Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #89 Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

Ben Greenfield drops by for his third appearance on the podcast. We discuss what he does for sleep, psychedelics for performance, healing leaky gut, and his thoughts on raising boys into manhood. Connect with Ben: Podcast - https://bit.ly/2nNNSET Website - https://bit.ly/2yJvqR8 Twitter - https://twitter.com/bengreenfield Instagram - https://bit.ly/2vuhWJb YouTube - https://bit.ly/2foe8TK Facebook - https://bit.ly/2muYJTc   Chili Pad - https://bit.ly/2Vwt32T Nano-B | https://nano-b.com/ Intellibed | https://intellibed.com/ MIndfold sleep mask | https://amzn.to/2vu9jOO Sleep Stream | https://apple.co/2VxacEV Pzizz | https://pzizz.com/ Methylene Blue | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylene_blue Sleep Remedy | http://www.docparsley.com/shop/   GlobalDRO | https://www.globaldro.com/Home Restore | https://bit.ly/2GR2b5E Renegade Pharmacist | https://bit.ly/2UQfQ0N Twin Eagles Wilderness School | http://www.twineagles.org/   Farmers Juice Promo: Get $10 off your first box order by visiting  thefarmersjuice.com/king    Dry Farm Wines Promo: Get a penny bottle of wine on your order by visiting  dryfarmwines.com/kyle   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/ Subscribe to The Kyle Kingsbury Podcast  iTunes  | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher  | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify  | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY  

All right, y'all, I want to tell you about a very special brand new product that I helped develop with Aubrey Marcus and ETG and the team here at Onnit. It is the Onnit Keto Hot Sauce. There's no weird sounding filler ingredients, no low quality oils loaded with unhealthy fats, just high quality, healthy for you ingredients blended together with a synergy that would leave every single one of the Avengers nodding with approval. All of the flavor, none of the bullshit, no carbs or sugar, packed full of high quality oils from coconut, avocado, and garlic that provide good for you fats, vitamins, and minerals. Oh, did we mention? It's bring a bottle with you to the restaurant kind of tasty. You optimize every part of your life, so why settle for bland

tasting food? Onnit Keto Hot Sauce delivers the flavor you want and the nutrition you need. Go to onnit.com slash keto dash hot dash sauce to find out more. And as always, uh-oh, not as always, we got a brand new code word for you. You're going to use code word Kyle at checkout or you go to onnit.com slash Kyle for 10% off all foods, including this brand new keto hot sauce and all supplements. What up, what up? We got my man, Ben Greenfield, the return. I think it's like three, four, I don't know, five. It's been on the show quite a bit. Ben is a guy who I've learned a lot from. Almost like a Paul Cech in terms of the wealth of knowledge, somebody who I can just draw from every time I'm around him. He's always on the cutting edge of what the latest, greatest scientific backed hacks are from a technology standpoint to the low tech. He's just an incredible guy.

It's really cool to get on the podcast with him anytime he's in town. I know you guys are going to dig this one. was a really good one thanks for tuning in we're clapped in the return once you get that up next to you act like you've done this get this all up in my face yeah i got to clean the granola out of my teeth my keto pb and j granola you can keep that away from your mouth while you clean your teeth i'm sure that's a great great listen for those in a car right now that stuff out of the cracks of my teeth during this podcast that was good i don't know what i just ate but it was good it is good it was ketogenic the cafe's got all the goodies well shit i mean i i have a couple places i want to take this but you're always into the latest, greatest, and I'm constantly learning from you.

You even told me about this. Obviously, we do the pissing contest on sleep scores, and you're always better. I won. What do you do for sleep? Because this is such a massive thing. People don't even realize how important it is for fat loss, recovery, cognitive function, function you name it

it all boils down to sleep so let's talk about your sleep habits i eat some chicken breast and masturbate and lay back and watch that deep sleep score just climb through the roof it's amazing it works every time yeah uh it depends um when i'm when i'm at home the the normal sleep hygiene stuff obviously dominates i get cold so i sleep on chili pad uh and i put it on boost function so it goes down to 55 degrees i don't have that when i travel uh so when i travel i take a cold shower before i go to bed so chili pad is for people that don't know it's a mattress topper. Tim Ferriss blew these guys up. Circular, it's cold water. Yeah, underneath and it just goes right on top.

If you have a wife that you sleep with who likes it a little warmer, you can still drop it down. You can have the his and hers. It's like the his and hers towel. You can have the his and hers pad. She has a pad. It's never been turned on. Two years.

