write. I’ll walk the room, especially if I’m not at home on my little treadmill workstation. I’ll walk the room. I use a headsets called a Jabra 930 headset.

30:08 It’s made by this company called Jabra, and it attaches to my head, and the other end plugs into my computer, and I dictate using Dragon Dictation as I’m walking and pacing the room, and that allows me to write without being in this hunched-over type of position. Okay. You have it courted. That’s a new thing for me. I’ve only been doing that for about six months. With the dictated. Have you done the voice dictation for a while, or is that a new thing? I’ve done the voice dictation for a while, but using Dragon Dictation with this, you know, voice dictation is highly erroneous, right? You’re always having to go back and edit words, and you want to punch your fist through the computer sometimes because it’ll misspell half of the things that you type. But this Bluetooth headset with Dragon Dictation, which you have to train, right? You have to train your computer for like three or four months until it gets to the point where it can recognize your words. Okay. You know, and so, comma, I’ll be talking, comma, to you, comma, Brian Rose, period. So you will say that. Select Brian Rose.

31:04 Cap that. Unselect. That’s how you do. New paragraph, you know, so you got to learn all the lingo and editing on the way. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But the, the wine, I’ll drink the glass of wine at night and then start into the fiction, but the problem with wine is that it’s, it’s calorie-laden. So you do have to be careful. You know, for me, I have to, I have to move my ass up hills really quickly, you know, doing these races. And so I do watch my weight. I, purposefully keep myself lean. Okay. I have a voracious appetite and I want to eat everything and so, but I keep myself lean because I have to for running. Okay.

31:35 I’m 10, 15 pounds below my, my ideal body weight. What do you weigh? My body wants to be at about 175. Okay. So, and when you write fiction, do you dictate it as well? Or is that mostly, mostly for your pros? I dictate the fiction as well. Okay. And the problem with wine is a lot of people have that one glass of wine and then they start making bad decisions about their diet or the second and fourth glass of wine. Right. Well, we were talking about this, but before the show, so, so I’ll do the wine. I’ve got, I’ve got a few tricks that I’ll use in addition to cyclic ketosis to keep myself from gaining weight from that type of carbohydrate. Okay. There’s three different extracts that I’ll use to either increase insulin sensitivity or decrease the blood glucose response to a meal and to further enhance the, the upregulation of those glute four transporters I was talking about that shove carbohydrate into muscle tissue. Okay.

32:24 Cinnamon is one. So, almost every time I have a cup of coffee, I’ll put a couple teaspoons of cinnamon, a lot of cinnamon. Like I’m chewing it out of the bottom of the cup. In addition to the vanilla, you’re pushing all these things. Yeah.

32:33 Oh, yeah. We didn’t even talk about vanilla on, you know, but vanilla is a great cognitive enhancer. That’s my, if I do a cup of, quote unquote, bulletproof coffee, I do vanilla. I do the dark cacao powder. I do the coffee and I do a little bit of the C8. So, it’s a much lower calorie cup of coffee. Okay. Lower in triglycerides, but the vanilla and the chocolate and the C8 together really spin your brain dials.

32:57 Okay. But the wine and the bad decisions with the wine, do you just tell your clients, just do the one glass? You just do the one glass, but you use the, use the cinnamon during the day. Okay. That’s one. Right. Apple cider vinegar taken at about one to two tablespoons prior to a meal acts very similarly to cinnamon.

33:14 And we’re talking about lowering blood glucose and increasing insulin sensitivity. And then a bitter melon extract is another one. This acts very similarly to the diabetic drug metformin, in terms of how much it can shove what’s called your post perandial blood glucose down. So much so that you don’t want to take it before workout, because you’ll go hypoglycemic before workout. But before my biggest meal of the day, before I drink alcohol, etc., I’ll use that in addition to that workout trick at the end of the day that I’m talked about. Okay. And then because you do have to drink a certain amount of wine to really, truly get into that, that mode that you talked about how writers, you know, they write drunken edit sober.

33:52 I use cannabidiol. In my state THC is legal. Right. Washington State, right. I use CBD mixed with THC. So the CBD takes like the psychoactive paranoia edge off the THC.

34:07 And so I’ll take, I’ll do THC, but I’ll combine it with with cannabidiol capsules. And then I still have to be careful when I take THC, because it’s technically, you know, it’s banned by the world anti-doping association. Right. So you can’t compete in races. I can’t, I can’t do that during race season, but I can use CBD, which is, which is legal anywhere in the world, as long as it’s from industrial hemp.

34:26 And then I’ll use that along with the wine. And that way you get a little bit of both. What about THC and biohacking? I mean, people don’t really talk about that much. The biohackers usually stay away from the marijuana and the THC.

34:35 But these days, the states like Washington and Colorado where it’s legal, and then like another 30 some states where it’s medically legal. Yeah. Should we start having that conversation more? You know, the, the CB1 and CB2 receptors. I mean, we produce all our own endogenous endocannabinoids.

34:52 THC, in my opinion, is just better living through ancestral plant medicine. Right. When, when you’re using something like that to shut down inflammation, or to enhance creativity, or to decrease salivary cortisol. I mean, there’s a lot of things that most forms of, of, of a hemp extract or a cannabis extract can do. Okay. The problem is, of course, all of the little things that go along with overuse. A little bit of a reduction of gray matter, if overused, especially when you’re, when you’re under the age of 18. Okay. The appetite sparking component. Right. Which can kind of backfire on you if, if you’re, you know, using THC at night and, and you get the munchies. Okay. Which is real.

35:35 Which is, which is real. It really happens. This is where cannabidiol or, or CBD, it’s, it’s an antagonist of some of those effects of THC. So if you use something rich in CBD or you combine CBD with THC, you don’t get a lot of those effects, but there are, there are a ton of benefits of that actual plant. You just have to be careful with, with overuse, but yeah, anti-inflammatory benefits, reduction in salivary cortisol.

36:03 There’s a lot of wheezing smoke in America, right? And I don’t smoke. Anything you burn, especially if you’re an athlete, that is going to affect your alveolar function. Yeah. Okay. So if I’m going to use something like that, to be honest with you, I get a high grain alcohol and I have a industrial grade blender, like an immersion blender.

36:23 Okay. And I will, I will purchase the weed that I want to use, whatever strain I want, depending on the effect that I want, a sativa, an indica, a hybrid, whatever. I’ll decarboxylate it, meaning I’ll cook it in the oven at about 200 degrees or so for 40 to 60 minutes. Okay. But that doesn’t release, that doesn’t release the grind it. That, that decarboxylation means you’re removing a carboxyl group from the, from the bud. And that’s what renders the THC actually active.

36:51 Okay. And from there, I will blend it with high grain alcohol for eight, 12 hours. So you get a very, very potent extract. The, the end product is a tincture, which you can put under your tongue and you can hold for 90 seconds. And you don’t have to vape.

37:07 You don’t have to smoke. You don’t have to go purchase weed, anything like that. And you’re not getting the effects of smoking. You’re not getting, you know, I personally, like, you know, I’ve got kids at home. I don’t necessarily want to be sitting there from a vape with my kids because then I have to answer a lot of awkward questions in front of them that they may not understand at this point because they’re, they’re eight years old. Yeah. I trust them to open the wine and to do the, the wine immersion for me, but we, we don’t talk a lot about weed. Okay.

37:32 So yeah, so I’ll do a tincture and then I’ll combine that with like a CBD capsule. Okay. And a couple drops under the tongue. Like a dropper. So the way that I mix it up is so, and it’s, it’s very simple math.

37:44 Let’s say you’re going to decarboxylate three buds of weed and wind up with three grams that you’re then putting in the immersion blender. Once you actually put that into a dropper bottle, like one dropper full winds up at being about two and a half milligrams or so, which is basically like micro dosing with, you know, so you could micro dose with it, or you could do like four dropper fulls and have 10 milligrams of weed and feel really good. Okay. So when will you, and I am not a pothead by the way, but you got me on the topic. So when will you have that conversation with your, your twin boys at eight years old about weed? Because I’m starting, I get questions from Gabby. She’s 12 about like, why is an alcohol a drug? Because it makes people fall over. And like, when do you have that conversation with them?

38:23 I’ve had, because they’ll always know sooner than you think. I’ve had shreds of that conversation, but when we step back and look at this from, when we look at the forest for the trees, the idea is that you never want to tell your children, in my opinion, not to do something. You want to enable them with the education that allows them to feel empowered to make that decision about whether or not they are going to do something. For example, my kids know that concentrated gluten.

