The Joe Rogan Experience - #1235 - Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

Ben Greenfield is a Coach, Author, Speaker, ex-Bodybuilder and Ironman Triathlete. In 2008 he was voted as the Personal Trainer of the Year by the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and recognized as the top 100 Most Influential People in Health in 2013.

four three two one hello ben hello what's up buddy there's a discrepancy my my coffee is way way bigger than yours i've got like this 40 ounce big gulp french press yes um versus the is that a caveman yeah cold Cold brew Nitros Yeah Those are pretty good too I love them That's pop a punch Yeah

Dude thank you so much For the bread And the macaroons And The goodies Yeah That's awesome Awesome stuff

I would probably be Morbidly obese If I wasn't an exercise freak It seems like it Yeah Yeah Jessa makes that sourdough bread And it is

Freaking amazing Did you do that Carnivore diet thing? Did you try that out? No. You didn't? No. No. I like meat, but I didn't do the carnivore diet.

I thought you were going to do it for a certain amount of time and test it. I thought about it. I'm too much of a foodie. What I did was I tried to eat ribeye steaks every night for dinner. So I did like a 33% carnivore diet, but there was a study actually that came out. It was just like two days ago on that TMAO, the sugar that is associated with gut damage when you're eating a high red meat diet. Right. When your body takes excess protein and it turns it into sugar. Right. With theoretically the idea being that that might be present because your microbiome is imbalanced from a diet that's too heavy in meat.

Is it a micro? If you work in enough fiber. It's because your biome? I thought it was just because of glucogenesis because your body has nothing but meat. Your body turns it into glucose? No, that would be something different. Oh, really? That conversion to glucose is a different sugar than the TMAO.

So what the TMAO is, is that's going to be present if you aren't getting enough fiber or if your biome is imbalanced. But what this study a couple of days looked at was people who were eating like a fish and egg and plant-rich diet, and they had high levels of tmao2 but they weren't deleterious they're actually protective because they had the fiber yeah and i mean you could do you could do a carnivore diet if you were there's there's a few populations that do this like in in spain i forget the name of the sausage but they'll like eat the they'll eat the ruminant like they'll eat the the intestine of the ruminant and get their grasses and their fibers and their plants literally by eating the stomach of the animal.

Like a cat. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the same issue with like, you know, methionine. Too much of the amino acid methionine from just eating red meat would be deleterious. But if you're getting glycine and some of these other amino acids, if you're eating like nose to tail, bone marrow, bone broth, all the organ meats, head cheese, Braunschweiger, just like all these different mixes of meats. I think that would be the way to do a carnivore diet. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are proponents of that as well.

And then there's a bunch of people that are, you know, it's interesting because you've got to, there's a disparity between the anecdotal accounts of health and well-being and then blood work. The blood work these folks get is not impressive. You mean the people on the carnivore diet? Yeah, from what I've seen. I haven't seen anything where I see all their inflammatory markers down, their testosterone up. I haven't seen anything where it's looking really good. Yeah, high blood glucose is another thing that you see but i should say that there haven't been a lot of tests done it's not like a lot of people are publishing

stuff on it but the anecdotal evidence is amazing it's like it's really weird like uh my friend jordan peterson he's had a tremendous success with it yeah lost a lot of body weight he says he's in his intellectual prime he said he's never felt better in terms of his energy levels. And that guy, he is so rigid and disciplined with it. All he's eating is meat with salt on it, and he drinks water. And that is it. Well, if you think about it, it's an elimination diet. Yes. Right?

It's like an autoimmune diet. Or you can say, well, I don't know what's giving me trouble, soy or wheat or dairy or what have you. So I'm just going to stop eating all that stuff and switch to primarily meat. The problem is that it's, you know, I don't want to call anybody out and call them lazy, but it's almost like kind of a very easy, lazy-esque approach because rather than figuring out how to do, you know, like that sourdough bread. It's slow fermented. The rye and the wheat are in there, but all the phytic acid that would normally inhibit your ability to absorb minerals is pre-digested by the lactobacillus and all the bacteria in the wheat.

So you've got a bread that's lower in a glycemic index, and it's more easily digested. Which is why both rye and sourdough are more healthy for you. Right, and you put the rye in it because it lowers the glycemic index. And then you've got the, what's it called? I forget the term. It's like a gluten-digesting enzyme that gets activated with the lactobacillus. So that's a smart bread.

I mean, it takes freaking 24 hours to, it's not 24 hours, but it's like 15 minutes over 24 hours that it takes to make it. That's an intelligent approach to food preparation, right? That's the way that our ancestors or many of the blue zones would have treated their foods, fermenting, soaking, sprouting, slow food. And you can take a lot of these things that would result in, you know, you're talking about Jordan Peterson. I know his daughter does this as well. Michaela Peterson, they use that elimination diet, you know, which is the carnivore diet to clear up a lot of those autoimmune issues, but you could also just render food more digestible or switch to an elimination

diet or an autoimmune diet for eight weeks or 12 weeks, something like the carnivore diet, heal the gut, and then return back to a more all-inclusive eating pattern that allows you to eat dairy, wheat, plants, etc., all these things that would normally damage the gut if the gut is actually leaky. So what's the process? What is happening when they go on this very strict elimination diet And they're just eating meat What is happening to their gut that allows them to have all these Pretty significant health benefits A lot of loss of weight, increase of energy, autoimmune issues Jordan had some pretty significant gum issues

Those all went away, Depression, that went away. Right. Some of the gum in the joint stuff might be just as much related to the fact that he's getting a shit ton of collagen, you know, fiber, or not fiber, but elastin and muscle fiber precursors. He's getting a lot of protein. I don't know if he's eating bone broth and bone marrow, but maybe a lot of glycine and some of these other metabolites. So part of it could just be more fuel on board to repair muscles or to repair the joints. But then the other part of it is that when you eliminate inflammatory products that you're consuming, like let's say you're eating whatever, you know, wonder bread

and commercial dairy or, or unfermented soy or any of these things that can actually damage the lining of the gut, you're creating an inflammatory scenario. And I know you're familiar with the gut brain axis and how our gut interacts with our nervous system via the vagus nerve. And when you have inflammation in the gut, that affects neural symptoms, it affects sleep, it affects intellectual performance. And then you've also got the autoimmune component. If you're actually truly allergic to or intolerant to some of those proteins that wind up in the bloodstream in the presence of a leaky gut, you know, plant proteins, lectins are another one that a lot of people complain about, then you create almost like a full body damage scenario. So the idea is you get rid

of all that stuff, you introduce the carnivore diet, and I don't know that there's a lot of components of the carnivore diet that are actually healing the gut as much as it's the absence or elimination of the foods that were harming it. Interesting. The Bell Brothers, Chris and Mark, do you know those guys? Yeah. Their take on it is basically they've never felt better, and these are guys that work out very heavily. The difference between them and Jordan is probably that, especially Mark as a gorilla. Yeah.

He's powerlifting and has been doing that basically his whole life. These guys are – what their take on it is essentially, at least the way they think, is that most people that are talking about diet, they really don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Even though you might be able to look at it on paper and you might have these ideas about what's beneficial or non-beneficial. Some people are proponents of vegan diets. Some people are proponents of, you know, paleo. He's like, until you are actually physically doing something,

until you are actually doing something with that diet, and then you report how much better you feel, the people that are actually training really hard. Those are the ones you should rely on. And he's saying for him personally, he's never felt better, never been leaner. Yeah. And a big part of it, I mean, this just returns to diet personalization and customization as a whole. You know, we live in an era where you can self-quantify pretty easily with genetics and you can find out what ancestry you came from, what blood markers that you have, what your gut microbiome looks like.

And I don't think we talked about this on the last show, but there's this idea of eating according to your ancestry and the concept of what are called cold spots, like areas around the world where people have a genetic susceptibility to have certain diseases that they don't actually develop. Those diseases don't actually manifest because of their traditional diet. Like you look at like the Icelandic population that carries the genes that would render them more susceptible to something like depression or seasonal affective disorder. But their diet is very rich in omega-3 fatty

acids and DHA, which we know can protect against those disorders. And you take the Icelandic population and you uproot them and put them in the context of a westernized diet, and all of a sudden depression and SAD manifest. That's interesting. Say the same thing for like Cameroon, Cameroon, Africa,

higher than normal risk for colon cancer, but they're eating a diet that's high in fiber. Why is it higher than normal risk? I don't know. It's a genetic susceptibility. But the idea is that that population probably figured out at some point in human history that if they eat a lot of plants or they eat a lot of fiber, all of a sudden people don't have as many issues with their colon, right? And then you take that same population again, strip out the fiber, put them on a westernized diet, and you get a large portion of the African American population developing colon cancer. That's crazy about the seasonal affective disorder. And you got to wonder how

would that affect people that live in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest that are dealing with constant rain? I wonder if that would have some sort of an impact on them. Probably even more if you come from that population. I mean, I'm on the Spokane side, but I'm out in the middle of the forest. I get sun for maybe 10 to 2, and I'm on a north-facing slope, and I work indoors a lot of the time. I'm typing on my computer. I'm blogging. And so I don't get a lot of sun exposure, but that's where all these newfangled light panels and head-worn light devices and things come in that were actually developed for seasonal affective disorder that actually work pretty well just

to keep your mood up. If you're working indoors, you don't get sunlight exposure. Right, but Spokane is a different environment, right? You're not dealing with the constant rain that they're dealing with on the actual coast? No, the precipitation builds up on the mountains and then dumps back on in Seattle. Yeah, I mean, it still must be, you must get much more than you get in california or southern california at least but uh it's supposed to be very beautiful out there it's it's gorgeous so i'm about 25 minutes from quarter lane oh really yeah okay yeah that's supposed to be amazing i've never been beautiful i used to go over there i

raced the iron man and they they'd have that in lake quarter lane it's an iconic race just because i mean the mountains lake, everything is just gorgeous. I saw pictures of the lake where people were taking photographs of the bottom of the lake, like from a hundred feet, a hundred feet deep of water, you could see the bottom of the lake. It's that clear. Yeah.

That is insane. It's kind of funny because it's actually polluted because of all the mines that they have around there. Like there's a lot of metals in it because the Coeur d'Alene feeds into the Spokane River and your allotment of fish that you're supposed to eat from the spokane river is like one a year what like it's that high in metals so i mean i don't eat any i don't want i don't choose no kidding that's awful yeah yeah god damn it yeah but it's a beautiful lake i mean it's but what is the allotment of fish that you're supposed to eat

from the lake is it similar i i don't know i don't know but if i if i went to cordelaine i spent a lot of time swimming there i'd probably spent some time in the infrared sauna too spend some of those metals out let me ask you this what's the benefit of infrared sauna versus traditional sauna is there a benefit so the the idea is it's cooler you know you have an infrared here no yeah so you walk into the infrared it's like 155 to 158 degrees, most of them. There's a couple that will go up to like 170. Even though the air is cooler, the actual photons of light that are being released by the panels, you're surrounded by infrared panels while you're in there, those penetrate more deeply into tissue.

So you wind up getting a deeper sweat. You sweat for a longer time. You can stay in there longer because it's not quite as hot. But you look at like the studies out of Finland, right? These studies that show four to five-year lifespan increases from a weekly sauna protocol of, you know, I think it's like four times a week for 20 to 30 minutes. And the significant drop in dementia and Alzheimer's and a lot of these mortality risk factors. And you look at the studies that have been done in athletes where you get almost an erythropoietin, like a blood doping effect from sauna exposure when done post-workout. You stay in there for 20 to 30 minutes post-workout. All of these were done in a dry sauna. Yeah.

That's why I use a dry sauna as per Rhonda Patrick's recommendation. I just got that because she said there's no real studies like that on an infrared. There's a few metal. So they've analyzed metal and detoxification in some of these infrared saunas. And they have found that you release more through your sweat. You get a deeper sweat. So if your goal is something like detoxification, then theoretically infrared would work better. But how is that even possible?

Like when I'm in that, I'm fucking drenched. Like how could I get more out of that? Have you tried like a 30-minute infrared versus a 30-minute dry? Yeah, I have. I'm an idiot, so I don't feel like I'm suffering as much, so I don't like it. When you're in the infrared, you don't feel like i'm suffering as much so i don't like it when you're in the infrared you don't feel like you're suffering exactly yeah see that's the thing is and maybe i'm jaded because when i'm my infrared like i've got a i've got a kettlebell in there i've put my bike in there

yoga in there when i go in there at night actually like i was telling you we're talking about those those massage devices those they say out there yeah so right the so ass ones are like a pso rite they're like a shiv in your abs love those things but they open up your your cell they have up there yeah so right the psoas ones are like a p-s-o-r-i-t they're like a shiv in your abs love those things but they open up your your cell they open up you can work them on a lot of different body parts um anyway so i'll have stuff like that in there and occasionally do body work but i actually move i exercise in the sauna there's actually a sauna that's designed for that what the fuck is that called again there's a specific sauna that a lot of UFC guys are using. They're in Vegas. Yeah, and they're building them in gyms.

I know Winklejohn's gym. It's got like a TV panel in there. Yeah, yeah. They have televisions in there so you can even watch things, like watch directionals or watch some sort of instructional video on exercise. Yeah, that's what I think they're doing is they're trying to have you do your workout. Like you look at a screen in the sauna and you do your workout while you're looking at the screen. I think it's a fit spa.

I think it's called fit spa, something like that. Yeah. But the hot one that I go into, I mean, I sweat so much. I have a hard time believing I would sweat more anywhere else. I mean, I'm literally pouring sweat. And I keep that fucker around 190 degrees. So I'm, I'm really feeling, but I love it. In an ideal scenario, I would like it. I don't have a dry sauna, but I would like to get a barrel sauna because I have the, the infrared in my basement. It's one of those big ones, like the

four person infrared sauna that you can get into an exercise. You can, you can have more people do yoga or whatnot. And I'm i'm you know i'm six two but i can get into like a full down dog or into a lunge or whatever but i'd love to have a dry sauna as well what is a barrel sauna a barrel sauna is a it's like a big barrel you've probably seen them before they're um i don't think so they got benches on either side they're shaped like a like a cylinder uh they're they're very. They build up a lot of heat. I think even the shape of the barrel somehow allows the heat to be distributed more evenly through the sauna or something like that,

almost like a Traeger grill, for example. Okay, so this is it. Yeah, yeah. So that's what a barrel sauna looks like. Yeah, so I've got – what I did was I bought one of those endless pools that you swim against. Jamie, go to that one in the upper right-hand corner with the bubble on the outside of it that looks fucking awesome yeah you keep that sucker in your backyard i was at a guy's house in santa monica a couple weeks ago that's so cool

look at that thing yeah and it heats up the same way there's some sort of a power source attached to that yeah that's pretty badass see i want to get one of those and just put it out in the forest where i can look out with the cedar barrel sauna yeah it looks fucking cool yeah yeah yeah especially if you're in like a cold area and you could like like that look at that guy's getting set up looking over a lake you could look out into the snow serene yeah that's pretty pretty like a pastoral scene yeah you get in the cryo after you do the sauna i do sometimes uh but most days no most days i do either or yesterday i did cryo yeah yeah yeah i've been doing cryo every day because i'm staying down at the hilton and they have a cryotherapy chamber there oh nice i'm a bigger fan of the cold water the hilton has a

cryotherapy yeah they've got a cryotherapy chamber they've got they've got somebody works it they have like this thing called upgrade labs and like the basement of this uh this hilton really got like a cryo they've got an infrared sauna they've got so i've just been going down there every day and working out my workout this morning actually i did this machine they've got a machine called a vasper have you seen this before no you put like it's got cold cuffs you you know katsu training like blood flow restriction training right yeah so you put cold cuffs on your arms and then you put cold cuffs on your legs and increase the millimeters of mercury until you're basically you get less blood flow to your arms and your legs and then it's one of these full body exercise devices right so you're moving your arms and your legs like an elliptical trainer you're barefoot and the whole thing is cold so it's

pumping cold water through the blood pressure cuffs on your arms and your legs. And then it's got cold water back behind you on the, here it is right here. We're watching this. Uh, and, and by the way, this, this thing is not going to make you an athlete. Like that's not the purpose of, uh, of something like, what is the purpose of it? Just general fitness. You know, you're, you're getting cold. And when you take off the blood pressure cuffs, what happens is you've got a bunch of lactic acid trapped in the muscle as you're moving. And typically you're doing like 30 seconds as hard as you can go. So you might go, I mean, pretty heavy wattage, like 600, 800 watts for 15 to 30 seconds, and then you recover.

