The Dr. Hyman Show - The Biohacks Ben Greenfield No Longer Uses (and What He Does Instead)
Episode Date: August 27, 2025It’s been five years since Ben Greenfield joined me on The Dr. Hyman Show, and a lot has changed. Ben isn’t doing many of the things he once swore by. In fact, he’s discovered that some of the m...ost powerful practices for health and longevity are simpler and more sustainable than the extreme routines he became known for. In this episode, we talk about the biohacks he’s left behind, the innovations he still uses, and the deeper priorities that now guide his life. Join us on YouTube for the full talk or listen wherever you get your podcasts. [YOUTUBE THUMBNAIL] We discuss: • How much exercise is truly healthy, and when it starts working against you • Simple training shifts that build strength and stamina while protecting long-term health • What recovery tools can actually speed healing and reduce inflammation • Can light and oxygen really reset your body’s rhythms and improve sleep? • Why community, family, and spiritual health may be the most overlooked keys to longevity True longevity isn’t found in extremes—it’s built through balance, connection, and simple daily practices that stand the test of time. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman https://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal https://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Health https://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Join the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Resultshttps://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Sunlighten, Paleovalley, Function Health,Timeline, AirDoctor and LMNT. Visit sunlighten.com and save up to $1400 on your purchase with code HYMAN. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Join today at FunctionHealth.com/Mark and use code HYMAN100 to get $100 toward your membership. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman. Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any order—just head to drinklmnt.com/hyman.
Transcript
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Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
I have learned a lot since being fooled into thinking that you can out-exercise your diet
and chronic repetitive motion exercise is the healthiest way to go.
Now, I'm a huge fan of walking.
These are all biohacking tools.
You only keep three practices.
What would they be?
Ben Greenfield is a world-renowned biohacker and performance coach.
From world-class endurance to leading breakthroughs in human health.
He's spent decades testing what actually works.
What's emerging around rejuvenation practices that are a little bit strange?
The newer thing that I just discovered is salmon sperm.
What I'm hearing you say is that some of these technologies that have helped us in many ways live better, also have a dark side.
There's even a term called the paradox of loneliness.
I think it was Surgeon General in 2023 identified loneliness as the equivalent of smoking like 15 cigarettes a day.
And I used to think you got to make the money first.
What made you kind of flip in terms of your priorities?
almost getting a divorce. We seem to be in a protein phrase right now. Are we kind of going
overboard on the much protein side? I would hate to cause people to think that they shouldn't
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Well, Ben, it's been a while. It's been about five years since you've been on the podcast.
You've been a really instrumental figure in helping a lot of people figure out how to up-level
their help. There's a term that's thrown around a lot by people in the space called
biohacking. It's like, in some ways, I like the term in some ways I don't. And the way I think
about it, and I'd like you to define it is, is the way I think about it is, is anything that's
going to help you optimize your health or improve your body's own functional systems.
And how do you, how do you think about biohacking? Yeah. How would you define it?
I would say anything that you can use to optimize your cellular or metabolic health that would
be considered something that allows you to do it in a more time efficient,
or efficient way, then you might be able to do in a native state.
Yeah.
So you're essentially hacking the OS, you know, using a tool or technology or, you know,
whether it be a, you know, peptide or hyperbaric oxygen or red light therapy or anything
like that.
So the Native Americans out west who used to do sweatlod used to do biohacking.
Well, I mean, you know, technically they created a natural environment in which to increase
heat and maybe, you know, if we acknowledge that biohacking would be considered.
a more scientific approach, maybe if they were inside of some type of a, you know,
electronically configured machine that could get hotter than they might be able to create
with a native sweat tent.
Those are, those are pretty damn hot.
Have you ever been one?
They are very hot and dark.
And there's, yeah, the drumbeat gets pretty loud and you kind of want to bust out of there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I agree that the term is used a lot.
And sometimes if I'm like going to give a talk on a stage or do a podcast and somebody
introduces me as a biohacker, I don't know quite what to think.
It seems like, they can't have the term biohacker.
I mean, Dave Aspreys popularize that and all the gizmos and gadgets.
And I think at a very fundamental level for me, though,
it's about understanding human biology and the levers you can pull
to move it toward a state of more vibrant optimal health.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of things you can do from what you eat
to different types of exercise to restoration tools, relaxation,
optimizing sleep these are all kind of incensed biohacking tools yeah but I think the things
that I other talked to you about are the things that you've learned over doing this for 20 years
about what works what doesn't work what's sort of the things that you used to lean on that you
now find maybe aren't all there were cracked up to be and what is sort of some of the newer things
that you maybe weren't doing back then that you maybe have changed and evolved and
and maybe he shifted more from just elite sports performance to more enhance
I would say probably the two top things that come to mind would be my approach to exercise
and my approach to community. I was was hardcore. You know, I race for Team Timex and Iron Man
Traathlon for 10 years. I switched to Reebok and race obstacle course racing for another four
years before that. I was two years as a bodybuilder. I mean, literally just like lean, mean,
3% body fat and 215 pounds, just like a piece of libidolous muscle who'd hang out on the
couch and go visit the gym and drink protein shakes.
So I experienced the extreme, yeah, not a head, yeah, Iron Man Triathlon and Bodybuilding, do not
do those sports for help.
You do them for photos and to climb your own personal Mount Everest, but don't fool yourself
into thinking that those are actually healthy sports.
And I think researchers like James O'Keefe have popularized this idea that there's a so-called Goldilocks zone of exercise, right?
Once you exceed, I think it's about 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise and about 70 minutes of high intensity exercise, which we could define because I think some people get scared when they hear don't exceed 70 minutes of high intensity exercise until they understand what high intensity exercise truly is.
But anyways, once you exceed those bounds, then you start to see things like atherosclerosis, increased risk of mortality,
arterial stiffness, a lot of the things that you would expect if someone was in a chronic inflammatory state without adequate recovery.
And, you know, if you look at, I don't know, either the bodybuilding or the marathoning craze of the 80s or the surge of CrossFit and fitness competitions, you know, Spartan, high rocks, it's very easy to fall into that category.
someone who over exercises. I certainly did for a long time and, um, and experienced a lot of
the issues that go along with that, you know, not to mention that I was also one of the
early adopters of the whole keto low carb thing for endurance sports, which is another kind
of nail in the coffin. If you don't have, it's not a bad approach, but if you excessively
restrict carbs, you just don't have enough for, for thyroid, for testosterone, for the, you know,
proteoglycans and joints, you can basically destroy yourself with excessive
carb restriction married to excessive exercise.
Yeah.
So I have learned a lot since being fooled into thinking that you can basically out
exercise your diet that the more is better and especially that like chronic
repetitive motion exercise, you know, like running and cycling and swimming that I did a lot
of is the healthiest way to go.
Now I'm a huge fan of walking.
Wow, that's a big Iron Man, a hundred mile racing.
I run occasionally.
So, well, if I'm playing pickleball, I guess that counts as running, pickleball or family
tennis on Wednesday nights.
And then occasionally when I walk down to the mailbox, because we have a long driveway,
I'll be like, okay, grab the mail and run back up the driveway.
Yeah, I mean, Mark Sisson just wrote a book about this, born to walk.
You know, it's about this whole idea that human beings are more biomechanically designed for
walking and it's more favorable for cardiovascular adaptations without excess damage to the body
compared to running, which I think is a good idea.
Chase and catch an animal, right?
You do, but for very short periods of time, not at a slow pace, you know, in short bursts.
And I consider that to be like a healthy form of running.
But yeah, 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise.
First of all, that definition would be not necessarily what people might think of as like
going for a walk or gardening or cleaning the garage or even tooling around your house
with a 10 pound weighted vest on if that's your thing.
Like I consider all of that to be just primal, natural movement.
You know, in physiology, you know, you'd call it neat, right?
Non-exercise exercise activity thermogenesis.
Yeah, I did a lot of that.
It's called fidgeting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In my medical school, that's crazy.
The fancy name for these.
There was actually a study that came out on glycemic variability and doing this.
They called them a soleus push-ups, which is basically what you and I probably call a seated calf raise.
But, you know, those type of little things, none of that falls into the category of the 150 minutes of moderate exercise that if you exceed would be bad for you.
We're talking about like the frowny face, like jaunt on the treadmill for 45 minutes a day or the triathlet or marathon or swimmer or cyclist who's getting like, you know, one and a half to two hours of moderate intensity aerobic exercise.
definitionally if you wanted to get into the physiology of it you know you've got your
aerobic threshold you technically have you have two different thresholds that you cross
during exercise vt1 and vt2 vt1 vt2 vt 1 is ventilatory threshold 1 that's when it starts
to get hard to carry on a conversation and that's when you've reached what's called
aerobic threshold that's what a lot of people now call zone 2 I think for example
probably dr peter attia has has popularized the most this notion
of zone two exercise.
That's right.
