Biohack Your Way to Health ｜ BEN GREENFIELD
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Summary
Ben Greenfield joins me for round two on the podcast to talk about how to take back control of our health and use it as fuel to excel in our lives. We cover the fundamentals of course, but we also get into some fringe ideas like utilizing infrared therapy to reduce inflammation, the distinction between medicines and drugs, markers to improve circadian rhythm, and ultimately how to biohack your way to health.
Transcript
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Making yourself healthy is one of the absolute best things that you can do for yourself and those
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you are working to serve, but it's too bad that most of the information and the way that we choose
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to live our lives is stacked against us. My guest today, the one and only Ben Greenfield joins me
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for round two on the podcast to talk about how to take back control of our health and use it as fuel
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to excel in our lives. We cover the fundamentals of course, but we also get into some fringe and
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not so common ideas like utilizing infrared therapy to reduce inflammation, the distinction
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between medicines and drugs, markers to improve circadian rhythm, and ultimately how to biohack
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your way to health. You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and
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boldly chart your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time. Every time
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you are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who
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you are. This is who you will become at the end of the day. And after all is said and done, you can
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call yourself a man. Gentlemen, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Michler and I am the host
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and the founder of this podcast and the movement, the revolution that is Order of Man. And I use the
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term and the word revolution deliberately. And I say revolution because if you think about what this is,
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and let me say this first, that that term is overused. But if you think about what the term
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and the word revolution means, it's revolving, it's coming back to something. And ultimately my
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goal and objective is to reclaim and restore traditional masculinity. And to that end,
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we're having conversations on this podcast. We've got the blog, we've got our YouTube channel,
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we've got all our social media channels, we've got our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council.
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We've got so much going on all in an attempt to, again, reclaim and restore masculinity in a world
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that seems to be moving further and further away from the idea that men are strong, that we're capable,
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that we're rugged, that we're independent, that we're here to serve other people and lift people
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up and ultimately become the best people that we can be so that we can adequately serve ourselves
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and adequately serve those that we have an obligation for, a responsibility for,
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and of course, those we love. So we're doing these interviews like the one today with the one and
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only Ben Greenfield, but I've had other guys like Jocko Willink, Grant Cardone, Tim Kennedy,
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Dakota Meyer, David Goggins, and so many more. So make sure if you're not already doing this,
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that you subscribe. And if you would also, I don't ask for this a whole lot, make sure you leave a
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rating and review. If you've listened to the Order of Man podcast for any amount of time,
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please understand that ratings and reviews go such a long way in promoting the visibility and
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really getting the message out to the masses that we are to reclaim and restore masculinity.
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We've also got our Wednesday show, which is an Ask Me Anything with my co-host Kip Sorensen. And
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then of course, your Friday Field Notes, which is just me and my thoughts and some of the things I've
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been thinking about from throughout the week. Guys, before I get into the conversation today,
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just a couple of very quick announcements. Number one is, and I've talked about this at length.
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If you guys aren't familiar with my friends over at Origin, I highly, highly recommend that you check out
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what these guys are doing and what they're all about. Specifically, I want to talk about their
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nutritional lineup. It's their Joint Warfare. It's their Super Krill. It's their Discipline,
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which is a pre-workout. And of course, Mulk, which is a protein supplement. It's all partnered
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up with Jocko. And I use all of those products. Specifically, the one I want to mention to you is
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Joint Warfare. This is so great for the joints. And as I get a little bit older and I push a little bit
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harder with my workout regimen and jujitsu. And also, as we get into baseball season, my arms
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hanging a little bit because I've been playing a lot of catch with my boys and I've been using that
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Joint Warfare. And I got to tell you, it's really, really helped ease up some of the joints and just
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make them feel a little bit better, not so painful and not so inflamed. So anyways, check it out.
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They've got some amazing, amazing products, all 100% made in America. Good friends of mine.
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They're out of Maine. If you head to originmaine.com, as in the state, maine.com.
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And then if you end up using or picking up any products or merchandise over there,
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use the code ORDER, O-R-D-E-R at checkout, and you'll get a 10% discount on anything that you
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purchase, including their rash guards and their geese and their jujitsu apparel. Again,
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it's originmaine.com and use the code ORDER at checkout. What else? In addition to that,
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we are coming up on the Hoyt giveaway. I think we've got 3,000 entries nearly at this point. So
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make sure that if you haven't already entered to win that Hoyt bow, it's a brand new Hoyt Helix
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that we're giving away on April 1st. Make sure you get that done very, very quickly.
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As of the release of this podcast, I think there's only what, three or four days left.