And when you finish and you take those cuffs off you get this amplification in growth hormone testosterone and based on some of the research they're talking about now stem cell mobilization really and it's like this this super quick 21 minute workout i actually want to get one from my house and how long is the amplification of testosterone and growth hormone and all that stuff how long does it last i don't know i mean cases, I mean, it's like a lot of things that affect testosterone or growth hormone or inflammation generally, it's like a 24 to 48 hour cycle. You know, it's like weed. You know, we know that weed suppresses testosterone, but it's not chronic. It's a temporary 24 hour drop in testosterone. Does it really suppress testosterone? It does. I didn't know about

that. Yeah. Although a lot of the studies on on marijuana they're using pretty high dosage and they're using rodent models they're using like 100 to 200 milligrams in rodent yeah and they're showing or i'm i'm sorry what would be the equivalent of 100 to 200 milligrams in a human on a rodent model you know a lot of a lot of the studies on supplementation same thing with tbi and concussion you know, and a lot of, a lot of the studies on supplementation, same thing with TBI and concussion, you know, you hear about DHA and fish oil for that, but you need to take a lot of fish oil, a lot of DHA. Like if you extrapolate from the rodent models, you're looking at like 50 to 60 grams of DHA or fish oil to manage like TBI or concussion,

which is, it's a lot of D dha but if you were going to use like a multimodal approach to to tbi or to alzheimer's or dementia right i mean i'm a i'm a huge fan of that i'm a fan of of like hyperbaric oxygen therapy um ketosis definitely works uh these these light devices that you wear on your head now. They've got a lot of research coming out on something called photobiomodulation for TBI. And these things produce hertz frequencies, 10 to 40 hertz range. You place them on your head. Typically, there's like a probe that goes into your nose. And they've got new research coming out on this for restoring blood flow to the head, increasing your alpha brainwave production, your gamma brainwave production.

Very cool devices. So what does a probe up your nose do? It delivers a wavelength of light that is supposed to activate part of the mitochondria. It's called cytochrome C oxidase. And when you activate that, you get increased mitochondrial activity, you get increased blood flow, you get increased production of nitric oxide. And this kind of returns to what I was talking about with seasonal affective disorder, where you can use a lot of these new things that are designed to deliver infrared light or light

to the body to increase mitochondrial density or to increase blood flow or to increase nitric oxide. to increase mitochondrial density or to increase blood flow or to increase nitric oxide. And people are now using this for TBI and concussion and stem cells as well. They've got a – actually, last time I was on the show, we were talking about how when I got that concussion in Austin, I did a self-administered infusion of sugar alcohols. I used Manitol, and then I followed that up with stem cells because I had my stem cells stored down in Florida and also in this lab called Forever Labs in Berkeley. And I followed that up. I chased it with a stem cell injection because when you inject sugar alcohol into your bloodstream, it renders your blood-brain barrier more permeable.

And then the stem cells can cross over through the blood-brain barrier. But now what they – Hold on. Slow down. So this – what are you doing with sugar alcohol? How are you administering it? Intravenously. An intravenous mannitol solution of sugar alcohol.

You're doing this yourself? I do this myself, but you could get this done by a doctor. And when you're doing it, like how? I recommend you get it done by a doctor. It sounds like a good idea to do. Yeah. Now what kind of dosage are you using? Of mannitol?

Yes. I don't remember. It was what I was advised to do by the doc who taught me this protocol. I don't remember how much it was, but it was like a vial. Yeah. I do the same thing with NAD every week. I do a weekly NAD injection. Every week?

Yeah. Do you do a push NAD that takes 10 minutes? It's a push IV. 10 minutes is pushing it. Yeah. It hurts. I mean, so normally if you were to get 500 to 1,000 milligrams of NAD, most people will sit under a four to a six-hour drip IV to do that. Mm-hmm.

And one reason for that that they say is that you get less of it degraded by the liver and the kidneys and the gut as the NAD goes into the body. Then a push. But I think that the bigger factor is simply the fact that when you do a push, like you're nauseous, you feel like your whole body's on fire. I mean, you feel like Superman afterwards, but it's a very, very uncomfortable IV. And I don't want anybody pushing that in except me. Like I want to be in charge of the trigger when I'm putting that thing in, because I got to stop and go and stop and go. But it's quicker. It's more convenient than sitting down and doing an IV. So a push, you would actually have a nurse actually pushing down on the button as things are going?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in intermittent intervals? I do about two, like two ticks on the syringe at a time because it's a 30 ml syringe. So I'll go like two cc's then stop and you can feel like your heart rate go up and you get nauseous and and your skin kind of flushes a little bit and you breathe it off then you wait like 10-15 seconds and you do another push kyle king's what he was saying it felt like his guts were on fire yeah kyle i think is a champ i think he did it in like five minutes or something like that which is like for me if i if i can do it in 10 minutes

then you know it's it's absolutely mind-blowing in terms of how hard that is i don't know how he did it in five minutes but well he's a savage you know it's interesting though i started to listen to your podcast with david sinclair on the on the car ride over and he's talking about this nmn stuff which supposedly when orally administered simulates a lot of what NR, nicotinamide riboside, which is one thing that a lot of people are taking for anti-aging, and NAD, which is what we were just talking about, administered via either, in most cases, it's IV. There's a couple companies doing like an oral NAD version.

But supposedly NMN, I don't know if Sinclair has any human studies coming out on this right now or at least released. But he's done rodent studies and shown that it's like exercise in a bottle. The NAD, from what I understand though, and this returns to the TBI concussion piece, crosses the blood-brain barrier easily or more easily than NMN or NR. So if you were doing it for like a cognitive or a neurological effect, you may want to choose NAD. It sounds to me like from the research I've seen, if you were doing it for the exercise effect, maybe you'd choose NMN or NR. Interesting.

The anti-aging effect. They don't even know in many cases all the pathways on which these things are working, but most of them are related to these sirtuin pathways, right? Like sirtuin activating compounds that actually allow your mitochondria to repair more quickly or give your body more antioxidants. So the idea is they probably all have a pretty good effect on anti-aging. And when you're doing it, are you pushing yourself? You say you're doing it once a week. Are you doing it yourself?

Are you pushing it? The IV? Yeah. And how much time do you give yourself? To actually you're doing it once a week. Are you doing it yourself? Are you pushing it? The IV? Yeah. And how much time do you give yourself? To actually do the NAD? Yeah. If I've got 20 minutes, I'm happy. If I have to compress in 10 minutes, it hurts.

I like to at least allow for 20 minutes. And then you follow it up in most cases with like an IV cocktail, like a Myers cocktail, vitamin cocktail. And supposedly that, it does a few things. Supposedly it enhances your stem cell mobilization or the activity of stem cells and allows the ND to be absorbed into the cells more easily. So you basically, I mean, the way I do it is I use it like just a butterfly needle and you do the NAD administration and then you just unscrew the end of the butterfly needle line, and then you put the vitamin cocktail in to follow up with vitamin cocktail, which takes like 30 to 60 seconds, and then you're done.

And why do you do it once a week? To feel good. No, but why once a week? Why not twice a week? The idea is you're supposed to maintain your levels, and there's even some evidence, and this is kind of similar to testosterone, that long-term use may suppress your body's own NAD production. So if you're going to start to do it, great. But you may want to realize that this is something you'd need to do regularly to keep your levels elevated because you may get like a down-regulation effect.

Oh, interesting. So your body might recognize that it has a surplus of NAD. It's got a lot of NAD. It doesn't need to make more. One of the very interesting things, though, I did a couple of weeks ago was I went to New York City. And I got NAD from this doctor, Dr. Chen, over there. But then he infused me with CoQ10 and a bunch of other vitamins to allow my body to make more of what are called adult pluripotent stem cells. They're also known as V cells, very small embryonic-like cells. Now, if you've heard of

parabiosis before, this idea of taking the blood from young mice and transferring that into old mice, there was research that they did at Stanford University on this. You impart, essentially, research that they did at Stanford University on this, you impart essentially enhanced longevity to the old mice. The idea is that's a non-autologous transfer, right? Like that's the transfer of blood from a young, healthy donor into an older recipient. And there are companies now in Silicon Valley doing this, like the Young Blood Institute, you know, for like $8,000, this company called Ambrosia will give you the plasma from a young, healthy donor. Is there any evidence that that does anything good for you, though, other than the studies that they've done on mice?

I don't know of any studies on humans. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But is there anecdotal evidence? I mean, do people that you know have done it? Yeah, I'm about to get into that. You're going to do it. But you haven't. No, I did an autologous version of that.

So I didn't want to put somebody else's blood into my body. So what I did was I had this doc take out a pint of my blood. And what happens is if you put all these vitamins like NAD and stuff into your blood, it increases your stem cell production. If you stress the blood after that, it dumps out a bunch of these tiny little adult pluripotent stem cells, which is exactly the same type of cell that you're getting when you do one of these young blood transfers. So he stresses that overnight in cold. You can use cold. You could use pressure.

You could use anything to increase the stem cell release from the blood cells. But they get stressed out. They release stem cells. And then what happens is you get them injected back into your body afterwards. Is this similar to what they're doing with Regenokine? I don't think it's anything like that. Well, you know, Regenokine, they take the blood out and they stress it with heat and then they spin it in the centrifuge.

But I think, I think, and I don't know a lot about what Regenokine is doing, but I think they're more concentrating the growth factors. I think they might be doing exosomes. I know they've got some overseas places where they're doing like a culture expanded or something like that. But as far as in the US, like this, this protocol is one of the few that I know of where you could take your own blood and get a lot of that same stuff that you'd get from culture expanded or from parabiosis, like using the blood of somebody else. And you get all these stem cells released into your body. So you essentially get the same effect as you would if you took a young person's blood.

If you did a young blood transfer. And the young blood transfer, they're not transferring the entire body's supply of blood. No, they're taking a bunch of plasma. I don't know the volume that they're using. In my case, they took a pint of my blood, so four 60cc tubes. Now, is there any anecdotal evidence or any published evidence on your style what you're trying to do and the benefits of it no just that equals one i just felt like a million bucks afterwards yeah the um the other one that i did that worked very

well on my knee because i have some meniscus issues on my left knee was i did what's called a nerve hydrodissection have you heard of this nerve hydrodissection. Have you heard of this before? Hydrodissection is a protocol where they take like a liquid and they use the liquid to act like the scalpel or the knife that a surgeon would use to kind of remove adhesions like scar tissue adhesions or separate a nerve that's causing pain or discomfort or lack of mobility in a certain joint. But when they do a nerve hydrodissection, they don't have to use like, you know, something like they'd use in prolotherapy, like sugar water or regular water. What I had done, and this was at a clinic called BioReset in San Jose with Dr. Matt Cook down there.

set in San Jose with Dr. Matt Cook down there. He went in and did a nerve hydrodissection and he used ozone and a placental cell. It wasn't like a culture expanded placental cell, which is what I understand to be illegal in the US, but just like a regular placental extract. He did that into my knee and my knee went from like 25% to in a couple of weeks and that protocol was called nerve hydrodissection they use ultrasound imaging to to basically visualize where the needle is going into the knee they identify the area where the adhesion or the scar tissue is they inject it right there and i mean it's like a 10 minute long procedure now this is for only a buildup of adhesion scar tissue what about for people that you know might need it was developing yeah it was developed for nerve pain and what they found was that it actually seems to cause some kind of a release of the scar tissue followed

by an increase in the blood flow which is difficult to get in some areas of the knee right especially so so yeah i mean i would i if I ever get to the point where somebody wants to sculpt my knee or something like that, I would definitely consider doing that treatment first because it worked very well and it was just quick and easy. I had a meniscus issue and I got exosomes shot into there. I've had it done three times now. And every time I've done it, I've experienced a good benefit from it then i beat the shit out of it and i think i gave it not enough time to heal up before i started pounding again i would give

it like a week off then start running again yeah but now i'm gonna give it a full six weeks with uh no pounding no running hills nothing crazy and i've experienced just in the two weeks since the procedure a very significant decrease in pain, no inflammation, decrease in discomfort. I have to, like, try to make it feel weird now. I have to, like, go out of my way. And it seems like every week that's more and more difficult to do and the range of motion's increased. I basically can go all the way down with my ass to my ankles with no problem. You know, I bend all the way down and back all the my ankles with no problem you know i bend all the way down

and back all the way up with no discomfort no weirdness yeah i kind of question the one thing because i've asked myself this before and i don't know if you have like when you get a protocol like that done and you kind of go easy on your knee because you really want it to work and you start backing off of some of that stuff you were doing anyways how much of it is you just backing off of what you were doing and how much of it is the exosomes and the stem cells i know because i did try to back off initially and it didn't have any impact at all yeah when i when i backed off initially with nothing i said let me just take some time off and let it see if i can let it heal up didn't do shit it just it stayed exactly the same like Like it was just hurt, you know? Like, so it was one of those things where in the past I would have had to just deal

with it. Like now this is my new world. This is my new feeling in my knee until I get it scoped. Yeah. So it's pretty significant, the impact that it's had. I mean, I'm a giant believer in stem cells and exosomes. I had a full length rotator cuff tear on my right shoulder and now it's gone it's gone like it doesn't exist anymore and really dr rodney mcgee out of vegas go you know he yeah

looked at the uh the mri and he said to me he goes you know how fucking crazy that is like you had a tear in your rotator cuff and now there's no tear yeah like it's regenerated tissue it's crazy which is the ultimate goal right i mean, I have zero pain in the shoulder. I mean, nothing. Did you do peptides for long? I did peptides. I did, what is it, BPC-157? Yeah.

Well, BPC-157, that's the only one that's still legal, according to USADA and WADA, for athletes to use. And that one decreases inflammation and increases blood flow. And then the other one, the one that's not allowed anymore, is TB500, thymus and beta 500. And that one repairs the actin and the myosin fibers. And so in a gold standard protocol, you go back and forth between the two for like two weeks. So you switch it up one day, one the next day? Yeah, you just like inject subcutaneously near the site of injury. And that works for a lot of people.