Zone two exercise, that'd be kind of like the zone you get into when you get to VT1.
And then you exercise and exercise and you're gradually burning more and more carbs and less
and less fat and lactic acid is starting to build up and you're beginning to be hungry
for oxygen and you eventually reach VT2, which is when lactic acid starts to accumulate
more quickly than it can be removed.
Some people will also call that like the anaerobic threshold.
So that 150 minutes of modern intensity exercise that if you exceed is, you,
no longer that great for you is that whole stretch between VT1 and VT2.
Right. And so again, most people who are just moving around during the day,
they're still below VT1. Yeah. Like I can, I walk on my treadmill sometimes when I'm
doing a podcast, right? Yeah. And that all counts as just, you know, nothing close to
the type of exercise I'll be bad for you. And then the 70 minutes that if you exceed
that per week is also bad at the top of the 150. Right. Exactly. It's not the
the common material effect of the two
of them, it's like don't exceed 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, or at least trying
to exceed it too much, and then also don't exceed 70 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise.
Within that 150 minutes or in addition, like 20 minutes?
They would be, so let's say you are, give you an example, let's say you're an endurance athlete
and you're barely doing any vigorous intensity exercise, but you're logging like 300 minutes
of moderate intensity exercise throughout the week, you would be past the Goldilocks zone regardless
of whether or not you've done the high intensity stuff.
And similarly, if you're a crossfitter who's logging like 100 minutes of vigorous
intensity exercise per week and barely doing any of the 150 minutes of moderate intensity
exercise, you'd also fall into that no zone.
That would be risky to get into.
The 70 minutes, that high intensity exercise, that would be all the stuff that's past VT2.
That would be pretty intense burn, going pretty hard.
Most people during that.
You walk into the average gym and one person out of 100 might really,
truly be in that zone.
But there's still a lot of people who do.
And keep saying this word, I don't want to throw them under the bus, but like crossfit
six times a week or, you know, they're training for something very intense.
Obstacle course racing, you know, an athlete who's heavy in training.
Again, like, I have no problem with people going out and doing an Iron Man or, you know,
training for CrossFit or anything like that.
What I'm saying is that I used to think that that was heart-healthy activity.
And now I can see that, oh, it's more something that's great for perseverance, for
endurance, for character, and to, again, climb your own personal Mount Everest, but it's not
healthy for you. And I used to think that it was. And I changed my stance on that. And so the
data basically is that if you over exercise and the ways you just talked about that you increase
your risk of inflammation, oxidative stress, already vascular disease, vascular stiffness, all
things you don't want as you get older. Yeah. Now the problem has been, I don't think most people
even come close to 150 minutes in America. I think we're speaking to the subset of the population.
And that's like the gym jockeys, which I think is still a significant portion of people.
And then the other thing, during COVID, during COVID, I went to Maui.
And, you know, there wasn't a lot to do because everyone was like hiding out.
So I would work out, drink, train in the morning.
And then I would go for a two and a half hour bike ride with 2,500 feet elevation for,
I would get my heart rate up.
I don't know.
I felt great.
Yeah.
Then I might play tennis in the afternoon.
Yeah.
I was probably overdoing it.
Possibly, which you can do for short sense of time.
And then the other thing is like you and I were talking about biohacking.
I doubt that.
Any of the studies that have looked into excess of exercise have taken those training populations and given them like normatech or hyper ice recovery boots and a hyperbaric chamber and some red light therapy and cryotherapy and all these things that can accelerate recovery of the neuromuscular and the musculoskeletal systems.
So it's possible that if you have the right tools at your disposal, you could go significantly beyond those two zones that have been identified as, you know, excesses.
exercise. That's so you might be you might be able to hack it a little bit because I
know like if I'm able to like be at home exercising and I'm using all my special
tools at home like laying on a PMF mat or you know breathing oxygen or you know
hitting the red light bed or something like that I feel way better than if I'm
traveling and I do the same workout I'm just like back into the hotel room yeah so now I
walk I do a little bit of super slow weightlifting like two or three times a week
moving the, have you done super slow training?
I've heard about it.
Yeah, Doug McGuff, I think he was an emergency room physician.
He wrote a great book called Body By Science,
where he gets into the fact that when you move muscles very slowly,
very high amounts of what is called time under tension,
up to about two minutes or so,
that you can get really great strength and cardiovascular results
with a very low amount of training volume
and a low risk of injury.
because you're moving the muscles in a very predictive and controlled fashion.
Do you use heavier weights to do that?
Use heavier weights.
Well, I use, there's a lot of machines now that can make it easier.
Like there's the tonal.
I have one of those.
I was just working out.
I don't know.
Tonals got a setting on there.
It's the eccentric setting.
Yeah.
The burnout setting.
Like you can literally load up your tonal with, let's say, um, deadlift, chest press, pull down,
squat, row and overhead press.
But there's a setting on the tonal where instead of choosing number of reps,
you can choose number of seconds.
You set that on 120 seconds, and you just do one set of each of those exercises.
You put the tonal on burnout mode and preferably also on eccentric mode, right?
So it's pulling you back every time that you're finishing a rep.
That would be a perfect example of super slow training.
And the nice part about it is it's over with quickly and you get really great strength
adaptations with a lower risk of injury.
The sucky part about it is it sucks.
Like it's not only a little boring, but it hurts a little bit going for two minutes.
and you, you know, you think you're at about, like, you think you're out about 115 seconds and
you look at the screen and it says like 65 or something like that.
There's the ARX.
That's the one that I use.
And it's kind of a horse.
I mean, it literally is like a two horsepower engine.
I tell my friends it's like fighting a giant robot of its same thing.
That one will push and pull you through a range of motion.
But again, it's just one single set for each exercise.
So when I'm at home, I do that about three times a week.
And when I travel, I kind of try to.
to use like Nautilus machines at the gym or free weights to do the same thing, or I use
blood flow restriction bands, which you can put around the arms and the legs to trick
your muscles into thinking they're under a heavier load than they actually are because
the lactic acid isn't able to get into the muscles.
I did like 10 pounds with bicep curls.
It's hard.
I feel like the leg of weakling, but it's great for like rehab or when you don't have access
to much training equipment.
I mean, if I'm traveling like here in Austin, even though I've actually had access
to fantastic.
training facility since I've been here. I always throw in my bag, one elastic band,
some BFR bands and one of those door frame suspension straps that you can do pull-ups
with. And that's like two pounds worth of equipment. Yeah. And I can get a great workout in my
hotel room or in a park just about anywhere. Yeah. So there's simple ways to do that. So yeah,
walk, I do that. And besides that, just like, play pickleball, play tennis, uh, built a frisbee
golf course on the new property. So, yeah, besides that is just sports. But if you
would have talked to me, like back to the root of your question, like, you know,
10 years ago, I would have been like, well, I wake up in the morning and I ride my back to the
gym and I swim 2,000 meters, then I go upstairs and I hit the weights and then I ride home
and later on that afternoon, I go for a run. And when you did that, did you feel okay or did you
feel badly? I thought I felt okay and now I have way more energy, way more libido, my
inflammatory markers, my lipids, like everything looks way better on blood work. So yeah, I feel a lot
better with the I probably average what someone might call exercise about 45 to 60 minutes a day
and then everything else is just walking and moving.
That's good.
That's good.
It's still more than most people are.
It is more.
But it's, uh, yeah, I would say I've definitely changed, change my stance on exercise.
And now you're, you're, you're heading over 40, right?
I'm 43.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Well, I'm 43, but I was telling you before we recorded.
I, for the past two days, I've been doing a plasma exchange.
with the little bag that I had infused after I gave two liters of my plasmas at 18 to 25 year old
healthy male plasma and so that was dripping into my body the past couple of days so I don't
know I might be 18 to 25 now so send okay this is a hold of the radical I want to go down
which is which is sort of what's emerging around rejuvenation practices that are a little bit
strange and I want to talk about them because I found them very helpful but there's some really
interesting strategies that you can get into when you're older that really help you to stave off
some of the ravages of aging. Yeah. And in your sort of exploration of what's out there, you know,
you focus on diet, you focus on exercise and some of these other recovery tools, you know,
whether there's red light therapy or a PMF mat or hyperbaric chamber, hot and cold therapy.
These are all things that help you heal, recover, repair. What are the things that are,
Have you found that are now kind of catching your interest as innovations that have signs behind them that help people to deal with the complications of aging?
Let's see. We could probably chunk it into like, kind of like face, body, and internal cellular processes.
I would say, and this is something that I do on a regular basis, you can get a microneedling pen.
Most of the really good face products come out of Korea.
They're big on aesthetics and face.
beauty there. So you get a microneedling pan or you can, of course, go to a clinic that does
microneedling. Even though it's a little bit more like a little bit more of a ripping effect,
you can use a derma roller. You consider this to be like aerating your lawn. And then once you've done
this, you would apply a product that would allow for renewal of cells or stimulation of collagen
or Alastin in the face. And that stuff really works. I mean, if you look at before, after photos of
people who do it. I can't cite like a human clinical study that says that it works because
this is all very qualitative when we're talking about the face. I do that about once a week.