38:52 Right. Not what you find in mom’s sourdough bread, but what you find in cupcakes at your friend’s birthday party, or in the bread from, from, you know, the, the taco part of the cafeteria at school, or what you might find in, you know, in terms of like the, the allergenic proteins in dairy that you might get from the milk at your friend’s house, those are bad for your gut. They can make you stupid the next day in school because they can create inflammation in your brain. They can even keep you from gaining muscle.

39:22 You get to decide if you want to have the cupcake. You get to decide if you want to have the, the cup of, of commercial pasteurized, homogenized milk, but I tell them it’s going to make you stupid. It’s not going to allow your muscles to grow as fast. Um, dad, can I have this wine? Well, technically, if you are still young and your liver is still growing, that wine can affect your liver, and your liver is what helps the rest of your body to get rid of any nasty things that you put into it.

39:49 So if you ruin your liver by drinking this when you’re young, it’s going to affect you when you’re older. So we have to wait for you to drink this until your liver is bigger, right? And then they know. Do they buy in mostly? If they wanted to steal a bottle of wine and bring it on me, it’s all there. They know how to drink and everything, but they also know that they have this very precious organ called a liver, and they have to wait until that thing is is fully grown.

40:10 Okay. Um, you know, all sorts of things like that, you know, uh, what’s another one that we’ve talked about? Um, coffee and bone mineral, right? Like I’ve taught them that coffee until your bones are fully formed, and you know, your osteophytes are then building all that new bone. Coffee has been shown to decrease bone mineral density in kids.

40:29 So they know that they can have coffee, you know, and they’ve sipped coffee, and they’ve sipped wine. They haven’t vaped, but you know, they’ve tried these things a little bit, but they know, right? Like if you have the cup of coffee with that at the breakfast table, you’re going to have weak bones when you grow up. Right. Okay. And you make the decision.

40:44 And they’re on the page now. They’re eight now. So far, they make pretty good decisions. Wait until they’re 12. They’ll grab the cupcake, and they’ll have it, but they’ll tell me.

40:51 Like that, I had gluten at the birthday party. I don’t think I’m going to do that again for a couple of weeks. Yeah. No, that’s cool. And I’m with you, and I have these same conversations with with my daughter. I’m just like, look, this is the deal with alcohol and drugs and all these things, and they make some people do this, and some people do this, and you’re going to experience people that do these things, and their choices that they make, and this is what’s going to happen, and I’m not telling you not to do it. You’ll make that decision. And I wasn’t raised that way.

41:14 Right. You know, I was homeschooled, K through 12. I grew up in a very conservative family. My first experience with alcohol was stealing a bottle of scotch from my dad’s office. I mean, like what age?

41:23 Oh gosh, I think I was 13, 14, you know, drunk, and in my bedroom, and you know, and you know, it’s, yeah, I think that the whole forbidden fruit approach to parenting is not a healthy deal. It’s not an option these days, but a mobile phone, I mean, they can have access to like porn, information, drug stuff. It’s like, they got anything, so you might as well just empower them to make some good decisions. Exactly. Like, you know, I tell my kids, I forget, can we curse on your show?

41:50 Yes. Okay, so I’ll, my kids know what fuck means. They know what shit means. They know what all these words mean. They know, you know, 20 different words for their dick, but they know, for example, they’re not supposed to talk about their penis in front of girls because that can be an uncomfortable topic in many social situations, or they know that fuck is a word that you use in specific situations, but most of the time it’s not an appropriate term to use at school, you know, and so again, you educate your children, you teach them about these things, then you let them make the decision. Right, the old school way. We’re going to find out about it anyways. Yeah, we were kind of raised with the, you don’t ever say that, and you don’t do that, and yeah, me too, which is just not very realistic, and then they’re going to want to do the opposite. Oh, we had, we had a freaking, like, squeeze box on our TV that would, I mean, my parents bought the thing for the TV that when somebody curses, it blocks it out. Really? And so all of us boys would gather around the TV, and we watch people’s lips, then we’d figure out what they were saying, and then we’d go look up that word and become infatuated with it and start to use it, so it’s, yeah, look how you turned out, right? Yeah.

42:50 Ben, one of the things I like about you is that when you come here, you talk about your successes, but you also talk about some failures and things that you’ve learned from those things, and I wanted you to tell me about some experiences you had in the last couple of years, like the world’s toughest smutter, and yeah, I know, and the Iron Man Championships that you did in some extreme heat, where you’re always a guy that’s pushing yourself all the time, and I remember last time you were here, you were talking about some crazy triathlons you were doing, where you think we were talking about the Navy Seal, Cacora. We did that, and then also times when you were on a bicycle, you had no business being on there on some of these races, and I like the fact, and I want to talk about the SEAL training too after this, but you know, you’re always pushing yourself into situations that sometimes you maybe shouldn’t even be on these races, and you’re doing it. Can you tell me what you learned from the toughest mutter, and from that that Iron Man Championships, and what your mindset change was after that?

43:44 Well, let’s start with the with the Championships, I guess. That was, I forget the year, but it was the Half Iron Man World Championships in Vegas. I do not DNF races. I finish what I start. What does DNF mean? DNF means did not finish. Did not finish, okay, which is a big bad thing. But I think that almost everybody who says that they DNF, or that they do not DNF, at some point in their life, they have DNF and they know what that feels like, and that was the time, I think that was 2013, something like that, that I had that experience. So Vegas, super hot. They had this race, and it was like 103, 104 degrees by the time we got out there on the run course, and I made the mistake of booking a posh hotel that was right on the run course, and the run course was a multi-loop course, right? So I do the swim, and I do the bike, and I had actually won the previous year gold for the USA in the long course World Championships on a similar course, not in that heat though, and so I thought I was going to own the day, because this was, you know, same location in Vegas, and I was ready to rumble. Did you train accordingly? Because then you thought you were going to win it?

44:50 Or was your training pretty good up to that? My training was good. Even since then, I’ve learned a lot about sauna and heat acclamation and all sorts of little heat hacks that you can use to do it better in the heat, you know, from colostrum to glycerin and all sorts of things, but either way, in that race… One of the things you said before you jump in about a race is you have to know your why for each race. Oh, absolutely. Which I think most people don’t think, because they look at Ben, and they’re like, Ben just does everything to the max, but like every race has a different why and a different point in your life, right?

45:22 Every race has a why at a different point in your life, and I’ll touch on that, and then I’ll get back to the championship. What I mean by that is my why used to be I want to be the strongest version of me, right? Like I want to see how tough I can make myself so that I can survive. I’m a little bit of a prepper right at home. I’ve got guns and gold and silver and ammo and solar and all these things that would allow me to survive the Chinese attacking or zombie apocalypse, right? And I like that feeling of just being a guy who’s ready for anything.

45:54 You just feel better about yourself. And that used to be my, you know, before that was I just wanted to do an Iron Man. Like I want to cross the finish line like those people I’ve seen on TV, and that was enough of a why, and then it moved into I want to be the strongest version of me and be ready for anything. And now I feel like I’ve reached that point, knock on wood, where I feel like I could get through just about anything that gets thrown at me. You know, I’ve done 50-hour races at 38 degrees below zero. I’ve done the full Hell Week thing with Mark Devine’s Navy SEAL program. I’ve put myself through some of the toughest events on the face of the planet. I don’t feel like being the strongest version of me is a good why anymore.

46:30 I don’t even feel like being able to show my kids that I did something hard to inspire them is really my why anymore, because they’ve seen that. Frankly, they’re a little over-daddy going off and then coming back and showing them the Facebook images from the next sufferfest that I did. Do you ever wonder why you wanted to be that strongest version of yourself? Is it because, I mean, I don’t want to go too deep right now, but you ever think it’s just like you don’t think you’re good enough, and I’m like, I got to prove to myself that I actually am good enough.

46:59 You know, when you talk about that, a lot of times there are failures in life that cause you to want to become a stronger version of you. I haven’t had a huge number of intense failures in life. I was never morbidly obese. I never had some horrible disease like cancer that I had to overcome. For me, I think it’s more of that primal, instinctual need to be a great leader and to be able to provide for my family, you know, provide, procreate, protect, right? Those are the three P’s of manhood.

47:33 You were doing that before the race. I was doing that before, but you know, and also, I’m in fitness, right? Like, I’m in nutrition, and this kind of leads into my current why. My why now is to inspire people to greatness, right? So now, it’s all extrinsic. When I’m out there, there is no make me the strongest version of me.

47:57 All there is, is there’s people out there on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on social media, you know, waiting for the blog post on my website to teach them about how to do this. Thinking about getting out and doing a 5k, or maybe just getting off the couch, or maybe thinking about doing an Iron Man and they need inspiration. They need to see people out there doing this stuff. They need to see me suffering. That’s more pressure on you, isn’t it?

48:21 It’s more pressure, but in my opinion, I’ve found that to be even more powerful. Why? Because then, even when you’re ready to quit, when you’re like, fuck this, I am the strongest version of me. All right, that’s good. I’m going home now.