Never even. No one. She's not even interested. Buzz there. If she were ever so inclined, but it literally has never been turned on two years never even no one she's not even interested but it's there if she if she were ever so inclined but it literally has never been turned on um so underneath the chili pad at home i like this concept of of healing the body while you sleep i just like to heal my body you know no matter what i'm doing you know so when i'm working i've got the juve lights behind me kind of shining the red light so do you work with like a suit top but no pants on that way you can get the direct light from the juve to your balls

with with i screw the suit top nothing on you have nothing on but but the juve light you don't leave on for 20 minutes if you do photobiomodulation like that for too long you actually create excess free radicals okay so you you don't want to overdo that it It's the same. A lot of these things that make the body better, even nootropics like methylene blue is very popular right now. You do too much of that, you create excess free radicals. You do too much of, there's another device called the Vylite, which is great for- Is that the intranasal one that you had me do at your house?

Intranasal light, little laser light cap. It's really good for amplifying mitochondrial activity and nitric oxide production in neural tissue, but you leave that on for too long and you create excess free radicals you know any of these things act on the same principle as hormesis almost you know you stay in a cold shower for for two hours and you might be kind of fucked up from that so you you want to you want to be careful so photobiomodulation i'll do that for for 20 minutes and that's it or when i'm writing my book i'll go sit on one of those uh pulsed electromagnetic field chairs and uh flip on

there's there's another device i know that this is sounding kind of kind of nerdy uh called a nano v and it's like a dna repair device and it circulates this water they're actually down here we're paleo effects and they they had a booth at the expo but i'll i'll stick that that kind of wand or has a nasal cannula that you can put into your nose and where a nasal cannula should go based on this not an anal based on the title nasal cannula uh so you know a lot of times when i'm when i'm working i just i do things to make my body better so The same thing when I sleep. I have the ChiliPad, which can also help out with your nervous system repair and recovery when your body is cooler while you sleep, but it also amplifies your deep sleep cycles.

Anything you can do to decrease core temperature will do that. The room's at 64 degrees. The ChiliPad's at 55 degrees. I don't load up with a lot of blankets, but I am getting into this idea of weighted blankets. It kind of activates your parasympathetic nervous system when you have something just slightly heavy on top of you. Holding you.

So they make like these, yeah, they make like these 20, 25 pound weighted blankets. And now, I forget the brand I have on my bed, but they actually breathe really well. They're not stuffy and warm as you would expect them to be. And when I travel, what I do is I'll just have like a top sheet, but then I put pillows on top of the top sheet, and you almost feel like you're weighted down,

and it's this really kind of cool feeling. Underneath the ChiliPad, I have this device called a body balance mat, and that's a PEMF device. So it's the same thing as if I were camping, right? So you're grounded, you're earthed, even if you're in a high-rise condo or whatever. And I spoke with the people who make that mat, and I spoke with ChiliPad, and they've actually talked to each other. And apparently the water in the ChiliPad kind of amplifies the effect of the pulsed electromagnetic fields that come off this body balance mat.

So I've basically just got two mats underneath me. And you can't feel them. I'm like the princess in the pee when I sleep. So I'm pretty particular. But you can't feel any of this stuff. It's just kind of like laying on your bed. So I sleep on this bed at home called an IntelliBed. It's a very good breathable mattress it doesn't

get really warm so the bed doesn't heat up either and it's extremely comfortable it it's designed to be like memory foam but it's a little bit more firm so it supports your body you don't sink into it uh you don't wake up with hip pain or anything like that. So, uh, so cold is the first thing. And when I travel, I just take a cold shower. I make sure I don't go to bed warm, sleep at the top sheet and throw some pillows on there, feel a bit of weight, um, keep the room dark. So when I travel, I use one of those mind fold masks. I think that's the best sleep mask. I was using the, um, that wraparound sleep mask for a while, the sleep master sleep mask, which is another really good one, but the mind folds even better.

It blocks out even more. Uh, sound is another in addition to light. So I always have some kind of an app that's playing sound by my bedside. And if I'm sleeping in a house with a bunch of other people, there's a lot of commotion going on i've got noise blocking headphones that i put in and they have headphones that work for side sleepers called sleep phones so if you want to sleep on your side they're like soft headphones that don't kind of dig into your face okay like a whatever like a bose noise blocking headphone would and the two apps that i typically use are uh one's called Sleep Stream. It's like a DJ for sleep. It'll play binaural beats.