My wife does also and then go to a clinic or have a machine. She has done both a clinic and then
also has the little thing at home that you do it with yourself. A little pen? This isn't like,
yeah. Well, if you go to a clinic, like they can do it very quickly with like the full on, you know,
they have like, I think like it's a bigger version of micrneedling. It's not comfortable. Like it's
It's less than a bumblebee sting, but you can feel it.
The derma roller, same thing.
It's, the derma roller feels a little bit more abrasive, almost like you're scraping your face.
The micronadaling feels like teeny tiny punctures, but it's, it's not bad.
Some clinics, if you go to a clinic to do it, will literally numb your face before they do it.
So you can barely feel anything at all.
It's just weird if you had it once.
If you had dinner later on, your lips are numb like, like it would be if you left the dentist.
I went to a clinic, a stem cell clinic in Costa Rica, and they basically put you asleep and then they, they do the needles.
and then they put the stem cells in.
Yeah, if you're going to do a full stem cell protocol or a cold laser protocol on the face,
which literally makes your face look like you've been hit by a truck for about three weeks.
And typically people who do this, you know, if they're a Hollywood celeb and they disappear for a little while
or somebody goes on medical tourism to, you know, Tijuana or wherever, they're disappearing for a while
because they just look like trash for about three weeks.
And then you look fantastic.
And I only know this because my wife has done it and she just looks scary.
and couldn't leave the house for a couple of weeks.
And then about a month later, like she was, I mean, she looked way younger.
And that was a cold laser with the stem cells.
But as far as doing something a little less invasive, just self-inflicted derma rolling or
microneedling, and then you typically apply a facial product, there are absorbable peptides now,
you know, companies like Young Goose or Alley Tora who are doing some, you know,
peptides like GHK copper peptide using things like NAD.
in their face products.
A lot of times you'll combine it
with something like a red light mask,
you know, to drive it deeper into the tissue
or to enhance the collagen attraction to the face
or the elastic in production.
But then the newer thing that I just discovered
is salmon sperm.
I'm not joking, but I was just at a clinic
and they told me that they wanted to do that,
you know, they wanted to give me like an exosome
microneedling facial and I'm sitting there nodding.
And then they say,
and then we finish it up with salmon sperm.
And apparently it's some kind of like a DNA isolate
from literal salmon sperm.
Maybe it's from Clearwater down in or a phenol.
I don't know.
They got some steelhead down there.
Yeah, you could probably just like start a milking farm yourself.
But yeah.
So salmon sperm is the newer thing that they're putting on people's faces,
apparently with very good result.
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That is kind of great.
So, yeah, for the face, typically you are initiating some type of mildly aggressive damage to the face and then following that up with a product that assists with healing, almost like exercise.
Like you're damaging muscle, then allowing it to repair and recover so that it grows back in a more renewed fashion, a stronger fashion.
Laser or whatever.
Yeah.
For the body, I think a lot of people already know about stem cells and exosomes.
I think there's, there's always been a lot of up and comers in the stem cell industry.
I would say the two that seem to be most popular.
right now in regenerative medicine circles would be something like a V-cell, which is a very small embryonic-like cell, I believe, is what that stands for, V-S-E-L.
They'll typically do some kind of injection and then red light therapy, which apparently attracts more signaling molecules to the area that they've injected, and that's something that's used for like a joint treatment, for example.
And then another form of cells, Mews cells.
Yep.
You go a muse stands for multi-lineage.
Stress-resistant cell, yeah.
Yeah, stress-inducing cells, something like that.
But apparently, they have a really good effect with very good,
or less chance of like an immune system reaction in the body.
Unless I believe it's called tumoro, you would know this word better than me,
tumorogenicity, something like that.
So less cancer-causing potential.
There's always some kind of new forms of stem cells.
Using those for orthopedic treatments for injuries or trauma.
are things you want to repair yeah yeah yeah but then as far as biohacking is concerned those get
very expensive like yeah those are those are spendy things yeah but i'm a huge fan of the idea of
and i do this just about every day at home some kind of electricity right to restore the electrical
potential of the body especially considering the electrical soup that we all live in nowadays
like a PMF mat or man-made electrical suit PMF mat grounding mat earthing mat you know more in
grounding shoes right now so these these shoes allow me to have conductivity when i'm walking
outside. You know, I even, I just built a new house and the house is tricked out as far as like
air, light, water, electricity, everything. But for the electrical component, every single
floor of the house is grounded with a copper conductive surface that then feeds into the
ground. So if I'm on the third floor of the house, it's still as though I'm barefoot out on the
planet. And you notice the difference now you feel from it. Oh, absolutely. You feel fantastic.
I mean, you feel like you're outside as a dirty barefoot hippie. It's inside you know, it's inside
your house during the day. You sleep better. You feel better. PMF mats are kind of like a concentrated
version of that. And what is, can you describe that? Because you mentioned it a few times. What is
a PMF mat? What does it do? What does it work? Post electromagnetic field therapy is a PMF
stands for. These are usually a mat. Sometimes there's some type of a PEMF unit that is attached to a
coil or a bed. There's companies that produce like full on like lounger chairs and massage tables.
And usually there is a hertz setting that you can set it on, like anywhere from zero up to, in some cases, thousands of hertz and an amplitude or power setting.
And when you wrap it around a joint or you lay on one of these, it causes the cell to have an influx of negative ions.
So you're essentially depolarizing the cell, you know, and so you're supposed to have a slightly negative charge on the inside of the cell, a slightly positive charge on the outside of the cell, a slightly positive charge on the outside.
side. And this allows for better blood flow and also allows your cell membranes to have a better
electrical charge across the membrane. So you would feel faster. You would have less inflammation.
You'd recover better. My favorite way to use it is if I have like a cramp or a tight spot in my back
or like my left knee gives me issues sometimes, I will wrap a PMF coil around that or lay
down on the PMF mat on my back and the higher intensity PMF mats just seemed to relax everything
once you've laid in them for a little while. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I had back surgery
recently and I got a PMF machine. Yeah. And you lay in this kind of sandwich as a coil on top
and coiled on the bottom. I did it for myself and I would notice it would go right to the area where
I had surgery. So it would go right to where the pain was. Right. That's very kind of like the area
that's the tightest is the area that feels like it initially reacts in almost like a nearly like a
painful. Yeah and I and I didn't know that it was I thought it just goes to everybody like that
like in my hips and my back and then I had somebody else used it and they're like oh it went to my
stomach or it went to my shoulder or went to exactly the area where I'm having challenges and I was
like that's amazing that it actually seems to go right to where the issues are and you feel the
intensity of it and in you feel I mean the one I have particularly is a super high powered one and
it called the Hugo that really you can jack up the current in it and feel so intense.
The Hugo and then the other one I know of that's super powerful, the Pultz Centers, those would be
like the two that are really good for actual injuries. Dr. William Pollock, he has one on his
website. Forget the name of it. It's also like a high intensity one. That's good for like back cramps,
muscle spasms, injuries, etc. And then there's
lower intensity ones that seem to induce more of like a full body effect that you'd use for
just relaxation or stimulation or wakefulness. Like the one I have underneath the top sheet in my
bed is called a pure wave. And that one you can barely feel at all unlike the Hugo or the
pulse centers. But it's kind of more like a full body sweep that's alternating between thousands
of different frequencies. Whereas like the Hugo or one of these others, you'd just put it on
certain hertz frequency like 7.8 for example and you just like target a muscle at that frequency
for a short period of time yeah 12 to 30 minutes exactly yeah it feels great i threw somebody out of the
day who had back pain and they were like oh this is amazing it's incredible for the back yeah as a matter
of fact i've injured my back a few times in different cities and one of the first things i'll do is like
google pmf plus the name this and try and hunt down a mat that i can actually use because it's that
effective well acute injuries in addition to electricity light use light a lot
not only for circadian rhythmicity, but also for the recovery effects and the blood flow effects.
I mean, red light therapy.
Red light therapy and also from a circadian standpoint, blue light therapy.
I mean, you know, the sun has this whole bluish green spectrum.
It's kind of cool.
They even saw meters now where you can hold the meter up and see the light spectrum frequency in a different room or where you might be outside.
As a matter of fact, if you have like a pair of blue light blocking glasses or something like that,
You can put the lens over the cover of this light meter and actually see what it's actually blocking or what it's concentrating, which is kind of cool to see if your blue light blockers actually work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For example, in my house, what we did was we put throughout the house bulbs into each can that when you flip on the light bulb once, it will go to daytime mode, you flip it on again, it goes to twilight mode.
You flip it on again, it goes into evening mode.