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So if you haven't already registered, head to orderofman.com slash Hoyt, H-O-Y-T. Again,
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orderofman.com slash Hoyt, follow the instructions. Very simple, very easy and get yourself entered for
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the drawing of the brand new Hoyt Helix bow giveaway. That's it. That's all I have by a way
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of announcements. Let's get into the discussion. I'm really excited to introduce you to my guest
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today. He's a repeat guest and a friend of mine. In fact, I believe it was around this time last
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year that we went on a hunt together in Hawaii, which was an incredible time. And I got to see how
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this guy really works, not just his mind, but how he actually works and the type of life he actually
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lives. His name is Ben Greenfield. And I know a lot of you guys don't need an introduction to this
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man, but maybe for those of you who do, he's one of the world's leading experts on the subject of
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health and fitness and nutrition, basically all things biohacking. And he's probably one of the
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most fascinating individuals that I've had the opportunity of getting to know over the past couple
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of years. He's got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics, and he's full bore into the fitness
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world. He tests new medical and health theories and really pushes himself as hard as just about
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any other human I've met. He's trained with SEALs. He's worked with professional sports teams. He's
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completed some of the most elite obstacle course races in the world. And today he joins us to talk
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about the power of biohacking your way to health. Guys, if you don't already have it, get a notepad out.
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You're going to want that and sit back and enjoy my conversation with Ben. Ben, what's going on,
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man? Thanks for joining me back on the show today. I see what's going on. Monday morning and I'm
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staring out at an icy landscape here in Spokane, Washington. Got a little sauna time in this morning.
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Had a little brekkie and now I'm talking to you. Right on, man. You got a lot going on. It's not
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just that. I mean, you make it sound like it's kind of comfortable just kind of hanging out, but I know
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you've been on a busy schedule to say the least. Yeah, it's not too bad. I travel a lot, but
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gosh, I've been traveling for years and years. When my wife met me shortly thereafter, I got into
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triathlon. I guess I was maybe 21. I kind of got out of bodybuilding and into racing these Ironman
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triathlons, but at that point just started traveling all over the world. So for the past 16 years,
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I've been on an airplane at least once a month and these days about three or four times a month
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traveling here and there. The nice part is though, I'm not traveling as much for racing and competition
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anymore. So I don't have to like tear down a time trial bike and build it back up and pack all the
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wetsuits and all the shoes and all the, you know, racing gear and nutrition and all that jazz. I just
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got to go put a bunch of shit in a backpack and get in a plane. So it's actually easy compared to
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traveling for something like Ironman triathlon. What do you take when you travel? And I know a little
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bit because we were in Hawaii. What about, was it about this time last year? I think when we were
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hunting. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you take with you specifically when you travel, whether it's
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presenting or going on a hunt to keep yourself in shape and some of the exercise regimen you go
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through? There's a big difference between presenting and going on a hunt, bro. I'm not talking about your
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hunting gear. I'm talking about specifically like workout gear, but yes, you are correct. You're not
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going to be hunting while you're presenting for sure. Yeah. I don't, I don't usually pack a bow and
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broadheads and mosquito repellent and all that jazz. You're not wearing camo on the stage or anything
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like that? No, I don't, I don't bring that to speak at a conference in Vegas or anything like that.
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I like to replicate my morning when I travel, really just my daily routine, right? So for example,
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you know, one thing that I do every single morning when I get up is I just find any body parts
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that are kind of sore or knotted up or are tight. And, you know, I make love to them with a foam
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roller. And, you know, I have all these little massage tools that, you know, like the vibrating
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power drills and the car massage or the car buffers that are designed for human body massage and,
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you know, the cross balls and, but I've also got many versions of those, right? Like I have,
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I have smaller things like, you know, little body scrapers or, you know, small golf balls or,
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you know, a couple of cross balls taped together. And, you know, I have this massage
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gun called a hypervolt. I'll usually pack a few of those kinds of things. Cause I'll do the same
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thing in my hotel room or Airbnb or wherever I am. I'll just spend 10 to 15 minutes every morning.
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Cause I figure by the time the weekends, you know, that gives me a good 70 to 90 minutes of
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pretty much simulating like deep tissue massage therapy. I've been doing that for a long time and it
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just keeps my body put together. It's never the same. This morning I was, I was working on my knee a
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little bit doing some voodoo flossing where you kind of tape below and above the joint with an
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elastic band and kind of do some squats and move the joint through range of motion to decrease
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inflammation or pull inflammatory byproducts out of a joint. You kind of get a rush of,
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of synovial fluid and blood back into the joint when you remove the band. So I'll pack a few things
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for doing some deep tissue work. I often use, and this is kind of a new thing in the past year or so,
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but I've been using like near infrared therapy a lot. It's really good for the skin. There's some
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really good studies now coming out on its ability to increase testosterone production. When you shine
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it on your genitals, specifically your balls, increases the mitochondrial production. There,
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there are devices that are really good for the head too, that increase your, uh, kind of your
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awareness, your nitric oxide production and some of your neural tissue, your mitochondrial activity,
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cardiovascular health, your blood flow, your nitric oxide production through the whole
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body. And so in my office, I've got these big kind of unwieldy panels that'll turn on sometimes
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when I'm standing at my desk, but I have like very, very small versions of those that I can take with
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me when I travel. I was sitting around some guys two nights ago at dinner and we were chuckling about
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this, but I always bring fiction wherever I go. Cause it helps me to turn my mind off at night.