It'll play pink noise, white noise, brown noise, whatever. I've heard of white noise, but I think most people are like, what the hell is pink and brown noise? So it's different frequencies, and they just give them different colors. And based on the latest research, pink noise, if you're going to choose a color color is the best noise for deep sleep so i set that in pink noise mode and what that does is just covers up ambient noise but then you can also if you if you want to you can put little piano tunes in the background or you know spa noise or even kind of like these almost almost psychedelic ish sounds that are you a wah, wah, wah, wah,

and that'll kind of lull you off to sleep as well. And they also have binaural beats in there. So like I'm saying, you can just put your own mix together, and binaural beats will play a frequency in one side of the headphone and a different frequency in the other side of the headphone. And the delta between those two frequencies is the brain wave that it elicits so if it's playing 295 hertz in the left ear and 305 hertz in the right ear you'd get a 10 hertz frequency if you're going for like a like an alpha brain wave zone or you can choose delta or theta

or whatever you want go a little deeper yeah the other app i like especially if i'm using any any kind of uh psychedelic or anything like that for sleep or or something like uh we were talking about ketamine the other day uh is there's an app called ziz p-z-i-z-z and that thing's really cool it's got like 30 different tracks that i i find are just amazing if you have like a mindful sleep mask on some noise blocking headphones you just go to this whole different landscape while you're asleep. And that one's really cool if you're, you know, if you're, if you're toying around with, um, you know, whatever, you're hitting a vape pen or you're taking some ketamine or something like that before sleep. You just have this, this amazing dream sequence while you're asleep.

So you got, uh, your temperature, you've got your light you have your sound and then uh last thing is just my you know my laptop doesn't come near the bed which is always a temptation when i travel i want to work in bed now the laptop's always somewhere else in the hotel room or somewhere else in the house never comes near the bed and then um you know the phone there's you can google um a red phone or a red light iphone and there's a little button you can push in your iphone if you program it right to remove all the blue light from the screen even beyond what the sleep mode built into the phone has yeah you showed me that on our on our hunting trip in hawaii yeah yeah pretty cool function it just gets rid of all all blue light

on the phone period so you can't you don't get anything it's like firelight which is really nice if you do want to whatever look at instagram before you go to bed or check a few things before you fall asleep so um those are a few of the things and then i i think i like this concept that a good night of sleep begins when you wake up like that's when sleep architecture begins so what i mean by that is, um, you know, I'll, I'll travel back up to Washington state from here. And when I am, uh, traveling from East to West and I'm at home and I wake up at, let's say 4am at home, because for me, having come from back East, that's 7am. Uh. That can be annoying.

I would rather not wake up at 4 a.m. because then I'll just be dragging later on in the day, you know, falling asleep at the dinner table with my family. So what you do in a situation like that is you wait to cue your body until the time that you actually do want to begin to wake up. So your main cues for your circadian rhythm are light, movement, and food, right? So you'd wait to eat breakfast until it's actually breakfast time in whatever area of the world you happen to be in. So, you know, if you do wake up at 4 a.m., you don't get up, you don't have coffee, you don't have food, you don't have anything, right? So you don't prime your body from a digestive standpoint. You also don't prime your body from a light standpoint,

meaning a lot of people wear blue light blocking glasses at night, right? They think the blue light blocking glasses make sense. They do to wear them at night to limit your blue light exposure at night, but you can also wear them in the morning, right? So you put on something like a blue light blocker glass. You don't turn on a lot of lights in the home. You keep your phone in that night mode. If you have one of these light filtering pieces of software on your computer,

you make sure that's in night mode too. And you just treat the morning like it's the night until the time of day that you actually want to wake up arrives. Then you blast yourself with light. You have a meal. You get an exercise or mobility session in and that works very quickly to reset your circadian rhythm i mean you can do it in one day with that type of strategy so that's what i'll do when i'm traveling is is use light movement and

food strategically to reset my circadian rhythm because i you know i travel a lot like i'm constantly on the road two or three weeks out every month. So I'm always having to reset my circadian rhythm wherever I'm at in the world. And then from a supplementation standpoint, I'm very careful with caffeine or anything like that after about 4 p.m. All right. So I've had my genetics tested. I'm a fast caffeine oxidizer. If I were slow, it'd be closer to noon based on the half-life of caffeine. But anything after about 4 or 5 p.m., I avoid caffeine. If I need a stimulant, I use nicotine because it's in and out of the system very quickly.

You can use nicotine up to an hour before bedtime and still be just fine. So if you had a dinner party or whatever and you want to stay awake, you use nicotine gum or nicotine droplets instead of a shot of espresso or something else that has caffeine in it or the swedish snooze i'm a big fan or the swedish snooze yeah those those those are closer those are pretty high those are like 10 20. they started i think eight a goat goat bird frappe but yeah i got them i got the 20 volts i don't know the way they taste i like the taste of tobacco i like more like kind of a minty gum or there's a fresh company called blue brain boost they make uh just straight up pure nicotine droplets same great company too

for the methylene blue they do methylene blue as well and actually a wonderful wonderful stack for earlier in the days you take methylene blue and you microdose that with uh cbd and nicotine that's a very clean burn. And you can get it like a sublingual trochee now. There are some companies that sell this. That's a mix of methylene blue, nicotine, and CBD. So it's like five mg of CBD. I want a link to that in the show notes.

