The Rich Roll Podcast - Nutrition, Fitness, Online Entrepreneurism, Homeschooling & What Happened When He Trained for an Ironman on a Low Carb / High Fat Ketosis Diet

Episode Date: November 4, 2013

For fans of Ben Greenfield, this is Ben like you've never heard him before. For longtime listeners and fans of health & fitness podcasts, Ben Greenfield needs no introduction. Self-avowed training guinea pig, ardent nutrition student, accomplished multisport athlete, podcast host, blogger and health entrepreneur at Ben Greenfield Fitness and all around good dude. Ben and I have been acquainted for some years — but only through the internet. He was an early guest on this show ( RRP #11 ), I have guested on his podcast as well as his Endurance Planet podcast ( HERE ), we did a nutrition-oriented Spreecast with Vinnie Tortorich back in February ( HERE ) and he has written about my exploits a bit as well ( HERE ). And yet surprisingly, we had never met in person. So it was a pleasure to finally sit down with the guy one-on-one so we could dig a bit deeper. Skype interviews are great, but there is just no substitute for sitting across from someone when you want to have a proper chat. And this interview gets it done in spades. Today on the show we talk about a multitude of things, including: * How he turned his passion for health and fitness into a thriving online business * Some keys for entrepreneurial online success; * His experience training for and racing an Ironman on a high fat / low carb ketogenic diet; * His plan for putting on 30lbs of muscle during the upcoming winter months; * Our experiences interviewing Durianrider; * What the lifestyle “hack” (as in #lifehack or #biohack) actually means; * His experience as a homeschooled child and how he homeschools his children; * How his dietary regimen is often misunderstood, his passion for plants & his vegetable garden; and * Ben's Upcoming Human Performance Course on CreativeLive. Like many of my guests, I don't agree with all points & issues raised. But I truly like and respect Ben, particularly his willingness to engage in all forms of self-experimentation and his transparency when it comes to openly sharing his results. I hope you enjoy the conversation! Rich

Welcome to episode 59 of the Rich Roll Podcast with fitness guru Ben Greenfield. The Rich Roll Podcast. Plant power. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I am Rich Roll. Plant power. If you've been listening to the show, you might recall a recent episode where Julie and I kind of talked about Halloween and the problems that it often poses if you have kids, how to navigate the pitfalls of Halloween and everything that it presents. I don't know about you, but I love Halloween. We love Halloween as a family. We make a big deal out of it every year. We spend weeks putting together our costumes and it's a ton of fun. We all look forward to it very much. But we have to deal with this issue of how do we go around and trick or treat and collect all of this crazy, crappy candy? candy and how do you deal with the kids who want to eat it and be a responsible parent who is supposed to be guiding their kids in the right direction with respect to nutrition and health. It's a conundrum. It's a tricky, it's a sticky wicket, I guess you could say,

because you want the kids to have fun and you want to have fun and you want to kind of do what everyone else is doing, which means collecting a gigantic bag or bags if you have more than one kid of all of this junk, all of this prepackaged, terrible for you candy loaded with high fructose corn syrup and the like. And in the meantime, supporting these companies that produce this stuff that is making us sick. And so Julie and I, actually Julie, it was really her brainchild, she put it together, and you might remember us talking about it in a much earlier episode with Julianna Hever. We decided we were going to do something different this year. We were going to host our own party called Plant Powered Halloween

and invite like-minded families to come on over to our house and we would host the festivities. But we were going to do it a little bit differently. We were going to require that there were two things, kind of two rules, I guess you could say. No store-bought costumes, none of that kind of plastic nonsense that's so easy to kind of go to Costco and just pick up and abdicate all kind of parental involvement in the joy and the hard work of creating your own costume with your child and constructing it over a number of days or, in our case, weeks. You had to create your own costume at home. Make it yourself somehow. Be creative.

Create your own costume at home. Make it yourself somehow. Be creative. Sort of compel the kids to think outside the box and the parents also to get more involved and not do the kind of easy thing of just picking something up at the store. So that was rule number one. family was to bring their own plant-powered Halloween treats, homemade organic sweets. And we didn't know how it was going to go. We didn't know who was going to show up. We had a lot of interest. And at the last minute, some families backed down. And I understand that. The kids at the last minute say, I don't want to go to a party. I want to trick or treat like everyone else. So it's always very difficult when you decide you're going to do something that is kind of at odds with popular culture. And we knew that it was going to be a challenge this first year to pull this thing off. But I'm happy to say that we had an amazing time. If you follow me on Instagram, at RichWall on Instagram, I posted a group picture of everybody that showed up at our party, and we had an absolute blast. We built a haunted house. I should say Tyler and Trapper, my sons, spent two days constructing in it. It was incredible in the garage.

Super awesome. And we had a ton of kids with wildly creative costumes. And all the parents brought their own homemade treats and they each set up a table. So we had all these different stations there. And Julie whipped up her genius in the kitchen and came up with some amazing recipes. One of which was the recipe that Chef AJ shared on a recent episode with the caramel chocolate apples dipped or whatever. And they were incredible. So we had

amazing treats that tasted delicious, but were all organic, vegan, and still Halloween treats, sweets and the like. But in the grand spectrum of Halloween food, I guess you could say, in the grand spectrum of Halloween food, I guess you could say, far, far, far more healthy. And, you know, kids just want to have a good time. And these kids had a great time. And I'm so excited about what we're going to be able to do next year. All the parents left, they were so kind of, I think, like relieved, like, oh my gosh, we can have a really fun time without having to do it the way that everyone else does it. And the kids can go home happy. The parents can go home happy feeling like they, you know, were acting responsibly with respect to health and nutrition. And it was a win-win for everybody. And our goal is to help inspire you guys out there, families across the United States and the globe who celebrate Halloween, to try this yourself.

We had such fun. And the parents were ecstatic to be able to do this. And to see the kids actually enjoying it and not feeling like they were missing out by going around the neighborhood was really a blast. Because I think what happens is, you know, when you go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood and the kids bring home the gigantic stash, then it becomes this, you know, weird negotiation with your kids about how to get them to give up the remainder of this gigantic bag of candy or avoid eating it yourself. And so you make these deals like here, you know, let's trade the candy in for, I don't know, a new toy or something like that. And it becomes awkward and bizarre. And then you want to end up throwing out all this stuff. And in the meantime, you're supporting these gigantic candy companies that are making us sick. So we're excited about

this new way of doing it. And the great thing was to get all the kids involved in planning the party. And so there's a sort of pride of ownership that goes along with it. And I can guarantee you that our kids will never forget this experience. It was really special. And just the process of, you know, being with the kids and creating the costumes with them, coming up with creative solutions and materials to make what they want as opposed to just picking it up at the store is a joy as a parent. And I think that the kids will always remember that. So we're really proud of what we were able to pull off and pretty excited about what we're going to do next year. We're going to put a little bit more thought into it, expand it, maybe put up a maze and do some really cool stuff.

And so anyway, if there are other parents out there that are interested in doing this themselves, reach out to us, leave a comment on the comment section for this blog post. And we're happy to kind of help share with you guys what we did. And I'll have Julie back on and maybe we'll do like a full longer recap of that experience. But it was very gratifying and it was cool. I love Halloween. It was awesome. I hope your guys' Halloween was cool too. Today on the show, we have fitness guru, Ben Greenfield. He was an early guest on my podcast way back when. I don't remember what episode number it was. And we did it on Skype. And despite the fact that I've guested on Ben's show a number of times, back when I did Epic Five and First and Second Ultraman, I was a guest on his show and on Endurance Planet, which he also

owns and controls. But we had never met in person. So it was really cool to finally hook up in person with this guy, sit down, have an in-person chat, and we went through a lot of stuff. It was really fun. We talked about, you know, I'm really interested in how he's taken his fitness acumen, his experience and knowledge in fitness and in diet and nutrition, and turned it into a really successful, viable business. So we talk a little bit about that, you know, kind of on the entrepreneurial tip. We talk about his recent experiments, training for an Ironman on a high fat, low carb, almost no carb diet and what that was like. He kind of did this experiment on himself to try to find out whether you could be an endurance athlete in this sort of ketosis state. And if you

listen to this show, you kind of know what my opinion is on eating that way. But, you know, we had a very kind of open-minded discussion about what he found out personally in his experience, what worked, what didn't work. And it was compelling and interesting to hear that story. He also just had durian rider on his show. We talked a little bit about that, about my experience having Durian Ryder on my show and him being on Ben's show, which is entertaining and fun. We talked about our points of commonality, you know, all the energy that goes into kind of getting guys like Ben and I to argue with each other, whether it's Ben and Vinny and Abel James at the Fat-Burning Man, or what does Rich think about this? And, you know, Ben and Rich disagree. And what about Vinny? And, you know, what does Dave Asprey say? And this sort

of cabal of health and fitness podcasters that has kind of blossomed on the scene in iTunes and across the internet, this kind of community that's developed and what it has sort of spawned in terms of a popular dialogue about these issues, which I relish and enjoy. So we get into all of that. We talk about flu shots. We talk about homeschooling. He homeschools his kids. And it was really interesting to hear his approach to that, being a homeschooled kid himself. So anyway, really enjoyed this interview. It was great spending time with Ben in person, and I look forward to having him on the show again multiple times and getting together and get with him in person and getting to know him a little bit better. So I think you'll enjoy this piece.

And before we get into it, other ways to support the show, use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. You can just click on that. We have a new banner ad for Amazon UK for all of the people overseas in the United Kingdom who've been following the show. You're always buying stuff on Amazon, right? So just click through the banner ad on richroll.com first. It takes you to Amazon, buy whatever you're going to buy. It does not cost you one cent extra. It probably adds two seconds to your purchase time. And Amazon kicks us a little bit of loose change, which keeps us going. So please do that. Bear it in mind. You can also donate to the podcast. There's a donate button. We've got products on the site, some nutritional products, my athletic recovery supplement. We got a vitamin B12 supplement. We have a downloadable PDF cookbook with delicious

recipes, the things that I eat to fuel my training and the things that we feed our kids, all very delicious, nutritious, and easy to prepare. We have a meditation program, Jai Release, which is highly effective. Thanks for everybody who's been sending emails about how much it is improving their daily experience. A lot of questions about t-shirts. We have some plant-powered t-shirts that we're going to be getting up on the site soon. Please be patient. We're building a new online shopping cart and redesigning some things on the site, and these things take time. So I want to have it all dialed in perfectly before I put all this stuff up so that there aren't any problems with shipping and fulfillment and all that kind of nonsense. And so it seems easy to just throw up a store on your site,

but it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. So it's taking a little bit of time. I can't say with any kind of confidence the exact date that we're going to launch it. I hope to have it done within the next three or four weeks. It might take a little bit longer. so stay tuned. But we're going to offer like three or four t-shirts, not just the one that you might've seen on Instagram or Twitter. And we're going to be building it out with all kinds of garments, cycling kit, and some cool stuff coming up. We're going to have signed books, a whole variety of products, which I'm really excited about. It's just in development right now. So anyway, also interested in plant-based nutrition, Julie and I have an online course at mindbodygreen.com,

The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. So whether you're a longtime vegan or just interested in getting more vegetables and fruits and legumes into your diet and not sure how to approach that, this is for you. It's three and a half hours of online video content broken down into five to 10-minute segments with an online community. It's really cool. I'm very proud of it. Check that out at mindbodygreen.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And

with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful.