48:33 Then you realize that somebody out there is watching, and if they see you DNF or drop out, all of a sudden, their inspiration plummets. Because you failed, and whatever it was that you wrote about on your blog the week before, or mentioned on your podcast, that shit must not work, because you didn’t make it through. So now, it’s about inspiring other people. But in that race that we were talking about, that World Championships, that was just me out there. Ben’s going to own it.

49:00 Being me, I’m going to own it. And I think it was a four loop course. This was a half Iron Man, so it was whatever, 13 miles. You’re running a few miles on each loop. How long should that take?

49:10 A half Iron Man, for me, would be somewhere between like 450 and 5. Right, right in there. So, I crossed one loop, and then the second loop, and I’m jogging that one, and it’s getting hotter and hotter. And I’m suffering more and more. And sure, a lot of my competitors were walking, but I just hated that feeling of having to walk in the heat, and you’re going slower and slower.

49:32 The body, you know, you got a carry muscle, you’ve got a cool muscle. The body can only go so hard and so fast in the heat. And I hate to go slow. I feel like a failure if I’m in a race, and I’m not at least moving it in some semblance of a jog. So, after the second loop, I just walked off the course. I’m still wearing my timing chip, walked across the street, into the hotel, walked up to my room, my air-conditioned room, took off my race kit, took a cold shower, went down and sat by the pool, and as soon as I sat by the pool and dipped my toes in, you know, looked across, and there’s people drinking their giant alcohol drinks from their sippy straws there in Vegas. I’m just like, dude, I suck.

50:15 And you can hear the crowd still. You can hear the crowds often. They say it’s distant, you know, across the street. The most horrible feeling in the world. But mentally, you were there. I’ve never DNF’d since.

50:23 Okay. Never DNF’d since. That is the worst feeling in the world. But mentally, you were done. Knowing that other people are still out there pushing, and you threw in the towel.

50:31 Why did you stop? Because, you know, prime one, you get to a certain point where your body’s like, that I’m gonna die if I keep going. If I keep pushing, it’s not really gonna die. I could have stopped for five minutes and put my face in some ice water I’d made station and cooled down, but I was just like, as soon as you walk off that course, you’re done, right? Like, they’ll review your chipped at after. They’ll see if you moved backwards, or you went to your hotel room, or whatever. Like, you have to finish, yeah.

50:58 But the physical went into the mental, and you were just like, I’m done. Right, right. Or the world’s toughest mutter. That was something completely different. Now, that one, the way that tough mutters work, is there, it’s, you just go as many loops as you can go in 24 hours.

51:13 Alright, so it’s not a race. You can stop when you want to stop. You can go when you want to go. So, there is no DNF, right? Like, you can do one loop, and technically have done the race. It’s a five-mile loop that you just go out and do over, and over, and over 24 hours. All through the night. Starts in the heat of the desert in Vegas. I’m talking Vegas again. It’s my bad luck in Vegas.

51:30 Right. I should never, never gamble. And then it’s, you know, super cold, you know, 30 degrees-ish once you get into the evening in Vegas. And, you know, I went into that race a little less prepared. You know, that was more underpreparedness. You know, wearing the wrong kind of wetsuit. That really, you know, I had a super-duper thin triathlon wetsuit. And you want like a, you know, a three to five-mil wetsuit for an event like that. Mine was like one to two-mil in terms of thickness.

51:57 And, you know, I didn’t have the right gloves. And I just, you know, you know, I lost my water bottles out in the course, because I didn’t realize how much crawling there was. And so, my water bottles are just out there strewn around in the mud with all my nutrition inside them. Just poor preparation, right? And I remember I was something like 40 miles into the race.

52:17 And my wife was my sherpa there, right? So she’s there. Yeah, every time you finish a five-mile loop, what do you need? How can I help you? And it was like 2 a.m. And I remember I just walked into our little tent there in the aid area.

52:31 And I’m shivering and shaking and controllably nearly hypothermic. I can barely take a step forward. I’m starved, right? And I remember I had these plantain chips inside the tent. I’m like, I just want some plantain chips and some water. So carnal at that point.

52:46 Yeah, oh, totally. And I went in there and I laid down, you know, stripped off my wetsuit, and I curled up in the little sleeping bag in there. And my wife, you know, bless her heart, she just like, you know, curls up next to me with her body warmth and just holds me as my whole body is shaking. And I stayed there for like two hours, right? And to me, that was failing. Stayed there for two hours as some other people were out there shaking uncontrollably, but at least taking step after step out there on the course.

53:11 I got up at 6 a.m. I kept racing. I did something like 53 miles. But that was another, you know, in my opinion, it was a failure, right? I came in underprepared.

53:22 I came in without a strong, strong why aside from, hey, I want to go out and just kick ass, right? It’s not a strong why. It doesn’t work. And long run, yeah. Yeah, so failure happens for sure. Yeah, sometimes it’s because your why isn’t strong enough.

53:37 Sometimes it’s because you give into that primal instinct. Sometimes it’s because you’re underprepared. But yeah, it certainly is a reality. They’re all part of the mix. And if some of them go wrong, then it really puts a lot of pressure on the other one. So a good why can probably get you through if you’re, say, lost at sea and you’re thinking about your family the whole time, that might get you through.

53:57 Right. Or if you’re prepared and have the nutrition and have this and have tested yourself in the heat, that might get you through. But when a few of them fail, that’s what’s happened. Right. You’re underprepared. You don’t have a strong enough why, or you just give into that primal instinct.

54:12 And before you know it, you know, you’ve DNF’d. So how did you decide not to DNF after that? I mean, you said you quote Lance Armstrong saying, pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever. You obviously believe that. But how do you align your why?

54:25 Oh, now, when I’m out there, I mean, if you’re hurting, if it comes down to that primal instinct or that underpreparedness, that’s where that, you know, like that quote from Lance Armstrong comes in handy. That pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever. You just have to tell yourself that. I mean, until you experience the feeling of signing up for a race, getting out there, showing up at the starting line for some reason, not crossing the finish line, you don’t know that it is the most horrible feeling in the world.

54:55 It’s more horrible than pushing through a sprained ankle. It’s more horrible than blowing a knee and being out for six months. It’s more horrible than being hypoglycemic for hours on end to have that DNF scar on your record. That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself. I remember you’re just not a good feeling.

55:12 Right. I remember your world’s toughest mudder, I think, and I was waiting. I was watching some of your posts and you were going to be tweeting at it during the night. And I was just like, okay, here’s another race that Ben’s going to own. And then I think you, but you’re always straight up and honest.

55:23 And I think it was like in the middle of the night, you’re like, this is not going well. I feel horrible. And it’s just like that’s a lot of pressure because, you know, you have a big media footprint. People know you as that guy world is watching me curled up in a sleeping bag at 2 a.m. Huddled up with my wife off the course.

55:40 Right. That’s a bad feeling too. Okay. And so now your why seems clear to you when you take on these challenges. My why is very clear to me.

55:47 Okay. I was, I was placed on this earth to inspire people to go out and climb their own personal Mount Everest to achieve greatness. And that is what I live for now. Cool. How long you had that alignment?

55:58 Do you think in your brain? Hmm. It’s been growing. It’s been growing. Probably to be honest with you, the most distinct feeling that I had of if anyone’s got, I’m going to sound like a druggie now, but let’s get back to drugs.

56:13 Right. Psilocybin on the beach in Kauai. And this was several months ago and I’m going through a massive rebranding of my, my business and what it is that I want to build, how many people that I want to inspire. And I, my intention when I, when I did psilocybin dosing down in Hawaii was to ask myself if I really was ready to do that. And I remember standing on a, on a log there on the beach, watching the sunset.

56:47 And then I don’t know if you’ve done mushrooms before. Yeah. So yeah, I was feeling with nature, you have an intense connection to your body. And I just remember opening my arms and saying, I’m open to being big. I’m open to greatness.

57:02 And when I walked off that beach, that, that feeling was the strongest I’ve had yet. And, and the one that stuck with me the most. So every, every day it grows though, but yeah, it is powerful. Yeah. I mean, this, the psilocybin can really be a great way to take a good, deep look inside yourself.

57:19 And I always think it, it connects your heart and your mind where a lot of times it’s funny as humans, we can really keep them disconnected for years on end and tell yourself these stories and people get to the end of their life and they’re like, Oh, wait a second. I’ve been doing the wrong thing. But if you need to ask yourself a deep question like that, that’s a great way to do it through a pretty good dose of psilocybin. I’m guessing you were probably in the three gram range.