So if you can send that to me, I definitely want to try that out. I'll find it. I got a few in my bag too right now. Awesome. Or my family bag. I have five. You're the first of five podcasts today. So I'm going to need to run that out i'll find i got a few in my bag too right now awesome or my uh my five fuck you're the first of five podcasts today so i'm gonna need to run that yeah i'll drop you have a blue mouth on morning uh and uh in in the evening though what i'll do is uh cbd oil and then uh typically what i like is something that's got just a little bit of like uh five

htp or a microdose of melatonin in it. And right now I'm using Dr. Kirk Parsley's sleep remedy for that. I have a serving of sleep remedy and pretty high dose of CBD. I'll take about 100 milligrams of CBD, which seems like a lot. But most of the research on CBD and enhanced deep sleep cycles pushes closer to 300 milligrams so which is a lot when you consider that when you get a dropper bottle of cbd or a cbd supplement or whatever like a serving is 10 you know there are some companies pushing close to 30 but you know that's that's one-tenth to one-third of the actual dosage that helps you to sleep yeah for me i mean i i'm we get a lot of free stuff as i'm sure you

do i know you do um but yeah the highest end cbd products that i use are still 30 megs per full dropper so that's i'm taking 10 full droppers to hit that dose i haven't done the 300 yet i've done the 150 and that's something i totally feel whereas with with one or two droppers still 30 to 60 megs a lot higher than most recommendations. I don't necessarily feel that the way I would do the 150, but I'm interested in trying the 300 now. Yeah. And then if you wake up during the night,

anything that enhances the release of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called gamma-amino butyric acid or GABA, that works well if you wake up, let's say 2 or 3 a.m. and you want to get back to sleep CBD doesn't do that so much um passionflower extract is very good uh valerian is very good I think you guys have a couple of GABA precursors in new mood yeah valerian's in there 5-HTP yeah

yeah the only issue with that is it's a capsular delivery and so it might take a little while to hit your system um typically I'll just have like a little passion flower dropper so you just put it put it sublingually um chamomile works pretty well too like you can keep like a little little bit of chamomile powder or chamomile tea next to your bed and sip on that if you wake up during the night that's really good yeah well let's talk uh i mean let's let let's talk about psychedelics. We touched on this ketamine nasal spray, which now, I mean, you can get from any cool doctor, functional medicine doctors. Any cool doctors will hook you up with this.

And obviously it's available on the street. But I want to touch on some of the ways that you optimize psychedelics for performance and whether that's sleep performance or you know just hacking creativity and energy systems like what are the different ways that you've found to be effective for that yeah i mean we we need to of course couch this in in terms of legality for any you know water only when you're in costa rica sanctioned athletes or off-season athletes like just just just know know the boundaries you know use use uh use global draw.com and make sure any of this stuff's legal for whatever whatever sport you're competing in um so a few of the things that i find particularly

handy uh of late one we've already touched on is is ketamine and i'd done ketamine infusions before overseen by an anesthesiologist for typically that would be used to uh to release childhood traumas or to simply be able to to relive elements of your childhood pull those back up and it's very good for for pulling things up from a historical context reliving those and releasing them right so like uh um you know i'll use uh my my wife as an example has has also done it and she had a very difficult childhood when it came to schooling right like she grew up dyslexic and i was forced to learn spelling and reading and writing in a manner that was very very difficult for her like she sees words as shapes like she sees the word the

word the it's not the it's just the shape of of the t the shape of the h the shape of the e forms the shape of the word the and that's how she reads and so she had a very difficult childhood trying to be forced outside the box or forced into like you know the box of how you're supposed to learn to read she didn't realize that was traumatic for her but it actually suppressed her creativity so when she did ketamine like one of the first areas she went back to was either her teacher or her mom i forget like trying to force her how how to how to learn to read the right way over and over again and she was crying and she was frustrated and she like her brain just didn't work that way and you know she came out of the came out of the academy and experience you know crying and and having never really realized how traumatic that

was for her and after releasing that trauma the very next day she started painting again you know it'd been a long time since she'd broken out her art supplies and really tapped into that creativity but she was able to release that and begin to work on her art again you know and now she's painting and she's making these amazing murals and pieces of art and that's that's what triggered that for her now what i've found with ketamine is with this new intranasal ketamine you can you can put a few doses of that in each nostril and and you snort it in and and i like to do this at night as i'm as i'm laying asleep to go to bed and you'll put in one of these apps like that that pzizz app i was telling you about is is very very good for