But peptides are weird. Like I'm attending all these anti-aging and longevity conferences now because I want to learn a lot more about this. I'm almost kind of starting to pivot from just pure human performance to how can you live a long time. You should talk to Sinclair. Yeah, yeah. I want to finish listening to your interview with him because I was intrigued. Fascinating guy. Yeah.

So the, um, the idea is that these peptides are talked about a lot now in these anti-aging circles. Like they, they've got weird names, like, like epitalon is one and two times a year, like a 10 to 20 day injection protocol of epitalon. times a year, like a 10 to 20 day injection protocol of epithelon, they're getting a bunch of increased mitochondrial density, decreased markers of aging, increased fat loss, increased muscle gain. And they've done that in humans. And so again, it's just a peptide. It's very easy. Like you would inject it next to your abdominals subcutaneously. There's another one. No side effects? This one, not with that one, but this one called Melanotan. Have you heard of it before?

No. So I was intrigued by this. Somebody was telling me about it. It's a peptide, and it was used in the bodybuilding industry for a long time. Because when you inject it, it gives you this amazing tan. They call it Melanotan. It stimulates your melanin production. Is that that lady that was on that fucking show

that was turning black? She believed that she was in the wrong skin, so she was shooting something into her body, and she got black like Congo black. Well, I tried it out. I tried it out for about a week. Did you try to get black? No, I didn't try to get black.

What if it stuck? I just wanted to see what happened to the tan. I started to get some freckles, but the side effect of this is you get massive boners that last a really annoyingly long time. Oh, poor baby. No, but people will use this as almost like an ED type of drug. Right. And I don't even know the mechanism of action.

I don't know how it's even working. Well, it's giving you a black dick so basically you get a tan and boners look at her no that's not how you would administer Milano tan she's doing some kind of like a volume filler what is that thing that she's doing with a syringe

what the that looks like a caulking gun like what is she doing isn't that the type of thing Like the Kardashians Are doing to their ass cheeks Like the fillers I don't know what they're doing To their ass cheeks

They're doing something That seems like Well it's very popular With the young people These days They're taking fat Out of certain parts Of their body

And putting it in their ass Right It's not I don't We should find out That's interesting. How are they getting diaper butt? Just Google, how are women today, how are Instagram models getting diaper butt?

I'm curious. Because that's what it is. It's what you have those little skinny legs. So they're taking their fat from somewhere else in their body. Yes. And injecting that. I know that some people do that. We should do that for our calves.

I know some people do that way. We could start an Instagram calf channel. No. I don't want fat calves where they jiggle when you walk like a girl's butt. Well, he's pulling that up. What kind of coffee is this? This is Black Rifle coffee. It's good.

Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. Fetra Noned. I figured out something. Thank you, by the way, for hooking me up with Traeger. Oh, no sweat. It's great, right? I got one of those Traeger Timberlines.

Those are the shit. And I've been making a coffee rub for the steak. You ever done a coffee rub before? Yes, I have. Traeger has their own coffee rub. Well, they have their own. I love you, Traeger. But I sometimes never know what all is in some of these spices and rubs.

They'll add some maltodextrin or sugar and stuff. Yeah, there's some sugar in there. So I fine grind coffee, and I mix that with black cone salt, cayenne pepper, and paprika. And you can just make that rub as thick as you want, put that on the ribeye. And I've almost switched completely from doing my stovetop sear followed by the quick broil on either side to doing like a one and a half to two hour smoke in the Traeger with that coffee rub on and then just finishing it on the grill with the Traeger. Yeah.

I did a, what would you call it? A prime rib. It's basically ribeye roast. Yeah. And I did one on the Traeger, and I cooked it for like four hours at 220 degrees. Holy shit. You smoked it for four hours? Yes. For four hours? Yes, yes.

And it had, I used Traeger's prime rib rub. Does the Traeger smoke at that temperature? There's a super smoke setting at 225 and below. Okay. Press the super smoke button, and it constantly infuses this pump of smoke. Like, it's like... I've never tried super smoke at that high of a temperature. Oh, good Lord.

It's delicious, dude. And the, but the Traeger prime rib rub, I know it has sugar in it. It's tastes too delicious to not, but Holy shit. When it's in there for three and a half, four hours and it has that crust on it. There's some, some about that long smoke. Have you tried a beer can chicken on that thing at all? Yes. Beer can chicken.

So I've, I've, I've tried a bunch of different rubs on that, but just, just coarse salt and black pepper works fine for the beer can chicken on that thing at all? Yes. Beer can chicken. So I've tried a bunch of different rubs on that, but just coarse salt and black pepper works fine for the beer can chicken. You empty about half of the beer can out. You open up the beer can, but then you poke a couple extra holes in the top so you get more of the steam so the inside of the chicken gets even more moist.

But then what I figured out is if you use like a little scalpel or X-Acto knife and you cut open the skin of the chicken around the outside a little bit and you stuff that with pads of butter and then you do your smoke with the pads of butter inside the chicken that the skin gets crispy like super crispy and so you just it's like i think it's like an hour an hour and a half you cook that one and you can't you can't smoke that one very successfully like you want to run the grill with the smoke on but you can't super smoke it.

It doesn't seem to work so well. But that beer can chicken, that's freaking amazing. Yeah, whoever figured that out, whatever drunk figured that out is a goddamn genius. I know what I'm going to do. It works. But I've wondered before if there are other things that will work even better than beer.

What do you got, Jamie? It says in most cases what I'm finding is either Brazilian butt lift or just like a fat graft or fat injection. But there have been cases where I'm seeing that they had to get an injection taken out within weeks because it was causing a problem. So like, I don't know if that was

just fat. Well, you got the fat put in and you have to take it back out? Yeah, because they were dying. That'd be a bummer. Great. And then you have this fucking war zone of an ass. Yeah, most of it is lipo from one part. That's got to leave some marks. Like a Syrian airstrip.

Yeah, no more G-string. 32 people died, supposedly, in 2017. Wonderful. Yeah, that's like the same amount of people that died from coconuts falling on their head. That's a fucking ridiculous way to die. And here's the thing. What they're doing is not aesthetically pleasing because it violates your sensibilities.

Because you look at the ass and you look at the legs and you go, what's wrong here? How did you get that ass with those legs? They don't go together like if you look at like a crossfitters legs like one of them powerful gals with a big butt but they also have especially with those knee-high neon compression socks it looks right it fits like if the ass fits the thigh it's not entirely disproportionate yes when the ass pumps out and then it goes these little little toothpick legs, you're like, that's gross. That's weird. You know?

Like, what's going on there? That's a real ass. See, that's a real ass. In the advent of Instagram, we may be evolving as a species to find these type of things more attractive, though. Because that's the whole idea with social media is you get a dopamine hit every time you click on the little blue notification button. Or you look at a new photo. So maybe we're just going to eventually develop a real appreciation for that type of symmetry.

No. We'll redefine our idea of what true human symmetry is. Incorrect. It doesn't look as good. It just doesn't look as good. It's a cheap fix for squats. Yeah. Get your ass to the gym, girls.

Do some deadlifts. Run up hills. All all right so squats and muscle building uh did you see that ronda patrick tweeted that study about mice and myonuclei and how when they when they dope mice they actually they they never actually lose the muscles myonuclei yes like those don't actually ever disappear. It's not even just when you don't, but just when, when you lift period muscle memory,

essentially, which we've already known, right. Built in muscle memory. Yeah. Muscle memory has always been in sort of an anecdotal idea. Well, muscle memory has been in many cases,

just based on a motor unit recruitment, like meaning like, you know, like, like my wife, she ran for university of Idaho. And when I go out running with her still, even though she doesn't train, she's just got faster leg turnover. She's got better form. Her body just remembers that. The same thing with a swimmer, right? I'll

do a triathlon. Somebody who swam in college but hasn't swam in 10 years will kick my ass just because they have that muscle memory in terms of which motor units to recruit when. But this latest one was basically the idea that you retain actual myonuclei in the muscle. Like they thought for a long time that those just disappeared and went away once you detrained. But it turns out that they're all still there. So as soon as you start training again, you build muscle more quickly and furthermore, and this was kind of like the political part 2013. Like this was a while ago where they took mice and they gave one group testosterone and the other group didn't get it. And then they spent six months off testosterone. I don't remember how long they were on it, but they spent six months off it.

And then they took those mice and they trained them with the training protocol and the mice that were on the testosterone, but we're no longer on on it had a 30% increase in muscle mass compared to the other mice that only had a 5% increase on it. So once again, and this was probably related to that myonuclei thing that just came out in this recent study. So it turns out that A, you should lift like when you're young because you can build all these myonuclei that just basically hang around your body. Like when you're young, because you can build all these myonuclei that just basically hang around your body. And then B, when they like ban somebody from sport for doping and then they come back and start to compete in that sport again, they still have an advantage. Well, that has huge implications for MMA. Because that's the big debate right now. How long should someone get suspended for?

And for how long, you know, how long afterwards should get suspended for and for how long you know how long afterwards should they be considered enhanced yeah you know like they're giving people some pretty significant suspensions now for steroids like two years but you know there's this john jones case that i'm sure you're aware of do you wear this yeah where he's testing positive for the metabolite for a long-term metabolite for a very small dose. He's never tested positive for a short-term metabolite. For testosterone? No, it's not testosterone.

It's, what is the stuff, taranabol? Yeah. And essentially, it's a tainted supplement, and it doesn't have any performance-enhancing benefit in terms of the amount of the dosage that he's tested positive for. But it's lingering in his system because the protocols for, well, their ability rather to detect these metabolites has increased rapidly. And over the last year, it's just unbelievably more sensitive to the point where, you know, they're detecting these infinitesimally small levels of these metabolites, and there also seems to be some sort of a pulsing effect,

where your body releases these infinitesimally small metabolites and then doesn't, so you'll test negative, and then the next week you'll test positive, but only for the long-term metabolite, which is an indication that there's no re-administration of the performance-enhancing drug. So it's real's and everybody's mad there's so many athletes that are mad about it and from what you're saying and for this study that dr ronda patrick highlighted it's you know it's it's especially for someone who's willingly taken something yeah there's a lot of those like once a doper always a doper type of

things there is that but see the john j Jones situation is very tricky because he's so good and he's so dominant that people just assume that he's been doing something his whole career. Yeah. You know, and when you catch him, they're like, aha, that's the reason why he's so good. Yeah. And it may be, but it also might be, he's got phenomenal genetics. He has two brothers that are super athletes. He was just the best of the guys who were taking drugs.

That's a different situation because that's a sport where, at least in the time period where he was competing, everyone was doing something, 100%. They had to go back to 18th place. And you don't think the UFC is like that. It's not right there. It's not. It's not.

It can't be. They're too strict. You saw it as knocking on doors at 6 o'clock in the morning, peeing this cup. And you do hear about positive tests, but the amount of positive tests versus the negative tests is overwhelming. Way more guys are not doing something.

It used to be the opposite. It used to be in the 90s, everyone was doing something. We were just talking about this on the Fight Companion podcast that a big issue is grappling. Grappling competitions are overrun with steroid users because no one's testing and these i mean it's the smell test is off the fucking charts you're looking at these guys they're just ridiculous just jacked yeah low body fat super high muscle mass and they're training jujitsu all the time too so you would think it would be very hard for them to maintain muscle mass as well as be able to train the way they're training with technique and drills and cardio and all those different things.

It's very difficult to maintain muscle. Yes. Any concurrent strength endurance training scenario, very difficult. Very difficult. So there's a real issue with some of these guys competing this way and then trying to transition into MMA. Yeah. Now, what's the deal with marijuana in the m in mma

much legal now um they they don't in season out of season yeah it's fine they just they they've lowered the um acceptable level or the they've raised it rather like what you could have in your bloodstream you basically just can't be high the day of the fight yeah yeah and that's another interesting one i mean that acts especially thc acts on a lot of these mTOR pathways you know that's that's the same thing with a lot of these anti-aging compounds right like rapamycin or you know metformin to a lesser extent acts on that mTOR pathway and inhibits it right but again it's it's short term with something like marijuana and you also get this pain killing effect and there was I forget if this was a study or if it was if it was like anecdotal, but it's almost like a higher thrill seeking effect.

Like the endocannabinoid system, when stimulated, shuts down some of your your your sense of fear when it comes to experiencing a new adventure. Really? And so you actually you actually go adventure seeking more. your your sense of fear when it comes to experiencing a new adventure really and so you actually you actually go adventure seeking more and when you look at like ultra runners um anybody who's competing in a a non-complex activity in which they might have already developed the ability to be able to be in the zone right they've put in their 10 000 hours of practice and they're able to just kind of check out and go into automatic mode. When you combine that with the pain quelling effects of something like, you know, in most cases, like a THC CBD combo is what a lot of ultra runners are

using. I'm not sure what they'd use in MMA right now. But ultimately, you get a good effect, but the loss of reaction time and the loss of the ability to be able to perform complex tasks, which they've proven in flight simulation studies, dictates that it's still not that great of a drug if you're going to be doing complex tasks. Here's the question, though. studies for people that are acclimated to taking marijuana or are they talking about it with people where they take a someone who's a sober person and they introduce them to marijuana and there's this overwhelming effect of it because one of the things that happens to people that aren't accustomed to thc is the freak out effect yeah where they're just like they're not comfortable with the experience after a while the way it's described And again, this is all anecdotal But by people that are accustomed to it They say, you just get good at being high

And see, the reaction time thing I don't buy Because a lot of strikers A lot of kickboxers They train while they're on marijuana It's very common I believe it Well, a study on reaction time was done on pilots

And there's a few more blinky lights in the cockpit than a mat. Sure. There might have been more going on. Sure. But the question is, are they experienced stoners? Or are these people that are freaking out? And maybe the reaction time is they're spacing out and they don't know what the fuck this experience is like. And they might have anxiety because of it.

You know, there's a lot of really overwhelming sensations that come with that marijuana high, and a lot of them you call paranoia or oversensitivity, and sometimes you get paralysis by analysis when you're under the influence of those things. Yeah, it's the acute versus chronic effect. But with jiu-jitsu, personally, my personal experience with jiu-jitsu and marijuana is it's an enhancer. And I've argued this, that I think it's a performance-enhancing drug. With CBD? No.

Do you combine it with CBD? No, just marijuana. That's what a lot of endurance athletes are, you know, like folks in the ultra-running community who use it now. Like they'll use like a trace amount of THC combined with CBD, like a 4 to 1 to a 10 to 1 CBD to THC ratio. to a 10 to 1 CBD to THC ratio. And I think now with the farm bill and increasing legality, I think this idea of developing sports performance supplements for athletes who aren't competing in sports where that is banned are going to be steered in the direction of high CBD

and then some of these other novel molecules like CBG or CBN. I'm not aware of those. What are those? Yeah, there's all these different – Cannabinoids? Not just terpenes. Yeah, CBG, CBN are cannabinoids. THC-8 is an anti-inflammatory that's totally different than THC-9. Are these from orally ingesting it or from smoking it or vaporizing it? No, they actually are now isolating these in labs, almost like organic chemistry.