So you don't have to have like different lamps and different lamp stands.
in each area of the house. You've just got one bulb. It's called a full spectrum bulb.
Bond charge makes one. Block blue light makes one. Those are two companies that do like a flicker
free. Right. So there's no back-end flicker. If you take a video of it with your, you know,
iPhone camera in slow motion, you wouldn't catch a flicker, which is something that kind of
causes a little bit of retinal irritation during the day and eventually can lead to kind
of a brain foggy feeling if you've been under bright light. You and I were like under
these lights all day. We'd definitely feel it. Because we're getting a little bit of flicker.
And then they're low EMF, right, which is something you also want to take into consideration
with your lighting system.
So basically, these are the light bulbs that go in any lights are.
Yeah, exactly.
And then the main areas of the house, because you're missing out on some of the full
spectrum of sunlight, even though they're a little bit more of a power hog and they're harder
to find, we have incandescent lighting, right?
So we've combined incandescent with O LED lighting for the circadian rhythm component.
And then if I'm, for example, I'm in Texas right now.
It is.
It's super fun.
Um, if I'm in Texas right now and I fly back to, um, to Idaho at, I get home on Sunday.
So at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning or let's let's put it this way at I've been waking up about 6 a.m. here.
So at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, Idaho time, it will be 6 a.m. Texas time and my eyes will probably, you know, flip wide open and I'll be ready to rumble because my body still thinks at 6 a.m.
So the way you can kind of play with circadian rhythmicity is.
rather than flipping on lights,
rather than taking your phone out of night mode,
rather than looking at a computer,
you would actually put on blue light blockers.
And this is something I'll let you put on blue light blockers,
keep the phone in night mode, keep the lights in the house
as dim as possible.
And then when the time arrives when you actually do want
to start waking up, that's when you just blast yourself
with blue light using either like, you know,
sunlight, which you can go out.
Sunlight, there's devices, you know,
like Las Vegas, you know, access to sunlight,
You can't get outdoors.
You can wear glasses.
Like there's a pair called the IOs, AYO.
There's another pair called the retimers.
And these produce really bright, bluish green light that shifts your body into your new time zone more rapidly.
And now they even make lenses.
So you know these, I just mentioned blue light blockers.
Now they have blue light concentrator glasses that will concentrate just the blue light spectrum from the room or from outdoors.
So that in the morning, if you really want to blast yourself with blue light, you just wear
glasses that instead of blocking blue light, concentrate blue light, like the first 30 minutes
of the day. Yeah. And this can jumpstart your circadian rhythm. And not a lot of this has to do
with healing the body. Well, I was interesting, I had sleep. I had surgery, as I mentioned, and I
was slept for like four hours a night for a couple of months. And in my recovery, the sleep
doctor I was working with, trying to get my sleep reset, having you wear these special things
in the morning. And I can show you later. It basically is a, it's like I put it on. It gives you
of like bright light in your eyes.
It's like glasses that just shoots light.
And it was like kind of blueish, greenish, bright.
Yeah, it's like those seasonal affective disorder lamps.
Exactly, right.
But they're wear it, but you wear it, right.
Exactly right.
There was a company, I don't think they're in business anymore.
They're called the human charger.
And they were designed to stimulate the photo receptors
in your ears with bright light.
I don't know if they still make them,
but yeah, there was a time when you could literally
have the light in your ears
and the light in your eyes
if you wanted to shift your circadian rhythm.
forward or backward.
And, of course, the opposite applies also.
You know, we'll dim the lights at night.
You got electricity, you got light.
This is different than, like, red light panels or red light beds,
a red light wraparound devices.
I'm a fan of all of those for enhance and recovery and use them almost every day.
But I'm more kind of intrigued and find more useful the idea of using light for circadian
rhythmicity.
And then oxygen is kind, that's kind of like a new thing for me.
Like, you were showing me how you have an I-H-H-H-T device, intermittent, hypoxic and hyperoxic
training. And in English, that means you
that means you sit down. Yeah, you go up to Mount Everston, but without
getting off the couch, right? So you're essentially training your cellular
physiology and flooding your cells with oxygen after starving them of oxygen while you're
just sitting there, which is fantastic, especially if you're just watching something or
meditating. I think a lot of people find that they almost shift into more of like a theta
wave state when they're using something like that. I feel like that in the hyperbaric,
actually. So it's good for a nap, good for meditation.
adaptation. Another way to starve the cells of oxygen and then flood them with oxygen is called
Ewat, exercise with oxygen training. And this would be a similar idea, except in this case,
you would use, I have a device called the Liv O2. It's next to my exercise apparatus, my cardio
machine. I can breathe hypoxic air and then at the flip of a switch, for example, if I'm going
a sprint, flip it to hyperoxia, and flood my cells with oxygen, which normally you'd only
be able to do if you were under pressure, like in a hyperbaric chamber. So there's two different
ways to do this. You either get into a hyperbaric chamber or your exercise or sit while giving
your cells hypoxia plus hyperoxia. And then, um, yeah. And honestly, like if you, I don't know
if you're hungover, if you're tired, if you're just getting started warming up in the gym and you feel
a little stale. If you just put on an oxygen mask, if you happen to have one of these devices
and you just bring it on full oxygen, you know, so you bring like 93% oxygen for the first
few minutes of your workout, you feel incredible. Yeah. You feel unstoppable. I mean, even without a fancy
pre-workout. So what is a low oxygen state doing, the hypoxia? The hypoxia is starving the cells of
oxygen. So it's a brief almost like hormetic effects to where you're going to upregulate oxygen
intake once you turn the oxygen back up. So you're basically going to get more oxygen in the tissues
than you would otherwise.
But a lot of the machines, they work on,
on helping your mitochondria rejuvenate.
That helps you with mitophagy and getting rid
of old mitochondria and then helps you create new
mitochondria and help them work better.
Probably the, the mitophagy would be induced
by the hypoxic state, right?
You're essentially creating a stress order
that kills off old mitochondria and then flooding the cells
with oxygen afterwards.
So the mitochondria basically run on oxygen and food.
Yeah.
That's what makes energy.
Yeah.
So you're taking away the oxygen.
I don't even work any better if you were in a fasted state, you know, like in a low glucose state also.
But electricity, light, oxygen, I would say those are three big ones for me in the whole, like, recovery performance department that I use almost every day at home.
And hyperbaric oxygen chambers also will do something different.
But they're very effective for recovery.
Yeah, you're breathing oxygen, typically you're breathing oxygen, even though you don't have to.
You're still going to get a little bit of oxygen delivery, just an oppression.
pressureized environment, but in most case you have a cannula,
you know, or a mask and you're breathing oxygen.
Breathing up to 100% oxygen.
Yeah, exactly.
Oxygen under pressure.
Yeah.
And what does that do to your body?
The pressure drives more oxygen into tissue.
So the way of oxygen yourself, but the, we're finding that it actually has a lot of
benefits in activating stem cells and increasing stem cell production, killing all the zombie
cells, which are the senescent aging cells that cause inflammation throughout your body,
increased telemere link. They have a lot of increasing kind of rejuvenation properties.
Brian Johnson just published something. Yeah, the hyperbarics. And he was talking about how all the
things he'd done over the years, when he did a series of these hyperbaric sessions, it led to him
improving a lot of his biomarkers that he had, was stuck. And Israel published a study where they
used this technology for brain health and rejuvenation and longevity. And they had pretty compelling
data about it. Yeah, it is pretty impressive. And I'm glad you said the word series, because I think
a lot of people hear hyperbaric and they'll do one session and expect the results.
But, you know, in most of these studies, they're doing several weeks of hyperbaric.
Like you're doing 20, 30, 40 sessions and something lasts like an hour, an hour and a half.
A couple hours, yeah.
Like you can get the PMF back if your back hurts and it'll be better right away, but
this is like a commitment.
Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, well, if you're jet-legged or hung over and you do a hyperbaric
session, you're going to feel a little bit better, but if you're in it for the longevity effects.
So these are kind of cool tools and they're, some of them are expensive, like a hyperbaric
chamber, but some of them, you know, are not.
that that price prohibitive and they can be things you add your daily life yeah you walk outside
barefoot and the sunshine and do breath work for for free that's right which is you know
like I mentioned community and I think that's that's the thing is that you see like whatever the
you know 110 year old grandma in sardinia Italy who's you know smoking the occasional cigarette
and perhaps drinking more alcohol than would be considered the hormetic effect and yet still
living a long and happy life because of the community piece that's right and
And, you know, I think it was the surgeon general in 2023, you know, identified loneliness
is the equivalent of smoking like 15 cigarettes a day, you know.
And so you're seeing increased blood pressure, increased cortisol, what else, increased inflammation.
You see even increased expression of genes related to inflammatory cytokines and a decreased
regulation of genes responsible for antiviral activity.
It's almost like nature wants to kill you off.
Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting field called sociogenomics.
I don't have you ever heard of it.
No.