this so there's a track on there i really like called heliophoric and you put this in and you you do the ketamine and you lay back and you just think of anything from your childhood that you can vaguely remember you don't have to direct your thoughts that specifically. You don't have to try and think of something traumatic or think of something painful from childhood, but you just think of something, you know, like whatever, playing, playing, playing ball in the driveway when you were a little boy or, you know, maybe taking your dog for a walk or whatever. And you start to play in, in vivid recall all these experiences from you know for me specifically

from my boyhood not traumatic experiences because i uh you know i i didn't have a very traumatic childhood i was just like pretty plain jane homeschooled in idaho like i had a pretty pretty easy boyhood pretty standard k through 12 homeschooling pretty standard k through 12 out of nowhere in North Idaho. Not a lot can go wrong. There aren't a lot of gangs and drugs. So what I found, though, is that by doing that, and I'll just do that one or two times a week, it's brought me closer to my boys because I've been able to recall my boyhood in vivid detail,

relive these memories from boyhood that I'd almost forgotten. You know, what, what I enjoyed to do, you know, having my friends over and playing basketball in the driveway with our old school boom box going until, until midnight or, um, you know, fashioning myself a little spear and making a bow and arrow and going out with my little boxer Bruno and going through the forest and hiding and, you know, shooting at stuff or, you know, digging giant holes and building these amazing underground forts. And I'll wake up and I'll be like, oh, I got to go out and do this with my boys. Or we got to go out and start work on that tree fort. Or we're going to play family basketball tonight after dinner in the dark with the floodlights on in front of the house. And so it's really cool because by being able to tap back into my boyhood and remember what it was like to be, you know, my boys are 11 right now, right? What it was like to be 10, 11, 12 years

old. I've been able to actually foster a deeper connection with my boys. So ketamine, that's been cool. You know, you ask more about cognitive optimization, you know, and for that, I think it's stuff a lot of people are probably already aware of. I like to, you know, occasionally microdose a little bit of psilocybin. I went through a period of my life where, you know, I did a lot of ayahuasca and DMT and psilocybin and LSD and did trip doses and, you know, and journeyed and found myself and dissolved my ego. And I'm over all of that. I'm pretty disillusioned with that.

And I actually don't like to lose control over my cognitive function and would rather use these things now just to be sharper. So one or two times a week, I'll take a very small amount of psilocybin, like a 0.5-gram dose dose and blend that with lion's mane and take something like a beetroot or some other sort of blood flow precursor. And use that as a cognitive pick me up or as a nature pick me up. You know, I've used that during hunting, used it for hiking, used it for any type of nature experiences because it enhances your sensory perception, your sense of smell, your sense of sight, et cetera. Death perception, a lot of death perception.

Yeah, it's a very cool plant in that respect. Same thing for LSD. There are companies like the website Lysergy, for example, that will sell something like PLSD. Very easy. Just go online and get. And I'll get like a blotter tab of that and dissolve a little bit of that with alcohol in a dropper bottle so I can dose very precisely. And just 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD for a day on which I'm doing a lot of writing because writing is typically for me a process of, you know, when I'm banging out a blog post on, you know, let's say

sleep, for example, for me, that's, that's a mix of creative and analytical work. You know, it's a merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. So for something like that, LSD works very well. So I like that for writing and that's something I'll use about once a week. I'm careful with any of these just because you do amplify dopamine and serotonin levels. And so you could potentially exhaust your neurotransmitters or create a neurotransmitter depletion or imbalance if you overdo this kind of stuff. But microdoses, LSD, microdoses lsd microdoses psilocybin what do you find the main differences between the plsd because john beer is a buddy of ours and uh you know he's he's he he was telling me about that website and some of the different things that they offer and there's just it looks like it's almost

like uh the menu at at uh the cheesecake factory yeah there's five five aco dmt and five mmo dmt and they have all these differentodmt and they have all these different dmt derivatives they have all these different uh they're called lysergemides you know any derivative of lsd is a lysergemide i think for a for a maybe a seasoned user of psychedelics there would be a perceptible difference um i i wouldn't even consider myself a highly seasoned user of psychedelics for me i i get a similar effect okay like a an acl versus an meo dmt or a or a plsd versus regular lsd or you know whatever so i i don't notice that much of a difference if you go to uh the the wiccanaut page for a lot of

these psychedelics they'll they'll list the the differences between them and a lot of times when you're reading through these wikis for each of them, it's essentially the same thing. The only difference would be the symptom or the effect onset can sometimes differ in terms of the amount of time, you know, 15 versus 30 versus 40 minutes, where the peak occurs, you know, whether it's two or three hours down the road, how fast it's out of your system or what the half-life is.