57:41 Removal. Yeah. It was right about in three gram range. Good guess. I mean, it was, you know, removal of external stimuli, removal of the MP3 player, removal of the social media, removal of all of that external stimuli.

57:52 And I mean, there’s even, I’ll butcher this Bible verse, but it’s something about how there’s there’s thunder and there’s lightning and there’s storms, there’s tornadoes and there’s hurricanes and there’s all this just this massive bigness and loudness of nature. But that God is in the silence. Right. And it’s when you’re quiet that you can actually hear his voice speaking to you. And I think that there’s something powerful about that, especially when you combine it with something like plant medicine, just removal of external stimuli, silence, and then just listening.

58:26 Yeah, being in nature, listening. And it’s not always the message you want to hear. And so I think a lot of people are not always prepared. And I try to go in once a year, maybe twice a year and get this message. And a lot of big thinkers do that as well.

58:39 But sometimes, yeah, it’s telling you what you don’t want to hear. It’s telling you you’re doing the wrong things. Because what I want, you know, I want to sit on my back porch and play my ukulele and write my little fantasy fiction book. Right. And no, but that’s like, and I still want to do that, right?

58:54 That makes me happy. But at the same time, I can’t shut down that calling to, at the same time, create greatness for people and allow them to be inspired, you know, and to go out and do what it is that they want to do in terms of their own personal Mount Everest. So yeah. And the question you were asking, I call them the mushroom gods, was really more, am I ready to be big and to be great? Right.

59:21 Because we all have these weird, maybe they’re doubts in our mind or maybe you’re not sure if I’m still living for the Ben Greenfield ego machine or am I ready to be big? Right. You were probably wanting to know that about yourself, right? Right, exactly. And it’s a big step.

59:37 I mean, when you see people stop living for themselves and start living for others, it’s this scary kind of power. And like when you see it, it’s very noticeable. And if you look at all of the great leaders of great movements, they’ve all had it. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, but they’ve all had this where you’re all living through me or these messages are coming through me. Right.

59:58 I might be the messenger and there might be some small ego involved, but a lot of times they’re talking about something bigger and it’s undeniably powerful. And I think that you do go through that period of time where it’s not about the other people, right? It is about you. It is about you becoming the strongest version of yourself. Then once you’ve reached that, you’ve got that pedestal to be able to inspire others.

1:00:17 Yeah, I’d like to think so. And then maybe it goes back sometimes and back the other way. You know, the ego is a strange thing. I think it’s also very necessary. It keeps you alive on those races.

1:00:26 But then you also have to know the time where it’s time not to have it play a big role. So that’s powerful. Talk to me about you and your brand then, because you I remember the last time we were talking, I mean, you’ve been writing and, you know, things since you were in high school. I mean, you were writing. Well, I wrote a 400 page fantasy fiction novel by the time I was 12.

1:00:46 I was a World of War cracked early adopter and I played the violin for 13 years and I was president of the chess club. I mean, that I was not, you know, an athlete. Yeah, I know. That’s things like you’re a geek, right? Yeah.

1:00:58 And you were also like online and blogging and stuff early in the days, right? I mean, oh, yeah, I mean, I’ve had my podcast for nine years. Nine years. That’s the one. So that’s like oh, seven.

1:01:09 Yeah, wait. Yeah. And I was a personal trainer, you know, straight out of college for six years running all these brick and mortar gyms and personal training studios. And at the same time, teaching myself how to code HTML to start doing things like online training and taking the newsletters I was writing at the gym and publishing those online and figuring out how to create an email list and doing all those things that you should definitely hire a VA to do these days.

1:01:33 Yeah, but now you know how to do it. Yeah, yeah, for better or worse now I know how to do it. And so what is the future of Ben Greenfield Fitness or your work, your movement and how do you kind of take it all to the next level? Because a lot of people have the dreams that you have. Right.

1:01:48 Executing them is hard. Right. The brand is not Ben Greenfield. I mean, it is right now, but it can’t be. Okay, it can’t be.

1:01:56 It can’t be. Because Ben Greenfield is just me, right? It’s not a Nike, it’s not a Coca-Cola, it’s not a Microsoft, it’s not a globally recognizable brand. And what I want to do is create a big, bold, daring, courageous brand that takes who I am and what I stand for in my character and puts those onto the products that I create. Because I try, you know, before I came in here, I was doing intranasal light therapy and you and I were talking about hot-cold contrast and different devices that can assist with blood flow during that.

1:02:27 And I’m big into designing my own designer supplements. Pretty much anything that I create, that I talk about on a podcast, that I feature on my site, it’s something I’ve created for my own needs, whether those be jet lag or deep sleep or any other form of biohacking or better living through science. But rather than just creating something and saying, hey, this is the Ben Greenfield version of this and this is the Ben Greenfield version of that, now is the time to create a globally recognizable brand that has its own logo, its own identity.

1:03:01 And sure, I’m back there advising that brand, but it really needs to not be about me anymore and more about this life that I helped to create for people in a tribe and a language and a brand and all those things that are important to have. That’s the next big step. That’s the only way to really scale on a big scale. It’s the only way to really scale, yeah. And yeah, it’ll mean giving up some control of my business and I just got done with a huge meeting at my house with a big rebranding team and we’re going to have to bring on investors and I’ll have to give up some control and all the things that go along with growing.

1:03:33 But yes, I’m open to being big, right? Yeah, that’s the idea. It’s a new challenge. It’s a little scary. I mean, investors bring all sorts of other crazy headaches and all that stuff.

1:03:41 But again, it’s an experience. You only hear once, right? And it’s a challenge and it’s the only way to really get your message out big. Yeah, exactly. Without the exhaustion because a big part of my brand is built around me traveling around the globe doing masochistic events or me every single day creating content for hours.

1:04:02 And don’t get me wrong, I love to write but I’d rather have the option to go do the masochistic event or the option to write. Right now, my entire business is dependent on me being who I am and perhaps when I’m 40, I’d like to be golfing rather than hiking up a steep slope and at 38 degrees below zero. I think there’s something in you that won’t just be golfing. How old are you by all? Speed golfing.

1:04:25 Speed golfing. With a weighted vest. Naked with a spear. And a training mask. How old are you?

1:04:30 I’m 34. Okay, you were talking earlier about how bodybuilders don’t look good close up and triathletes don’t always look good. You look good close up. Yeah, well, it’s my anti-aging skin serum, Brian. It’s all that crap I smear on my face.

1:04:43 No, I mean, seriously though, I mean, there is certainly something to be said for some of those things we were talking about earlier like controlling how many advanced glycation and products form in your body from the combination of high protein and high glucose because that affects college and it affects tissue. You can put antioxidants on your skin. You can, even things like I do a deep, deep sweat every day. Like I start every morning with 30 minutes of kundalini yoga inside of an infrared sauna that I built in my basement and I hacked it and I insulated it and I stuck a wine cork in the temperature sensor so it can get really hot.

1:05:20 Proceed at your own risk if you’re listening to a lot. infrared, so the lights are the lights are stay hydrated and the lights are heating you up from the inside out. So a lot of people who do Turkish baths or Russian baths or Japanese baths, they would consider this to be blasphemous to do this type of high tech sauna work but I’ll do because they do it through steam or through air. Right, exactly, which I love those type of things. Whenever I land in a city, like I just did this a couple of nights ago.

1:05:42 As soon as I landed in London, I hunted down a Russian bath house and I did my hour of steam to cold, to hot sauna to cold but I do that every morning. That sweat and I take high dose niacin beforehand which lipolyzes fat cells and releases even more toxins through your skin and that’s amazing for your skin to do that and then I’ll do so I had a crane drop a 19 foot pool out in the middle of the forest behind my house. Of course you did. I keep that pool at 50 to 55 degrees and so I’ll go jump in there and I’ll do like Wim Hof style breathing and underwater breath work and swimming after I’ve done that heat so you get that big dump of endogenous nitric oxide which is like Viagra for your whole body.