And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. calm. Ben Greenfield, ladies and gentlemen, good dude, tons of information. The guy loves to geek out on nutrition stuff. He loves to use himself as a guinea pig. So get out the propeller hats, get out the notebooks. You might want to write this stuff down, but it's really interesting conversation and proud to call this guy my friend. And without further ado, enjoy the interview. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Greenfield.

You're going to build a soundproof room?proof room yeah downstairs away from the kids super fantastic private podcast yeah i'll put up an electric fence so they can't go near it yeah the ultimate man cave yeah exactly kid let's see your fingerprints yeah you can't even hear the knock retinal scans well it's like in my house uh the kids will be completely quiet and until it's like okay now i'm gonna try to record a tag for a podcast and then the minute you do that that you're just like putting the energy out they just like to sing their favorite song like you had to do that right now so i you know i like to kind of just keep that stuff i mean it's sort of you know it's like hey you're a I, you know, I like to kind of just keep that stuff. I mean, it's sort of,

you know, it's like, Hey, you're a human being, you know what I mean? It's like, you're not doing a radio show. Exactly. And it's free. Yeah. But you know, as I've said before, people get very demanding about their free content. Yeah. Yeah. I've experienced a little bit of that. I'm sure you have. Yeah. So thanks for driving all the way out here, man. It's awesome to be here. I was able to get away from the gray, cloudy Washington state and slip down to California for a week and make my wife jealous. Oh, you're here alone for this trip? I'm here alone, yeah.

Just me and my rental car and my sunglasses. And the nice weather. And the nice weather weather yeah yeah only thing missing is a bicycle october it's a shame to come out this way without a bike and october is like the nicest month the riding out here is epic so next time yeah i know i gotta i gotta eventually get one of those suitcase bikes you can get um oh you mean you mean the cases to travel with or well no i have the case but like the actual foldable bikes oh right like the carbon bikes that you can hook you up with a bike down here there's a big ride on sunday you're gonna miss really yeah the uh mike nascar memorial ride does it's like 8 000 feet of climbing over 80 miles and money for a great cause are you gonna

do it i am gonna do it yeah I am going to do it. Yeah. So it gets a pretty good crowd every year. So I'm looking forward to it. Nice. Yeah, man. So next time the bike has to come. I'll do it. So what are you doing in LA?

All sorts of stuff. I came down here to meet today earlier, had lunch with a business mentor and of course had to squeeze in a visit to the mighty rich role that's right his uh his recording studio here which is beautiful and kind of creepy at the same time it's a lot of a lot of equipment a lot of equipment and and uh i brought you into a storm trooper costume or something like that there's a few of those. Yeah. And yeah, I'm going to see our friend Vinny on – I was going to ask you about that. When are we getting together? Sunday, I think I'm going to get together with Vinny and Tawny from Endurance Planet.

And I'm going to see Mark Sisson. And then I've also got a meetup tomorrow with some of my buddies who I'm part of like a business group with. So we're going to have brunch and play some basketball and hang out for the afternoon doing some masterminding, which always sounds like an impressive word, throw around. And then headed down to Santa Barbara for about two days to do some work on a phone app down there that I'm working on. So and then fly back home and hang out for a few days. And then I'm off to Thailand with the family for racing and triathlon clinics and all sorts of stuff. I feel like you, you know, you've really got the internet wired. You know, I look at your site, which you, when did you redo your site?

the internet wired. I look at your site. When did you redo your site? Oh, gosh. I brought on a new guy named Jake, who's a real wizard and has a good eye for design and stuff. And we redid that about three months ago or so. I felt like a lot of the articles I write on the site were kind of getting lost in the shuffle. And I wanted it, I wanted, I felt like a lot of the articles I write on the site were kind of getting lost in the shuffle and I wanted it to look more like a newspaper and just have a bunch of the articles kind of appear right there on the front along with podcasts and stuff like that. So, so yeah, we re redid that a few months ago and, um, yeah, it's going well. It's cool. I mean, yeah, you get blasted with content when you go to that page and, and, um, you know, it's sort of. And it's sort of you're further kind of down the line from where I'm at right now.

But I use you as a case study. I study your site. It's like this is your personal site. This is your coaching site. And you have the podcast there and you have blog content. But you also have products and you have services. And you're publishing all these different books and making all these offerings. And, you know, it's not an easy thing to figure out how to configure all of that and make it user-friendly and where the end user can go to it and find what they're looking for. And, you know, you've really created, you know, quite a little empire.

Well, nothing that I do is planned out, really. I don't believe that. No, seriously. I was a personal trainer and a coach for years, and I remember sitting up until like 2 a.m. at night trying to figure out how to program HTML and make my first website, which was this coaching website called Pacific Elite Fitness. I wanted to coach people online, and it was just like this ugly website that I was making in my apartments. You know, when I get home from the gym, personal training, I just, you know, we didn't have any kids or anything.

And I'd go in there and try and figure out how to put articles online and how to create a newsletter and, you know, how do you get people to, to sign up for a newsletter so you could send them stuff. And it, you know, all this stuff was just built up, um, you know, from the ground. And then, you know, I started trying to figure out how to put books online and, um, you know, all this stuff was just built up, you know, from the ground. And then, you know, I started trying to figure out how to put books online. And, you know, eventually. I mean, you were doing it long before. I mean, now it's sort of like every knucklehead has their e-book or whatever.

But, you know, you were doing it way before a lot of people. It became, like, popular. Like, I remember it was five or six years ago that I sat down in front of my webcam. And there was this new thing called podcasting and I wanted to do a video cast. And I actually figured out how to get it to show up on iTunes. And I was so proud of myself and did like two videos. I don't even know if you could still find them. They were like five-minute long videos where I was talking about the latest research and strength and conditioning or something like that. where I was talking about the latest research and strength and conditioning or something like that.

And then I switched to audio because that was way easier and I didn't have to comb my hair or put on a shirt. And yeah, I've been podcasting for a long time. How long ago was that? That was a long time ago. Like I started experimenting with this stuff like five or six years ago and then really launched like hardcore into podcasting

almost four years ago, like in terms of like putting out content on a weekly basis. Well, it was almost – I mean anybody who was doing it earlier than that was almost too ahead of their time. The audience wasn't there yet. Yeah, yeah. And iTunes was finicky and the RSS feeds that you had to put out, which I still don't really understand, they would always break and it was just weird. So yeah, it seems a little easier now, which is why everybody and their freaking dog has a podcast now. I know. I think there's 250,000.

There's a lot. There are a lot. So how many episodes of your podcast do you have now total? How many have you done? I do one a week that's like the official Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast where we talk about research and do Q&A and stuff.

And there's 262 episodes of that. But then there's about 300 additional just like interviews, talking to people and getting special guests on and stuff like that. And you're also like the quick and dirty tips, fitness guy, right? Yeah. So how did that get fit guys in my, in my red tight pants?

What's the story with that? Cause I go on iTunes and I see like that series of those on all different subject matters. And they're always like way at the top of the rankings and all the categories. Well, they're a podcasting network. So, so everybody bounces off each other. And if someone subscribes to one, the others will show up in their feed or the You Might Like This. The Quick and Dirty Tips Network, which I don't know if it's owned by the Grammar Girl, the Mignon Fogarty. Yeah, I think she's the one who started it. But she's in charge of it or something. She's a wizard.

Karjavid or something. She's a wizard. Quick and Dirty Tips is one. There's another network called the – it's like 5x5 or something like that. But if you go to iTunes and you go to the right-hand side, there's like maybe 10, 15 different networks listed. And Quick and Dirty Tips is one of those networks that's like a syndicate of – I think there's maybe like 15 of them. And so they rank really high in iTunes. I think it's just like one of those rising tide kind of things. So did they approach you or did you come up with that or how did that work?

I approached them like two or three years ago. I saw that they were putting out nutrition tips and grammar tips and business tips. And I didn't see anything in there for fitness. So I found a number and I called them up on the phone and we chatted and I sent them some sample episodes. And we kind of went back and forth for about three months and then launched the podcast. It happened pretty quick, actually, about as fast as it took to draw some kind of a get-fit-guy avatar, which I don't think looks anything like me. You sit anonymously behind that. Did they not even allow you to like – you can't even attach your name to it?

Like, is that part of the point? Like it's sort of the, you know, you're just the quick and tips guy. I'm allowed to say my name. I do say my name. I say, I admit I haven't listened to any of them. I just see them. They're all scripted. Like, yeah, you, you write out the whole episode.

You write the whole thing. It's like five minutes long or something or five to 10 minutes long. So every Tuesday I sit down and I write out an episode. Usually I will either look at questions people have written in or I'll go to like fitness.alltop.com and see what's trending in fitness. And then I'll write an article based off of what people seem to be interested in at the time and then send off the article and it gets edited and comes back. And then I literally am reading each

of those episodes, trying to make it sound like I'm not really reading, but you know, you walk a fine line. So everybody knows, I think that I'm reading the script, but yeah. And so they're five to 10 minutes long and I send those off and yeah. And how does that work? Do they pay you to do that or do you get like, I'm just interested in the – you don't have to answer if you don't want to. It's kind of like writing for Triathlon Magazine. I'm interested in the business aspect of what you're doing. So they get sponsors, and those sponsors pay the Quick and Dirty Tips Network from what I understand here. And I could totally be hacking this together and, and, um, misrepresenting what they're actually doing, but I'm pretty sure they've, they've got

sponsors that come on board, like, you know, whatever, um, you know, done in Brad street or audible or whoever. And then, uh, the sponsors are paying them a certain fee per episode. Uh, the sponsor gets a placement in the episode, get a sidebar advertisement you know i mentioned their name that kind of thing and then um i get paid essentially similar to like what a what a freelance magazine journalist would get paid so you know like when i write an article for for lava magazine or something like that you know i'll get a few hundred dollars and um you know it's it's not something you could make a living off of with that model. Like, you know, I could never have that as a full-time job. But you can say this is, you know, you want to learn more.

You're allowed to advertise your own site. Yeah, I'm allowed to say my name and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe talk about a book I've written or, you know. So essentially right now you've created this career out of like a whole variety of different pursuits that all rotate around, you know, this sort of singular idea of fitness and training and sort of biohacking and life hacking. So you have the magazine articles. You have quick and dirty tips. You have your podcast.

You have your coaching business. You have your books and your e-books. And so when I look at it, I'm like overwhelmed. I'm like, how do you even like, and you're super fit and you're going to Kona, like, how do you, and you have kids and we're going to talk about that. Like, how do you, like, how do you find the time to sort of take care of yourself physically or, you know, make all of these pieces, like have the gears all like humming. You know, I have systems that I use, like for example, one thing that's really worked well for me because I used to have like this never ending checklist,

right? It was just like this notebook. And eventually it was a word document where just like every time I had something come across my radar that I wanted to do, it went into the checklist. And now I use a program called Evernote, and I have Monday through Sunday in Evernote, and every single day has a specific task or range of tasks associated with it. So the only day I ever shoot videos is on Tuesday. So if anybody ever says, hey, we want you to shoot a video for this or if I have an idea to do a video for my YouTube channel or whatever, that gets shoved to Tuesday. So you know Tuesdays are always your day for doing that. Out of my head. So it's about keeping a clear mind.