And you can take hemp or marijuana and you can actually isolate specific compounds and then combine them. So you could take like CBG, CBD, combine that with other terpenes from like whatever, let's say lavender and valerian and chamomile and make like a de-stress relaxation type of compound. relaxation type of compound or you could do like a like a thc but a thc8 instead of a thc9 and combine that with like cinnamon and peppermint maybe some caffeine or creatine or something like that to make like more of a pick-me-up type of compound but i think that's that's the wave of the future when it comes to a lot of these these marijuana companies that are developing stuff for specific goals i know a lot of folks that are trying the CBD that use it for inflammation, especially athletes, like it with a little bit of THC. They seem to think it's more effective.

You know, there's some sort of combined effect of the THC with the CBD. Yeah, yeah, they call that the entourage effect, you know, when you have all the different terpenes and the endocannabinoids playing together. Which one's turtle? Yeah, which one's turtle? I have no clue. So there's hundreds of different cannabinoids, right? I don't think there's hundreds. I think there's at least dozens.

I don't know about hundreds. How many of them? Let's find out. I mean, if you look at a chart of the different endocannabinoids they've actually discovered, if you were to just Google. 113. I don't know. 113.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a lot. it's a lot of fucking cannabinoids i wonder yeah i wonder if they'll be able to like design something that gives you the high without the paranoia or gives you the you know various effects yeah without spacing out yeah i think that's that's where supplementation is going in general right it's just like we were talking about with diet how how based on your genetics, based on your blood work, based on your biomarkers, that's how you would choose your diet. I mean, like the carnivore diet, if you're, let's say, like sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian and you have high levels of – there are genes for salivary amylase. There's one called the AMY1 gene. amylase there's one called the amy1 gene there are genes responsible for you having a higher inflammatory response to saturated fat or a ketogenic diet or like there's one called the apo e gene you know apo e34 which i have dictates that even though i personally eat it kind of like

a higher fat low carbohydrate diet the majority of my fats come from Mediterranean fat sources, you know, olive oils, avocado oil, a lot of fish. And I do that because my genetics dictate that, you know, my macronutrient ratio, my diet is going to is going to be best suited to that specific ratio of fats. But you could say the same thing with supplements, you know, I think with supplements now with all these different places that will self-quantify, you know, like WellnessFX and InsideTracker and 23andMe, you can take all this data, put it together and actually determine, you know, whatever. Everybody's saying I'm supposed to take 2000 international units of vitamin D a day. If your vitamin D levels are like 80 or 90, then that could cause arterial calcification if you're taking excess vitamin D. I had both myself

and my kids tested for our genetics. None of us boys in the Greenfield family actually have the gene that allows us to generate appreciable amounts of vitamin D from sunlight. So we all now supplement with vitamin D and vitamin K. My boys, neither of them possess the enzyme or the, I guess it is an enzyme, superoxide dismutase. It's a gene that allows for increased expression of this enzyme that allows for glutathione production, right? So they take glutathione now. They have the one that results in a lower than normal level of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the stuff that's like miracle girl for the brain.

So they use lion's mane extract now before school. blood test and looking at what your ancestors would have eaten if you happen to to have i i guess kind of like a clean enough to interpret ancestral profile to be able to say well here's you know i'm mostly northern european so this is what i'm going to do well on you combine all that stuff i think you know return to your question about the carnivore diet that's the way to eat this apo e4 is also leaves you predisposed to CTE, correct? Yeah. So you have that? At higher risk. No, I've got the ApoE3-4.

3-4. The ApoE4-4 is the one that's more concerning for that. Oh, okay. Yeah, and you get a very deleterious response in many cases to fats. It's like an inflammatory response to fats. That's interesting. Very similar like if you had familial hypercholesterolemia you know and you get on like a ketogenic diet for example and your cholesterol goes up to 500 i mean it's something that just doesn't agree with a lot of people yeah that's what's really important to

discuss right that everybody's body really does respond differently to all sorts of different diets and yeah it's so difficult for people especially if they don't have a lot of research in the field if they don't have you know they haven't read a lot about it to try to determine what's the best diet for them yeah there there are there are specific characteristics though that regardless of macronutrient ratios and regardless of food composition you see over and over again in centenarians or in people who are living in a blue zone or people who have the absence of a lot of disease risk factors or high risk of mortality. Like we see regular periods of caloric restriction, like at some point, either a compressed feeding window or intermittent fasting or like, you know, the Mediterranean diet, everybody talks about goat cheese and olive oil and fish and eggs, but not a lot of people talk about the religious aspect of that. That includes certain periods of time where you fast certain periods of time where you don't

eat meat, certain days where you, where you aren't drowning all your food in olive oil. Right. And so in terms of other characteristics that you see, glycemic variability, you see very low periods of glucose fluctuations occurring throughout the day because of high intake of either fiber or legumes is a big one that you see in the blue zones, right? Like high intake of things like lentils and split mung beans and a lot of these things that get thrown under the bus now where we're talking about lectins and gut damage. But ultimately, returning back to what I said earlier, soaking and sprouting and fermentation makes a lot of those things more healthy. Can I pause you right there? I'm not aware of that. What are the issues with lectins and guttons? So the issue with lectins, and this is based on a book that was published, I think, about two years ago called The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry. And he talks about how lectins are these built-in natural plant defense mechanisms that are in primarily plants and seeds and the skins of certain fruits and vegetables that will cause your digestive tract to become damaged or would give you a deleterious or inflammatory response to that food. Kind of a similar argument as the paleo people make, right? They say, well, you don't eat dairy

because that could have inflammatory proteins in it that might cause an autoimmune reaction or don't eat bread because of the gluten and the phytic acid. But when, when you step back and you look at a lot of, a lot of blue zones, a lot of longevity hotspots, a lot of centenarians, you don't see avoidance of these foods. You see smart preparation of them, right? When you hunt, you don't sit up in a tree with a, like a dagger in your teeth, like Peter Pan and jump out of the tree on, you know, on the back of a deer and, and, you know, just start eating the deer, right? Like you have to go through a pretty long process of tracking and stalking and hunting and, and field dressing and quartering.

And even then, you know, there, there's a pretty intensive cooking process. And we do things like, you know, like coffee rubs and things to decrease the amount of carcinogens in the meat when you cook it. And, and we dry age and you'll take the organ meats and soak them in lemon juice or buttermilk to remove the gamey flavor and blah, blah, blah. Stop, stop, stop. Okay. Hold on. I've got to do this.

Otherwise, I'm going to forget. Coffee rubs. How does it decrease the amount of carcinogens? Well, coffee, rosemary, thyme, a lot of these things that we use as rubs, one of the benefits of them is they decrease the formation of a lot of these carcinogenic compounds in the meat, you know, like the burnt, charred components of the meat. Anything that's an antioxidant, right, and you could just go in your spice cupboard and start to make up rubs based on this concept. Anything that would be, you know, these sirtuin precursors that people are talking about now for anti-aging, like blueberries and red wine and dark chocolate and dark purple fruits and berries etc you dry those you powder those that's a great rub right because all of a sudden you're decreasing the carcinogenic aspects of burnt meat or charred

meat or heavily cooked proteins particularly so the idea is you want to prepare your food in a manner that renders it digestible and that unlocks the nutrients. And so when we talk about dietary customization, not only do you see calorie restriction, compressed feeding windows, fasting as one element that regardless of the diet that you choose has been shown to improve health and lifespan. But you also see low amounts of glycemic variability. You see a high amount of emphasis placed on rendering the food digestible, again, no matter what it is that you're eating. And so whether you're eating a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet or a high-carb, low-fat, high-fat, low-carb, what have you, the idea is you try to choose real recognizable food. Then you render that digestible and you eat as many different food groups as you can eat

based on self-experimentation primarily until you land on that diet that works well for you. If you can combine that with self-quantification, blood, biomarkers, look at your microbiome, look at your genetics, I mean mean there's no reason that that most people shouldn't just be able to eat the diet that works for their body but it's a hard thing to discover the the idea that you can figure out what works best for you like what feels best like people start convincing themselves you know that one thing is more beneficial to the other and that's one of the things that people wonder about this whole carnivore thing is like are they mind fucking themselves are they giving themselves a placebo benefit of only eating this way yeah and then you just go to sean baker's instagram every day and you hashtag meat heals

and you're like yes meat's healing me and you start a tribe right it's a tribe it's like a church it's a religion it's the nutrition is highly religious and dogmatic well the the carnivore diet people are the exact opposite of the vegan people. They're the same but different. They're all just preaching that you should only eat meat and meat's the thing. They're mocking vegans and the vegans are saying disparaging things about people who eat meat. It's really similar. The issue is the same thing, though.

It's the fact that when you start on a highly restrictive diet, that tends to be dogmatic, too. Like, I'm going to only eat meat, or I'm not going to have meat, and I'm going to only eat vegetables. You feel pretty good. Like, you feel a difference. It's impossible not to feel a difference once you go completely myopic on your diet and have a very limited number of food choices. myopic on your diet and have a very limited number of food choices. But we know that vegans build up deficits in creatine, in taurine, in, you know, unless they're eating algae and stuff like that, in DHA, in EPA, in fatty acids and amino acids, long-term deficits in cortisol, which affects your cell membranes. You can definitely do it right. I mean, there's dudes like, you know,

freaking Rich Roll, right? Like great guy. And he, and, and he's into like the, you know, freaking Rich Roll, right? Like great guy and he's into like the, you know, fermentation, soaking and sprouting and superfoods. And, you know, it's honestly kind of expensive and time consuming to do a vegan diet the right way, but you could do it. A lot of people don't. But if you're not careful, you build up deficits long term, even though you feel really good short term. It's the same thing with something like a carnivore diet. short term it's the same thing with something like a carnivore diet like you're probably going to build up some kind of microbiome bacterial deficiencies unless you're eating the intestines of ruminants or i suppose supplementing with some kind of really good probiotic well it's just fascinating because they they find these people that have been doing it for 20 years they pull

these folks out of the woods like look we got this one guy he's been doing it for 18 years look how healthy they are they so show someone doing chin-ups but But the reality is you don't really hear about that diet or you didn't really hear about that diet until like three or four years ago. Right. And much more so over the last two years, probably because of me, accidentally. Ups. You know, having all these people on and talking about it. And, you know, the people like Jordan that have had –

look, it's impossible to deny the benefits that he's gotten. The guy looks fantastic. He lost a tremendous amount of weight and but to your point that is most likely because of an elimination diet and whatever was fucking with him before and i think you know most people that start off with a poor diet and then switch to a restricted diet they're just going to be better because they don't have the the stuff that's poor they don't have the trans fats they don't have all the sugar they don't have all the nonsense it They don't have all the nonsense. It's probably causing a good deal of the information in the first place.

So by eliminating all those bad things from their diet and then concentrating on the one thing that they, the only one thing that they're eating, you think the one thing they're eating is causing all the benefits when it's probably the lack of the bad things. Exactly. It's a fancy elimination diet. But it's a delicious one. It is. Speaking of delicious, are you hunting at all this year? Yes, yes.

What's your hunt? Well, I mean, I'm going through the two elk that I've given away a lot of it to that I shot last year. Every year I schedule two elk hunts and assume I'm going to strike out. And the last two years I've been very lucky and I got going to strike out. And the last two years, I've been very lucky, and I got two elk each year. Yeah, it's breaking the rules of the secret in Think and Grow Rich, to assume you're going to strike out.

You're supposed to sit cross-legged in your sauna and manifest that shit. Yeah, I work hard, but I assume. It's a hard thing to do, to fucking kill an elk. And people don't realize. No, they don't And you look at a clip Like there's clips of me online And the clip is like a minute long

And it seems like Oh look how easy Yeah You don't see stalking in for hours You don't see the hundreds of hours Of shooting arrows The coaching from John Dudley All the reading archery articles

And understanding And keeping your mindset clear in the moment. It's a lot of difficulty. It's a long haul. My boys have their first hunt in three months. What kind? And we've been prepping for seven months. They're doing bow hunt in Kona for pig.

Oh, wow. Yeah, my wife, she's going after sheep. How old are your kids? The boys are going after pig. They're 10. So are you getting them a crossbow? No, no. Right now they're shooting a hoyt ignite um they're

shooting at about 25 yards jess is shooting at about 40 yards how many pounds have they been prepping they're about 45 now which is going to be enough that's enough if you have a yeah but i mean they're still contact yeah i mean they're still when they when they draw they're you know pointing up and pulling so they've still got a couple more months of training to really get dialed in um but yeah it's it's difficult i still haven't even gotten my elk bow hunting you know i spent my last time i spent six days up in the colorado mountain range in the uh the um what they call the santa de cristo range you know and and on the last day i finally came in on elk and it was dark and i shot and i missed and that was after seven freaking days of trying and you walk out how far was the shot ride your horse out completely empty-handed it's about 45 yards yeah you know in dusk but you know i mean

you know how it goes you're shaking it's a little dark and yeah yeah um anyways though so i'm gonna do uh i'm gonna do kona i would like to get you in touch with dudley because i know i've been in touch with him we've talked before i know how you shoot you shoot with a finger trigger yeah i shoot with true fire yeah no i need to it's it's on my list but uh because those moments like that when you you're hunting for six days and you're just trekking through the woods 20 miles a day and you're exhausted and you finally get that one moment. There's so much weight on that moment that it's so difficult to stay focused entirely on the task of executing the shot perfectly. And there's methods. There's a guy named Joel Turner who has –

I don't know him. He's got a website called Iron Mind Hunting. He's an instructor for first responders and snipers and things along those lines. Iron Mind? Iron Mind Hunting. Where does he live? I think he's a Pacific Northwest guy. Really?

And he's helped me tremendously. His methods. It's all about keeping the difference between an open loop system and a closed loop system, being able to control it and stop it and stop the process anytime you want, and keeping yourself in that versus like a baseball bat swing, which is once you start swinging, you're just swinging. Yeah. And the idea is to maintain the present and to have a mantra. And the idea is to maintain the present and to have a mantra.

And he gives you a mantra to chant and to think about it in terms of controlling all of those movements. So you are in control constantly of your movement. Well, you develop your own, but the idea is to talk yourself through it. Don't let your excitable mind take over. Oh, geez. Yeah. You freak out and you pull the trigger and you shoot fucking over the things back and you don't even know what happened what's your mantra you're lost um i i pull back and i i say draw i go through all the steps in my head that i'm supposed to do i actually modified his

and went to john dudley's so his he has his own one, which is draw back and aim, get it done, watch it to keep it. And the whole idea is just keeping those things in your head so you have one thing. But with Dudley, I go through all the different things that he says, like draw back, tip of the nose, center the peep, center the bubble, pull through the shot, pull, pull, pull, let the shot break. And so I go through

all those things in my mind, but the whole idea is to not allow the freak out because the freak out is what causes the target panic. And when you have that itchy trigger finger with the finger trigger, and that's, I've done it. I mean, I've seen it. I've done it. I've seen it. I've heard it. Everybody does it.

The arrow goes in the spot where you're yanking it and you're pulling it. It's not very precise. You want to get it to where it's a surprise shot. Yeah. And when it's a surprise shot, you're just concentrating entirely on the area that you want to hit on the elk. Your form is perfect. Everything's aligned in order. And if it's not, you let down.