1:06:25 After you’ve done this infrared sauna and I mean you want to talk about like a glow to the skin and feeding blood to the muscles and enhancing your ability to utilize glucose and nutrients. It’s an amazing way to start. And how long have you been doing that morning routine for? I’ve been doing the sauna and the cold for about a year and a half and then I started doing the kundalini yoga which is the only form of breath work and yoga that’s been shown via electroencephalophagram EEG measurements to significantly enhance blood flow to the brain because it’s all…

1:07:01 No, you’ll do something like for example for three minutes I’ll be doing then you close your eyes and you focus on your third eye chakra and you just do this for three minutes and then you finish and you come here and you squeeze everything you squeeze your sexual organs and you squeeze your diaphragm you hold your breath and you squeeze your hands together and then you release everything and you feel that energy come out your fingertips and you breathe up through the spine up to the crown of the head and then release again and then you’ll go into another movement you’ll be punching another movement you’ll be thrusting down Okay And the kundalini aspect is these movements Yeah, I have this gal create like a custom routine for me because it opens up different chakras I totally want to open my liver and my heart and I wanted to enhance cognitive performance so she designed this custom 30-minute routine for me and do that in my sauna and if I’m traveling I’m just in my hotel room and I’ll do it right there in my hotel room but dude amazing way to start the day I pre-dose with niacin caffeine I do that I follow up with the cold So 30 minutes in there doing that kundalini moves you’re getting you’re sweating sweating, sweating, sweating you’re sweating you’re detoxing a lot of times if I’ve been traveling I’ve got like you can use blue light therapy so I have glasses that produce blue light I have intranasal light which is like a LED that enhances

1:08:27 It’s called a vylite it basically shines a light up through your nasal cavity up into your brain Okay It activates what’s called cytochrome p450 it’s like an enzyme in your brain that enhances blood flow to your brain and then I’ll do in-ear light therapy because you have photoreceptors in your ears that help to reorient your circadian rhythm so if I’ve been traveling I’ll do like the blue light in the ears the intranasal light do the kundalini yoga the infrared with the niacin and then the caffeine then go jump in the pool strip off all the electronics Go jump in the pool Dude Okay So now Amazing way to start that I love it I love it I mean I’ve been playing a little bit with hot cold work and I’ve been a huge fan I did it over Christmas at a spa somewhere and I was just going back and forth and there was some psychedelic things going on there I was doing things I didn’t understand with my brain but I liked it I had the Iceman in here, Wim Hof and I started playing with his breathing stuff I started getting more comfortable going into the cold and being in the cold Talk to me about the stuff you do in the cold so you go from there into your pool that’s in the middle of your estate that you had dropped in there and then you go in there Talk to me about the Wim Hof stuff also talk to me about being careful about doing breath work underwater So Wim Hof stuff is a little bit different than kundalini so you’ll notice with Wim Hof there’s a subtle nuance

1:09:45 When he finishes and I’ve had him on my podcast he came on the first time like four years ago and then back before he was all over the place Yes hugely You finish with it with a full exhale So with the Wim Hof style breathing you’re breathing off a lot of carbon dioxide The important thing to realize is that carbon dioxide is your body’s trigger to take a breath So if you’re doing underwater breath hold and you’ve breathed off carbon dioxide you can get shallow water blackout because your body does not get that message because there’s absence of CO2 that you should be breathing We see that in seal training sometimes right? Guys block out underwater So I do the kundalini yogi you’ll notice that I didn’t finish with a full exhale I finished with a full inhale So technically you’re holding onto a bunch of CO2 So I can’t hold my breath quite as long after I’ve done that but what I’ll do is I’ll go out to the pool My kids do this a lot with me They’ll join me just for like the last five minutes in the sauna and I’ll do the Wim Hof style breathing but I don’t blow off CO2 at the end So I’ll do like some fire breathing and then I’ll get in the pool and I’ll do like five I took a free diving course where I learned how to do these purging breaths and these type of activities that help you to not blow off all your CO2 I’ll do a little bit of underwater swimming back and forth and I’ll come up take a few breaths go back do the underwater swimming and I don’t do that for too long

1:11:07 That’s just five or ten minutes But it’s very cold at that point Because at some point in the morning I have to go to work There’s at some point I have to quit playing and go to work And this free diving breathing What was that all about? Free diving is something that a lot of Olympic athletes have started to do now Because when you get to a certain depth some very interesting things happen physiologically For example, your spleen compresses and when it compresses it releases a huge amount of red blood cells that you normally have to either blood dope to get meaning free to extract your own blood freezing it re-injecting it taking erythropoietin which is banned by WADA and USADA and it’s something that cyclists get popped for or interestingly infrared sauna is another way that you can increase the EPO So infrared sauna or free diving are two of the best ways to bump up your hematocrit or your red blood cell production Free diving I originally got into because I wanted to take advantage of all those physiological benefits and then I started doing the free diving and I took this course from a guy named Ted Hardy Ted worked with James Nestor who wrote the book DEEP which is an amazing book about free diving and the physiology of water on our bodies in general and I realized as I was doing these deep dives and getting deeper and deeper into the ocean the intense relaxation and the activation of what’s called your mammalian dive reflex which is something

1:12:34 That’s crucial for your vagus nerve the most important nerve in your body it travels through all your body it activates a ton of different organs you may have heard of the parasympathetic nervous system before a rest and digest nervous system most people are walking around with screwed up vagus nerves you can test this via heart rate variability so there’s something called HRV testing you do the test if your number is suppressed it indicates that your vagus nerve is not feeding your heart properly in terms of the correct release of acetylcholine to either speed up or slow down the heart and there’s all sorts of ways that you can tone your vagus nerve jaw realignments deep breathing exercises and meditation exposure to blue light in the morning and red light at night supplements like choline-based supplements and a lot of things that all things you do drugs I have a huge list of things that I do specifically for vagal nerve tone and you would be amazed at the changes that occur in your body both from a mental and a physical standpoint if all you focus on is vagus nerve and I mean you could google vagus nerve tone or how to tone your vagus nerve you’ll find a ton of stuff on it but the idea is that freediving is one of the most powerful ways to do that cold water being underwater holding your breath in general will do it you don’t have to have access to 60 or 70 feet of water yeah you’re going to drop up a 60-foot pool in the back of your yard

1:13:56 You’ve probably looked into it though haven’t you? I’ve thought about a well shaft but I think it’d be dangerous for the kids and their friends so I do the underwater primarily because of that activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve but I tapped into that from freediving but really freediving I mean ultimately what it’s allowed me to do from a practical standpoint is spear fish and I was telling you before the podcast I will never fish from a boat or a dock or a beach again like once you get on the fins and you go underwater and you have the giant gun with 300 pounds of pressure that you pull back and you can dive 60 feet underwater and go look under a rock and see a grouper and spear it and drag it back up to the boat barbecue I mean there’s nothing more primal when it comes to finding underwater food than spear fishing and it’s a spring loaded spear so it’s got some kick to it it’s like a rubber big thing it’s called I use one called a Koa KOAH roller gun the freediving course it taught me how to hold my breath up to five minutes yeah could you die nothing for freediving five minutes okay could you dive 60 feet before that?

1:14:57 No No I had to learn all the techniques there’s a specific equalizing technique called Frenzel which is basically where you’re drawing you hold your breath and you draw air up you’ll notice that your nose kind of splays out like that so I learned how to do that during this week-long freediving course that allowed me to go to depth and then I learned spear fishing guy who writes spearing magazine he took me out on his boat and taught me how to spear fish was the freediving scary? Were you worried about dying, drowning? You have to shut down your sympathetic nervous system big time I couldn’t get the equalizing down until I closed my eyes because you panicked or I was panicking there were two sharks that kept swimming around us during the course and that was me I’m not super scared of sharks but that was making me a little nervous a lot of these freedivers they were special there’s like this they were vests that will block a fish from getting your heart rate signal the same thing that hunters now wear all of our hearts emit an electrical field that emanate out from around us and fish and deer and everything can sense this but sharks have an electrical sensor in their nose and a lot of freedivers and spear fishermen now use this special electric piece of equipment that they can attach to their bodies it emits this signal that the shark’s nose receptors can sense and it keeps the shark away I didn’t have any of that stuff I just had my old wetsuit

1:16:23 And my mask on Okay but you had to make sure you had to calm yourself down before you closed my eyes closed your eyes really just block everything Are you on a guide rope on the way down so you can close your eyes and just dive? Just fins but there’s a rope that you can follow so you know that you’re going vertically down and it’s marked with like notches so you know how deep you go because you don’t want to get so far down and then run out of breath so you’re doing some calculations beforehand based on your pool breath hold time and any freedivers listening or watching I’m butchering it because I’m not a freediving expert by any means but the idea is that in terms of the physiological benefits from a performance standpoint the relaxation benefits from a vagus nerve toning standpoint and then the ability to be able to go out and freaking screw this it’s like I you know Right spear fish spear fish dude Okay so you liked it a lot more than you thought you would and there were a lot more Well because I bow hunt I love that idea of not shooting an animal from a thousand yards through a scope I don’t think that’s fair I like the idea of being able to spot and stock it and have to take it from 20 or 30 yards away and it’s just a much more physical form of hunting I compete in these hunting competitions back in the states I want to talk about hunting Let me just say one thing before because I just wanted to just talk about the underwater piece