But the effects, aside from the time they take to kick in and how long they stay in the system, are pretty similar from lisergamide to lisergamide. So I don't think there's that big of a difference. And then a lot of the things that are easier to get your hands on or more within the bounds of legality I think are still really effective. For example, what's one that I found recently that worked really well? Racetam, like any of these racetam or paracetam or aniracetam type of compounds combined with methylene blue like that that's another very very good pick-me-up gives you good clean high for about five to six hours uh caffeine

nicotine stack you know the old school writer stack i mean that that works very well for a long day of writing it's easy to get your hands on a on a nicotine toothpick and stick that thing in your mouth and sip a cup of black coffee have you found much difference between the racetams because one thing i noticed was you know aniracetam can be better for anxiety and has a calming clean high oxiracetam is very energetic and it can make people a little racy if they're already prone to anxiety um but i always you know you got to stack these with some form of alpha gpc or some type of choline tartrate just anything that exactly upregulate that i loved and it's funny i didn't even realize that i was stacking this before but i used to stack methylene blue with oxy racetam and alpha gpc and that's

that's a hell of a stack yeah yeah and and that's a good point you make a lot of these things if you stack them with any acetylcholine precursor, have a good mess of scrambled eggs and walnuts beforehand for a more natural form of choline, you get less of a crash afterwards and you get less long-term choline depletion if you're using these type of things regularly. Another thing, speaking of choline, that's a really good one-two combo if you tend to be more sympathetically driven or have like a low HRV or vagus nerve issues is hooperzine mixed with acetylcholine because a lot of times your your acetylcholine levels tend to be depleted if you're highly sympathetically driven always in fight and flight mode you have poor vagus nerve function or low hrv and you can take um i believe doesn't alpha brain have hooperzine in it alpha

brain has alpha gpc huperzine okay yeah so you've got both in there but yeah using a blend of huperzine acetylcholine is very very good for vagal nerve function and there are people uh there there's i recently discovered this a link between acetylcholine depletion and gut function meaning that a lot of people who have constipation or IBS or lower GI issues, what happens is the ileocecal valve can get stuck in a closed position. And one of the things from a chemical standpoint that can open that back up and relax it is huperzine and acetylcholine. So you can actually use this as a strategy like in the morning when you first get up,

like you have a bunch of huperzine and acetylcholine have a cup of coffee and that can a lot of times initiate a bowel movement and people who are constipated especially if you blend that with like the use of the uh like the so right device that works on your psoas or use any type of like vibrating massage tool over the ileocecal valve you can have an amazing bowel movement in the morning and i've used that with a couple people who who are constipated. It works really well. Damn, that's good. Yeah. I mean, you just touched on something I wanted to pick your brain on.

Fuck, we've had a lot of podcasts in the last few days. But we've had our buddy Dr. Michael Ruscio on. We had Sharon from Bonafide Provisions on. And they spoke a lot on gut health. I wanted to see what your thoughts were on you know product I didn't really get into products but obviously you know you're a supplement guy what do you think of the product restore and different things like that for like really healing leaky gut syndrome which seems to be an issue for quite a few people yeah so restore

Dr. Zach Bush's product it's and I have zero affiliation with these guys let me just soil-based extract of lignite that uh specifically seals the the leaky gut based on its interaction with the zonulin protein in the gut and it was specifically designed to mitigate the issues with leaky gut brought on by glyphosate exposure because that's one of the issues with glyphosate that's one of the reasons people will go to europe and say that they're able to meet more eat more bread and pasta in europe and a big part of that is not because you know there's kind of this myth going around that uh the grains in the u.s are bred for high yield crop and therefore higher in gluten and it's higher amounts of the wheat agglutinin or the gliadin proteins that are in the crops in the U.S. that cause people to be able to do just fine

grains and pasta and bread in Europe but not be able to handle that in America. That's not true. The levels of gluten are pretty similar. The difference is that there's more glyphosate in the crops in America and so what happens is the the gluten is able to cross that gut blood barrier more readily and also contribute to the leaky gut issue more readily because the glyphosate is essentially poking little holes in the gut lining and lignite or this active ingredient in the product restore is supposed to mitigate those issues. Um, I think it does. I've, I've seen some of Dr. Bush's data. Um, I use it, I give it to my kids. Uh, my, my kids take a few different supplements and that's one of the ones that they take regularly, particularly if they're eating

grain-based or bread-based products. Uh, and, uh, the other reason that I use it is because even though we grow all our own food, uh, or the majority of our food, I hunt a lot of our meat. We get our eggs from our chickens. Uh, I do have well water and we live below a bunch of farmer's fields. And so I'm concerned about glyphosate runoff in the well water. So before breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my kids have a shot of restore and I do too. Um, so I, I kids have a shot of Restore, and I do too. So I am a fan of that stuff.