Yeah. If it's not, you let down and try to get your shit together your shit together yeah see those train to hunt competitions helped me out quite a bit i'm sure but it's like it's like a 3d shoot but you're running around and getting exhausted well no not not really like like they're uh they do have part of it as like that like an obstacle course race with your bow but then part of it too is just a 3d shoot like a like a 40 target 3d shoot where one shot might be i'm facing you but the target's behind me and you've got a 10 second time span to draw turn and shoot or you got to take a shot seated through the trees at 40 yards and then within you know 20 seconds do a shot at 60 yards. So it's a lot of hunting scenarios.

But Dudley would tell you that that is going to cause target panic, that that whole thing of shoot now, that you should never just do that, that you should always execute the shot correctly. He doesn't even like this fucking game, this thing, this techno hunt that we've done. He doesn't like that. He thinks that that thing causes target panic because you only have a brief window and you're like, it's like he believes that you should concentrate entirely on the

correct fundamentals and execution of archery and then with time and understanding of the situation the experience of hunting itself then when those moments present themselves you're going to execute correctly whereas when you have this like 10 second you got to turn and behind your back, ready, go. You're like, ah, you're just going to hit that. You're going to hammer that trigger. You're going to put that pin on the target and hammer that trigger. And that's just, you are emphasizing all the wrong things that you could do when you're

hunting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to go to Hawaii next month and do a sheep. Which island? Big island? It's going to be Kona. Kona. I like to go to Hawaii next month and do sheep. Which island? Big island? It's going to be Kona. Kona.

I like to go down there because you can spearfish. So you can double up and do a bow hunt spearfish. So we'll do sheep and goat, pig, possibly turkey, and then we'll have a couple days out on the boats. And that'll be actually Kyle and Aubrey are going. Oh, yeah, yeah. Aubrey was telling me about peter t is gonna come with us oh nice we'll have a doctor on the trip oh cool and uh and then the one i'm excited about is uh doll sheep up in alaska so i'm gonna do the the arctic national

wildlife refuge wow that's a float hunt so you're floating about 40 miles down the river up there you fly into uh into fairbanks and there's a fort that you fly in from there on a charter, and that'll be doll sheep, caribou, and grizzly. That's a 10-day hunt. And this is a bow hunt as well? That'll be a bow. Well, I'll pack. Like I've got a Smith & Wesson.44.

It's a big-ass gun. So I'll pack that, and then I'll probably have a 272 um if i if i if i can make weight and are you hunting grizzly or are you just avoiding them no i'm hunting doll sheep like that that's what i really want that's just an adventurous i'm not much of a trophy hunting guy but i am an adventure guy like like i want to go out and have an amazing adventure let's explain to people why that's an adventure because the the the place where these things live is some of the fucking sketchiest ground on earth. It's shale rock, a lot of it. A lot of times you're wearing crampons on your boots.

You're at extremely high altitude in precarious situations. These little cliff peaks. Long packouts. I'll have a caribou tag and a grizzly tag as well so if you have a grizzly tag to shoot a grizzly because it's charging you or to shoot a grizzly that would actually be to harvest and eat a grizzly like i i'm actually pretty you know i'm a cook look at those doll sheep yeah exactly exactly so that is an adventure right there to be able to get to those little specks on that rock. So hard.

So we'll be floating the river. We'll be fishing. They got Arctic char up there. A few other fish. Those are beautiful fish. Yeah. So you get some big fatty fish out of the cold water. It'll be about 10 to 12 days.

And then I'll just fly all the meat out and fly home. Now, grizzly as a meal that's a thing that where people are hearing this and they're going what the fuck are you talking about and I had Donnie Vincent on the podcast who's a he's a really interesting guy very educated and really really articulate and really like like Rinella in a lot of ways does a great job of explaining what hunting truly is about and the conservation aspect of it but he's a big fan of eating bear and he's always telling people like you know like they're all good like if you prepare correctly all bear is good yeah apparently the trick is to to get rid of the glands early on

when you're field dressing because apparently that taints the meat and i've never field dressed a bear so i don't know but um steveninella, though, I love his cookbooks. Yeah. He's close to me. He's up in Bozeman, I think. Yes. But I've been trying to get him to come through Spokane and swing into my house to do a podcast. So I want to actually ask him some questions about his—

Have you connected with him? He's got a new cookbook. Yeah. Yeah, we've connected. We've talked a few times. I just got to get him to come through Spokane. I love that guy. Yeah.

He's the one who got me the honey. yeah it's fun though yeah he's a great cook too he really is he really understands like so many different preparations and tries to get people to try things like osabuco you know to braise the shanks and yeah yeah yeah i love that now how about spearfishing have you gotten into into the whole spearfishing free diving scene at all i was in hawaii recently my youngest daughter is obsessed with fishing she fucking loves it and uh we caught a bunch of yellowtail when we were in hawaii this last trip and now she's super hooked because you know she's eight and she's hanging onto this rod and you know i mean i was sometimes i was helping her like i was holding the rod and she was with her two little arms cranking these yellowtails and you know i mean i was sometimes i was helping her like i was holding the rod and she was with

her two little arms cranking these yellow tails and you know you catch a 10 pound yellow tail when you're eight years old i mean the fucking that's a fight that thing oh my god they're so powerful it's a fight i took my boys out for steelhead yeah and my my boy uh taryn he almost got pulled into the water on north fork of the clearwater big steelhead i mean those things are massive what is the deal with snagged one you're not supposed to eat them right you're supposed to let them go it depends there's a certain i forget that i forget the color but there's a certain style of steelhead that you are allowed to he had to throw this one back this wasn't the one one of the ones that we were allowed to eat i don't totally understand that i mean i kind of

understand it but it seems to me like it is it's an ocean-bound rainbow trout correct yeah exactly so why can't you eat it i don't know i don't know and and there's there's a certain variety that you actually can't eat well you you can eat it physically but you're not i mean legal i mean legally yeah but that seems so strange to me is the idea to protect the population because they're in the process of breeding and you don't want to interrupt. But there's a certain mortality rate that they're accepting with catch and release. This is one of the reasons why I have an issue with that. And I've done catch and release fishing.

I don't want to appear like I'm a hypocrite because it is fun. But there's a thing about it is like you're just shoving a hook into things face and then releasing it. That is why I like spearfishing because you're underwater, you're going after the exact fish that you want. Like there's no doubt in your mind, I'm going to shoot that fish and you're not wondering what's going to bite the hook. Right. Like whether it's going to be a legal one or an illegal one, regardless of whether you

get a fish, it's amazing. You're happy. You see the coral. You're going down and up. There's all, like, if you're into fitness, the cold thermogenesis and the breath hold and the spleen compression and the red blood cell production. So, I mean, it's an amazing workout. It's just fun. It's zen.

Yeah, they wouldn't let my daughter do it, though. She's too young. They said you have to be 13. To spearfish, yeah. To spearfish. She wanted to. She could probably do, like, shallow water with a sling. And that's the way to do it though she's too young they said you have to be 13 so to spearfish yeah she wanted to probably do like shallow water with a sling and that's that's the way to do it is you want to start offshore 8 to 15 feet of water you want an easy sling you know a lot of people think spearfishing and they think of like the big roller guns that you got to like put the handle against your chest and pull back right it's very difficult and then you got

to dive to depths you know for if you're going after tuna you got to be able to go like 30 plus feet and you have a floater and it's a very involved process but if you're just like in freaking hawaii and you've got a sling and a good spot and some coral and some good fins and you can just basically swim away um you know i'll tie a string around my waist and put a little knife on my belt, and you can just go out there and string four or five fish, and it's an easy day. It's a ton of fun. Yeah, and it's almost like it's not fishing.

You'd call it spearfishing, but you're basically hunting underwater. You're hunting underwater, yeah. I haven't done this yet, but maybe you've seen these underwater bows. You can shoot a bow at the fish. It's a bow. I don't know if they call it bowfishing or what, but maybe you've seen these these underwater bows you can you can shoot a bow at the fish yeah it's a bow i don't know if they call bow fishing or what but have you seen this i've seen something like it yeah i know there's a lot of bow fishing that people do they're shooting down at like gar alligator gar in particular that's a big one that they use yeah have you ever tried that as well no it's supposed to be really good smoked really it's such a weird looking animal it's almost seems like in my mind it almost feels like you shouldn't shoot it because it's a dinosaur yeah keep it alive because

yeah they they really haven't changed in millions of years yeah such a freaky look they're fun to prepare though i do fish feed after spearfish you're all cold you're hungry last one i did uh we had we had a parrotfish down in hawaii stuffed with avocado and mango coconut oil baked it in the oven with macadamia nut like encrusted macadamia nut parrotfish are the ones that are eating the coral and shitting out white sand i don't know yeah did you know that you've watched more nature tv than i have that's what white sand is it's shit really yeah believe it or not it's like these yeah these fish eat coral chew it up and shit out the white sand So like a giant white sand beach like Clearwater, Florida

Shit That's all fish shit Yeah, parrot fish poop makes beautiful beaches There you go, there's the article I wonder if it's good for your microbiome I don't know Because you're out on bacteria These motherfuckers are out there just eating rocks

That's a lot of shit That's a lot of shit That's a lot of parrot fish over a very long period of time Mill taking a lot of years like here you go you can see them do it they're chewing on the coral they bang it out they have like a beak essentially that's why they call them parrotfish they smash down that coral and then all that white around them is they're just basically swimming around their own shit that's pretty cool it's crazy that's pretty cool very strange yeah um i was gonna ask you something um metformin you started talking about with david yes david sinclair you can take that yes metformin maybe i don't know it seems weird because that one's a

drug it's it's like it's like the darling of the anti-aging industry right you know it's like a nickel a pop and it's it's uh and inhibits mtor to a certain extent but the big deal with that is is glycemic variability reduced risk of chronic disease but there's a lot of side effects of that really i want to mention that okay so he was saying that there's none no there's lactic acidosis and it inhibits the the um electron transport chain in the mitochondria which is fine if you want to downregulate metabolism, live a long time, but not if you,

not if you're an athlete, right? You don't want to inhibit mitochondrial respiration necessarily. Vitamin B12 deficiencies, like it's derived from French rue and physicians for, for hundreds of years, been using it, but in limited quantities because it induces nausea,

right? So you get gastrointestinal disturbances. My take on metformin, because I've been looking over the past year into a lot of these anti-aging compounds that people are now using or talking about using, like rapamycin and metformin and NAD and a lot of these sirtuin precursors. But metformin and rapamycin, actually, for different reasons, because that's an immune system suppressor, are two that I don't think I would ever take. Really? Because with metformin, there are a variety of natural compounds

that reduce blood glucose and improve insulin sensitivity in the absence of that, like berberine, curcumin, apple cider vinegar, Ceylon cinnamon, bitter melon extract. And you think all those things are mimicking what metformin is capable of doing? I think so. I'm not wearing it right now, but usually I wear a Dexcom G6. It's a continuous blood glucose monitor. It actually fell off yesterday when I was doing that exercise.

That's one of those ones you see diabetics wear. They stick it to their body. It sends my blood glucose to my cell phone. I learn all sorts of interesting things. Like my blood glucose would spike in the mornings, like clockwork, about 8 a.m. every morning. And I was trying to figure out, like, why is my blood glucose going to 120, 130 every single morning? Well, I'd have a cup of coffee in the morning.

And even though I don't put cream or sugar in my coffee, I just drink straight up black coffee. Coffee actually causes your liver to engage in something called glycogenolysis. So you actually release glucose into the bloodstream, which is a good thing. That's why you drink coffee. You want that cortisol release, that glucose hit, you know, maybe you want the flavor and the antioxidants too, but I would get a blood glucose response from coffee. Another one that surprised me was green beans. You talk about legumes, you talk about slow release carbohydrates, and it falls into that category, but my blood glucose would go up whenever I'd have green beans. So I actually got a food allergy

test through this company called Cyrex. They do like a really good food allergy test that doesn't give you this big laundry list of false positives. There's like, like, uh, there's like the Elisa and the Alcat test, like the skin prick tests. You just get like a very small number of foods that you're actually allergic to because a lot of these other tests, they'll show a bunch of antibodies to food, but it's antibodies to food because you're eating that food. All right. So, so many people will be like, dude, I'm, I'm allergic to eggs. I got a test down allergic to eggs and I'm depressed because that was a big staple in my diet. Well, it's only showing that you're allergic to them because they're a staple in your diet because you're eating a lot of eggs and you're winding up with a lot of those egg proteins in your bloodstream. But this Cyrex panel.

Wait a minute, explain that. So basically, if you're eating a lot of eggs, you actually have a lot of egg proteins circulating in your bloodstream. proteins circulating in your bloodstream. And if you get a food panel, you actually can very readily produce like a food allergy panel, you produce antibodies to the egg protein. And they say that you're allergic to the egg protein when in fact, you just have a lot of egg proteins in your system because you've been eating a lot of eggs. And sometimes they'll even test the white blood cell reaction to a raw egg, not a cooked egg. And so your white blood cells are going to react more readily to a raw egg versus cooked egg, a raw chicken versus cooked chicken. I don't think a lot of these food allergy panels are that accurate for that reason. I think they're just giving you a laundry list of foods that you may or may not be allergic to.

But this one, it's called Cyrex. I have no financial affiliation. I don't like that with this company, but I just think they do a good job with their testing. You've got to order it through a physician. And I ordered this test, and I was allergic to almost nothing. Barely anything would spike for me, kind of like a moderate spike for gluten. Green beans, though, were off the chart, off the chart. So that continuous blood glucose monitor was actually able to tell me that I was eating something that my sympathetic nervous system was responding to. I was going to fight

and flight mode, releasing a bunch of glucose. And I never would have really known that or gotten a clue about that unless I was wearing one of these continuous blood glucose monitors. I'm not going to wear it my whole life, but I'm going to wear it. My plan is to wear it for a year to just learn a lot about the foods that I usually eat, what they do to my body, what certain workouts do, what certain supplements do. But returning to metformin, I started to use a lot of these things like berberine, like curcumin. You can do a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal. Take a couple of teaspoons of Ceylon cinnamon in your smoothie. And these things actually have an effect on blood glucose that mimics what you're trying

to get when you take metformin, but without the side effects. That's all that metformin is doing is just limiting blood glucose? Well, like I mentioned earlier, it does inhibit mTOR a little bit, right? So you get that mTOR inhibition, but you can inhibit mTOR through like calorie restriction fasting done regularly or like a compressed feeding window. I should have had you here yesterday. Yes. I should have had you here to talk to Davidson.

I want to finish listening to that interview too because he's a very smart guy. Yeah. But I just – I'm not enamored with metformin. Well, he's not an athlete. I think there are better, more natural alternatives. He's not an athlete. He barely works out. He works out a little bit.