Wednesdays are podcasting days. Saturdays and Sundays are days that I'll review like training files from clients. So for the podcast, do you bang out a bunch of interviews in one day and then have them? Or do you just do one and load it for that week? Or are you playing catch up

or do you have it really backlogged? So usually the main Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast is never backlogged just because we're trying to talk about really relevant new content. But I will have interviews backlogged. So Thursdays are the days that I try to schedule folks to come on who are going to be featured on that next week's podcast. who are going to be featured on that next week's podcast. But Wednesdays are the days that I'm meeting with Brock, my podcast sidekick who lives up in Toronto, and we're actually recording the official big podcast. So yeah, and those are done one at a time.

So if we mess it up, we're kind of screwed, and folks just have to wait a week. We're up until midnight. Right, and for the podcast, I mean, do you have people that do the post-production end of it or you do it all? Brock does most of it. I used to do it all myself until like a year and a half ago. And then Brock came on as,

as a sidekick and he's really like an audio wizard. So I record on my end at home in Washington and he's up in Toronto and we're basically just like Skyping together. Right. And, um, then he does most of the publishing, which is really nice that I don't have to do that anymore.

I think people don't understand. It's fairly time consuming. You know, it'll take me a good four or five hours, you know, per episode. Trying to get rid of my kids, like flushing the toilet in the background. It's not hard, but it's just, it's like you need this checklist

and all these things you got to do to get it up right. Yeah. Yeah. It takes some time for sure. All right. And then you have coaching on – you do coaching clients on another day and then – Yeah. Do you train in the mornings or you train twice a day or how does that work?

I usually don't get out of bed until about 7. I'm not a morning guy at all. So I train at about 4 to 6 p.m. or so in the afternoon. I like that training time because everything I do is short and quick and fast and explosive. That's just what I do is kind of this minimal volume type of thing. And your body's core temperature, your reaction time, and what's called your peak protein synthesis all occur between about 4 and 6 p.m. So for me, as far as like muscle repair and recovery and being able to achieve high intensities,

that works for me. Then I have dinner. So training in the afternoon or evening, working slash homeschooling in the morning. And then we usually do lunch. We do a nap. I work a little bit more. And then, yeah, go work out, have dinner. Usually work a little bit more. Then go work out, have dinner. I usually work a little bit more after dinner, so it's kind of pieced together.

Yeah, I mean I'm sure you get the question all the time, and I get it, which is, well, I work full-time, and I've got to get up early, and I have kids and family too. I'd love to train for an Ironman or even do a triathlon or a 10K, but I just don't have the time. I can't find the time. And I have a certain answer for that, but I'm interested in kind of the counsel that you would give to that question. So the first thing is that if you have written down what you're going to do, and this is going to sound like dumb old school advice, but I mean, it works. There's a reason that this advice has been around for so long. If you actually have written down what you're going to do, that's, that's huge. You never roll out of bed without a plan because that creates decision fatigue. So for the same reason that, that I keep

a clear mind at all times, meaning like I'm always shoving stuff out of my head onto Evernote. It's the same deal with my workouts. Like I know what I'm going to do when I roll out of bed. And if I don't, I'm probably not going to go do. Yeah. I mean, I know that when I'm working with my coach and I have my program and I know what my workouts are for the week, I do them. But when I'm not working with my coach or I'm not preparing for a certain race, then I just – it's harder to follow through on that. And most times I do it, but it's a lot easier to not do it. Yeah. times I do it, but it's a lot easier to not do it. Yeah. And the other thing that I do to get away with staying in shape, but training minimally is I've kind of hacked my lifestyle to stay as active as possible. So like if I'm at home, I'm usually standing seven, eight hours a day. So standing

workstation, I've got a, you know, pull up bar on the door of my office, and my rule is every time I walk under it, I need to do five pull-ups. I've got a barbell out in my garage. I never, ever sit for longer than an hour without doing yoga moves and jumping jacks. And so by the time I actually do work out in the afternoon, I've already been – You've already done a ton of stuff. Yeah, I've kind of had a lot of time on my feet, and I think that's really important too is if you want to get fit with minimal time, you're kind of sort of simulating fitness and exercise just while you're working throughout the day. That's why I think that it would be really cool if corporate America would get on kind of at least like the standing desk type of bandwagon. Treadmill desks are expensive, but you can hack together a standing desk type of bandwagon or the, you know, treadmill desks are expensive,

but you can, you can hack together a standing desk pretty inexpensively. Well, in LA, just so you know, like every time I go to some Hollywood executive's office for, you know, they, they all have standing desks now. Oh yeah. It's not, it's, it's. Or treadmill desks. It's really, I mean, even for people who are exercising like one or two hours a day, if you're sitting for longer than two hours during the day, your risk of dying is still elevated no matter how hard you're working out at the end of the day. So it's not about how much exercise you do. It's about how much time that you've spent sitting.

We should have gotten two treadmills and just done the podcast. I know. I know. We should have. There treadmills and just done the podcast. I know. I know. We should have. There are some people doing it. I don't know how they cover up the noise and everything, but there are some podcasters out there. Running on a treadmill? No, just like walking.

And I have some clients who use treadmills. Brett Plankner does that a little bit on his entry. He'll like bring his – I think he just maybe does it on his iPhone or whatever. But like while he's riding his bike, he'll just record clips. I'm building a house right now. And I've got all the windows raised high enough. Like I've planned out the entire office to where it's built to never be sitting down. Nice.

Like the windows are high and the workstation is built just wide enough for like a truck desk treadmill. And everything is just laid out to have me moving. I like that. And it's soundproof. So no, no toilets. Um, you use the word hack a lot. Like there's, I know it's like sort of super in vogue right now, like life hack, biohack, um, these terms, I don't know who sort of pioneered that. Maybe it was Tim Ferris, but certainly popularized by him. And I, and I, I was thinking about that the other day, and I was like, they're not really – I mean, I understand that the idea of the hack comes from this concept of saving time,

but really they're just good practices or experiments, really. But that doesn't sound as sexy as saying hack. I know, but then it's like, yeah, it's not a hashtagable thing. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, I have this new biohack and everyone wants to know. You can call it a system, a practice, a habit, whatever. Well, yeah, I stand up. I don't sit down too much.

That's my hack. But it's like, well, is that a hack? That's just something wise to do. Right, right. And it is, you know, it's a habit. It's a system. It's a practice. But the word hack is very marketable right now.

It's very in vogue, like you say. I'm going to start using it more. You should. You should, for sure. All right. You're my new life coach. So I feel like there's this kind of cabal of fitness experts and fitness podcasters right now. There's you, there's Dave Asprey, uh, there's Vinnie Tortorich, um, there's Abel James, the fat burning man.

And, uh, and it's sort of cool because there's a little bit of a community that seems to be, I mean, I'm like new at this. I mean, I've been doing it a year, but I'm still like pretty new and learning. Um, there seems to be kind of an interesting community that's developing where we're kind of all guesting on each other's shows and we all kind of know each other, which is funny to me because I used to just train with Vinny, you know, before either of us had podcasts and now, and now it's all about like, well, what does Ben think about what Vinny said? And what does Vinny say about Ben and Red? Did you hear what Rich said? And like, yeah, but Abel James says this and, but Dave Asprey has, you know, the, the, the biohack coffee or, you know, whatever. And it's, I think it's cool, you know, that like people are

interested and they're talking about it and that, um, there is this like growing community, even though I feel like kind of the outsider stepchild because I'm like the plant-based guy. So my message is a little like left of center of what you guys are talking about. It's so good to have a niche though. But yeah, I mean, but my niche is not as marketable or as popular as like the paleo, primal, low carb, you know, like a lot of things that you guys are all talking about that seems to be kind of dominating the debate, I guess, at the moment, um, for better or worse, but, but, uh, I kind of like relish the whole thing and I'm humored, you know, when I go on Twitter and there's like, you know, there's this like sort of, there's this, there's a lot

of energy behind, um, how do I put it? Like, like getting us all in a room and we're going to box it out and see who comes out on top in terms of like who's right and who's wrong. And even with us today, it's sort of like, ooh, what's Rich going to say to – and like I'm not really interested in that. I don't think you are either. I mean we could sit here and debate all day long and then you're going to leave still convinced of what you're doing. The thing is that controversy is enchanting to people and people are drawn to it. And they like to see opposing viewpoints. People like the idea of debates. People like the idea of fights.

And I'm personally really not interested in that kind of stuff either. What I, what I find is, um, that for me, like the past few years in podcasting, it has been really cool to see like all these new people come on the scene, like you, you know, you mentioned other people like Abel and Dave and, and, um, there was a long time where there really wasn't, it seemed, much discussion. Like a lot of podcasters weren't having each other on their podcast. And you'd have like the 5K Runner podcast and he'd put out the stuff on 5K Running and Jillian Michaels, whatever the hell she was doing. I don't really –

I've never listened to her podcast. I have once and it just lost me. I couldn't even follow it. I wasn't sure what was going on. But, yeah, I like it. Like I like that sense of community and that sense that, you know, us calling each other out on Twitter and Facebook and it's kind of fun. And for a long time, it wasn't really like that. Like you were just kind of the lone wolf podcaster.

So, you know, for better or worse, I think it's, I think it's great. I think it is too. It's cool. And, uh, so we got to talk about, um, you just had during rider on your show, right? So by the time this goes live, that will be, is it, is it not like, I actually, I put it out on the app today. So, uh, people have the app. They, they may have noticed that the locked button just disappeared on it because I put it out to the general public and then it will go live on the website tomorrow. So, yeah. So just for a little bit of background, I had him on my show. There was a lot of interest in me having him on the show.

Um, and, uh, as I said in the introduction to having him on, I, I had, um, a little bit of reluctance cause he's very controversial, but, but, you know, he puts out a very strong message. He's very passionate about what he believes in. And people were relentless and say, in telling me like, you gotta have a mind, you gotta have a mind. And, and I did. And, um, and, uh, it was, uh, the response was pretty divisive. I would say.

There were some people that were super psyched. Oh, it was the greatest interview ever. And then other people who left comments. I mean, I never had more comments on my show, like on my blog page. Really? By like quadruple the number of comments that I get for any other show. So it definitely created dialogue and a debate. But there were a lot of people who were like angry.

So one guy was even like, I've listened to every episode of your podcast. I read your book. So it definitely created dialogue and a debate, but there were a lot of people who were like angry, you know? So one guy was even like, I've been listening, I've listened to every episode of your podcast. I read your book and I'm, I'm unsubscribing and I'm like, I'm done with you. And I was like, wow, you know, 57, you know, like 150 hours of free content and you're going to like ditch me off of one interview. And like, I, I'm'm like i'm a sensitive guy so like i don't i don't know how comfortable i am with like that kind of uh dissonance i suppose and he took a dig at you and i defended you because he was talking about like low carb ketosis and yeah no i heard it i was listening while i was out of the run yeah and uh and um and uh oh i just lost my train of thought.