1:17:43 You know Tim Ferriss had Josh Waitskin on his podcast for the second time recently and Josh was like a very long time I think he did a lot of freediving as a kid and a lot of underwater work and he got into the Wim Hof recently like the whole world is and he was playing around with the breath work and he went unconscious at the bottom of a pool in New York City you know with his two-year-old son at the house nearby and they pulled him out three minutes later I mean this is a guy that should know not to do this stuff and again he just miscalculated like you said I think probably with that exhaling breath you keep the carbon dioxide out of your system which means you forget that breed Especially if you combine it with physical exertion Yeah and he was doing that he was doing underwater dives like from one length pool the other length of the pool after Wim Hof oxygenation techniques and when I heard that on the podcast I was like wait a second this guy should know but it just happened and luckily he didn’t breathe any water in when he was down there maybe he had some weird reflex and they fished him out and he was okay but just as a warning to anybody they say then you really shouldn’t probably mess with the breath work Yeah you got to be careful with I mean I love hypoxia you know I just did last night here in London I went to the altitude training center where’s this giant room and they suck all the oxygen out of the room and you do this killer cycling workout

1:19:02 Or rolling machine or treadmill whatever you want to choose and you’re exercising at 3000 meters and in my garage I have this thing made by a company called hypoxico and it’s a HEPA air filter attached to a generator that sucks all the oxygen out of the air that you’re breathing and I have that next to an incline treadmill that I’ll set at 40% and you can just walk out there and put the mask on and walk uphill for 30 minutes and when you get this this big big dump in terms of the the amount of altitude that your body is able to handle What does that feel like mentally if you go? It’s hard It’s really hard You feel like passing out the whole time but at the same time you’re not in water right so it’s not dangerous and I’ll also use the the training mask works differently it doesn’t simulate altitude at all the studies that they’ve done on that this this elevation training mask that you see in the movies it’s one that looks like Bain you breathe out CO2 into the dead space of that mask and then what are you breathing back in after you breathe out that CO2 air that has a higher concentration of CO2 right so it teaches your body how to deal with acidic air basically okay so when you take the mask off it’s almost like you you’ve all of a set it’s like training with a weighted vest essentially so it’s just like you know have having having a weighted vest for your lungs but it doesn’t actually take you up to altitude or actually suck the oxygen out of the air

1:20:24 Tell me about this fascination we were talking about it earlier with the Iceman with all of these like hardcore outdoor treatments this kind of roughing it this kind of caveman piece there was a movie or a documentary you were talking about earlier oh yeah I just went to the screening in San Francisco yeah what’s it called so so this movie this new documentary this this was a screening of so I don’t even know if you can see it right now but it’s called Rise of the Sufferfest and it’s about our infatuation with barbed wire and mud and dirt and spears and this this whole new sport of obstacle racing that’s taken the world by storm like Spartans and tough mudders and tough guys it’s you’re a huge participant in this yeah I mean that’s half my life give your own obstacle course on your I’ve built a 10-acre obstacle course on my land I mean there’s everything from 33-foot ropes hanging from the trees to you know a 40-foot long rig with numb chucks and ropes that you hang from and it’s a ton of fun and there’s a little like 3D animals hidden in the trees you can carry your bow and and shoot animals along the way it’s just it’s a playground it’s a video game that’s crazy but the idea is that this movie presented several different hypotheses as to why we are infatuated with getting out there and getting our hands in the dirt and our faces muddy and barbed wire scars on our back and sure part of it is about getting out of your nice pristine office

1:21:51 And just going out and living life and coming back in after the weekend kind of like fight club like a little black eye and a scar and saying hey guess what I did this weekend because you don’t feel like because when you’re all in the pristine apartment like he was in fight club having everything you needed with the stringy green strike patterns he had a need to connect again on a real visceral level instincts it’s connecting on the visceral level we don’t we don’t really fight much anymore engage in hand-to-hand combat not many people hunt not many people run from wild animals or have to like you know get down there in the blood and gut a wild animal after you kill it a lot of people don’t even guard and get their hands dirty and so we have this deep visceral connection desire to be with the earth and to maybe be out there fighting our fellow man or competing our fellow man or going to battle we’re not able to tap into that and that was part of it but the movie also presents the fact that you see this rise in participation these events that directly correlates to the rise in social media part of it is that these things are just so freaking conducive to us looking like badasses on Facebook or on Instagram right like what could be a better profile photo than you jumping over a fire or crawling under barbed wire so a big part of it is just you wanting to be able to use social media to its fullest extent which is a very interesting philosophy

1:23:11 I hadn’t really thought of it that way but it is true and I’ve been guilty of that too like I’ll be in a race and I’ll think during the race man this part of this this is gonna look really good how do you feel about social media you mentioned Snapchat earlier you know you produce a lot of content how do you feel about social media and your relationship with it I don’t like so for me it’s almost strictly business I know I have to play the game I listen to guys like Gary Vee right who’s like all over Snapchat he’s like you gotta be on Snapchat it’s the next big thing it was here a month ago I just thought it was people sending their vaginas to each other you know in 10 seconds photos and I would never I’m on Snapchat all the time now posting my stuff but I would never watch somebody’s Snapchat story I just I’d rather be outside in the trees right like I don’t spend time on my Facebook feed I’ll post stuff and I won’t be on Facebook for a week sometimes and I’ll just have stuff that’s getting posted or auto posted that I take photos I don’t like social media because I think it just the tracks from things you could there are advantages but I’d just rather be out in nature I’d rather be swimming I’d rather be in the sun I’d rather be running but I have to play the game for my business I under it’s just like TV yeah you know I’ve got a reality TV show coming up where it’s me racing Spartans right but I don’t even get TV reception I don’t know how to use my TV

1:24:33 I did and so do you know who Guy Kawasaki I know I have to play the game but yeah I know he’s the rich dad is he the rich dad? no no Guy Kawasaki he worked for Steve Jobs at Apple and he says okay yeah he writes about our social media yeah but he said Brian I’m a producer of social media not a consumer of social media that’s it that’s you thank you yes that’s how I feel about social media okay and so you’re going to be the reality show but your kids aren’t going to watch it at home we’ll figure out a way to download it on the internet okay basically so yeah no it’s dangerous it’s weird and the whole art of sharing like we think about this a lot at London Real because a lot of our stuffs gets shared and some stuff gets shared and some stuff doesn’t and there’s a whole psychology behind why you share something it’s usually because you want to be perceived as like that piece of content so you share something that’s funny because you want to be thought of as funny you’ll share something as hardcore because you want to be thought of as hardcore and it kind of goes along with those pictures you know if you can be in that thing then people can see you as that and even though it doesn’t result in the same physiological or mental benefits that we get from being with people you know there is this concept that loneliness is a new social phenomenon even in our social media age and there’s a great book about this called Reclaiming Conversation and it’s just about how

1:25:47 Even when we’re on there all the time thinking that our 5000 friends are real true friends they aren’t unless right you know it’s you and me sitting here flesh and blood seeing each other’s eyes getting that oxytocin dump from our pupils connecting with one another that’s why we do this feeling each other physically and yeah because this is like a real convo and people can feel this is a real conversation and I agree they say sitting is the new smoking and by the way Ben is protesting sitting here but he’s going along with this I protest it and I’m avoiding doing my well here just to just to do it this is how I’ll spend most of my time I was at a conference with Ben a year ago and I looked in the back and we were all sitting there all day and Ben was like this in his chair for the whole time and I was like okay I get it Kelly Starrett just wrote a really good new book called Deskbound I used to have a poster on my wall that had like 30 different positions you could be in throughout the day it’s like this comma sutra of standing and kneeling and lunging positions and that’s the way I built my office so I have a slant board I’ve got a foam like balance mat I’ve got a treadmill I’ve got a stool that you lean against called a MOGO the only thing not in my office is a chair okay so I do anything except sitting and then there’s a heavy bag so that after I finish a Skype session or I finish a consult I can just beat the bag for like two or three minutes

1:27:02 Yeah Kelly and Julie Starrett amazing Kelly’s been here but that was back in the supple leopard days and I know they’ve done a lot of work with kids at standing desks and schools so I definitely want to check that out very much on board with that I’ve purchased stand up desks for my kids school just so the kids can see that you don’t have to sit to get shit done like you can stand too but back to social media really quick and I had Simon Sinek in here a couple weeks ago the TED talk speaker start with why and he’s just going on about just how this whole social media creep and how we don’t realize what it’s doing into our own brains what it’s doing to us socially like you have all these friends but you don’t when was the last time you had a real conversation or a real interaction or a real fight or something like that and how like I don’t know where we’re going to be in 10 years let alone where our kids are going to be growing up with this best friend they have which is the iPad and trying to get that out of their hands is literally like you know now that’s a fight and I don’t know what’s going to happen but it’s dangerous and something we need to really think about because it is the new drug right it is the new smoking it is the new heroin my kids will be to a certain extent at a disadvantage when it comes to social media because we don’t have a lot of devices in our home and they spend most of their time when they get home from school

1:28:15 Running around outside in their underwear playing on the off-school course or shooting their mows or getting money gardening with mom and so they’re going to grow up with a certain set of skills that are going to serve them in one sense but they will be and that’s just they can make that choice when they get old enough to save up money and buy a phone they can buy a phone but yeah I mean I’m having to tackle that with my own kids yeah I mean there’s a lot how to expose them to just enough technology to where they know how to use it but I would rather they just be primal men yeah and a lot of silicone valley you know magnates just restrict their kids from you know iPad usage and iPhone usage so it makes sense let me ask you about two things first one is hunting a lot of people get hate for talking about hunting Dan Hardy one of the big UFC fighters you know whenever someone like Joe Rogan talks about hunting it all comes out it all kicks off how do you talk about hunting with people that you know that don’t feel good about it what’s been your own journey with hunting do you think everyone should learn how to hunt I really want to go hunting you’ve offered for me to come out and see you and hunt what you read on it?