He does like a little bit of a run, a little bit of lifting. But you can tell he's not a guy who's really exerting himself rigorously. To me, I want the marriage of performance and longevity. Yes. I don't want to live a long time if I can't kick ass and feel good. I don't want to be cold and hungry and libido-less and live until I'm 150. Yes. Even if that means I'm going to live until I'm 145 instead of 150, right? Because I've got more muscle mass

or whatever. Like I want to feel good. So whenever I'm looking at a compound like that, I'm questioning whether or not it's the best way to go if it's going to inhibit my actual performance. Right. His focus is so- Especially if there's natural alternatives. He's so focused on longevity yeah yeah but you could say that about a lot of these things i mean like like cryotherapy chambers right i mean you look at the the cherokee native american tribe would dip their babies in icy cold water until they were like two years old or the uh there's that the viral video footage of the

siberian school children i don't know if you've seen this one. They rush out into the snow during recess in their underpants and they dump cold water on themselves and run around in the snow and then come back inside. In Iceland, based on some of the research that was done a few decades ago on immune system, they let their babies sleep

outside in sub-zero temperatures in strollers. The Russians, the Finnish, the Eastern Europeans. They're trying to kill their kids. They've all got their cryotherapy, like the Baltic Sea. You know, you go back and forth. When I go to Finland, they've got the men's Finnish sauna society. There's no cryotherapy chambers.

You know, it's just old school saunas. Then you go jump in the sea and you dry yourself off in the air. Then you go back in the sauna. So, you know, a lot of these things there's natural alternatives yeah and and i i get flack a lot of the time because i'm you know i'm one of these so-called biohackers right i have like the the laser lights in my office that that i shine on my balls and i've got like the you know the lights that go in your ears and i've got you know the the stem cells and ivs and injections but i always always want to make sure people know that you go after the natural stuff first like natural ways to

get cold natural ways to get hot if you're going to buy some expensive pulsed electromagnetic filled mat you sure as hell be better be going outside barefoot right like or camping or sleeping outside or learning how to earth and ground in a more natural way what do you what is involved in earthing and grounding is there a real provable yeah there is research especially in terms of a reduction in inflammation and improvement in joint comfort that's a very interesting one and then when you take these same frequencies, so the earth naturally emits somewhere in the range of about three to a hundred Hertz electromagnetic frequencies, like way lower than that. And the million Hertz frequencies are getting when you hold your cell phone up to your ear, but we're walking around on basically a giant electrical mat. Like, like there's radiation electromagnetic frequencies released by earth.

And the idea is that these fancy devices, now these mats that you can sleep on or do therapy on there's a, there's a bit like I've got one in my basement that just packs a punch. Like he was using the racehorsing industry for a long time. It's called a, a pulse centers and you lay on that thing and it just like vibrates your whole body. What is it doing? It reduces inflammation.

And you think of it like exercise for yourselves. It's opening and closing the cell membrane. What's it called? This blood flow. It's called a Pulse Centers. It's like a giant table. Pulse Centers? It's got different coils.

Yeah. Yeah. It's Pulse Centers is the name of the company that makes this. Centers or Centers? Centers. Centers. Centers. But it's got like attachments, like coils and pads that you can attach to your knee

or attach to like a bum shoulder or whatever i'll just sit in there and work on my computer i get a massage on it every week for a couple of hours so it's taking the same frequencies you get from the earth and just magnifying those just delivering them in a more concentrated manner the same thing with like a like an infrared light panel i don't know if you've seen these before. They deliver near infrared, far infrared, red light. People will strip off their clothes and stand in front of these things to get more collagen production. Or, you know, in the same way that that light that I was talking about for your head can enhance mitochondrial activity in neural tissue, your balls are basically little eyes. They have photoreceptors on them. They respond to light. You can actually

increase mitochondrial activity in the testicles, the latex cells in the testes to increase testosterone or increase sperm production. So you shoot a light in your balls? Oh, yeah, it is. You grow more test? You'd go outside and you'd sunbathe nude or you'd use one of these lights and just stand in front. Like I literally, I look like an idiot at work, but this is what I do. I've got a light panel in front of me.

I'm at a standing desk. I work at a standing desk. I've got a light panel behind me. And every day for 20 minutes, I just take my clothes off at work and I stand sandwiched in between these light panels. And it basically blasts me with this red light. But I also go out in the sun, right? Like if I've got the option to do that versus get outside in the sunlight, I go out into the sunlight. If I've got the option to take berberine and bitter melon extract instead of metformin, I'd rather take the berberine and bitter melon extract. So I think it just strips up down and go as natural as possible. And then once you step up to the more advanced, you know, anti-aging strategies or biohacking strategies or what have you,

you still have to look at those with a skeptical eye andhacking strategies or what have you, you still have to look at those with a skeptical eye and ask yourself whether or not those are really safe or if they have side effects that might, in many cases, limit your physical performance. And why do you prefer a standing desk? Well, the whole sitting is the new smoking thing I disagree with. I think sitting is just fine. It feels natural to sit. It doesn't feel like you're breaking some rule of the human body to sit down. We're sitting down right now. It feels pretty good. The problem with sitting is that that is the posture most people

are adopting for eight hours per day. The best position to be in when you're working would be whatever position you're not in at the moment. Same, you know, when, when you look at weight training, this would not apply to hypertrophy, which would dictate that you want to hit a muscle over and over again, using the same angle with increasingly difficult loads. But for metabolic, uh, training, you would want to actually throw curve balls at your body, right? You would, the best workout therefore would be the one that you're not doing right now. If your goal was, was just to limit any type of metabolic efficiency. So the idea with the standing desk is I have that to give me yet another position to be in during the day. So I've got a true form treadmill, and I had true form modify it to take the dashboard off.

So I've got that in front of my standing workstation, and then I've got one of these balance boards that I can stand on. And I've got like a stool that I can lean against. So I've got all these different positions that I can be in during the day. And then I've got that, that, uh, Pult Center's chair in my office that I can go and sit in. So every 25 minutes, I'll just shift to a different position. And my standup desk is a hand crank standup desk. So I can crank it up and down if I do want to sit at my desk and just, it just works you know it's it's it's the idea of hacking your environment of equipping your environment to be in as many different positions as possible so i think that's the key to feeling good at work especially when

you're stuck indoors do you believe in one of those um have you seen one of those uh it's a you stand at your standing desk on this variable sort of surface. Have you seen those things where it's like a topographical mat? Yeah, it's weird. There's a bunch of those. There's one called the Topo. The one like in our Boulder offices for my company, we've got the stand-up desks that go up.

You push a button and they go up and down. But then what we have is just scattered around the office, a few of those mats. We've got some of the, I don't know if you've seen these fluid stance things. They're kind of like skateboards that you stand on top of, but they're not as gnarly as a balance board, so you can still focus while you're standing on top of it. We've got different stools, different chairs that will go up or down.

So, again, even if you're in a corporate office, it surprises me how many people in their corporate offices don't equip their employees just to be able to move during the day. Yeah, they don't care. Yeah, and most people aren't using ergonomic chairs either. Yeah, yeah. What do you use as your main chair for an ergonomic chair? These chairs that we have here.

That's what we're sitting in, right? What am I sitting in right now? It's called a Kapisco. I feel like I'm not using it to its full capacity. It's excellent. What's the purpose of the way that this is shaped in the back of this here?

You can kind of lean on it in a weird way, put your elbows on it if you like, but it encourages you to have an upright posture. I've got this thing called a Mogo Upright. It's a stool. And I can even travel with it because it will compress it weighs about two pounds and you can actually lean against that and get into some

different positions on that one what is that company that sent us something they have one that's basically almost like it's on a spring where you kind of have to balance yourself out you have to like activate your core just to be i saw one of those at a chiropractic event once it's like kind of makes you squeeze your pelvis while you're in the chair but there's actually there's this dude in finland um he's got a company called sally s-a-l-l-i he used to ride horses and he decided to start making chairs that would get him into the same upright position that he'd be in when he was riding a horse. We have a saddle chair. Yeah, it's a saddle chair.

There's one in another room somewhere. I have one of those, too. That red one. That's up at my kitchen table. That shit is so uncomfortable, though. Yeah. Really? Yeah, it feels like your balls are sandwiched in between these two planks.

I think the armrests on these are so you can spin it around if you want to sit, like, A.C. Slater-style at the, like— Really? Yeah. A.C. Slater-style? What's A.C. Slater-style? It's a chair backwards. Oh, really? sit like A.C. Slater style at the, like. Really? Yeah. A.C. Slater style? What's A.C. Slater style? It's a chair backwards. Oh, really? That's A.C. Slater style?

That is, in my head, that is for sure, yeah. Well, those saddle chairs, they've got, like, little Allen keys that come with them, and you can adjust to your pelvic width. No, I mean, it fits my width. It's just weird. Maybe all those fat injections you've been doing just give you that big-ass wide pelvis. How dare you? I don't do that.

You're sagging on your chair. That was my main chair for a long time, the saddle chair. But then when I started using these Kapisco chairs, it's way more comfortable. Yeah. Well, if you're sitting for a long time. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just, it's easy. And I have no back pain. When I use a regular office chair and I sit for long periods of time, I get that center back pain from just poor posture, just sitting in a curved stance or a curved position. What about a treadmill desk? Have you tried one of those? No, no. See, I can't do a lot on the treadmill desk production-wise.

But if somebody's interviewing me on Skype on a podcast or I'm doing a consult call with somebody reviewing blood work or something like that, I'll be walking on my treadmill. And then I've got my microphone in front of me, and I have this program called Dragon Dictation. And Dragon Dictation allows me to talk via like a headset. And then it'll type the words on the screen. I used to use that a long time ago, but apparently it's moved leaps and bounds. Yeah, it's called training your dragon

you get the software to train your dragon and so you say all these words you read all these paragraphs and it learns to identify your phrasing right the volume of your voice and it gets more accurate but it's way better than the built-in apple uh whatever it's called the voice recognition software yeah so it works and i like that because then i can just walk i can i can talk emails i can talk with people so there's like three or four different things that i do at work that i will walk during yeah no that makes sense that makes sense i i write when i'm just completely alone and quiet staring at a computer because uh i want to spend time on each individual word and really concentrate on what the fuck I'm saying.

Because most of the time I'm writing stand-up. So I need to bounce it back and forth. And to talk it out is not really the right strategy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm working on a book right now. And what I've found is, for me, I have to have a triggered environment. Like a place in my house that when I go to that place, that's the place where your mind says, okay, this is the writing spot.

For me, it's this chair in the corner of the living room outside of my office. As soon as I get into that thing, it's like writing mode. Right, right. And I just go Pomodoro. I'll write for 25 minutes, get up, take a five-minute break, come back. That's how I do it. I just have an environment to write in. Yeah, an environment and a good time, like a specific time to write is good too. Like when you know, hey, now it's X amount, you know, it's X time.

That's when I write. Yeah, yeah. That's the idea behind all this new research they're doing on morningness, eveningness, chronotypes, different people being night owls versus morning larks. Even there was a study I was looking at yesterday about the response to like an inflammatory stressor. I don't remember what the stressor was, but like when a morning type is stressed out in the morning, they handle it better than when they're stressed out

in the evening and vice versa and it's very interesting this research on chronotypes i like the idea of just just being able to shift your circadian rhythm because i travel a lot like i haven't been home in 17 days i've got two more days on the road and then i'll be i'll be home but when i'm going east to west or west to east, I use light a lot to reset my circadian biology. I call the zeitgeibers, right? Like these are cues that regulate your circadian biology. So like eating is one. You want to wait to eat until it's actual mealtime in whatever area of the world that you're traveling to.

So if you arrive in whatever, you know, New York City from California at 3 p.m., you don't want to eat a bite of food until like 7 p.m. when it's actual dinner because that helps to regulate your circadian rhythm. Movement is another one. You want to get outside, go for a walk, go for a swim, go hit the gym. I found that. That's a big one for me. Whenever I travel, the first thing I do is I check in. I go right to the gym. Yeah.

I actually go outside. I take Yeah. I actually go outside. I take off my shoes and go outside. That's good, too. But for me, a rigorous workout makes all the difference in the world in terms of how I actually feel. Especially if I'm traveling a lot and doing shows. You don't want to. You get to a hotel room, you just want to lay down and relax. You have to defy that urge.

Yeah. I just go straight to the gym. Yeah, that's what I find. If you shut up the inner bitch and make it through the first two minutes, you're good to go. But light is the biggie. Light is the biggie. So I've got these buds that make light that go on my ears.

You make light into your ear? You have photoreceptors in your ears. Really? You have photoreceptors all over your body. That's why if you wear a sleep mask to go to bed, you still have to make the room dark because you have photoreceptors in your ears. Really? You have photoreceptors all over your body. That's why if you wear a sleep mask to go to bed, you still have to make the room dark because you have photoreceptors on your skin. I've got the one that I was talking about that I wear on my head. That one's called a V-Light. The one that goes in your ears is called a human charger.

And then I've got the one that goes in the eyes. That one's called a re-timer. And that one makes like this greenish blue light that's not damaging to your retina, but that just blasts your entire skull with light. So I've got light on my eyes, light on my ears and light on my head. And I'll flip those lights on back in front of the body. And that's my home setup to get my circadian rhythm restored. So what I do is if I've been back East, right? And my body at, uh, 4 a.m. Pacific time is telling me it's 7 a.m. Cause I'm on Eastern time. My circadian clock is on Eastern time. What I do is I wake up, I'll, I'm not going to lay in bed for three hours, waiting, waiting until the time when I actually do want to get up. What I do is I wake up, I get out of bed and I put on those blue light blocking glasses, the ones that you're supposed to wear at night, right?

You know, like the yellowish-orange lenses. But I block all light. So I'm basically just walking around in a pretty dim setting in my house. You know, I'll make coffee sometimes or have some water, stretch out, get some work done. But I've got the light blocked the whole time. And then whenever the time rolls around, when I actually want to start waking up, all right, let's say I'm like 6 a.m. I don't want to wake up at 4 a.m. I want to wake up at 6 a.m. Then I'll go down to my office and I'll put on the eye thing, the ear thing, the head thing,

the light in front of me, the light behind me. I've done it on an IG story before. And then you just blast yourself for like 20 minutes and if i do that for two or three days like my circadian rhythm just right back on time right back on time and i and i mean i fall asleep but i'm supposed to fall asleep you know i go to bed at like 10 p.m i get up about 6 a.m and that's that's my cycle every day but i just blast myself with light when i get for me lack of food is a good one. Make sure you use some sort of fasting in order to regulate everything when you're traveling and then exercise. Those are the two big ones.