But I actually came up with this term independently because I realized, you know,
after working in Haiti and learning about the work of Paul Farmer who used community health
workers and basically neighbors helping neighbors to help people treat AIDS and TB in some of
the most challenging health conditions in the world, which most of the public health
cleaning and giving up on as they had to take their medications on a regular schedule
for multi-drug resistant TV and for AIDS. And it was too hard. They didn't have clean
water. They didn't have to, like, it was just super poor and difficult. But he really used
the power of community to help heal. And I realized that, you know, when I started looking
to literature, that it can work for good or for bad. Like if you're in a dynamic with somebody
and then you're in a conflict situation or fight.
Right.
You're going to express all these genes that are inflammatory
as your emotion is getting inflamed,
your biology gets inflamed.
But if you're in a loving, deep heart center connection with somebody,
the opposite happens.
You activate all these anti-inflammatory genes
and healing genes and repair genes,
which is fascinating to me.
And so you can use community as a tool.
I know you just launched a new community platform,
which is to help people connect around.
Oh, yeah.
And I think that's useful.
If you are...
It's called the Go Life Network, right?
Yeah, go, I mean, there's a lot of community platforms.
I mean, there's, I mean, yeah, I think a lot of the people in the industry now, you know,
you mentioned Dave Asprey, I think he has one, Gary Breka has one, Brian Johnson, who we were
just talking about, he has one.
Do you have a community?
Yeah, it's called the Heim and Hive.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great, is it like HYV.
And no, it's HIV.
Oh, it's a good idea, though.
Anyways, though, I think the importance, if you're in a community, is that you're in a community,
even if it's a digital community, is to try and connect with people in that digital community
who might actually be in the same region as you or be traveling to the same area or conference
as you because there's actually a book by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation
where she gets into the idea that a digital interaction misses a prefix and it misses an actual
you know, an IRL relationship, you know, an in-re-life relationship.
And I think one of the, you know, if you look at the underlying biological mechanisms behind that, you know, if, like, I were to shake your hand, we're triggering skin receptors, you know, your Pesinian corpuscles.
So you're getting, you're getting a stimulation of the vagus nerve, which is going to lower blood pressure and lower heart rate and lower cortisol and all those things that we look for when we're trying to increase heart rate variability.
we'd see like an oxytocin release, which, you know, is your trusting, loving, snuggling hormone,
which a lot of animals who are monogamous and mate for life have oxytocin receptors.
And a lot of animals who, who do not, don't, but you can genetically modify like a mouse
to express oxytocin receptors and it will become more socially active when you do that,
you know, whereas like a human or a prairie hole, like we already got them built in.
I know, we got a dog.
You must have a lot of those receptors because she's constantly
dogs, kittens, yeah, a lot.
We have baby goats.
I think they have a few.
You get the oxytocin release.
And then, of course, that can result in a subsequent serotonin release.
You've got another feel good neurotransmitter hanging around.
You've got the, you know, you look at like the research by the heart math
institute on the electromagnetic signal produced by the brain or produced by the heart that can
actually affect the energy of those around you.
And we miss a lot of those if we're in a purely digital.
environment. And so, you know, even me, like, I tend to be an introvert. I tend to be a loner. I'm one of
those guys who can be super happy by myself for long periods of time. And yet, when I look at all
the research, you know, I think if I'm spending time doing, you know, light and water and electricity
and air optimization and all these biohacks that I, getting a hug could be a biohack. I need, I need to be
going out of my way to also build community. You know, beyond just, you know, Dunbar's number is
150, right? The the approximate network of people that were able to interact with and stay in touch
with. But what Dunbar was getting at when he came up with that number was also the idea
that the deeper those layers, the more satisfied and happy a person was, right? So you have like
your five intimate family members or very close friends, than 15 kind of sort of friends,
then 50 people who you get around with on a regular basis and maybe a few dozen others in your
community. And once you fall out of those layers, you know, it's like this built in ancestral
mechanism where you just freak out, right? It's like the body goes into this state of nervous
system stress. I mean, if you don't have those relationships. If you, if you aren't connected
to people, you know, it's the equivalent of banishment, which would mean, you know, in a time.
That was a punishment. That would have been punishment or death, right? It wouldn't have been
ostracism. You know, that's, uh, that literally comes from a Greek term for the pottery
shard called the Ostraka that they used to actually write the name of the person who they wish to banish for 10 years from, you know, in, in the church and organized religion, you know, excommunicare, excommunication, putting you out of communion, yeah, the exact opposite of companionship. Yeah. Pan is like breaking bread with someone. Companionship, you know, excommunication is getting thrust out of that banishment. Yeah. It's a, it's, you know, I think that's a, a French word, you know, banier to send away to expel, to push out. So, it's a, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's a, you know, it's a French word. So, it's a. So it's, it's, you know, it's a. So it's a. So it's. So it's. So it's. It's. It's. It's
if that happens to a human, we go into this sympathetic nervous system back to the, you know,
running from a lion mode because we become hypervigilant. We no longer have anyone around us to
protect us. And that would have served us very well in an ancestral environment in which we had no one
around us. So we had to have our guard up in order to not get eaten by a bear, you know, alone out in the
forest. Now there's even a term called the paradox of loneliness. And the paradox of loneliness is similar
to the paradox of obesity, for example, right?
We have built in calorie conservation mechanisms
that have served us really well thousands of years ago.
If we didn't have access to ample amounts of food
and we came across, let's say, a kill,
I don't know, a wooly mammoth or whatever,
we would want to eat as much as possible
to store away as much fat as possible
for when the times of need arose again.
Yeah.
And now with 24-7 access to hyper-palatable food
and like a Ben and Jerry is like two blocks away,
Those same calorie conservation mechanisms cause overweight or obesity, which is paradoxical.
With loneliness, it's also paradoxical, right?
Because when we're away from people or even perceive that we're away from people, because
there is this idea of not just subjective loneliness, right, being lonely, but also subjective
loneliness, seeing whatever friends and followers and fans and likes somebody else has,
comparing that to yours and suddenly feeling like you're not keeping up and you're subjectively
lonely, whether it's objective or subjective loneliness, those same biological mechanisms that
we were talking about, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, increased cortisol.
Well, what's that make you?
Like nervous, anxious, depressed, irritable.
And here's the paradox part, being the type of person who's exactly the type of person
that nobody wants to hang around with.
So you almost create like this vicious cycle of loneliness.
So, you know, that's why I think it's so important to check yourself.
and, you know, ask, hey, if I've been by myself all week, you know, am I a loner mode?
Am I keeping in touch with old friends or making new friends, you know, am I taking my earbuds
out and maybe, you know, foregoing a podcast and just going on a hike with somebody and having
a chat, you know, these are things.
Underrated, it's underrated.
People need to think about, yeah, just as much as whatever, red light bed or PMF or whatever.
It's one of the key things around longevity and I remember traveling lots of the blue zones
when I was writing my book Young forever and I, you know, just striking to me how there wasn't
loneliness. So everybody, even if they're, you know, they didn't have kids, they'd be taken in
by a niece or a nephew when they got older. They'd be, somebody's wife died, they'd be all,
their kids would move in with them. There was just a whole network in the community where
everybody was part of it. And there was community celebrations, community connection. And it was
pretty remarkable. And I think there was, you know, Dan Buehner talked a lot about this,
but it's definitely underrated. Like, you can do all these fancy things and take all the
supplements and eat all the great food and exercise and do all these biohacking things.
But if you don't have community.
Huddled up and lonely inside a hyperbaric chamber sucking on a B-Propylosl lollip
with your binaural beats.
And yeah, I mean, you're still by yourself.
I mean, you know, back to Moscow, Idaho, my, my mom who doesn't exercise and eat as healthy
as she knows her son would like her to.
Welcome to the club.
It's actually a pretty good help because she has a copy shop in downtown
in Moscow, and it's like the hub of the town, and she's like the grandma of the community.
You know, like, she's hanging in all these college students and pouring beer and, you know,
walking all over the coffee shop and visiting with people.
And I am so glad that she has that outlet because I know, after having seen a lot of these, you know,
studies and data and the blue zone stuff on loneliness that, you know, even if she's not exercising
and eating as healthy as I like, like, like she is, she's up to some very good activity when it
comes to her longevity, her happiness, right?
That's a, like the, what's the article, Five Regress of the Dying?
You know, it's an article in the book by the palliative care practitioner where she
talks about what people expressed on their deathbeds.
And it was basically, I wish I'd chosen to show my true emotions more.
I wish I'd chosen to be happier.
I wish I'd work less.
I wish I'd been my true authentic self instead of who I thought the world expected me to be.
And the last one was, I wish I'd stayed in touch.
with my friends.
Yeah.
And it wasn't.
I wish I answered all my emails.
Right.
I wish I got the zero inbox every Thursday.