I think that you could probably also do things like or approximate the same type of activity with colostrum, which also acts on the zonulin protein. So you could use a colostrum powder or a colostrum capsule. Yeah, Dr. Thomas Callen, who you had on the show show really is a big proponent of colostrum when i lived in california i used to be able to get like fresh colostrum from uh it was raw colostrum from grass-fed grass-finished cattle from a company called organic pastures but most people in the country and now that i'm here in texas you can't you have very difficult time buying any type of raw dairy yeah and breastfeeding mothers are going out of supply they're just getting exhausted from the demand for colostrum i demand yeah so i mean what are

some of the ways that you've found like really good colostrum that's actually beneficial because um and maybe maybe you do take capsules but but going from having this really fresh raw organic source of colostrum to now have to buy it in capsules just seemed a little off to me yeah we have goats so okay uh so we we have nine nigerian dwarf goats so i mean there's there's plenty of colostrum to go around but before that and this is this is the company i typically recommend to people is there's a little organic goat farm in western washington called mount capra that's a really good bioavailable colostrum and it's is there's a little organic goat farm in western washington called mount capra that has a really good bioavailable colostrum and it's even it's a smaller protein than what

you get from a cow so it's even even better absorbed in the same way like goat's milk is is better than cow's milk just based on the protein thermodynamics but they're they're very small they go in and out of stock so it's it's tough there's another guy interviewed who has a pretty good colostrum that i didn't realize that the growth factors and some of the lactoferins and other protective compounds in colostrum become activated when they contact salivary amylase in the mouth. So he does like a powder that you dissolve in your mouth and then swallow. His name is Neeraj. I think it's Neeraj Neljik. Yeah. Um, you could find my interview with him cause we talk about colostrum for like an hour on my podcast, but he has his

own link. We'll link to it. Yeah. He has his, his own brand as well. He's called, he calls himself a renegade pharmacist. Um, and I, I don't know where he's getting his colostrum. That's a bovine colostrum. Uh, but, uh, yeah, Mount capra is the goat place and then renegade pharmacist has has colostrum or you know if you if you want to go out and buy a nigerian dwarf goat and milk its little teats that's an option as well uh yeah but you you've also got you know glutamine bone broth or there's some other ways to skin that cat so um yeah that that is one of the few supplements my kids take though i had them genetically tested we did a like a we tested a lot of their snips we went through a company up in canada that can test more snips than 23andme initially they're they're twins i just wanted to find out whether they were

identical and aside from from one snip which is SNP for aromatizing testosterone into estrogen. So Taren's got the man boob gene. Aside from that, they're completely identical. So he can't drink out of plastic bottles. But they also have the gene that is responsible for slightly lower amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic factor production or BDNF production. So I've educated them about the importance of things like, especially as they age,

aerobic exercise, sauna exposure. They drink a cup of Lion's Mane tea before they go to school now, because that's really good for amplifying BDNF production. They, like me, lack the gene that allows for efficient production of endogenous vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure. So they both take like a liquid vitamin D, vitamin K blend. And they also have the gene that is responsible for lower levels of superoxide dismutase or sod production. So they also take like a sublingual glutathione. So they take glutathione, they take lion's mane's mane they take vitamin d and they take that restore supplement that's their stack

that's a good stack yeah and your boys are 11 now yeah 11 11. yeah yeah super good brother uh well one of the last things that i wanted to chat with you about now that i've got here we're in we're in a small men's group that you organized yeah or for dads raising boys yeah and the importance of which uh it can't be overstated you know look around in our modern society and everything going on um and really just it's it's not something that happened overnight but we're in a spot now where I think we're at a critical point in our history for how we raise our boys and I wanted to ask you and kind of pick your brain on what are some of the different ways you're looking at rites of passage and things to make our boys turn into men and to allow them to foster into the best possible human beings they can be an actual

marking or recognition of the passage into manhood, the passage into responsibility, the fact that a woman, when she goes through her period, has a distinct passage into womanhood. And that's her mark. And when we look at a lot of indigenous societies or hunter-gatherer societies, we see everything from getting hooks pierced through the skin and hung from the ceiling and twirled around and beaten with sticks and dropped and then sent out to,