But essentially, there was a wide variety of reactions to that. Oh, and I think I even emailed you and gave you a heads up. And you were like, oh, I just listened to it. It was hilarious. I was laughing. And I was like, really? I would have been upset. There's a difference when you listen to something and you're out you know out in a run and the wind's blowing

through your hair and the birds are singing and you know i'm sure if i would have listened to it i was stuck in traffic maybe i would have not been so happy about getting called out about you know doing low carb ketosis iron man kind of stuff but and you did it as an experiment i mean i think you went into it yeah i did this of like I don't know if this is going to work or not. And there were some bad stuff that happened when I did that. Like I cut my carbs way too low. Like I messed up my thyroid. And I wasn't getting adequate conversion of T4 to T3 hormone.

So what's called my thyroid stimulating hormone skyrocketed and my active form of thyroid T3 went way low. But just as a little bit of background for somebody who might not be familiar, so just set the stage of what you were trying to do. Well, what I wanted to see was if you could compete in endurance sports at a relatively high level, not like a professional level, just because I really, you know, I'm an age grouper athlete and I didn't want to turn pro as much as see if I could be like a fast age grouper athlete on like a higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet, specifically a diet of ketosis, meaning that I would measure my blood ketones and my breath ketones. And what I was looking for was a value above 1.0 millimolar.

And what does that mean? Which means that your mitochondria are burning fatty acids at a rate that churns out ketones or these byproducts of fatty acid metabolism at a high enough rate to where they're appearing in your blood at that volume, at that level. and your blood at that volume, at that level. The reason that I wanted to try it out was because there's a lot of talk about what's the best diet for endurance, low carb, high fat, high fat, low carb. And all I wanted to see was whether or not you could actually get away with doing almost no bars, gels and goos, drinks, just like sugar in general. And so I trained that way for 12 weeks before Ironman Canada. gels and goos, drinks, just like sugar in general. Right.

And so I trained that way for 12 weeks before Ironman Canada and then did Ironman Canada. But just to interrupt you, so during that period of time, you're eating not just like on the bike and on the run, but your meals were basically close to no carbs. It was like if I went out to an Italian restaurant and they didn't have, you know, like a whatever, you know, steak and avocado on the menu,

I was drinking sparkling water and, you know, waiting until we got home to make a, you know, whatever, an avocado chocolate smoothie or something like that. Right. So breakfast would be like a meat-based, eggs and meat? No, I'm not an eggs and bacon kind of guy. I would do what I call a high-fat smoothie for breakfast. So it was kale or spinach and then coconut milk and coconut oil or what's called medium-chain triglyceride oil, which is basically like coconut oil, but it's been centrifuged.

Right, the MCT oil. And some of the MCTs have been like isolated. Do you get that bulletproof? Like Dave Asprey makes it. I do. I do. Yeah, I get it from Dave's website. And then, um, I would put Brazil nuts in there and some almonds and a half to a whole avocado, some cinnamon, a little bit of dark cocoa powder, a little bit of vanilla extract, just like the kitchen sink. Right. And that was breakfast. Um, and you know, it's like,

you know, it was a good 20 ounces worth of just smoothiness and then i'd put something in it to give it some texture but that wasn't super high in carbohydrates like dark cacao nibs or coconut flakes or something like that right so but in the grand scheme of like a high fat uh low carb diet that's that's a pretty healthy oh yeah super super the healthier side. Oh, yeah, super nutrient-dense. And before my actual races, I would do that Bulletproof coffee blend, and that actually worked really well for me for races. So I would actually take grass-fed butter and that MCT oil and then coffee and blend all that together, and that was all I would take in. Like before Ironman Canada, before Ironman Hawaii, just basically like a cup of coffee with some, with some fats blended into it. Um, and then lunch, uh, usually fish. I'm, I'm a fan of like sardines and chauvin stuff like that. So I would just do like a spinach salad with avocado fish. Yeah, I do. We go through a lot of sardines at the Greenfield house. So, um, and it's also a

little bit more economical than like, we do have really good wild caught fish and stuff up there, but I mean that, that adds up on the grocery bill doing wild caught fish, you know, with, with lunch every meal. But, um, yeah, we do, we do fish with olive oil and, uh, avocados, olives, pumpkin seeds, stuff like that. Usually over vegetables, we have a big garden in our backyard. We, we dug up our whole backyard and just turned it into an enormous garden. So just like a bunch of vegetables drenched in oils and fats and some fish and stuff like that. Occasionally we do like a boiled egg or something like that on there. And then usually before my afternoon workouts, I'd hammer through another half can or so of coconut milk. We just do like an organic B um, BPA free, uh, coconut milk.

And then dinner is usually, uh, dinner was, was usually where I'd put in more of the carbohydrates, especially after I saw it was happening to my thyroid. Cause I did extensive blood work the whole time to kind of track anything that was responding deleteriously. And so, um, dinner would typically be anywhere from 50 to 75 grams of carbohydrates from like white rice or quinoa or sweet potato or something like that. And then, um, we, we usually do some kind of like an organic meats or fish or something along those lines with dinner, um, with like a roasted vegetable or, um, you know, or something from the garden, uh, that's the steamed or roasted or baked. All right. And so 12 weeks, this was the idea. You're going to train on this. And so you're watching your blood markers the whole time.

And so explain what happens and what's going on. So most of the blood markers didn't change because I was tracking prior to that point. And I showed all the things that I tend to see. I do work for a company called Wellness FX out of San Francisco. And they send me a lot of their CrossFitters and their triathletes eating a variety of different diets from low-fat, high-carb to high-carb, low-fat to vegan to paleo to everything. Consistently, you tend to see hypercortisolism. You see a lot of cortisol in people who are training a lot. You see- And what is that an indicator of?

Stress. Just, I mean, you know, we're running from a lion more than the average person is. And, you know, sometimes doing it for hours in a row. You tend to see like lower levels of testosterone in guys, lower levels of progesterone in girls, lower levels of DHEA in both sexes, vitamin D typically lower than what you'd expect it to be for people who are spending a lot of time in the sun because you get what's called the pregnenolone steal going on, which is when vitamin D from the sun or from food gets shuttled into cortisol formation rather than getting shuttled into, say, like testosterone. Oh, that's interesting.

So if you're overtraining or you're overstressed, even though you're out in the sun, you're not getting the benefit of that vitamin D. Exactly. And you hear that from a lot of people. They're like, well, I'm out in the sun and my vitamin D is fine. And you point out that it's – I like to see vitamin D levels between 40 and 70 in terms of what's called your hydroxy vitamin D in your blood. And you see people with like 20 and 30, which is not – it's not super-duper low, but it's lower than what you'd expect to see in someone who's eating like a healthy diet.

And so you tend to see low vitamin D. And so I've seen a lot of that stuff in my same blood work, and I know what's going on. I mean I'm beating up my body. I'm training for Ironman. And so I expect to see cortisol higher than what it would normally be. I expect to see testosterone, you know, not as high as I would really like for it to be if I weren't doing as much training, but you know, from a, from a response to the diet standpoint, the thyroid thing definitely changed quite a bit. Um, and I kept a really close eye on cholesterol too, specifically oxidized

cholesterol, what's called your very low density lipoprotein, your ApoB and another parameter called LP little a, and all of those are really good biomarkers to track if you want to look at your risk of cardiovascular disease. So I kept an eye on those because I wanted to ensure that I, that by eating all these fats, I wasn't just creating like a metabolic firestorm in my arteries. And kept an eye on like blood glucose, kept an eye on insulin. And really the biggest thing that concerned me the most was the thyroid issue. And I could tell too, like I was colder in the morning and my body temperature regulation wasn't so hot. And I started to get a little bit low on energy, a little bit sluggish in the afternoon. So I fixed that by kind of adjusting

carbohydrates. And I figured out that you could on some days get as high as 200 grams of carbohydrates on this ketosis diet and still be in a state of elevated ketones. And so how were you feeling when you were out in your training sessions? I mean did you feel different? Did you feel better? Did you feel worse? First few weeks were tough. Like if your body is used to burning sugar as a primary source of fuel and you're trying to shove it into fatty acid oxidation, it's tough. I tell people if they decide they wanted to do a diet like this, like save it for the off-season. And I started into it like hardcore as I was starting into Ironman training, which wasn't a grand idea in retrospect. Um, the, the main thing though,

that I noticed, especially racing and in longer workouts was, uh, I had to take about a quarter less fuel, like far fewer calories on board. Cause I was just burning through my own adipose tissue. And then during the actual race just felt stronger and stronger and stronger as the race went on. Just because I think there was a lot less going on in terms of like energy fluctuations and blood sugar fluctuations. And I was able to kind of tap into my body's own storage fat as a fuel. Right. How much do you think the balance of – there's a distinction between training your body to burn fat as fuel by virtue of the training itself, like the aerobic zone training, for example, versus training your body to burn fat

by virtue of the foods that you're eating. Like those are two different things. My understanding has always been that it's really more about the kind of training that you're doing than the diet that you're eating? You know, when it comes to what's called mitochondrial biogenesis, which is how dense you can get your mitochondria, which are the little powerhouses in your muscles, for example, exercise is going to have a bigger effect on mitochondrial density just because you're sucking in oxygen, you're having to train your body how to use that to generate ATP. Diet does have an effect though. For example, if you're snacking eight to 10 times a day and then you go into an exercise physiology lab and you test your resting metabolic rate, which is where you put on a mask and it measures the amount of carbon dioxide produced and the amount of oxygen consumed, what you find is that your resting energy expenditure or what's called your RER, it will rise. That indicates greater

levels of carbohydrate oxidation at rest. And when you are snacking fewer times or eating higher amounts of fat, fat oxidation goes up and that RER goes down. So you can definitely, you can hack it through diet. You know, I think that exercise is always going to be, it's going to play a bigger role than diet. But, you know, if you look at like a sedentary person, I recently had a guy on my show who's like a kind of a relatively sedentary professor. He's working out like every two or three days or something like that. And he keeps his body in a state of ketosis or fatty acid uh oxidation just by um eating a high fat diet and he also is uh he also like literally like drinks ketones to to keep his body in that state too for the mental edge. This idea of ketosis though, I just, I struggle with it. I mean,

you know, I've had a couple cardiologists on the show who kind of have a, you know, they have a traditional perspective on, you know, saturated fat intake and the onset of, you know, arthrosclerosis. I always struggle with that word. And my understanding is that ketosis is really kind of this emergency state, you know, this emergency, but like what are the long-term implications of being like, is ketosis like, you know, there's this idea that, and I think Vinny is kind of behind this, which is that, you know, ketosis as a lifestyle, which I don't really, I have a hard time, you know, getting behind that or understanding that. I can understand because I think there's a distinction between diet for performance goals and your lifestyle and your long-term health.