Yeah. And then eating after rigorous training puts everything sort of back into perspective. How do you fast? What's your fasting protocol? 16 hours every night. Every single night? No, one or two nights a week I'll fuck off. What about longer fast during the year i don't at all no i haven't done that i started doing it yeah i started last year so my protocol now is 12 to 16 hours intermittent fast

every day christmas thanksgiving what like as soon as i stop eating i'm competitive i'll set my watch if i finish eating at 8 p.m i don't eat again till 8 a watch. If I finish eating at 8 PM, I don't eat again until 8 AM. If I finish eating at midnight, then I don't eat again until, you know, if I get up at midnight for a snack, I won't eat again until lunch at least 12 PM. So I do that every day. And then what I started doing once Walter Longo came out with his research on the longevity diet and this whole idea of a fasting mimicking diet, inducing cellular autophagy and enhancing longevity to the same extent as if you were just do like a pure water fast or stop eating. So what you do is on a quarterly basis, four times a year, you restrict the normal amount of calories that you would eat

to 40% of what you normally eat. So maybe you're doing maybe you're just dropping one meal, or for every meal that you're eating, you're eating a little bit less. And you do this for five days on a quarterly basis. I started doing that last year. And I just have like this stew that I make with split mung beans and basmati rice. And it's called Kitchery. It's an Indian Ayurvedic cleansing stew. Dr. Longo's company, El Nutra, sends out these kits called Prolon kits that are all done for you. But I just wanted to make my own stew. That's easy for me. I put a little coconut yogurt on it and that's just

breakfast, lunch, and dinner for me for five days in a row. It's almost like a seasonal cleaning. So you do that four times a year. And the only other thing that I do is one or two times a month, I try to go from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner without eating. So it's almost a 24 hour fast. And with those three things, 12 to six hour intermittent fast, the quarterly five day, like modified fast, and then the 24 hour fast one to two times a month that's sustainable for me. I could still perform. I could still work out. Um, I think, I think that's the way to go. How do you feel when you do that 24 hour fast? Does it affect your workouts? 2 PM you get hungry at 2 PM in the afternoon on Sunday. Cause what I'll do is I'll have dinner

on Saturday and then I'll wait the whole day and then I'll have a big Sunday dinner. And honestly, it doesn't affect the workouts that much because the magic of fasting seems to be the compressed feeding window and not the calorie restriction, right? This returns of fasting seems to be the compressed feeding window and not the calorie restriction, right? This returns to not wanting to be hungry and cold and libido-less if you're going to live a long time. So the idea is that you could fast from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner and have a giant ribeye steak, sweet potato fry, you know, red wine, dark chocolate, halo top ice cream, whatever you, whatever you, at the end of the day on Sunday, eat 3,500 calories, and then you're topped off and you're ready for the next day.

And you have a long period in which you're engaged in cellular cleanup, cellular autophagy, but you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too because you have a bunch of calories at the end of that. Are you drinking coffee? Yeah. So coffee's fine. I was actually surprised you didn't ask me when i brought in the sourdough bread and the and the coconut macaroons and everything if they would take you out of ketosis or break your fast i get that question a lot now well people are like well let's put no but people

people want to know if the butter in your coffee you know putting 800 calories of butter in your coffee is going to break your fast what basically, the idea is if it has calories, it breaks your fast. Yeah, of course. If it doesn't have calories, it doesn't break your fast. Coffee has zero calories? It's negligible. It's like a few cholesterol molecules and like the, what do they call it, coffee stall and the cahway all.

And even that, if you use a paper filter, you're filtering a lot of that out. That's actually why I like French press because you're not filtering some of those like brain spinning compounds out. Have you fucked around with any of that Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee? Yeah. I like that out. That's actually why I like French Press because you're not filtering some of those brain-spinning compounds out. Have you fucked around with any of that Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee? Yeah. I like that stuff a lot. That's actually, before I came over here, I had a cup of coffee and I had a packet of that Four Sigmatic Lion's Mane,

which is good for cognition. Yeah, I've been drinking those little packets. They're fantastic. It's a sponsor now. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, I'm a big fan. I know that guy, Taro. He lives down in Venice Beach. Smart guy. Seems like a place for a guy that makes mushroom coffee. Yeah. They do a good job with their mushrooms. So yeah, anything that has calories is going to take you out of fast. But I'll drink black coffee, green tea. Both of those enhance your fatty acid burning. So it's actually enhancing the benefits of a fast. Occasionally, if I'm going to do a pretty epic workout, the two things that I'll use in combo are ketone esters with essential amino acids.

You combine those. It's a very low number of calories, but that's like rocket fuel. How much ketone esters are you? Because you get the anabolism, about 10 grams of essential amino acids. And then the ketones, what I've been doing is a shot glass of this stuff called uh it's ketone aid and then there's another company called hvmn that does like it they all taste like ass but you combine those with like a little bit of amino acid so you have high ketones high amino acids but neither of those are insulinogenic so it still keeps you in a relatively

fasted state if you want to go to a hard workout or maintain muscle or whatever. What about cordyceps mushrooms? You ever fuck around with those? They're amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I like cordyceps. They seem to act primarily on some of the pathways for oxygenation. Have we gotten you any of the Onnit Shroom Tech?

Yeah, I've got all the Onnit stuff. I'm a giant fan of that. Shroom Tech is good. Actually, Four Sigmatic does a Cordyceps as well. But the other one, the Lion's Mane, what I've been doing, I'll do this about two times a week, is take a very small amount of psilocybin, about 0.2 grams of psilocybin, and you take two packets of that lion's mane the the four sigmatic lion's mane extract and then anything that increases blood flow so it could be like

beetroot um any nitric oxide precursors you could probably try shroom tech um niacin a lot of people use niacin but you combine anything that increases blood flow, couple map packets of the lion's mane, and then about 0.2 grams of psilocybin and the cognitive pick me up you get from that is profound. I mean, you know, that psilocybin increases your sensory perception, your ability to pick out color, smell, sense temperature, et cetera. But just for getting through a day of work or even like going on a long hike. I would not be surprised if our ancestors used psilocybin for hunting because you actually do get a pretty good increase in sensory perception, smell, and sight from it.

And visual acuity as well. Yeah, but that mix works really well where you do the lion's mane along with the psilocybin extract. It makes sense that there would be some sort of a symbiotic benefit to combining those sort of mushrooms together yeah yeah well it's like that uh we were talking about this last time that doctrine of signature is the idea that what things look like in nature could actually give you clues about their benefit for the body and when you find lion's mane i don't know if you've seen it in nature, but it looks like this cluster of axons and dendrites. Like it looks like brain cells, you know, up close.

See if you can find it. Yeah, just look up like lion's mane in nature. It's pretty badass looking. Or like there's a lot of stuff like that. Like there's this place in Kauai that I go to called Kauai Organic Pharmacy. And they just grow on this tiny little two-acre farm all these superfoods like you know noni and cacao and they've got comfrey there and if you dig up the root of a comfrey plant there it is yeah that's lion's mane is created really does in that lion's mane yeah great name yeah but it also looks like dendrites and axons and neurons. So it's very cool.

What a fancy plant. It's an amazing plant. I have yet to actually find it in nature, but apparently you can find it up in the inland northwest where I live. Anyways, though, comfrey, they call it knit bone, and the roots look like knuckles and joints and human bones. And it's very good for healing up fractures or for making like a plaster for your joints a plaster comfrey plant what do you mean by a plaster yeah well what what that uh that pharmacy in kawaii does they grind it into a powder and then you reconstitute that with water and you smear it like over a shoulder joint they could just use like a like a t-shirt

or whatever to hold it on there or an ace bandage and it actually increases the speed of bone healing or joint healing like it like it's an anti-inflammatory they do like a like a muscle cream with it too made out of the comfrey so it's very interesting there's there's there's all sorts of different different things in nature that give you clues you know like the the carrots and the eggs for your eyes or the walnuts for the brain i think there's something to it the how does that stuff increase your bone healing like what is it doing what's the mechanism i don't know i don't know it might be like uh some way of mineral delivery through the skin something like that i've been blown away by cbd by using um putting cb CBD over muscle injuries.

Yeah, a lot of companies do. You know what the trick with that is? One of the guys, one of the doctors who work with Tour de France teams was showing me this. Do you have an electrical muscle stimulation unit? I do, but I never use it. Like a Mark Pro or a Compax or what have you? Yeah, I got a Compax.

So you put your CBD oil on or your magnesium or your Arnica, your Tromel, whatever it is that you're using and you rub that in then you put the electrodes on top of that right and then you put an ice pack on top of that so it's three things you've got the the cream or lotion you've got the electrodes and then you've got the the topical thing that holds it on And the electricity drives the anti-inflammatory deeper into the tissue. So it enhances the effect of like a CBD oil or a magnesium. And the ice allows you to turn up the electricity to a higher level without getting uncomfortable. So I do this at home.

I use one called a Mark Pro and just kind of surround the area that's actually torn or that's painful, and I'll do a rub like that. But you're right, CBD oil works amazingly for that. Yeah, that stuff is remarkable because you're putting it on the surface of your skin, and it's weird how it can get all the way deep into a muscle or into a joint. Yeah. Like a lot of people use it with knee pain, and it's remarkable how well it works. The skin is a joint. Yeah. Like a lot of people use it with knee pain and it's just, it's remarkable how well it works.

The skin is a mouth. Yeah. That's why some of those personal care products are kind of scary. But CBD. Personal care products? Yeah, like personal care, like parabens and phthalates

and, you know, estrogen, you know, phytoestrogens and endocrine disruptors and stuff like that in them. I mean, you know, they've done studies where, you know, like guys will like take a shower with the average shampoo that's got, you know, like parabens and phthalates and these things that can be endocrine disruptors or, or phytoestrogens,

you know, mimic estrogen in a man's body. And they actually, within a short period of time, after taking the shower and using these care products you can actually detect this stuff in their urine like your body's actually soaking this up and absorbing it there's the very very interesting book i interviewed this guy on my podcast it's called estro generation about how many guys have really high estrogen levels now from primarily their personal care products really or their household cleaning chemicals. So it's true. That stuff is trying to turn you into a bitch.

Yeah. It is. More or less. Like if you go over a guy's house and you see a bunch of sweet-smelling shampoos, you're like, what are they doing to you, bro? That's what always surprised me. Like when I raced for Team Timex, we used to train out at the Giant Stadium in New Jersey, and I'd go in the locker room there, and it's just like this.

You'd think that the peak of performance in professional sports would have started looking into by this point, how could you keep testosterone as high as possible on a male athlete's body? Right. But you walk into the bathroom and it's just like every endocrine disruptor known to man, just like lined up in a pretty shiny row there on the shelf in front of the meeting of the shaving cream and the shampoos and the spray deodorant just like an endocrine disruptor yeah i mean any not all shaving cream right but if it's if it's something that has those kind of chemicals in it absolutely have you ever used dr carver's shave butter that sounds familiar it's a

it's a dollar shave club uh product it's the most fucking incredible shaving cream of all time. Regular shaving cream, you just won't use it after you try that stuff. I think I've tried that because this probably happens to you. You get lots of personal care products since your studio or your home. Yeah, but that stuff blows me away. It's like a butter. It's called Dr. Carver's? Yeah.

Huh. Yeah. Interesting. I'll get them to send you some. I'll have to try it. You'll fucking be blown away by it. I don't have to shave that much, so don't have them send very much. You don't grow a lot of facial hair?

No, I don't grow a lot of facial hair. No. No. But yeah, these- You would think with all your experimenting- You'd think something would have sprouted, but you'd think it'd be kind of weird. It'd just be like one right side patch of the chin right it's like a hair but there's a mole attached to the hair do you ever wonder like what you're doing to yourself stem

cells bleeding out the end do you ever like sit in bed occasionally that like there's some of the stuff on stem cells that admittedly are a little bit of like a venture into human experimentation without robust evidence of safety how about the one where you shot into your dick yeah that's that's a good example yeah but uh i'm kind of shifting my whole philosophy on stem cells to kind of go after stuff from my own body as much as possible you know the technical term being autologous you know you're like that one i did in new york city it's just it's not somebody else's blood. It's just my own stuff. Or, you know, in some cases you could argue that placental or umbilical or amniotic cells are so young and so pluripotent, you know, and if they don't have the, the, the, uh, the DNA in the nucleus, which apparently they can, they can kill off somehow, which is how they make exosomes.

Like you're not getting somebody else's dna you know it's it's it's just something your body would have made anyways and recognize itself so yeah some sometimes though um sometimes though i probably have taken it too far with a few of those things but uh but the cbd that you were talking about i'm a a huge fan of. I take CBD before bed every night. Orally? A lot of it. When you look at the studies on CBD for anxiety and for sleep, most of them are pushing 100 and up to 900 milligrams,

which is nuts when you look at the actual serving size of the average CBD tincture or capsule or pill, it's like 10. So you've got to take a lot of it. But I sleep like a baby. Like last night, I got the ring that I do my sleep squon. I slept eight and a half hours last night and I take a hundred milligrams of CBD. I take a little bit of melatonin and I'm just out.

But you got to take a lot of it. And you wake up kind of groggy when you do. But if you're used to that and you know, like you get up, shake it off, 10 minutes later, you're good to go. What's the groggyness coming from? Probably just overstimulation of the endocannabinoid system. You're just, like, super relaxed, which I want to be when I sleep.

Right, of course, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's how it works. What about regular marijuana? Does that affect your sleep? Do you find it beneficial or no? So CBD can enhance your deep sleep cycles, right, which is when a good majority of your neuronal repair and recovery occurs.

THC allows you to sleep, and it actually decreases sleep latency, how long it takes you to fall asleep, but it does reduce the amount of time you spend in deep sleep. So if you're one of those people whose mind races, who's hypercharged up,

and you've got to get to sleep at night, use THC. Like, you know, hit a vape pen or whatever, but know that you might miss out on some of the things you want during deep sleep. Memory consolidation, neuronal repair and recovery, you know, nervous system repair. But it's still pretty decent sleep. system repair, but it's still pretty decent sleep. And you're not getting as much of a reduction in deep sleep as you would get if you were to be taking like Ambien or Valium or something that's literally just like a sledgehammer for your frontal cortex that knocks you out, but you almost get no deep sleep. So if you do this, if you were to get like a sleep tracker and test your deep sleep levels, you would find that with CBD, you don't fall asleep as fast,

but you get higher deep sleep levels. And then with THC, you can fall asleep faster, but your deep sleep isn't quite as high. When you consider that CBD can counteract a lot of the effects of THC, then that means that what you could try is take THC to allow you to fall asleep faster, but then pile a whole bunch of CBD on top of that.

And I've done that before, too, where you just take a hit on a vape pen and then take a bunch of CBD and you shoot for the best of both worlds. Yeah, folks that are taking Ambien, I mean, especially people that are doing it virtually every night, that has got to have a profound effect on your brain's ability to recover. I think there are a lot of people shorting themselves on life who are taking Ambien or Valium. I mean, I think to start with sleep, you need to rely on your body's own internal chemistry, and that would be breath work. Like I think everybody, before they start taking whatever,

phosphatidylserine and adaptogenic herbs and all this shit for cortisol, and before they start taking valium or ambient or anything else for for sleep you should learn how to control your physiology with your breath i think that's the most powerful way to do it i mean your prana your shock or whatever you want to call it like being able to do things like breath work box breathing alternate nostril breathing uh even even holotropic breathing like you can go some very interesting places in terms of DMT production by the pineal gland, by just doing holotropic breath work, like there's, there's a lot of very interesting things that you can do with your breath. But I think that

for getting to sleep, or for decreasing stress, you start with the breath, and then you start to introduce some of these other molecules, but ambient valium, like in the era of, like in the era of readily available CBD and all the other sleep compounds that we have available, like Valerian and Passionflower and Chamomile, all of those are what are called gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA precursors. They produce inhibitory neurotransmitters. I don't understand why people are still taking Ambien and Valium. Because they're idiots. Yeah. They're just addicted to it or they just want a pill.

I mean, that's essentially what it is. They want fat in their buttocks and they want Ambien and Valium. I don't know if it's the same folks, but many times it is. I think it's our president. I think our president takes that shit. I think he's sleeping with Ambien. I think a lot of politicians do that. Yeah.