Um, no, because, because I mean, everybody knows like your work will eat you alive if that's
the highest order of priorities, you know, it probably took me until I was like 35 years old
to figure that out that, you know, my order of priorities is God and my spiritual health and then
my wife, because if you and your spouse don't put your oxygen mask on first, you can't be there
for the kids and then the kids and then my health, which isn't hard for me because it's a,
industry that I work in, and then business comes last. I used to think you just, you got to make
the money first, and then once you've made enough money, you'll be able to take care of the kids
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slash hymen what made you kind of flip in terms of your your priorities almost getting a divorce
like literally i was such uh uh an unpresent father and husband traveling all over the world at the time
not just for speaking in conferences but also racing you know in iron man and i was
was really not putting my family first. My wife for the first five years of my son's existence
was basically raising my sons almost by herself because I'd pop in, pop out, you know, go out
and give myself the excuse that I was just out, you know, slaying dragons and providing
for the family. Yeah. Um, and it took a pretty rocky patch with her for me to buckle down
and start to put family first. And I mean, I literally, I'm kind of like an all or nothing guy.
So I jumped into it pretty hard core and we started to build like a family constitution and a family mission statement based on a family core set of values.
We all went to a cabin in Utah for three days and developed a family logo, which then led to a family crest and family flags and a giant family logo sign and logos on our pickleball paddles and our hats and our shirts that we wear out.
We started doing a morning and a family meeting where every morning I got.
the whole family at 7 a.m. and we sit around the living room and we talk about our evening,
we talk about the day, we read the Bible together, we pray, we have a big hug and just this
super happy coming together in the morning and then the same thing. And you get your teenage boys
to do this. That's impressive. Seven p.m. like clockwork, we all gather in the kitchen. We sing a song
together. I bring my sons through a book that we are typically going together with, you know,
each month I bring them through a book. So we have our chapter discussion before day.
dinner and we have like a whole game closet full of hundreds of games that we play games for like an hour and a half and so every single day I've almost like guarded me from being a workaholic because I bookended 7 a.m. no matter what I'm doing. I have to be on the living room floor with the family. Somebody's going to wonder where I am or what's going on. 7 p.m. same thing like clockwork. That's my ending because I have to be there with the family. Get to be there with the family because it's like this amazing party that we have. And we've been doing that for.
10 years. That's incredible. And so not only do my sons have a real identity of what it means
to be a green field and what we stand for and what we hold deer and what each little portion of the
family crest means, but they feel a real sense of belonging, you know, and I think there's a far
less chance of creating like, you know, regs to riches to regs mentality or silver spoon mentality
in a young man or young woman who really identifies with a sense of pride in the family name and
wanting to build generational health and generational wealth and continue to build upon what you've
started as a parent, you know, basically legacy.
So I put a lot of work in a lot of working.
That's an incredible.
That's true biohacking.
That's like that that.
And it's so meaningful.
I mean, I miss out on work.
Like I work less than I used to.
I probably make money at a far slower pace than a lot of my friends.
But, you know, it's kind of like the, a little bit like the old adage of, you know,
If mom ain't happy and nobody happy, if my whole family's happy.
Well, you've rejiggered your priorities to understand what matters.
Yeah.
And it takes a long time for people to figure that out if ever, you know, if ever.
And, you know, all the things you probably do in your day, my guess is that's probably
a thing that keeps you the happiest and the healthiest.
Oh, it's, it's the best.
I mean, it's, you know, not to get too esoteric or woo, but I mean, you know, if you think about
The two most eternal things that we are surrounded with every day of our lives, it's either
other souls or God.
Everything else is going to pass away.
You know, all of our books and homes and money, insects, and cars and everything.
Yeah.
There's this, this idea that comes from ancient philosophers like Pence's or Augustine or, you
know, more modern authors like C.S. Lewis of this hole in the soul, this eternal hole in the
soul that will always feel empty unless you fill it with something eternal, right?
So all material wealth, our business, you know, even our health, all of that is material and temporary.
But if you're able to fill that hole with a relationship with a higher power and relationship with other people, then all the other stuff becomes even more fulfilling.
It's almost like the icing on the cake.
And I think a lot of people just miss out on the part of starting with the eternal and then all the other stuff becomes fulfilling.
and instead, chase money, you know, chase cars, chase houses,
chase women, chase men, whatever, thinking that's what's going to make them happy
when it's family, it's community, it's God.
For me, it was similar.
I mean, I went through many years with just, you know, focusing on my career and work,
and I had to kind of rejigger things and realize what was important.
And now, you know, I just went through this pretty serious health crisis with back surgery
and almost died and it was pretty intense.
Wow.
an infection in my back and you know what was so meaningful and powerful was the amount of people that
were there for me who were in the hospital with me who came and visited me who there was like
i think a WhatsApp threat of like it was sort of a hundred plus people wow there was it was
healing circles and people praying for me and you know it made me realize that you know i've
invested a lot of time and energy in building connections and community and friendships that are
deep and that are not related to who I am, but in terms of being the world, but just more who I am
as a human being. Yeah. And in terms of, you know, my soul friends, I call them. It's a powerful
memento Mori-esque exercise, this idea of asking yourself. And actually, there's, there's an
author named John Ortberg. And I think he puts it like this. He's got, he has a book that says,
his book is called, I'd like you more if you were more like me. He has a lot of books,
This is a great book.
And he has a part of that book where he lists kind of like the five regrets of the dying,
all of the questions you might be asking yourself when you're at death door towards the end of your life.
And the last question that he lists there is who will cry at my funeral.
Yeah.
Who will cry at my funeral.
Yeah.
And even in digital community, like, I know, like, I probably have, like, thousands of people who follow me on Instagram or Facebook or whatever who really are not,
getting give a crap about my funeral and move on to the next expert or author or podcast
or whatever if I were to pass away but my local network of community and friends and family
members and people who I've built you know again IRL flesh and blood relationships with
those people will yeah and you know back to the loneliness piece it is kind of sad that we do
live in a time when it's so easy to build those super digital shaky digital relationships
that unless they blossom into something else are kind of flat at the end of the day.
That's amazing. And, you know, when you, when you have, you know, that kind of structure
that you put in your day around connection and family and just even having the thought of
creating, you know, family values and what your mission is and how you take care of each other,
how you relate to each other, what's important and what you focus on, it's, um, it's something
I think, you know, just so few people ever think of doing. Yeah. And, and your, my guess is your
kids are pretty well adjusted. They're probably not addicts. They're doing okay in school.
They're, you know, probably happy. I mean, we give them a lot of drugs and hanging from cages
and, um, I'm kidding. I think if a child is given time and love and presence, that's one thing.
And I think most parents and people are aware of that. But I think it's time and love and presence
and this deep sense of belonging, like knowing that they're part of a movement or part of something
greater. I'm not saying like, turn your family to a cult or something like that. But,
this idea of like having in the same way that you would brand a business and in an ideal scenario
in a successful business, all your employees know what the business's values and mission
statement and core purposes. You essentially brand your family the same way as you would brand
a business all the way down to the freaking logo and the sign on the wall. And that's what we did
for our family. And it's, it's incredible. Well, you're sort of like, uh, kind of touching on this
concept of like rules to live by. Like what are the simple principles and rules to live by?
Right. And most people probably don't know this piece of.
about you. And I think that's a, it's such a gift that you shared it because it's something that
I think most people probably, hopefully take away from this and understand that, that it makes
them reflect on where they have done it or haven't done it in their own life. And hopefully it'll
inspire people to actually lean into this. Yeah. And, and I, I wonder, you know, given all the things,
you know, you, you've talked everything from your soul to, you know, PMF, Matt's, like,
Sam's sperm.
Stavisperm,
plaza friezes,
like after years and years of experimenting
and optimizing and every level,
you're obviously your body,
your mind, your spirit, your soul.
I'm wondering like what you kind of are down to
and distill down to in terms of like key practices
that you want to keep.
Like what are the,
let's say,
if you only keep three practices,
what would they be or five,
whatever you think is that sort of stood the test of time
and you want to carry forward going.
Key principles.
move well. And as we've established, not too much at too high in intensity, but I think
movement is underrated and it's very easy to not move. I'm shocked at the number of people who
get a movement meter or wearable and think they're taking 10,000 steps a day and they're taking
3,000. Yeah. So move more. Eat well, which I think most people are aware of and you have many
books about this and you don't have to follow a special diet, but back to the blue zones,
you know, eat in a mindful state, eat a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices.
You know, throw a little bit of hormesis in there occasionally from plants and herbs and spices and maybe even alcohol, avoid ultra-processed foods and eat well.
I would say thermal stress or discomfort is underrated.
We live in temperature controlled climate.
So subjecting yourself to like the ancestral rigors of heat and cold on a regular basis.
That's why I think we've, we see a growing body of research on things like a sauna practice.