Right. First of all, ketoacidosis, I mentioned that when I was doing this, I was keeping my blood levels of ketones above 1.0 millimolar. And many people who are looking, for example, for their brains to use ketones as a primary source of fuel, are going to only need to keep ketones above 0.5 millimolar. When you get your ketones above anywhere from 7 to 10, which would be like where you'd be – let's say you were to go on a fasted bike ride for like six hours and come back and eat nothing and go to bed and wake up the next morning. You're going to be really shifting into like this extremely catabolic state of ketoacidosis. And that can be metabolically damaging. That's literally a shift in the pH of your body. And that's not healthy and it is a state of emergency. Ketosis is different than that. Ketosis would be anywhere from one up to, depending on who you ask, seven to 10 millimolar of ketones. And that's an okay state for your body to be in. I mean,

if you look at like, you know, babies drinking breast milk, for example, they're often in that state of ketosis, you know, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0. So it is a state that humans are able to be in and able to thrive in. For me personally, I find it really difficult, and I didn't really talk about this too much, but I find it difficult from a social standpoint primarily. How is the breath? The breath, if you're actually burning fatty acids as a fuel, is not going to have that acetone like nail polish smell. If you are say like using a ketone supplement like drinking what's called beta-hydroxybutyrate salts, which you can buy now as a ketone supplement, and you're jacking your levels of ketones up that way,

you can actually get that type of nail polish breath. But I've never, ever had the breath issues at all. And I think it's because I'm actually burning a lot of those fats as a fuel. So I think in a sedentary person eating a high-fat, low-carb diet, from what I understand, that's a bigger issue. Right. Something like that. So I have a friend who's a professional cyclist, and he played around with this over the course of this past season. And he said that it was very difficult, like the cravings were very high,

and just to be able to be strict about the diet. And one of the interesting things that he said is that he said he felt really good aerobically, but with respect to doing hard efforts when you really have to get into that anaerobic state that's glycogen-dependent, that that was a struggle. state that's glycogen dependent, that, that, that was a, that was a struggle. And he, he felt like he couldn't hit his peak, you know, like his, his, the sort of performance levels that, that he was used to without taking in some sugars. Yeah. There, there were three things that I did to, to kind of help out with that. One was actually using interval training and what are called isometrics. So you're getting into positions where you're building up a lot of lactic acid in the muscle and training yourself to buffer lactic acid more efficiently,

to literally shovel lactic acid up into the liver where it gets reconverted into glucose and can be used in the absence of oxygen, like in those really, really hard, what are called glycolytic efforts. But how long are you going to be able to see? I mean, if you're doing tempo work or like long sustained intervals or, you know, like things like that, that's, like slamming a gel or taking a Coke or whatever, you try to go hard at that point. That's when it becomes near impossible to really sustain that, that hard, heavy interval. And for me, um, that didn't happen until about hour eight of Ironman Canada. And I actually, I got, I dug myself into that hole. What were you, what, how were youing throughout the race?

So during the entire race, what I used was MCT oil, about a tablespoon per hour. I used super starch, which is a really slow-release glucose, which I take in about a quarter of what I would normally use in terms of carbohydrate when I'm using that. Right. But that is a – that's a carb source of fuel though. Yeah, at 100 calories per hour. So very, very slow release with the idea that that is supposed to keep your glycogen or your glucose levels just enough topped off to where you can burn those matches when you need to burn them. Right. By comparison, those people are taking in 200 to 300 calories of carb per hour. Yeah.

I used to do 450 an hour. And don't get me wrong. My performance was great on that. And for me, this was a little bit more of a health decision combined with a – basically like a promotional stunt just to see. What do you mean a health decision? Meaning that when you're eating sugars and especially when you're taking in sugars during multiple training sessions throughout the week, goos, Coke, sport drink, whatever. But you don't have to do that.

You could take in carbohydrates that are not those things. Yeah, but most people are not doing that. I know you're doing a lot of, from what I understand, you do chia seeds and you've got- Well, bananas and dates and almond butter and things like that. More nutrient-dense sugars or like nuts and seeds. I'm not drinking Coke and doing gels. Not that I haven't done that in a race context. I try to not do that as a daily practice in training.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the reason that I wanted to snub Gatorade, so to speak, in doing that was because I don't think that a lot of these fuels are healthy, these frankenfuels. They're not. I have no problem with you snubbing Gatorade. Yeah, and I think a lot of people think that they are or they think that you can achieve high levels of performance unless you're using the gels and the sports drinks and things like that. So I also used amino acids quite a bit, basically amino acid capsules during the race. And that is another way that you can actually – gluconeogenesis is one way that you can provide your body with glucose from amino acids without generating a lot of the reactive oxygen species or what are called advanced glycation end products that you get from consuming simple sugars. And so I was mentioning there were like three different ways that I was kind of overcoming this issue with being able to achieve high intensities while in ketosis. And amino acids was another strategy in addition

to doing like isometrics and interval training. And then the last thing that I used was a supplement. It's called oxaloacetate or a salt of oxaloacetate. And that upregulates that corey cycle, that conversion of lactic acid into glucose on the level of the liver. So you're trying to get your body to be able to have that glucose to burn for energy without you consuming it from sugary external sources. Right. So the amino acids are not a fuel source. They just create a metabolic chain reaction that allows your body to do what? Well, they're actually getting converted into glucose. And high levels of amino acids in the bloodstream

can also increase your rating or decrease your rating of perceived exertion. What that means is that you send your body a message that blood levels of amino acids are high so it doesn't have to cannibalize muscle. It's not in that state where it needs to down-regulate your intensity

because amino acid levels have dropped so low. So it's like an anti-bonking strategy, basically. Sounds like a lot of work, man. It is. I mean, for you, this is your thing. But this is the stuff I love. This is your thing, but how many people? It sounds like you're just making it so complicated.

Like, who could follow this? I mean, I guess the biohackers out there. Once you write it all down and you figure it out. But yeah, there's like six different things going into my blender when I'm blending up my water bottles and stuff on race morning. And for me, I like this stuff. Your kitchen has to be like a chemistry set. But yours probably is anyway all the time, right? For me, I'm to the point where all those fuels like MCT oil and super starch and all this stuff blended together in one bottle.

I'm not taking that stuff out on workouts because frankly my workouts are so short. They're short. So you never have that experience of sort of acclimating to the training context and how your digestive tract is going to respond to these sorts of fuels over long periods of time and the heat and all that kind of stuff right so i mean you have about three to four times under your belt like you already have some familiarity with that i tried to get out about three to four times before iron man to practice you know either in my running flask or in my bottle what i plan on using on race day all right so what's what's the upshot here like what so you're you're this you're you're concerned about your thyroid how many weeks in were you when that started to crop up that was like six weeks and it stayed

with me you were like i'm gonna see this through like i'm morgan spurlock and supersize me i'm gonna go to i'm gonna do this you make adjustments and retest so i started eating more carbs with dinner you did and found that i could still keep myself in a state of ketosis because that for me was after i'd finished my workout if i if was more of a morning workout guy, I probably would have added in like a banana or some extra carbs with like the morning smoothie. Okay. And so you go and you race Ironman on this diet and you had a good result, right? And you qualified for Kona. Yeah.

I did a 939 up in Canada. And how is the – like how did you feel racing compared to what you're used to feeling? I felt awesome the whole day until I got to that eight-hour mark, and then I tried to go hard. I don't think I took in enough fuel up to that point, or I got my body to the point where there's a possibility that you kind of reach that point or I got my body to the point where, you know, there's a possibility that you kind of reach that point where what you're doing is so unnatural anyways that you simply do what you can. So at that point, I started drinking Coke just to get my blood sugar levels as high as I could get them and then just ran as hard as I could to the finish line.

So yeah, it was a really, really good feeling in terms of just like my stomach and there wasn't a lot of carbohydrate fermentation going on in the guts and my energy levels were great up until that point. So, yeah. So did you continue to pursue that through your training through Furcona? I wasn't going to because I didn't – like it's a really rigorous – and I mentioned this before. Like socially, it's hard, right? When you're like, oh, I'm staying in a state of ketosis, so I can't eat that gluten-free pizza with you or – You're talking to the vegan. You're talking to me about –

Yeah, that's true. Or I got to hold back after a couple glasses of wine or whatever. So for a few days after Canada, I was kind of like, yeah, I'm done with this. I'm just going to kind of use the eat real food diet going into Kona. And then I decided that I'd keep on experimenting up until Kona and kind of went back into the ketogenesis thing. And my plan was to, during Kona, up my levels of amino acid intake, almost quadruple my levels of amino acid intake during that race. Um, and then do a little bit more super starch on the bike specifically so that I wasn't going into the run quite as depleted and, um, mixed all this stuff

together in a bottle. And this was just a total tactical error on my part, but I got up to Javi and that, that second bottle that I grabbed at Javi was just like 90 degrees. Yeah, I can't imagine drinking that stuff hot like that. Like the oil. That's gross, man. I should have brought a cooler or put it on ice or something. But yeah, so my plane kind of fell to pieces at that point. I raced a 9.59 in Kona, so it wasn't the fastest day there.

But it was fun, and it was kind of an interesting experiment over the summer, and I will definitely be eating fruitcake and cookies and stuff like that over the holidays and letting myself be a little bit more socially rambunctious with the diet. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, that begs the question of sort of the idea of it being an experiment or a temporary thing versus like, okay, this is my lifestyle now. Like, is this something that you could sustain or would want to sustain or would be advisable to sustain, you know, for your life or for the average, you know, 10K runner who, you know, it's not like, you know, biohacking themselves 24 hours a day. Yeah. I used to be a bodybuilder. And so I was very used to low carbohydrate intake, for example, to get my body fat low. For me though, when I would do stuff like that and I was even relatively low carb going to this ketogenic diet. I would do what's called cyclic, meaning that I would eat like a lower carbohydrate intake on the days where I had slightly lower levels of physical activity. And then on the days where I was throwing down a big bike ride or a big run or a big swim, I would actually take in more carbohydrate.

And that would be my cheat day or that would be the day I'd have ice cream or whatever. And for me, that was a little bit more socially doable. I still was able to get my body into that state of metabolic efficiency or fat oxidation during most of the days, but then still have a couple days of the week where I wasn't quite so strict with the diet. And I think that's more doable if you're going to do something like this. Will you get all the metabolic efficiency benefits or the buildup in mitochondrial density and all that jazz and be the ultimate fat-burning machine? Probably not. But you also have to live a little.

And for me, that includes going out to the Italian restaurant and things of that nature and also i think just for people that are listening you know i mean obviously there's a lot of um you know plant-based people that listen to this show but there's a lot of you know there's all different kinds of people there's paleo people and all that um but not there aren't very many people that would be coming into an equation like that with the amount of knowledge and background that that you have So I almost feel like it's a, you know, don't try this at home kind of thing. Like, you know, you're able to, you know, look at your results from WellnessFX and understand what all those blood markers mean and see when you're going into the red in one category or another. Most people aren't going to know that, right?

And so to me, I feel like there's a little bit of a cautionary tale that you kind of have to append on to this. Like what do you need to understand and what do you not need? You know what I mean? Like it just sounds dangerous to me. Yeah. And I mean to a large extent, I wonder also – I grew up on pizza and hamburgers and french fries. And my version of vegetables was iceberg lettuce drenched in ranch dressing. And my kids have grown up on a completely different diet comprised of initially breast milk and then wild-caught fish and avocados and olives.