Well, they can't sleep otherwise. They're fucking ruining the world. I found that if my brain is racing, just completely concentrating on breathing in and breathing out and concentrating on just the breath itself, like really being cognizant of it and slow, deliberate breaths in and out and in and out. By doing that over long periods of time, I've found that I can pretty much conk myself out. You can can but that takes focus a lot of people are not willing to learn how to do that because they want the fast track out they just want to take a drug and pass out that is the thing right they just want a pill yeah it's very unfortunate that those things exist in that that that sort of thinking is

you know it's reinforced yeah yeah it's encouraged in fact you know all these ads and all these doctors and different people well if you have a hard time sleeping i'll just write your prescription the next thing you know and i mean you look at the animal world like they self-medicate they'll use clay for parasites and you know dogs will eat grass for stomach issues and you know i guess birds now are putting like nicotine and cigarettes in their nests because there's some kind of benefit to that and you see animals self-medicating you see our ancestors using everything from you know cannabis to ceylon cinnamon to you know all sorts of different derivatives for thousands of years

so it's not like supplementation or self-medication or the whole creation of pharmaceuticals is something that's unnatural or not an acceptable human activity. But once you start to use it as a crutch, I think that's where you run into issues. Once you deny the human body's ability to be able to heal itself or to be able to decrease stress on its own, you begin to rely on these exogenous chemicals. I think that's where you start playing with fire.

I just wonder what's happening to people's minds over long-term use of this stuff where you're not going into these deep sleep cycles and you're using it every night because essentially once you get hooked on it, a lot of people have a really hard time sleeping without it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're shorting themselves, right? Right.

But I mean, I wonder what studies... Big part is memory, it's learning, like that. That's where a lot of that type of stuff happens. I mean, it's the same thing with, what's it called, glymphatic drainage, like this new drainage system for the brain that they've just discovered in recent years. This idea that you actually detoxify the brain during these sleep cycles. And it's even enhanced when you sleep on your side. They even looked at sleeping positions and this thing called glymphatic drainage. And when you're not going through proper sleep cycles, or you're constantly waking because you're on your back and you have, you know, a lot of people have sleep apnea where you'll look at their sleep charts and they'll frequently wake during the

night or you'll see periods where they just get ripped out of deep sleep. Yeah. You wake up and you don't have memory consolidation or you don't have the type of neuronal repair and recovery that you'd want, or, you know, you can even short yourself on muscle repair, you know, and there's, there's probably a lot that we don't know about just dreaming and its ability to be able to you know do things like help form memories or or make you know learning or experiences more deeply rooted but yeah i mean it's it's i think sleep architecture is something that just gets super fucked up in a modern post-industrial era we've got access to pharmaceuticals that just take a sledgehammer to our heads yeah no question about it and it's also there's been a lot of work done on actually going to sleep with a problem this

whole idea of sleep on it like there's there's actually something real to that that there are some there's some cognitive balancing that's going on while you're sleeping where your mind is actually going over whatever issues you might have and trying to come up with a problem during sleep time, during your subconscious. You don't want to know how many times now, and I'm learning this as I get older, that you delay a decision or you delay replying to an email or delay responding to a text message or what have you until you've gotten a full night of sleep on it. And the clarity that you get after that, I mean, you just basically, you think about it a little bit before you fall asleep and then you go to sleep and you wake up with such a better answer. The same thing with walk on it, like walk on it is another thing. We know you, you make more nerve growth factor and more brain derived neurotrophic factor when you walk while you're learning. I recently gave a

TEDx talk and I just, I and I made the whole TEDx talk, and I learned the whole thing while I was walking up on the farm road back behind my house. I'd just walk up through the forest, pop out into the sunshine, walk up and down that road, and just listen to my TED talk on my earbuds and give my talk. It's amazing for the brain. But, yeah, I agree. Dwelling on something before you go to sleep it does the trick i always if i do that i always have a response the next day that's kinder less emotional more understanding friendlier um you know it's reciprocating any any sort of

good vibes it's it's it's really interesting. It's really interesting how there is some sort of a wisdom that's imparted on you while you're sleeping. There is. And now what I do is I'll think about what it is, but I am a big fan of fiction before you fall asleep. It just lets you escape to a whole different world. I took my kids on this giant tour of New York City. We went to Chelsea Market and the Highline Park and the Empire State Building and Ellis Island. We just did it all. But we went across the street from Central Park to the New York Historical Society where they had a Harry Potter exhibit.

And we walked in there. I've just always been resistant to the Harry Potter phase. I've never read the books, never watched the movies, but my kids really wanted to go, so I took them. And when I walked through there and saw all the research, the deep research that J.K. Rowling did on alchemy and herbology and the history of magic and wizardry, and she actually took a deep dive into all this stuff. She pre-planned out all seven of those books before she even wrote the first one, and all of her original manuscripts were in there, and her letters back and forth to the editor and to the publisher. I walked out the other end of that exhibit.

It took us about two hours to get through, just looking at everything, thumbing through everything, and I was just like a die-hard harry potter fan where is this this was that i don't it was one of those things that was at the new york historical society but you know a lot of these they'll do an exhibit and they'll kind of go in and out during the year so i doubt it's still going right now because this was like three months ago and uh you know we walked out and i'm you know my kids are like dad this is the gryffindor wand and this is is the Dumbledore's wand, and the Gryffindor sweater, and the Slytherin sweater. And I just started buying them all the sweaters and the wands, and now I'm reading the book. So I'm halfway through Goblet of Fire right now, and I'm actually digging it.

My 10-year-old read all of them. She read all of them in the course of a year. Have you gone to the Universal ride? No, but they have a brochure for that down at the Hilton where I'm staying. It's amazing. The Harry Potter World ride. It's incredible. It's a 3D ride

where you're on a roller coaster, but it's not 3D, but it's augmented. That'll be next to me. I'm a fan. I'll go by myself. Scream. My hand's up in the air. You'll love it. Yeah. It's really good.

The whole Harry Potter world is really good. It's amazing. Don't drink that butter beer, though. It'll give you diabetes. I did. Well, one of my boys made butter beer for his classmates because they've got like a, they help mom with all this stuff. They've got like a cooking podcast and they do, their last episode was marshmallows.

They made marshmallows but there's like a cup's worth of bone broth in every marshmallow and it's like this healthy like glycine infused marshmallow that they made a dark chocolate fondue with wait a minute dip it in coconut flakes how are you using that much bone broth in a marshmallow i don't know what does it feel like i don't have the recipe but it tastes amazing like i'm i'm usually not much of a sneak snacks into bed kind of guy, but I was like taking marshmallows to bed, eating marshmallows and reading Harry Potter in bed.

How much sugar is in the marshmallows? Not a lot. Really? Not a lot. No, they're doing a good job with their podcast. Like they're doing a lot of like blackstrap molasses, stevia, and raw honey, and they're doing like uh um what else did they make they made like a like a uh a gluten-free baked donut with a cream cheese ginger frosting and cow nibs on top that just

like you dip it in coffee and it tastes like a real donut good lord they are they're turning into little little chefs they do a cooking podcast yeah. What's the benefit of grass-fed beef over regular beef? I know there is a benefit, but I never can recall it correctly. It has something to do with the essential fatty acids. It's mostly fatty acid ratios. Yeah, because grain, you're going to have more of the omega-6 fatty acids, which have been unfairly vilified, meaning that a lot of people are just like,'t eat any omega-6s don't have any arachidonic acid like don't don't overdo your seeds your nuts your nut butter kind of like the

the orthorexic health world as a whole you know like when you read nutrition magazines and stuff they're like do your omega-3s but be careful americans have a 20 to 1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio but the problem is that omega-6 is that, a lot of those are derived from what are called parent essential oils. And your cell membranes need a certain amount of omega-6 fatty acids from seeds and nuts and plants and even to a certain extent grains. excess of omega-3s and not enough omega-6s because you're going so far into the fish oil category, then it actually damages a component of your mitochondrial membrane called cardiolipin. You actually make less of that. Really?

So you interfere with normal cellular activity. What seeds are most beneficial? Flax? I would imagine the most nutrient-dense ones. Right. Do you have a specific ones? a specific almonds macadamia i mean what i is like almonds macadamia nuts brazil nuts i just don't eat the quasi nuts like peanuts which are you know they're not as high in nutrient density they're more of a legume than a nut um i a lot of my nuts either raw or lightly roasted you always look at the label to

make sure they didn't put a lot of vegetable oil and canola oil in them. But, you know, I'm a fan of nuts. I eat my nuts like you'd eat your nuts if you were going to have to shell them, right? Like if you've ever had to shell a walnut, you're not going to eat 30 walnuts because that would be exhausting, right? You might have a handful. Yeah, like eat your pistachios in a shell. It's annoying as hell, but it keeps you from eating too many of them i buy them shelled and i eat fistfuls of them yeah like last night i ate like a half a bag yeah pistachios are great for your microbiome too

yeah i actually had a couple of research studies on that last year that showed an improvement in the diversity of the bacteria in your gut with pistachios. That's one of the nuts that's good for your body, probably because of the fiber content in pistachios. But grass-fed versus grain-fed is primarily the omega-3 fatty acids. I mean, you have less of the arachidonic acid, less of the potentially inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids. There's probably part of it being that grass-fed, grass-finished beef is generally raised on a farm that's using less herbicides, less pesticides, raising their meat in a more sustainable fashion, giving it less hormones, giving it less antibiotics.

That's painting with a broad brush. But generally grass-fed, there's more to it than just the fatty acid composition. It's just a better meat overall. Well, better health-wise. Grain-fed beef, I will not lie. You can have a pretty damn tasty fatty cut of grain fed beef you certainly can but i honestly prefer the the taste of grass fed i like the denser meat the darker meat i like it better just to me it just it it just tastes healthier i just i crave it more you know and when i go back and forth between the

two of them when i eat grain fed, it feels like a lazy cow. Like it's mushy. It's good. It's delicious. Don't get me wrong, but there's a difference. It's kind of funny because I've gone over to Dubai a few times and taught fitness conferences over there, and they advertise grain-fed. Like they want everybody to, like when you go to the restaurants, like this beef is the finest grain-fed like they want everybody to like when you go to the restaurants like this beef is the finest grain-fed beef you know we go to like peter luger's which is a lot of grain pretty widely recognized as the greatest steakhouse in the world that place is all that place is a trip

i actually i i didn't like my steak how fucking dare you i know i'm gonna get i'm gonna get why did you not like it some rude brooklyn waiter going to take me out. How could you not have liked it? I didn't like it. What didn't you like? I didn't like it. Just something about, like the meat, just taste it. It tasted like it was drenched in vegetable oil. Like something about it just didn't taste right.

Maybe I had a poor Peter Luger's experience. That doesn't even make sense. But I did not enjoy it that much. Dude, I ate there and afterwards I'm like, I don't think it gets better. I don't think food gets better. Yeah. How dare you new york does have a lot of good restaurants though yeah no they do my buddy uh david boulet he's a chef over there and he has this wonderful restaurant where he brings like doctors and nutritionists in and they teach you about certain aspects of the food that you're eating like i did one one there on longevity. And I taught about like having bitters before your meal to reduce your glucose and your

insulin response to the meal and the use of like sweet breads for your thymus gland to increase the activity of your immune system to, you know, like a lot of these polyphenols and antioxidants from the purples and the greens and the blues to, there are these things called uncoupling proteins that actually get activated with, with cryotherapy and cold water immersion. But that also are something that get activated with the consumption of it's, it's like a sea urchin is basically, it's like a sea urchin foam that they did at this dinner. But basically what he does is he'll partner with the physician or the,

or the nutritionist or whatever and make this amazing like four hour you know five star meal that's designed to enhance the health effects or whatever it is that you just learned about wow and i was actually in new york when i did that blood procedure a couple weeks ago i dropped in there again and ate that's one of my favorite places to go so you know who's got a steakhouse in new york city is that guy who fucking sprinkles the salt. What the hell's his name? Salt Bae? He's got a place in New York City. I don't know this guy.

You know that fucking meme online where the guy's got the salt and he's throwing it on the meat? No. You're too busy doing actual work. But I like salt. I like good salt. As a matter of fact,

you know what the very best salt that you can get is? What? This is based on, I was with a group of doctors a couple of months ago in Park City, and this guy, one of the guys that was there, he's like a water and a salt expert, and he did what's called a mass spectrometry analysis of all these popular salts, like Himalayan sea salt and black kona salt and Aztec salt and Mexican salt, all these different salts, and analyze them for their mineral content because you want high mineral content, but their metal content, right?

Like we know that iron, especially in guys now, we're finding out it's not that great. It's oxidative. It can cause damage. It's associated with inflammation. We know that metals and microplastics and all these kind of things are winding up in the food supply. But top of the list in terms of cleanliness and mineral content, what do you think that was? Kosher salt.

It wasn't kosher salt. You can buy this at just about any grocery store. Morton sea salt. No, no. It's Celtic salt. Celtic? Celtic salt. You know, a blue bag.

It's kind of like a gray salt, and it's gray because they don't, like, bleach it. But it's still clean. It's not, like, pink and reddish because it doesn't have bleach it but it's still clean it's not like pink and reddish because it doesn't have a lot of iron i've never even heard of Celtic salt yeah it's amazing it's flavorful it's big it's big chunk so it works well as a meat rub oh i carry salt there it is look at that yeah i mean you can buy that just about anywhere yeah yeah and that that stuff is about the healthiest salt you can get okay according to this dude yeah i like it i started you know i always travel with some kind of salt my wife gets pissed because you

know she'll make these amazing meals and the first thing i do is i just pull out the salt and just cover everything in salt but i think it's because i excrete a lot of salt if you're working out a lot when i raced for uh for for uh for timex, they brought in a bunch of physiologists to test our sweat sodium analysis, meaning that they measure how much sodium you excrete for any given volume of sweat. And this kind of returns that whole genetic thing. ancestry, who would have come from a population that did a lot of fermenting, a lot of curing, a lot of pickling, we would develop some pretty robust sodium excretion mechanisms, right? Because we're preserving our food with salt. You don't want all that salt to build up in the body because, you know, theoretically you could increase blood pressure. You could cause some damage if you have too much salt. And when you look at other folks who didn't, you know, people who would, for example, sweat a lot and live in a hot environment, you know, like whatever, South Africa or a very hot region of the Philippines or whatever,

they would have some pretty robust salt conservation mechanisms to be able to hold on to sodium and hold on to salt because you're sweating more. and hold on to salt because you're sweating more. Well, my sweat sodium analysis revealed that I lose like two and a half times more salt in my sweat than the average person. So I think that dictates to a certain extent almost my craving for salt. When I was racing Ironman triathlon, I would lay awake at night, and I could feel my blood pounding in my ears after a day of training. And I started using salt heavily. And one of the first things that happens because salt regulates aldosterone,

which is one of the compounds that regulates your blood pressure, all that went away. Like I could fall asleep at night, you know, when you lay your head down on your pillow and I couldn't hear the blood pounding in my ears. So for about four years, I've just, I've been salt on everything. There's a ton of it. I'm sold. I got to wrap this up, It's a ton of it. I'm sold. I got to wrap this up.

Unfortunately, that was awesome though. You're the best dude. Thank you so much. It's always good to talk to you. I don't know how the fuck you retain all this information, but I'm glad you do. Thanks man.

Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Uh, give everybody your Instagram. Just, uh, Google Ben Greenfield. I'm everything.

There you go. All right. Thank you brother. Appreciate it. Thanks man. Thanks, man.