And I think we'll see more and more coming out on cryotherapy and
cold immersion because very similar to exercise. You know, we need to be throwing stress
ores at our body, you know, even down to the hypoxia that we were talking about for
mitophagy, just for cellular autophagy in general and cellular resilience. You know,
you need to do uncomfortable things within limit, you know, as we were talking about earlier.
So it's so move well, eat well. Uh, stress our bodies. Thermal stress. Yeah, or just discomfort
in general. And if I could name a couple of others, I would say, take,
care of your personal environment. We touched on air, light, water, and electricity. So pay attention
to quality of your air and the cleanliness of your air, your water filtration system, and what
kind of water bottles you're drinking out of when you travel. Your lighting environment, especially
how much LED, high flicker, high EMF light you might be exposed to on a regular basis and
sunlight on the good side of things. And then the electrical environment that you live in, you know,
Even my house, like, there is no Wi-Fi.
You pull up to the bar at the kitchen and you peek under the bar and there's six little
Ethernet ports there where anybody can plug in if they want to, but they're not going
to get a Wi-Fi signal.
I didn't want a house where it was inconvenient and I'd have a bunch of upset visitors
who could never get on the internet.
So I literally have Cat 8 metal-shilded Ethernet throughout the entire house.
You can just plug in.
You don't have to go to those extremes, but little things.
Like unplug your Wi-Fi rider where you're sleeping at night, for example.
Personal environment.
discomfort, move well, eat well, and I would say the last thing is something that we just got done
touching on. It would be the fifth thing I'd name and that would be your spiritual health,
which I think includes your spiritual practice and your relationships slash community.
And like those would probably be the five that I would distill it down to.
Yeah, pretty sage advice, pretty solid. And I think, you know, the one part I think people might
not completely understand and it's worth diving more
into your work about this, you know,
is this piece around how do you control your environment
to support your health, whether it's, you know.
How do you build your own blue zone?
Yeah, a lot of people feel pretty bad most of the time.
And, and it's often the result of things
that we're not aware of like the quality of our air
or the cloud of our water or the...
Yeah, exercising, they're eating healthy
and they still feel like crap by 2 p.m.
And so what I'm hearing you say is that some of these
technologies that have helped us in many ways,
live better, more fun, or interesting lives,
also have a dark side.
And there's ways to mitigate that dark side
and rejuvenate your body in many different ways.
So last day, I just kinda wanna sort of hear
what your thoughts are about the latest longevity trends.
What are the things that are popping for you
that you think are worth leaning into?
And one of the things that maybe are like,
you know, misconceptions or things that are misunderstood
or maybe not really.
Talked about some of the beauty trends.
uh and so salmon sperm i'm gonna take that away salmon sperm and uh yeah we didn't touch on this but
but another thing the same clinic does is they do Botox injections at your your sexual organs
which apparently relaxes the muscle tissue and allows for for better better uh vascularity um to
my wife was very concerned when i told her i was going to austin to get a paralytic toxin injected
into my my my man piece yeah um but uh you know it
They just had this health optimization event down here, and it was a lot of, you know, the things that you would expect to see lots of different kinds of, you know, the 18 flavors and variants of beef tallow and beef jerky and energy bars.
And I think a lot of the, the cool technologies like we discussed, you tend to see those more like, like, uh, A4M in Vegas or something like that, that are kind of like the cool things coming down the pipeline.
For me personally, that I have been getting super into, and I briefly mentioned this to you as I was looking at your biohacking setup here, the idea of combining different modalities to relax and kind of downregulate the nervous system, namely haptic sensations, light and sound in some kind of combinatorial environment.
So what I mean by that is when I travel, I have one of these Apollo.
wrist bands or ankle bands that will vibrate and then a neurovisor which is a headset that
you wear that produces light and sound and there's something about light plus sound plus
vibration that will knock me out on an airplane or after a busy day at a conference when
I have too many central nervous system stimulants in me and at home I have this vibrating chair
called the shift wave which is kind of cool just vibrate your whole body you can wear a
fingertip sensor and it'll kind of do it in combination with you.
your actual heart rate variability as you breathe in and breathe out. But then right above
the shift wave chair, I've got this lamp called the Roxieva. And that also does light sound
therapy. So I've got a travel setup, the neurovisor plus the Apollo and at home, kind of like the
big guns, the shift wave plus the roxiva. And you don't, so you don't wear an eye mask when you do
the shift wave. The shift wave, you can wear an eye mask if you're just doing the shift wave. But the way
I do it is I've got eyes open and there's like an AV cable that comes out of the Roxieva
because they've got about 20 different sessions that are built for haptic sensations.
And haptic is like vibration.
Yeah, like vibration.
The Roxieva comes with this teeny tiny little like base speaker that you put under a table
or to vibrate your body.
So I thought, well, why not look up to the freaking shift wave?
So I plugged the AV cable into the input of the shift waves.
So now when the lights come on, they're just blasting it off to outer space, which is incredible.
If you just need to like check out at 3 p.m.
and turn your brain off, you're getting blasted with light.
You have the headphones in, so the sound is doing the thing in conjunction to the light,
and then that's feeding into full body vibration.
Yeah.
And it's pretty cool to essentially just knock stress flat out of your body.
Like I feel incredible when I do that or the, for 10 minutes.
The Apollo, oh, I'll, I'll run it.
My, my scheduling team knows that you don't schedule anything for Ben between about
two and three 30 PM because I finish lunch and I go into my,
my little lounge and I'll spend just anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, you know, it's kind
of part of my job, if you want to call it that, to try out all these new devices.
So the other day I was trying out the new Mews has some new Athena headband that
detects blood flow and brain waves or I'll be messing around the shift wave or what happens
if I plug this into that or if I take my neurovisor into the hyperbaric chamber.
So that's my relaxation experimentation time.
Yeah.
And I'm not in there for an hour and a half, but usually, you know, I don't,
I mean, a little bit of padding time on the other end to come out and, you know, and get back into the emails and stuff.
What I've found is that stress is an incredibly exhausting thing in your body.
And if you have ways of discharging the stress, you know, Tony Robbins talked about changing your state,
whether it's just jumping up and down or breathing or whatever.
And this was a stage.
A prey animal would relax after being chased by a predator.
By shaking.
Right.
And so there's these devices or tools you can use to help reset your nervous system.
I mean, you can do it with breath work, you can do meditation.
and you can do with, you know, stretching.
There's a lot of ways to do it yoga.
But this technologies are pretty cool because they just,
they kind of, we all are living in this heightened state of cortisol.
Yeah.
And so how do you kind of drop out of that?
And so these technologies are pretty much.
And it's a routine thing too.
Like I'm typically up between 4.30 and 5 a.m.
Because I like to have that time when the world doesn't expect me to be up and I don't
have to be guilty about having my phone off so I can do my morning routine and get ready
for the day and have my time with God and have my coffee and just have my,
have my morning to myself because I also have a family and we have these wonderful,
glorious family dinner parties. I'm usually not in bed till 10, right? So I'm getting maybe six
hours of sleep a night. But I find that if I can program in 30 to 60 minutes of relaxation in
the afternoon, it's almost like time hacking. Because if you add it up, you know, that's still only like
seven hours. I'm supposed to be getting, you know, depending on the research, you look at seven to nine
hours. But I can be super present for my family at dinner as long as I have that afternoon checkout time.
So I'd much rather get up super early and nap than sleep in, not have my morning, and just bang out the rest of the day.
So I would say, that's what I'm excited about, just the use of haptic sensation, light and sound.
And then what did you ask me?
What is it overrated?
Yeah.
What are the things that you're like, oh, that's kind of like, that's kind of like misconceptions.
I would hate to cause people to think that they shouldn't prioritize something like, you know, like the whole SICO calorie and calorie out equation.
because I do think that trumps a lot.
But I think there's a lot of people,
maybe this is similar to my reply to you about exercise
who are overdoing the whole intermittent fasting keto thing.
There's, you know, I talk to a lot of, for example,
especially like premenopausal women who are doing like 16 hour fast
and they're seeing, you know, these intense hormonal imbalances
and downregulation of fertility.
And, you know, they're essentially treating themselves as men
when women, especially premenopausal women,
and do better on like a 10 to 12 hour intermittent fast
and, you know, strength training and adequate protein
and all of the, you know, so, you know,
I see a lot of cardio bunnies, you know,
not to stereotype who are doing excess intermittent fastings.
That's one one thing that I think is overrated.
And then, look, I am all about controlling glycemic variability.
You know, a lot of times I wear a blood glucose monitor.
I am aware and cognizant of my carbohydrate starch and sugar intake.
But I think a lot of people now, especially with the surge in CGMs, they're just scared of carbs, scared of sugar, and often equate what would be considered traditionally a therapeutic ketogenic diet, right, like 30 to 40 grams of carbs or whatever a day that you'd used to, you know, in a situation of TBI, concussion, Alzheimer's, et cetera.
And they're saying, oh, well, this is like my new cognitive enhancing superpower.