And like they eat incredibly healthy. And I just wonder if they were to use a diet like that for performance like I used, if they wouldn't experience quite as much of a bounce back from their body or quite as much of a barrier to hurdle when it comes to shifting your body into fat utilization. So, you know, sometimes I wonder whether or not, you know, dietary history makes a difference as well. Yeah. And I mean, I think it also goes back to the sort of what I was referencing before, this idea of diet for performance reasons and diet for sort of ultimate long-term health and lifestyle. You know, I can understand and appreciate, you know, the experiment that you went through. And I think it's great that you go into something with an open mind and say, I don't know what's going to happen. Let's see what happens here. And then I'll document it, you know, and be completely transparent about it. Um, but I still, you know,

I still wonder and question about like ketosis as a, as a lifestyle. Like, can you feel the keto? Like it's, it's clearly effective at weight loss, but I just wonder, you know, what does that look like if you do that for five, 10, 15 years of eating that way? I think that if you're keeping your ketones elevated, uh, via, via a healthy method, you know, avoiding trans fats, avoiding fake fats, avoiding, you know, mixing fats with high amounts of starchy or sugary carbohydrates that can tend to oxidize the fats or adhere to cholesterol surfaces, that type of thing. I think that if you're mixing that type of stuff up with, you know, it's kind

of like that Atkins approach, for example, you know, eat a bunch of fat or eat a bunch of proteins, but don't pay attention to the sources and, you know, allow junk into the diet. I think that that's where you start playing with fire. You know, for me, it's pretty hard to feel guilty about, you know, eating avocados and olives and sardines and stuff like that. And my lipid panel in particular was pristine. I mean, my inflammation was rock bottom, my triglycerides were rock bottom, my HDL was, uh, my very low density lipoprotein was rock bottom. My Apple B dropped my LP little a dropped. I mean, like everything looked really, really good from a cardiovascular standpoint. And so I think, uh, and this is just anecdotal, but it, you know, my sort of perspective is that people that play around with this, again, these people, you know,

people aren't gonna have the kind of background and wherewithal and time to kind of study their results like you do, but they don't seem to, like they'll do it consistently for a period of time, but then they lapse, and then they go crazy in the other direction, like they've been sugar starved or something like that,

and then they go crazy. And I'm like, well, there's something about this that isn't working because people have a hard time sticking with it. And then they go off it and then they balloon up and they go crazy in the other direction. Yeah. And that's the tricky part too. I mean, you even take something as simple as gluten. If you have like a transglutaminase reaction to gluten, that can stick with you for like 12 days, 15 days, a few weeks. And so, you know, that's why I tell people being partially gluten-free is like being 90% pregnant. I mean when it comes to like from an inflammatory standpoint, you either – If you're a little gluten, then you're done.

Yeah, exactly. I need to work on that. I mean I essentially – I'm that guy. I'm the guy who's like 90% gluten-free. Like I'm pretty good at it. I certainly feel better when I'm completely gluten-free, but every once in a while I have this or that that has gluten in it. And I convince myself that that's fine. you can't leave out happiness too. And there are some cases where slamming a pizza late at night after you've been through half a bottle of wine,

yeah, maybe it's going to mess up your gut for a couple of weeks. But if that's what makes you happy, I mean, and you need that every once in a while, then I don't have a huge issue with that. Half a bottle of wine in me would be a problem. That would cause a longer-term problem. But, yeah, I hear what you're saying. Um, you know, the thing is, is, is that, uh, you know, I've been doing this for seven years now and I just don't crave those foods anymore. So I don't, I don't approach it like a deprivation, you know, it's just, it's, I don't really think about it at all. You know, I mean, occasionally I'll smell something and go, oh, that would be good to eat, but I'm going to

choose not to, but I don't have that kind of obsessive kind of craving. And I think that, I think maybe we talked about this last time. I definitely talked about it on the podcast, but that's kind of the issue that I have with these diets that allow the cheat day, because you sort of remain enslaved to this, like, unless you put enough distance between yourself and whatever it is you're craving, you're going to continue to have that persistent craving, right? And it's just been so long for me since I've eaten so many of those foods that I just don't, they don't carry any charge for me anymore. Yeah.

And a big part of it too is what you mean when you say cheat day. For example, there's a very popular diet out there called carb backloading, which is where you eat a lot of carbs at night. And you work out in the evening, you eat a lot of carbs at night, but they're ad libitum and they can pretty much be from any source, whatever, Twinkies or ice cream

or bread or rice or whatever. And you could also have a similar cheat day or a similar carb backloading protocol where you're eating sweet potatoes and yams, you know? So, so part of it comes down to whether we're talking about cheating from like a macronutrient standpoint or like a food quality standpoint as well. Well, I mean, the slow carb diet is kind of like that too. I mean, the idea that you would, you know, sort of train your body physically and like eat really well, and then one day a week just put a bunch of garbage in it, or whether it's at night or whatever it is, the Twinkies. I mean, why would you – how is that any part of a healthy protocol for anybody?

Right, right. I mean, it makes it popular, and it makes it palatable because people love to hear that kind of stuff. Yeah, so when you hear me throw around a word like cyclic, I'm not talking about cycling in and out of, from junk to health food. I'm talking about cycling your macronutrient ratios of carbs, proteins, and fats, and not necessarily allowing yourself to have like a junk day that's complete crap.

Durian Ryder. I want to hear about durian rider how did it go we actually had a pretty civil discussion for the most part i would say it was about two-thirds civil i think that we we actually started to wrap up our podcast at about the 60 minute mark and i was kind of getting to the point you, where you start to wrap things up where you're like, so for more information, go to. And then he started talking a lot about, you know, cholesterol and heart disease and, you know, and bonking and, you know, a lot of, just a lot of things that I think that he wanted to bring up that we hadn't gotten a chance to talk about up to that point.

And so we spent about the next half hour really kind of digging into a lot of the controversy that would exist between his dietary approach, very like raw, vegan, low-carb, but also – High-carb, you mean. Or high-carb, but also combined with some really interesting youtube videos um and then my approach which is which is obviously in stark contrast to that and we we argued a little bit more for like the last half hour of the show but ultimately you know at the end he was like yeah we should do this again and he actually wanted to come on again and talk again. And I don't, I'm trying to remember. I don't think I saw any inflammatory

or concerning YouTube videos come out about me after that. I think that Vinny had me on his show shortly after I interviewed Harley, the Doreen Ryder. And Vinny and I talked a little bit and Doreen Ry rider did do a video afterwards about that oh he did he called like some snippets or something like that vinnie torlini calls me uh what like gren beanfield or something like that he was playing some because i had i had gone out and and uh i had been hunting that day and had shot deer and he was playing clips from me

talking about that and uh yeah but it really wasn't wasn't that bad he he uh talked talked a lot of uh trash about vinnie though yeah he did yeah vinnie loves it too though oh yeah i mean vinnie and harley are cut from the same cloth like they they love the they like to mix it up so those guys got to get in the same room together that would be fun i'm here to see that i think you know see if we're gonna make that happen but um i saw on your blog that you had uh because one of the things that harley said was that he wanted to challenge peter attia to like a cycling challenge or something like that and then peter hadn't gotten back to a fifty thousand $50,000 challenge to climb Mount Washington

to see who could win with the caveat that Peter had to be in a state of ketosis while racing. I see. And then he said Peter didn't get back to him, but then you emailed Peter and then I saw the response about like raising a million dollars for charity or something like that.

Yeah, Peter wanted it to be raising a million dollars for charity, but also Peter threw in deadlifting, bench pressing, swimming, running, like tire flipping or something like that. Yeah, he took the scale in that direction. Oh, and a mathematics test, mathematics and English test. Oh, okay. So it turned into a whole different can of worms, and I don't think it's going to happen if it's going to be that complex. Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, I think from an end-user point of view, it's easy to look at it and be confused. It's like, well, Ben is going and doing this diet, and then you have people like Harley and Michael Arnstein who are essentially fruitarian, and they're excelling in what they're trying to do that way and passionate about that lifestyle. And I do what I do, and it feels right right to me and I feel great and all of this. So somebody who's listening, they're like, well, what am I supposed to do? You know, like, how do I find my way with this? And my response to that is you've got to take the mantle of responsibility upon yourself and experiment, do your own homework, and nobody's

going to make, you know, nobody can make that decision for you. You've got to try on a couple different shirts and suits and see what feels good. Yeah. And you can trace, I mean, you are going to have to bring some money to the table, but for $99, you can go to 23andme.com. You can see if you come from, you know, whatever, an African versus an Asian versus a Northern European versus like a, you know, a Native American or whatever. You can trace your genetic ancestry. Have you ever done 23andMe? No. It's funny.

I was with my parents a couple weeks ago and we were talking about it and my dad was tempted to do it because he wanted to know. And part of me thinks, well, do I want to know? Like, I don't know if there are certain things that maybe I don't want to know, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. There is some stuff like, you know, for example, I have higher than normal risk for type two diabetes and for prostate cancer. And so, you know, those are things that are concerning, you know, when you see those jumping out and they've got the little red percentage thing next to them on your results dashboard. But they also make me think about ways that I could live my life to reduce the potential of those becoming an issue. Yeah, that's valuable.

And I could also look at where my ancestors came from in northern Europe and what kind of diet have they eaten for thousands of years that my body might be more genetically adapted to. for thousands of years that my body might be more genetically adapted to. And then, of course, you can combine that with more acute measurements of biomarkers. You don't have to use – Wellness FX is not inexpensive because you're paying for a consultation and you're paying for their little dashboard that tracks all your results and everything like that. You can go out and use a wholesale laboratory testing company like Direct Labs, for example. And you can order a lab yourself and get it printed out, take it into your local lab core or Quest Labs or whatever. They run the blood test. You've got a PDF emailed to you within a couple of days. And you're going to be scratching your head if you don't know how to interpret it or you don't have a, you know, somebody there to help you through it, but at least we have that available and, and you can, um, you know, there are even tests,