1:29:21 I eat what I hunt I hunt to feed my family I can I can join a CSA and I can buy a cow and that’s what my wife and I did for a couple of years was we would just like we’d get a quarter cow or a half cow because even though I restrict my meat consumption there is a certain extent to where you activate a protein called mTOR when you eat meat and it does fly in the face of longevity to overeat meat but about once every two to three days or so I have a good sized portion of meat I’m not one of those paleo bacon and eggs everyday type of guy for me I am surrounded by deer and turkey and rabbits and elk and all sorts of creatures that can feed my family in the same way that my wife is out tending eight different raised garden beds every day for kale and lettuce and celery and everything else so that we can grow our own food economically and not need to go to the grocery store and also have this deep connection with nature and where our sustenance is actually coming from I have the same relationship with the animals that I hunt where I honor them I am not a fan of firearm hunting because I think that unless you’re really really desperate for food it does put the animal at a bit of a disadvantage I just don’t like that idea of shooting an elk a thousand yards away through a scope on a mountain top I think that’s more just killing than it is hunting but it’s how I feed my family you know I just three weeks ago you know made a bunch of breakfast sausages

1:30:55 With my boys from a hog that my wife butchered for the pork lard and a deer that I shot down in Texas and it’s just part of living part of surviving and just like obstacle course racing connects us to nature and free diving connects us to our Vegas nerve and our parasympathetic nervous system and gardening connects us to the vegetable and plant part of the earth hunting connects us to an entirely different part of the earth I honor any animal that I you know if I ever take a life it’s never casual I had some friends over at my house the other day and some wild turkeys went across the driveway and they said get your boat shoot them and I said no that’s not what I do if I’m going to shoot something it’s a very religious isn’t the right word but I take my time I honor anything that I would take the life of and in the same way that you know you would pick a plant and say thank you to the earth and if you take an animal’s life you also say thank you to that animal thank you to the earth for providing I’ve heard it’s right you’re honoring that animal when you you know dress it you treat it that way in the field I hear it feels like right and we can certainly talk about the fact that when you are killing animals you are indeed you know for example pruning the herd allowing for ongoing survival you know keeping overgrazing from occurring on the land and just keeping the cycle of life going there’s that component too but ultimately that is that is my take on it

1:32:27 It’s it’s primarily to to eat and to provide for my family and what would my ancestors have done if they were in the same position as me out in the middle of the forest surrounded by animals and needing to eat meat they would have gone out and harvested an animal so bow hunting is hard isn’t it bow hunting is it’s difficult so I do these competitions that help me to prepare to ethically shoot an animal it’s called train to hunt and you do a 3D shoot on 20 to 40 different targets where you get a certain point for getting closer and closer to what would be called a vital shot where you which would be an ethical shot that would kill it you know whatever a turkey or you know a deer or an elk or whatever it is that you’re hunting and then after that you do what’s called a meat pack which is 100 and hunt to 150 pounds as fast as you can move it for two to four miles which simulates the act of getting an animal out of the mountains after after you’ve gotten your meat because you have to you know we’re not we don’t hunt from pickup trucks we don’t hunt over alfalfa and corn on a feed stand like some people do I mean you’re out there in the wilderness hunting and you have to get this food back so that’s the second part of it and the last part of it is an actual obstacle course where you’re under barbed wire hole in sandbags bouncing over logs crossing water obstacles but then you’re stopping after each obstacle to shoot under pressure with your heart rate high

1:33:47 So you got to do box breathing and get your heart rate down and activate your parasympathetic nervous system when your fight and flight is through the roof and these train to hunt competitions are what I do as part of my obstacle racing to actually get me ready for something like an intense hunt that’s intense are you a good hunter bow hunter? um I won I know okay so I’m so yes I want to get better I’m not as good as I want to be in terms of shooting like I’ll ethically take a shot on an animal anywhere from 20 to 40 yards and there are some people that can shoot at 90 to 100 and have no issues with that and so you know I would like to be 90 to 100 yards yards with a bulb yeah I mean 20 to 40 is crazy yeah hit something 3d potentially yeah exactly moving animal but I I I could I could get better and I would expect nothing less from the events um last thing I want to ask you about is fighting why go and fight somebody I’ve been getting punched in the face is something even UFC fighters don’t like doing I’ve been punched in the face plenty I’ve been my nose broken in Thailand and I’ve rolled jiu-jitsu in my tie and all that stuff but you want to do this you’re going to do a fight you had your own bone broken I was supposed to fight in July just a amateur cage fight back home kickboxing and yeah broke broke my orbit fractured my orbital bone two months ago sparring you know and this is the fracture where you blow your nose and your entire eye

1:35:15 Swells up and I got the CT scan and and you know wasn’t able to spar for a couple of months and you know just just got hit the wrong way with an uppercut because my kids roll they they do jiu-jitsu every week and so you roll jiu-jitsu too, right? well they’re rolling no you never have? I thought seriously about it after but I’m just I’m just trained for tie kickboxing basically so while they roll I train with a private instructor and then I do sparring one or two times a week and yeah just got hit the wrong way and and for me it’s about there’s a guy who does spec scans of people’s brains called Dr. Daniel Amen he’s written a really good book about brain growth and I like the idea of living life to the fullest by experiencing lots of different things but also growing my brain and keeping my brain and my body young by doing everything from you know learning the ukulele which is back at my hotel room and I was playing before I came over here and I travel everywhere with my padded ukulele case and you know I play table tennis which is actually of all the sports on the face of the planet including chess the best sport for increasing blood flow to the brain when I’m sparring and it’s a 1-4-5-3-6-6-1-2 I mean you’re having to stimulate your brain you know it’s a new sport and then once you throw in something that I seem to be attracted to quite heavily which is that primal component of fighting and moving and I grew up playing tennis just kind of like boxing over a net

1:36:42 Right it’s like physical chess back and forth over a net and that’s what I played in college was tennis I like that idea of sparring of hand-to-hand combat or you know in the case of tennis racket to racket combat but it’s not something I ever really learned how to do so for about less than a year I’ve been training and I’ve moved that fight forward probably November or December okay you’ve been doing it step into the cage yeah I mean the gas tank the fitness that’s not a problem yeah I can outlast anybody for for three or four or five minutes knock on wood but it’s just a matter of using my using my hands properly and obviously defending my my orbital bones your eyes so yeah and it’s very primal and it’s scary and yeah I mean I love it it’s a it’s a rush I mean I you know I uh it’s kind of funny I get home from sparring and I want to make love to my wife because that testosterone is so high right there you go it’s crazy so I’ve had some fighters in here and guys that train in MMA and they’re just like when that cage locks it’s the loneliest place in the world just because it’s all you your team is not there I’ll admit I’m nervous about that part but yeah but yeah what a rush right?