And you tend to see, you know, back to what I was saying earlier for me back when I did that when exercising a lot, you know, impact.
on the thyroid, impact on testosterone, impact on joint health.
The way that I do things now, after experimenting with a lot of different approaches,
is I kind of think you can have your cake and eat it too.
I don't eat a lot of carbs and sugars most of the day, right?
I save my carbs until the evening, which is typically the meal that tends to be the most social,
the most difficult sometimes to control what you're eating because you're out at restaurants,
you're with friends, you're at a party, whatever.
Yeah.
So I eat like low carb relatively keto most of the day and then I'll have like 250 to
350 grams of carbs at night, which is great because you sock away a little bit of liver
glycogen and muscle glycogen for a great workout the next morning.
So would you go with that being a serotonin, a melatonin response?
It's not going to be like white flour.
You're not doing.
No, sweet potato, purple potato, uh, yam, beet, parsnip, dark chocolate, yogurt.
So, you know, good carbohydrate.
sources um you know do a lot of like cara fries sweet potato fries so not a lot of grains or beans
not a lot of grains or beans besides my wife does really really good fermented sourdough bread
so she makes those crunchy cannon balls which are pretty good with a little bit of honey and
sea salt on them i'm basically in a pretty uh glycemically stable state the entire day quick
feeding at night that because i'm usually doing something active before dinner playing tennis or pickle
ball with the family, doing a sauna cold plunge, going on a quick walk, or even using bitters,
for example, before the meal.
I'm inducing almost like a temporary state of heightened insulin sensitivity prior to the
evening carbohydrate feeding.
So I'm not getting a huge blood sugar spike to last until midnight and then a hypoglycemic drop
that wakes me up at 1 a.m.
or whatever.
So I'm active around dinner time.
I have some bitters with dinner, which kind of act as glucose disposal agents.
and then I sleep like a baby and then get up the next morning and rinse, wash, and repeat.
And I see a lot of people who just, like, go for way too long, restricting carbohydrates,
whereas I think more of like a carb-refeeding approach works way better.
And that's the way I've eaten for, like, probably more than a decade now.
And you're talking about carbs like sweet potatoes and things that are much lower glycemic.
Right.
I avoid, yeah, I avoid non-nutritionally dense carbohydrates.
I generally avoid, period.
Ice cream.
Yeah.
Well, it depends on the ice cream.
This is a good brands out now.
And, you know, we have goats.
My sons make some pretty good goat milk ice cream.
That's amazing.
But yeah, it depends.
But yeah, most ultra-process starches and sugars, you should avoid in general.
But especially even like the health world, I just see people being carbophobic.
Well, you see fatphobic, yeah, exactly.
And then we're all.
Hopefully it doesn't become protein phobic soon.
Yeah.
That'd be the worst.
Protein is something we've talked about on the podcast and other guests,
like every out line.
But, you know,
we seem to be in a protein phrase right now and,
you know,
all the natural festivals and all the meat bars and protein bars and protein snacks.
Like yesterday I tried a new bar that was, you know,
made with, you know,
way protein and beef collagen and yeah.
Beef tallow and it was actually pretty good.
There's a lot of them.
They're super tasty, yeah.
And I was like, wow, this is like really lots of good fat, lots of high quality protein.
What's your take?
Are we kind of going overboard on the much protein side?
I mean, depending on the on the studies that you look at, I mean, there's something like
go up for like three grams per pound and some, you know, studies on bodybuilders on protein intake.
I'm kind of a fan of the one-ish gram per pound sweet spot.
Which is twice as much or more than the RDA, which is the government sort of minimum amount.
Exactly. And I think if you're if you're not physically active, you might be able to get away with a little bit less than that.
I would rather people be prioritizing protein than running from it. But I think with protein, it's the quality that matters, you know, because if you, you know, let's say you're plant-based and you're, you know, rotating legumes and grains and, you know, eating a variety of, like, quinoa and peas and maybe some seeds and nothing.
etc. The issue on that side is unless you're taking the time to properly prepare, you know,
soak, sprout, ferment, slow prepare those foods is going to do a number on your gut
and you're not going to unlock a lot of amino acids from those protein sources anyway,
so you're probably going to wind up a little bit protein deficient unless you really go out
of your way to do a plant-based diet correctly. And then on the omnivorous or carnivorous side,
you see people who a lot of times have more of the I-I-F-YM approach and they're just like, hey,
if I'm getting enough protein, I don't care if it's from a, you know, McDonald's Big Mac with
maybe the bun removed or something like that or a Costco steak or a Rosar steak or, you know,
or, you know, hopefully, you know, grass-fed, grass-finished, good pastured sources.
So I think the cleanliness of the animal from which you're getting the protein is really important,
not necessarily because the protein is going to be that different,
but because of all the other things that you're getting along with it,
you know, whatever one might be concentrated in the fats or something like that.
Although there may be, but there may be good things.
I mean, you know, there's Stephen Van Velaide that's some interesting studies looking at bison
and bison just that are purely fed on regenerative methods using kind of multiple wild plants
that they eat versus a bison that's, you know, mostly grass fed,
but then is, you know, feedlot fed at the end with corn and grains.
and they did very detailed metabolomic studies
where they looked at not just things that were bad
because they probably weren't coming to these bison hormones
and antibiotics and things like that,
but they were still eating like a grain diet
that the metabolites in the meat of the fully regenerative bison
were really quite different
and had all sorts of phytochemicals that weren't in the other meat,
all sorts of fatty acids that weren't in there
and other benefits that you wouldn't expect.
I'm not convinced the amino acid composition would be different.
Yeah, right.
You know, if we're talking about purely the proteins, but yeah, I think, you know,
as much as you can go out of your way to ensure that the quality of the protein source is superior.
Yeah.
You know, the better.
If you look at some of the people who are, you know, waving the red flag on protein,
typically it's around potential for something like gluconeogenesis, you know,
where you get excess protein causing some type of an insulin genic reaction or a glucose spike.
Yeah, I met a guy's carnivore recently, and he's like, his insulin levels were pretty high.
Yeah.
That's interesting because he's, yeah, yeah, exactly.
What you can do, you also tend to see, uh, folks in the longevity camp who raise concerns
about excess stimulation of mTOR, which theoretically result in impaired longevity,
um, from excessive methionine intake, right?
amino acid that you find in a lot of meat, especially if you're not eating a nose to tail
source and balancing out methionine with glycine.
So I think the variety of your protein intake matters, you know, getting sources that are
rich in glycine and collagen and gelatin and gelatin and not just eating meat.
Right.
Is important.
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think include, I think, I don't like the term lean protein for the most
part, you know, I think that a fatty cut of salmon and the egg with the yolk and, you know,
getting as long as the animal's been fed well,
a little bit of the, you know, the CLAs and the saturated fats from,
you know, well-fed pork or cow.
I think that's a good idea.
Um, but yeah, I, I think that you could make a case that if you get too much
mythionine and too high protein intake to the point of like acidity or excess mTOR
activation or gluconeogenesis or something like that, like it could be bad,
but I don't think many people are reaching that high level of protein intake.
Yeah.
I agree. I agree. I think, you know, it is the only macronutrient we need in gram amounts.
Yeah.
You know, essential fatty acids, we need milligram amounts of carbohydrates. We don't need them,
although they help us in different ways, but there's no essential carbohydrate. Yeah.
So it's an interesting moment. Like we've got this low fat, low carb, high-cargy now.
I think the world just kind of keeps spinning around the nutrition confusion. Yeah. I think
people need to just like focus on it. Very dogmatic. You know, nutrition is very dogmatic. And it's also
an easy industry to make money in because people want a perfect solution right right so if you can
come up with a perfect bar or the perfect book or you know the perfect diet or whatever like you're
going to raking some cash for a little bit and then people will move on to the next big thing once they
realize that one isn't working for that's right i mean it's obviously don't let your ideology run over
your biology yeah like pay attention to how you feel and what's going on in your body don't let your
ideology you know because they got to listen to your body it's basically the bottom line
It's generally the smartest doctor in the room.
And Ben, you know, your work's been so great.
You've, you've really helped bring so many of these ideas into public consciousness.
And I think I really encourage people to check out more of your work.
And you've got a new book coming out this set of an update of your older book, right?
The Boundless is just coming out April.
Well, so what, where can people find you on online?
Uh, my, my hub is a Ben Greenfieldlife.com.
Mm-hmm, Greenfield Life.
And you can connect to everything you're doing there.
pretty much yeah that's great and uh thank you so much for being such a sort of pioneer and
thinking about tools and practices and things from a scientific perspective and kind of separating
the week from chaff and helping us sort of navigate what are often very strange and controversial
topics with with you know humor intelligence and and great thank you ben for me on the podcast
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This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center,
my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer.
This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions.
nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care
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This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical
or other professional advice or services.
If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner.
And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic,
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It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
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