you know, this was one of the Native American ones, you know, then you attach buffalo skulls to the chains that are hooked through the skin and they got to drag those through the fields for three days and finally get them ripped out or wait until the flesh rots out and they come back and they get their, if they're wanting to become a back and they get their uh if they're if they're uh wanting to become a warrior they get their pinky cut off or if they're if they want to prove themselves truly brave they get their index finger cut off and then boom they're men uh so far my boys aren't that interested in in that rite of passage they're not doing the bullet yeah yeah another another one is

uh you know you the the i forget the uh i think it's an amazonian uh culture where you just stick your your hand in a in like this glove that's full of fire ants and they just eat away your hand you got to leave that thing on for i don't know how and you can't wince if you wince then you're yeah you gotta keep a straight face you can't be a warrior otherwise yeah um and then And then we also see just this idea of silence, solitude, meditation, you know, something very similar to just like, you know, Jesus Christ going off and fasting for 40 days in the desert, in the wilderness. And, you know, maybe that was in a certain way like a rite of passage for him and now uh there are there are many people especially in our in our health and fitness circle kind of tapping into this idea of when you're when your boy is 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 years old taking them and and training them leading up to this this uh time to actually have the wilderness survival skills to be able to go alone by yourself into

a forest or into a desert or into a jungle for anywhere from seven to ten days being left just with yourself a wool blanket a backpack maybe a knife or or a bow and drill for making fire and you survive on your own you know in, in complete isolation, just learning how to find your own independence, how to survive for yourself, how to go through hardship, how to go through difficulty. And then when you come out the other end of that, typically there's some form of a ceremony. Sometimes it's a plant-based ceremony with ayahuasca or psilocybin or marijuana or that young man's first exposure to the responsible use of plant medicine, which of course is important

because that's also accompanied by ego disillusion, right? And so that passage into manhood is marked by that. And there's, you know, kind of a cutting of the cord, right? This idea that after that point, the young man is expected to find a way to help chip in, to support the household, to pay for their own food, or to get their first job that allows them the household to pay for their own food or to get their first job that allows them to begin to save up for college or in some way actually translate that responsibility that they've attained through their right of passage into brick and mortar, boots on the ground, actually providing for themselves or helping to provide for the family. And I think that something like that is feasible versus fire ants and getting hooks pierced through the skin for a lot of young men,

if their parents are able to organize something like that for them. And so in our case, our kids have been doing Tim Corcoran's, who's been on your podcast before, his wilderness survival camp each summer. And typically they'll do some of his overnights during the winter to begin to give them the skills necessary for the rite of passage that they'll do when they're 13 or 14 years old. And I'm personally helping them out with a lot of these things too. Like we have the Spokane Survival School dropping our whole family off in the wilderness next month for seven days, right? Mom, me, the boys, backpacks, wool blankets, that's it. We just survive as a family for a week. Um, you know, they're, they're taking their first animal tracking and, and butchering course in September. They're doing their first bow hunt for wild pigs in two weeks. So I'm trying to get them to the point where, you know, probably that

initial rite of passage where they're just seven to 10 days off by themselves in the wilderness is going to be something that, that they're able to handle. So you got to go into these things responsibly. You just don't, you know, rip a kid out of school and drop them off in the forest. But, but yeah, having the ideas, you're raising a young man that at some point in their life, they're going to embark upon that rite of passage and you're going to recognize their transition into manhood is important. And if you're already a man and you never had a rite of passage, like I didn't, there are organizations that, you know, there's like, you know, Kokoro seal fit, or maybe for you, it's going to be like training for and completing your first Ironman triathlon or going out to the, the Boulder survival school and doing their two week,

you know, hunter gatherer course where they leave you out in the middle of the desert and you got to eventually, you know, hike back into Boulder after surviving out there in the, in the desert. You know, there's a lot of ways to approximate that rite of passage, even if you're an adult. And I know, you know, again, the, uh, um, uh, Twin Eagles wilderness school up by me, they do these rites of passage for adults too. So, you know, even if you're an adult adult already i think it's important if you never went through rite of passage to push yourself through something like that to where you can say okay i've i've gone through and i've learned what

it really means to to be a man and to to be able to just survive with my own two hands and not be dependent on anybody yeah absolutely massive dude you crushed it again it's been excellent having you on i'll have you on every time i see you just like paul check yeah i love you brother thanks for being here love you too thanks for the peanut butter and jelly you got it thank you guys for listening to the cal kingsbury podcast with my man ben greenfield please leave a nice rating for us in itunes or just give us a shout out online let us know what you think of the show and i'll be happy to respond to any questions you have thanks for tuning in