1:37:48 Yeah Can I ask you about some of your success secrets and just what you what that word means to you when you think of the word success you know who comes to mind? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy become a member and get access to live shows exclusive courses my webinars bonus content meetups live events an amazing community and much much more now back to the rest of the show I got to ask you about the Buds training before we finish up because it’s something we talked about last time yeah I’ve also had Jocko Willink Kokoro Yeah, Kokoro who was the Navy SEAL that’s you know he kind of walked through the Buds training and didn’t really want to talk about that just as Jocko Willink who’s the Navy SEAL who was in the Battle of Ramadi he’s a very hardcore SEAL but for him the SEALs is more about Buds but for the outside people we see Buds and it’s something you’ve gone through the civilian version of tell me about your experience there in San Diego I guess and what we don’t know about that training that process physically, mentally that training was designed to be a version of Hell Week for civilians who want to see what it’s like who want to see what it’s like to spend six hours in the water in the middle of the night with wave after wave crashing on you as you hold arms with your teammates shivering uncontrollably who want to see what it’s like to do a 24-hour night hike and then do the CrossFit workout Murph

1:39:27 But do it with the 50-pound pack-on who want to see what it’s like to crawl through the desert for hours through thorns and surrounded by little tarantulas and scorpions and stand up, sit down, lay down stand up you know over and over again until you’re just covered with abrasions on your body from the sand and the rocks we talked about it a lot last time I told this story about how during that particular Kokoro camp they even brought us into a diner and force-fed us pancakes for like an hour and then had us do like backwards bear crawls and partner carries and sprints uphill until all of us had had shat our pants and had vomit coming out of our mouths and we went in and did an hour of hot yoga before a four-hour beat down on the grinder with cold water getting sprayed in the face I actually partnered up with SealFit and we’re doing a mini event like that for 12 hours at my house in my land in the forest we’re gonna fill that 19-foot pool with ice and we’re going to turn the entire obstacle course into a sufferfest for 12 hours it’s called the 20x it’s like a mini version of that okay is it the hardest thing you’ve done the Buds training?

1:40:41 It was up until a few months ago it was up until a few months ago and don’t get me wrong I highly honor Navy SEALs men and women who serve our country I do not propose that I am at their level because we didn’t have boats we didn’t have guns right like I am I am not in the military and so I don’t want somebody to think that I’m saying I’m a Navy SEAL now but that particular camp Cocoro man I mean like if you want to be strong and I don’t know if you’ve had Mark Devine in here or not no not yet I want to you should pick his brain and Cocoro is the camp in Cocoro is the name of the camp in San Diego that they put on that’s like the version of Helway and so what I did was their five week or their five day SEAL fit academy that culminates with another three days of this Cocoro at the end of it okay intense okay so eight days I was there for a total of seven days okay yeah but Joe DeSenna has an event on his farm called the Egoji which is named after the intense training that they used to put the little Spartan boys through and I went and did his his 50 hour Egoji event a few weeks ago it just so happened that it was the coldest cold snap in 50 years back east and it was 38 degrees below zero in this event and it was comprised of everything from orienteering and mapping your way through the wilderness in the middle of the night in this snow to standing for five hours barefoot inside of his barn just standing at attention doing absolutely nothing to dragging a canoe

1:42:18 Across a frozen lake a canoe full of hundreds of pounds of our rucksacks but all in intense cold where if you pulled down your pants to take a shit you’d get frostbite on your ass cheeks where normally in a race you’d go through an aid station and there’s Gatorade and Powerade and energy bars and like in this race there’d just be like 12 rock solid frozen fish sticking up out of the snow that you had to somehow with your fire kit figure out how to cook using a little metal pot that you had and anything you collect from the forest to burn I mean it was it was nuts They intentionally make these very very hard for you It was nuts Does that make it even harder when you’re like Two people dropped out by losing their toes in like the first few hours of the event I mean like just Does it make it harder when you know that Joe is behind the scenes making you do all this stuff and you’re like really Joe really the fish couldn’t you at least give me this I mean it was all staffed by military personnel officers people who were like the cool thing about it was like if you didn’t know how to do something I didn’t know how to use an altimeter for example to go with my compass and my map to be able to follow the elevation charts on the maps where we were wayfinding our way to certain points They taught me how to use my altimeters Like this staff is there to help you We had a certain point where we had to make a shelter in the woods and they taught us how to make our fire

1:43:40 Next to the woods so that the rock that we built the fire next to would radiate heat into the tent So you pick up little life skills in these types of things but in my opinion because of the intense cold like that was that was harder even than the Kokoro just because there was much much higher risk of like death and hypothermia and losing a limb and that amount of cold just sucks like when you can’t take a deep breath because you feel like your lungs are going to freeze and it’s the first night and the sun is setting and you know you got to last all night and then the next day and then watch the sun set again and last the next night and the full next day I mean you just it’s a long freaking time Yeah Joe takes it to the next level yeah I mean he started off with the death race which was that this is just like the new version of the death race and that was the original race where you know people would show up exactly it was like 100 hours and you had to do all these like death type nonsensical and there is no finish line it’s just done when it’s done when you decide you when they decide it’s done no you little coin when I like no no check no giant check Ben I always finish the show in the same way I asked the same questions last time but I think you’re a different man so I think you might give me some different answers but if you could ring that young 20-year-old Ben up and actually have that conversation with him where you’re like hey Ben 20-year-old Ben

1:45:01 And give that young man a bit of advice what would you tell him? Do what you’re good at and leave the rest up to everybody else what I mean by that is don’t not live life to the fullest but man like learning HTML and you know building my business from scratch and like I could have 20X the pace at which I built whatever tiny fitness empire that I’ve built by you know hiring people for everything from graphic design to you know virtual assisting with tasks to you know I don’t do any of those I don’t do my shopping I don’t do my banking I don’t do my shipping I don’t even mow my lawn because I spend time doing the stuff that I know that I’m good at and man I would have saved myself years and years of time I can go back and call 20-year-old Ben I’d tell him dude frickin’ like hire a virtual assistant get somebody to mow your lawn I know it costs money trust me the productivity that you achieve while somebody else is doing that stuff for you is going too far outweigh any money you might lose paying somebody do that kind of stuff I think that the value of learning how to do it yourself is a little bit overrated I mean heck me knowing how to program HTML bites me in the ass now because I know how to go in and change a website and if something breaks at midnight me knowing that I can go fix it sometimes means I go fix it rather than hiring the person to do it that’s supposed to do it right but I guess the only way to scale your message when you have limited time

1:46:34 Is to really focus on what you’re good at which for you I think is your message and your content and your ideas and by doing all these other things yourself you just held that back yeah do what you’re good at and outsource the rest it’s funny because a lot of doers don’t do that they want to do everything themselves I’m guilty of that too and you tread a lot of water I think there was some economic students at NYU and they did the math early on and they were broke but they realized that if they were going to maximize the curves on everything they should outsource everything even though they couldn’t afford it but outsource the cleaning outsource of this outsource the cooking the shopping because they knew that scientifically they would maximize the potential if they did that yeah it’s great advice and even you this you know you have someone mow your lawn because it’s just you could be doing other things right exactly I like that intense connection with nature of mowing the grass clippings and taking care of the lawn and getting the good bacteria from the soil but man I can write during that time so yeah second part of that is best advice you ever received I know you don’t have mentors per se but is there something that maybe you read or wrote or heard Teddy Roosevelt say or something where you were just like man that really rings and keeps ringing and resonating with you you know the quote that I have on my actual computer that I wake up to is the quote about

1:47:58 How a man should be able to do everything from man the helm of a ship to change a diaper to you know eating insects to prepare a meal to you know coat a website yeah coat a website right exactly which I know sounds mildly hypocritical but basically that a man should be able to to do all these all these things a man or a woman be a renaissance man or a renaissance woman but it’s an incredibly long clunky quote that I don’t even have fully memorized but I would say that if I could give you another one that I think is very important because we talk a lot about productivity and wealth and becoming the best version of ourselves and I talk a lot about achieving physical performance and maximizing your IQ and biohacking your body it would actually be it’s a quote from the Bible and it goes like this what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul all right so ultimately when we talk about about anything from physical to mental superiority what things are really coming down to is what’s inside you your spirit your soul how good a job are you doing taking care of that and ultimately you know you can be overweight or obese or have a brain that’s not working properly or have bad skin or whatever and if you got a good soul I don’t care the ultimate biohack maximizing your soul last part of that question to that 20-year-old version of maybe the young Ben Greenfield that’s watching listening to us who wants to grow up and be like you you know to have

1:49:53 A business you know an entrepreneur doing what he loves pushing himself you know beautiful family out there looks like you do what you want to do what advice do you give to them? Never stop learning I immerse myself every day I read three to five books a week when I’m working out and I’m charging through the forest people think I’m listening like Tiesto or something like it’s for an audiobook or a podcast I’m always always learning I am voracious when it comes to learning never stop learning you will stay on top of your game if you’re always on the cutting edge of learning don’t tell me you don’t know how to speed read because you can learn and mostly it just comes down to reading right that’s how you learn from speed readers you just read you put a bunch of books by your bedside and everywhere else you just read so never stop learning nice Ben it’s been nice seeing you kind of change over the last couple years you’re maturing at a fast rate and it’s funny how you said you’re an introvert because people see you and they’re like oh he’s the extroverted guy but you are an introvert no totally and you also have a little edge to your personality too and sometimes I’m like man that’s an abrasive edge to Ben and I think that’s just who you are and I think as you’re figuring yourself out that’s changing and a lot of this stuff is happening through you as opposed to just to you as it was for a long time and it’s nice and it feels good and thanks for being here