I think it's called like labtests.com or something like that, that even help walk you through the interpretation. If you did want to kind of walk, go down that route of kind of trying to, to figure out the values yourself. So there are ways that you can look at what's going on inside your body to give you clues about what diet is going to work best for you. also ways that you can look at what worked well for your parents or your grandparents or your great-grandparents or people who live in hundreds of years before you. Yeah, certainly. I mean, that's great advice. And that's very much like the scientific sort of logic-based response to that. And my kind of like, you know, foofy new age take on that is, I guess my fear or my reluctance or one of the, if there was a reason why I wouldn't do it,

it's because you are sort of inviting into your world, into your mind, the idea that you might get, you know, this or that. And then once that little seed kind of, you know, plants in your brain and you're thinking about it all the time, like, oh, I might get, you know, I might get prostate cancer. I might get prostate cancer. I believe, you know, for better or worse that, you know, you create your own reality, you know, and thoughts have power, a lot of power. And the more thought that you put into that, the more likely you are to sort of create that scenario in your power. And the more thought that you put into that, the more likely you are to sort of create that scenario in your life. And that goes for professional, you know, whatever

you're pursuing professionally or family or whatever it is, you know what I mean? And so if I was to get a piece of information that says you have a 75% chance of getting this, or you're definitely, you know, a super candidate for this. You know, I don't know what else I could be doing sort of to take care of myself other than I already do. I mean, I could biohack probably a little bit better with the advice of somebody like yourself. But I don't want to, I don't know that I want to have that kind of fatalistic, you know, notion floating around in my head. Well, I mean, you know, for me, for like, like, uh, you know, prostate cancer, for example,

we grew a crap load of tomatoes in our garden this, this summer and spring. And I ate a lot of them. Like I've probably had two raw tomatoes a day for the past year. Right. You know, and that's just the simple example of something that you can do. And there are other interesting things too when you like, you know, like I found out I was a fast caffeine metabolizer, for example. So I won't have a cup of coffee, you know, like three hours before a time that I want to be awake and alert. I'll do it an hour before instead. Right. That's helpful. There are some helpful things in there, but you're right. I mean, it kind of depends on your personality and the way that you're

going to use that information. And also in your consideration of what you believe that the universe is going to bring to you, actually indeed bringing to you. And that's where you definitely, you have to be careful thinking in a fatalistic way when it comes to some of that stuff. Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the questions I put out on Twitter earlier today that we were going to sit down and a bunch of people asked questions, and 99% of them we're not going to get to. But one I think that is a good one was, you know, what is the point of commonality, you know, between a guy like you and a guy like me? And I'm like, most of it is common. You know, we differ on some specific things that are personal choices, but, you know, there's a lot of commonality. We believe in, you know, healthy

lifestyle and exercise. We believe in eating whole foods, you know, we believe in- Beating ourselves up on the lava fields. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's a lot. So I. So I think at the end of the day, like a good takeaway is, you know, eat real food, eat whole foods. You know, to echo Michael Pollan, maybe you disagree with this and this is going to go into your winter plan, but eat real food, mostly plants, not too much. You know, you might differ on that. It's kind of funny because I posted photos of my diet to a blog post recently entitled, what do you eat every day? And someone commented under the posts, well, Ben, this looks like a plant-based diet with some, like some meat thrown in here and there. And I, you know, I do eat a lot of plants, a lot of vegetables.

Of course you do. I mean, and yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm totally on board with that. And, you know, in the house I'm building right now, it's, it's on about 10 acres and we'll dig up the majority of that and we'll have a huge vegetable garden. We'll also have goats, we'll have chickens and, and we'll use those as well. But yeah, I mean, like I'm, I'm definitely on definitely on board with eating lots of plants. Cool, man. What else are we going to talk about? Somebody asked about flu shots.

Do you get a flu shot? No. I don't get a flu shot. I never get a flu shot. I take elderberry, oil of oregano, and echinacea. That's good. I get essential oils. I get them from a certified organic source and just use those in the flu season and knock on wood, no issues so far.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't gotten a flu shot in forever and I rarely get sick. If I feel like I'm starting to get sick, I have a protocol I can implement that will sort of kick it in the butt and I can usually kick it in like a day or two, but I'm not going to inject myself with the disease itself that's already sort of morphed beyond. Exactly. Along with metals, you know, and mercury. And I did a minimalist vaccination protocol for my children because we traveled pretty extensively internationally with them when they were infants. And, you know, looking back, I question whether even that was necessary with the research that I've done since then in terms of the use of essential oils specifically to be able

to have some pretty good efficacy against a lot of parasites and things of that nature. We use a lot of essential oils with our little girls. Yeah. We did not vaccinate our little girls and I realize that's super controversial for a lot of essential oils and things of that nature. With our little girls. Yeah. We did not vaccinate our little girls, and I realize that's super controversial for a lot of people. It is. Our boys are vaccinated. They're older. Man, that's a whole sticky wicket, I suppose.

But one thing, another point of commonality between us is we both homeschool our kids, right? So how did you come to that decision for yourself? You have two kids, right? Yeah. I was homeschooled K through 12. Right? So how did you come to that like decision for your, you have two kids, right? Yeah. I was homeschooled K through 12. Oh, you were? Interesting. And when I, when I was, it started about when I was in seventh or eighth grade, my parents

just started kind of handing me the books and telling me to go through them. And I was that kind of learner. And so I, I was almost self-schooled for, for much of my, my upper years. And then I had a tutor for a few things. Like I had a tutor for calculus. It was a little bit of the unschooling approach. And, you know, I've read the, what's the unschooling book?

Is it called Radical Unschooling? Yeah, something like that. I know what you're talking about. I try and inject kind of a little bit of structure and a little bit of unschooling into our approach. Like we're moving to Thailand for a month next week. And a big part of our schooling this year has been teaching the kids how food works by preparing pad thai once a night every single week and learning Thai, learning to speak Thai and exploring Thai geography. And also learning about – we've really had a big focus on swimming because we want them to do a lot of like snorkeling and swimming over there.

And we've kind of tweaked and shifted a lot of their learning towards that perspective over the past few months. How old are they now? They're five. Oh, they're twins. That's right. They're twins. And then we also have structure. We use a curriculum called five in a row, which is kind of cool.

And the way it works is you read one story a week, like last week was Mike Mulligan and the steam shovel. And every lesson that you teach your child for that week is based on that one story. So we learned, I took them out to a bunch of construction sites around town and showed them all the different kinds of tractors and dump trucks and trailers. And we worked on geometrical patterns because that book is all about digging these square holes in the ground to like build a cellar and build these different skyscrapers. And what else did we work on? Basically, all the lessons, it's one story. Yeah, you take one thing and you go deep into it as opposed to another story. Yeah, exactly.

And kids love stories. And so, you know, we ended up reading Mike Mulligan like three times last week and everything was centered around that story. And then, you know, next week will be a different story. So, yeah, that's what we do. And then we combine that, you know, they're in piano and soccer and basketball and swimming and everything else. So we're trying to give them social opportunities. They're still a little young for this, but are you using any online resources? and swimming and everything else. So we're trying to give them social opportunities. They're still a little young for this,

but are you using any online resources? So limited. We've used the Udemy Thai class, the Thai language learning course on there. I've done a little bit, I'm blanking on the name of it. There's a website that lets your kid read online books and kind of walks them through page by page. So a little bit of that.

I'm teaching them speed reading using a book called Victory Drill, which is the same book I grew up on. And not doing a ton on the internet really. We don't use it a bunch. I've kind of got an issue to where I want my kids to almost be less dependent on computers and smartphones and electrical devices than I am. I think that there's a certain level of electromagnetic field exposure that is not healthy, especially for kids and they're forming brains. And so I'm careful around that stuff. You know, there's a fine line between using it to its full capacity and also just kind of shielding your, you know, we, we turn off our wireless router every night. So there's a good eight hours of the day to where we've gotten a wifi signal going on

in our house. Uh, we've got dirty electricity filters in every bedroom. Like we're, we're really careful with that stuff. Um, yeah. Do you have a locker full of ammunition? Are you prepping too? I do have a lot of guns. I you prepping too i do have a lot of guns i do have a lot of guns a lot of ammo and gold and silver too i i will admit if the zombie apocalypse happens i'll i will be one of the survivors i'm building my house 10 acres vegetable garden i'm like all right the militia yeah my my wife does walk around with a g19 in her purse so pacific northwest it's all come together ben now i'm getting a picture of what's really going on up there yeah so no i like it um yeah i mean i i uh i i like the idea of respecting the child enough to empower them, to let them sort of guide you in the

direction where they want to head. And then as the parent, you can be the voice of reason and the responsible person to say, all right, clearly I'm getting a picture of what this young person is interested in. How can I create a learning experience around that? So they're already innately interested in what they want to pursue. And that level of interest is really the catalyst for true learning that's going to stick as opposed to read this book, take this test, moving on. It's hard though. It is hard. I don't know what you feel about this, but like it is so easy to get carried away with what I'm doing during the day,

because I work from home, you know, podcasting and blogging and all this stuff. And like, when it's time to homeschool and time to focus on the kids and you're 10 feet away from your office, I mean, it's, it is hard, like, you know, and it's, that's been the biggest barrier for me is combining working at home with schooling at home. And, I mean, you talk about sort of the social pariah aspect of trying to eat the way that you're eating. I mean, how does that work with homeschooling your kids and your community? I mean, how is that perceived? You mean in terms of like the social exposure for our kids? Yeah, like do you have – I mean, you're coming at it because you had that experience yourself.

So, you know, like – so you have that sense of confidence in what you're doing because you've lived it. But, you know, and in Los Angeles, more and more people are doing it. But I'm interested in, like, where you live. Like, how is that perceived? There are, like, social support groups, like homeschooling groups, and they do field trips together, like rock climbing trips and trips to museums and trips to the library and stuff like that. And then we also use sports a great deal. So my kids go to peewee tennis and do tennis lessons and they play on the soccer team and the basketball team and they go to the swim lessons. So, yeah, I mean you're talking about social – I mean I'm not talking about like being worried about your kids being properly socialized.

I'm talking about like your peers saying you're know, you're homeschooling your kids. Like, what are you doing? Sure about that? No, you know, most of the folks that we hang out with are pretty open to it. You know, it's one of those deals where I find that a lot of homeschooling families I don't really see eye to eye with because they tend to be what I call prairie muffins. They're just kind of a little bit backwoodsy almost. There's a little of that, and then there's people that do it strictly because of religious proclivities, whatever their religious perspective is. They choose to keep their kids out of typical school.

kids out of typical school? Yeah. No, I mean, the way that I explain it to folks is that, you know, I don't care if my kids go to college, you know, if they want to go and start a business with, you know, their college savings fund, then they can go start a business with that. If they want to graduate when they're 15, because they decided to do their last two years of high school in one year, then I'm fine with that. And I think that you really give your kid a step up when you don't make them learn at the rate that, that they would be forced to learn at in like a group classroom setting. Um, and, and so, you know, there are, um, I really haven't encountered anyone who, who is, who has kind of given me the shock and awe treatment in terms of homeschooling my kids. And, you know, it seems pretty accepted.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you're saying about the kind of calendar that, you know, we sort of have these notions about the appropriate time that a child should learn how to read or be able to do this kind of math or that kind of math. And every kid's different, man. And they have their strengths and their weaknesses. And who's to say that, you know, you have to learn this by this time, you know, and I think sort of being more open-minded and allowing in that process. I mean, I've just noticed it with our two little girls and, certainly I had, I come from a very traditional schooling background. And so this is a challenge for me to kind of, and I struggle with it. But now I'm seeing the benefits in my younger girls. she's not really like the, she should be doing this and this and this by this time. And then I kind of just learned to like, let it go. And I'm seeing them step into it on their own and the kind of empowerment that takes place with that because there's, they're owning it. And then,

and, and they're, they're sort of taking that responsibility upon themselves with guidance, of course, but there's something really profound about that and powerful, I think as a life lesson. There's something really profound about that and powerful, I think, as a life lesson. Yeah, yeah, that independence that they get. And you teach your kid to be a leader, not a follower. And there are certainly drawbacks to that. The independent-mindedness of that. I think that the risk that you run is a kid who sometimes breaks the rules when they're not supposed to break the rules. sometimes breaks the rules when they're not supposed to break the rules.

But I think that the benefits outweigh the risks of creating a leader and a kid who's able to think outside the box. Yeah. And like you said, it puts a lot more responsibility on the parent. You're not abdicating your education to somebody else. You can just forget about it and talk about it over dinner. You have to really own that in a different way and that that's a lot to handle there have been many days where i wish that my kids were sitting in a desk somewhere away from the house learning from some teacher um but then you know whatever we we go for a hike and we spend you know two hours out in the field learning and walking and talking and it's just like you know that pushes the reboot button and you realize how, how cool an experience that you do give to your kids when you make a decision like that. So cool, man. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. Right on. So, uh, so cool. I want to, I'm going to wrap this up and get you out of here. Um, but I want to hear about, uh, I saw on your blog also

that you did, are you about to, or you just did a, um, thing with creative live? I'm about to, you're about to, have you recorded it yet? Or are they going down to San Francisco right when we get back from Thailand, I'll go down to San Francisco and we're doing a three day shoot there called achieve ultimate human performance. So if you like to throw around the word hack, you're definitely, that's the home of the body hack, you're definitely going to see a lot of that. That's the home of the body hack already. We're just going to do like detoxing your home, making your own cleaning supplies and personal care products, cooking tips. It's the prepper thing too. It kind of plays into this.

Yeah. So it's going to be like all the stuff that goes above and beyond just working out or training and exercising. Right. Cool. And how did you hook up with the creative i love what creative live does and i think they're they're like they've really done such a nice job and the way that they sort of um produce and and display their courses you know just about everything in this whole like growing realm of of internet learning or internet business

or whatever it's just a good old boys network. I happen to have been at a summit called the Consumer Health Summit, which is put on by a guy named Michael Fishman. Yeah, I've been following him on Twitter. I haven't met him yet, but I'm interested in what he's doing. He's a really good guy. And I met a guy at his summit who is involved with CreativeLive. And literally like that thing was fleshed out from, you know, messaging on Facebook back and forth. So, you know, a lot of this stuff is, is pretty much just, you know, it just happens to be who, who you met at a conference or, you know, who you had a drink with or whatever. I gotta go to more conferences. I don't go to conferences. Yeah.

Get out there. I mean, especially when it comes to internet business. I mean that like that's, that's big is getting to, to like go into some to go into some things with like some of the big names in internet business like Ryan Lee and Yannick Silver. And there's a lot of guys out there, Bedros Koulian. I don't know who any of those people are. Yeah, see that if you want to take the internet thing to the next level. Tell me what conference I need to go to, all right? I'd start with pretty much any conference that ryan lee puts on you'll just basically meet like a dozen people right off the bat that that send you in the right direction so all right cool

yeah all right so creative live and that that so that'll go up but you do those courses they are live right so you're doing that soon yeah i'll throw my big boy clothes and stand up there with a powerpoint presentation and yeah i mean how many hours is it gonna be it's a lot it's like doing an extended ted talk like like uh it'll come out to almost 24 hours of content wow that's a lot that's a lot of prep yeah i'm to be on the airplane over to Bangkok doing some serious PowerPoint. Wow. Interesting. Cool.

Yeah. And tell me what else you got going on. You got a new book. I got a new book over at, there's my shameless plug, right? It's not shameless. Beyond. It's just plug. Don't judge.

It's my atlas of human performance. It's called Beyond Training, Mastering Endurance, Health, and Life. And that's at beyondtrainingbook.com. So I am in the hair-pulling-out mode of getting chapters back from the editor and everything as we take it to hard copy publishing. And I'm sure you've been through all that. Yeah, yeah. Recording the audio book and just doing it. You're doing your own read?

I'm going to do my own read. Okay. Yep, yep, yep. I decided to not hire some sexy British woman to record it. I actually, I will. I will do it. As a matter of fact, all the chapters I've recorded so far, I've been in an intermittent fasted ketotic state in the morning.

Cause that's when I think really clearly. So yeah. God bless you. And, and if other people want it, so what else that is, those are the main things going on. Well, come on, man. I'm quitting. I'm quitting triathlon training for the most part. Well, first of all, I'm done I'm quitting triathlon training for the most part are you? forever? first of all I'm done with Ironman

I'm cutting triathlon back to one swim one bike and one run a week I used to be a competitive bodybuilder and I'm going to spend about 4 or 5 months just putting out a bunch of muscle mass why?

two reasons number one again again, shameless self-promotion. Uh, I will, I will find hashtag moments. Well, I mean, here's the deal. There are a lot of, of guys, uh, and girls who want more curves, more mass where maybe skinny and they want to put on some size. And so I'm going to, uh, do a, do about a, a half-year guinea pig experiment where I see how big a skinny triathlete could get. But you know how to do that already. Yeah. You're a bodybuilder.

I know how to do it. I'm pulling a few new tricks out of the closet that I've learned since I was a bodybuilder because that was a little while ago. So you're going to get all beefed out now. So I'll be a beefcake, yeah. Get a big, thick neck and the whole thing. I'm going to get swole. Are you going to start doing CrossFit too? No. No, I'm not going to do CrossFitfit it's too too trendy i think right now too trendy i thought that's what this is all about yeah but there's too many people doing the crossfit thing i want

to do something new so yeah yeah so so you're gonna be like eating organ meat right a lot of braun schweiger and head cheese baby yeah just brush your teeth before you come back here yeah and then i'll i'll get back into doing sprints and olympics and stuff probably around july or august next year and so this is gonna be like a nine this is gonna be like a nine month i would i would ideally like to compete as a clydesdale in triathlons next year that's the that's your goal is to be a clydesdale i weigh one i've competed as a clydesdale and triathlons next year. That's the idea. Your goal is to be at Clydesdale. How much do you weigh right now? I've competed as a Clydesdale before at 205 and I weigh 175 right now.

So I'm just going to put on a bunch of muscle and just to see how fast you can do it. Are you going to try to do it like stay cut or are you just going to get huge? I'm going to not get a pot belly while I'm doing it. Like I'll try and keep my body fat around like six to 8%. So I'm at about seven right now. So that's the thing I see. And again, this is completely anecdotal, but when I, when I like sort of see people that are big time into CrossFit, they don't, they're not like

lean, you know, they look kind of like not bloated, but just kind of like a little puffy. A lot of them are bloated. Like a lot of the women, especially they have like these abs that like stick out and stuff. And part that is inflammation from hypercortisolism and overtraining. Right, because they're hitting so hard day in, day out. Yeah, dropping estrogen, big rise in testosterone sometimes, especially in the women. So yeah, it's – I actually just recorded a podcast this morning from my hotel room about how to gain mass without destroying your body. And a big part of it is not beating yourself up day after day with wads or workout of the day. And instead, like lifting hard and then giving yourself 48 hours of just like easy movement, yoga, foam rolling, taking care of your body and eating crap loads of food.

You're probably already all up on this, but I was reading crap loads of food. Right. Have you, you're, you're probably already up all up on this, but I was reading about rhabdo with like how this is like a thing in CrossFit. I mean, is that really like a, I mean, how many people are hitting it that hard that they're suffering from that or explain to people what rhabdo is.

Anytime you've peed after like a really hard event, like you, you were probably close to it during your, your five Ironman five-day event, what happens is you get enough muscle cell breakdown and enough protein in your bloodstream to where you're overworking your kidneys with that much nitrogenous ammonia byproduct. And so you can go into kidney failure and it's essentially from breaking down too much muscle tissue, breaking down too much muscle fiber too fast. Um, you know, kind of similar to like, you know, some muscle damage

is good, but too much overloads your kidneys and you simply can't excrete the toxic byproducts that produces fast enough. Right. So, uh, you know, it's kind of like ketosis versus ketoacidosis. Um, and yeah, you get a lot of CrossFitters going into rhabdo. It happens to football players. It's kind of like ketosis versus ketoacidosis. And yeah, you get a lot of CrossFitters going into rhabdo. It happens to football players. It's even worse in heat and dehydration. And ibuprofen incidentally is another thing that can do it. If you combine like ibuprofen and an Ironman triathlon, you can do something very similar in terms of kidney load. So yeah.

Yeah, I'd never heard of it before. But then I'd read it in the context of this. It's like a growing thing in the CrossFit world. And I didn't know whether that was hyperbole or actually that was going on. Maybe they should change their mascot from Pukie the Clown to like Rabdo the Rhino or something like that. I think there is some kind of – they make a joke about Rabdo. Do they? That was what it said in this article.

It was a blog on Medium. I don't even remember who read it. But anyway, maybe I'll put a link in the show notes up to that. Interesting. You can check it out. But cool, man. And bengreenfieldfitness.com, that's the main place to check you out, right? That's me riding my bike down the Queen K Highway in my budgie smuggler.

Yeah, I know. What's up with the red Speedo on that photo? That's my team Timex Speedo. People give me a hard time because all these pictures of me on the internet without my shirt on or whatever, but you just took it to a different level with the Speedo. Yeah, that was actually a promotional shot for Quintana Roo Bicycles that I ended up getting my hands on for the banner on the website. Cool. So you want to learn more about what Ben is up to? You can go to that site and your Ben Greenfield on Twitter and Facebook page, Ben Greenfield Fitness, right? Facebook.com something, something.

All right. BG Fitness, I think it is. Is it BG Fitness? Yeah, I think so. All right, man. So you're going to teach me how to dominate the internet like you? Let's do it. Yeah.

If you were me, what would you be doing that I'm not doing right now? I would be taking more of the content that you're already producing and packaging it into nice little usable pieces of content for folks. And then, you know, that, that's really the ultimate, uh, you know, the ultimate passionate lifestyle based business is to solve problems for people, solve problems for your audience. I like to just have long rambling conversations though. I'm not about the bullet point. Yeah. Yeah. You have to take some of the stuff and monetize it. And I, I used to have kind of an issue asking people for money for the content that I was putting out there. And that's something that you have to overcome too is, you know, if you're putting out good content that solves a problem for somebody, they're usually pretty cool with paying for it. So, you know, you just have to be willing to kind of put a price stamp and a buy it now type of button. Right.

The bright orange one with the little Visa logos underneath it. With big arrows pointing to it saying buy now. You have to research all the stuff that actually converts. I mean, so, you know, and this is probably not the best point to end on, but when it comes to internet business, the porn industry has it all figured out. And if you look at what they're doing, that's the model to follow when it comes to offering people

really nice free content. And then if they want more, they pay for it. All right. So basically you're telling me to go study a bunch of porn sites right now. You got to go study up on the porn. You can tell your wife I gave you that assignment. All right.

Well, we have to end it on that, right? Because I've got homework. You got to hustle. All right. All, we have to end it on that, right? Because I've got homework. You got to hustle. All right. All right, man. Thanks for dropping by. I can't believe it took us this long to get together in person. It was awesome.

Your studio is beautiful. Yeah, thanks, man. And I'm super stoked that I had the honor of being able to come on your podcast. I appreciate you making the trip out. And tell Vinny to stuff it when you, uh, when you see him, uh, today's Friday, I'm going to, I'm going to see Vinny, Vinny and Tony and I are going to podcast on Sunday. So cool. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Vinny and I keep talking about getting on a ride, but we're all too busy doing this stuff now. All those days that we used to spend on the bike. Seriously. Yeah. Someday we'll, we'll invent a, uh, a podcasting studio that you can

take out on the, out on the highway. Yeah. Cool. All right, man. Well, enjoy the rest of your time in LA. Thanks Rich. All right, man. Peace. Later, man. Plants. Thank you.