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You know, like right now I'm, I'm almost done with a Harry Potter series. I'll pop up in my book at night
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and lay there in bed and tuck this little travel device. The one I use is called a Jew go. And I
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just put it between my legs and shine on my balls for about 20 minutes while I'm laying in bed
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reading. But it's also good for on your face. If you kind of put it next to the computer while
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you're working in the morning, it kind of simulates sunlight. So I usually travel with something like
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that too. Yeah. That's interesting. You were talking about light, even I don't remember when we
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were together last is like light actually in your eardrums as well. Your ear canal, correct?
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Oh yeah. Your whole body has photoreceptors and, and that's more like bright light, not red light.
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Thanks for bringing that up. You know, there are these things called a zeitgeist. It's like a German
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word for essentially what our circadian rhythm cues. Like there are certain things that tell our body
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it's daytime and tell our bodies it's nighttime. And some of them are, are pretty simple like food,
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you know, for example, timing your meals to take place at the same time as the people are eating
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wherever you happen to travel to. So, you know, if I travel to Japan and I landed in Japan at say
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2 PM and I'm starved, cause I usually fast when I'm on the airplane, it's just better for
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lowering inflammation and you're sedentary anyways. So it's not that great.
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Well, not to mention you can't get great food in the airport. That's going to be good for you.
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Yeah. I mean, that's not an issue. You can travel with food.
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Yeah, true. Yeah. Just if you're a little bit more intentional about it than most people are,
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You know, face stuffing on an airplane doesn't usually work out so well in terms of inflammation.
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And it's just a chance to fast, you know, it's a chance to keep your circadian rhythms aligned by
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not eating on the airplane. And then whenever you get to where you're going, you know, again,
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let's say I get to Japan at like 2 PM, I'll wait until it's dinnertime there, right? Like even if
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I'm starved coming off the plane, I'll wait till 7 PM to eat because food is one of your circadian
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rhythm cues for a very, very long series of travel though. Let's say to, uh, I'm going to Dubai and
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I've got a lot of connections. I'm going to be traveling for like 21, 22 hours. I'll pack some food,
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but usually it's very kind of low glycemic index, more kind of like fatty, almost ketotic food.
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So I'll, I'll take like elk jerky bars from on it, or I'll pack like a, into Ziploc bags,
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some macadamia nuts, some chlorella and spirulina algae tablets, and a little bit of coconut flakes,
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almost like a DIY trail mix. That's really low in sugar, you know, munch on that sometimes. And,
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you know, I'll do that. I chew on gum a lot. So, you know, I just bring a lot of gum,
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bring some homemade trail mix, bring a few good, clean bars that are less carbohydrate
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based and more protein or fat based, you know, for a long series of travels, I'll use something
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like that. With intermittent fasting, which I know you talk a little bit about, but actually
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quite a length about, does that actually play into these circadian rhythms as well? Or basically
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the benefit there is caloric deficit. Yeah. Intermittent fasting is actually a great way
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to keep your circadian rhythm aligned because by timing your meals at specific times and Dr.
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Sachin Ponda, he wrote a book, I think it's called the circadian code. I believe his name is his book.
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He talks a lot about this, how having a 12 to 16 hour fast every day, you know, not eating late at
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night, having a regularly timed breakfast, at least 12 hours after dinner, preferably 16 hours after
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dinner, that really helps out with sleep architecture and sleep rhythms. So yes, that's important as well.
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Now, food is one of your cues that even includes for people who normally skip breakfast. If you're
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traveling across a lot of time zones, sometimes it actually is quite helpful when you get up in the
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morning to eat breakfast at whatever, you know, time is the morning, wherever you happen to be.
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Movement is another cue. Getting out and moving, you know, one of my favorite things to do because
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usually you are kind of inflamed after you've been flying a lot or traveling a lot, getting outside,
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preferably in bare feet, like going for a walk in the sunshine. Sometimes if I'm at a hotel,
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I'll just find a grassy spot up behind the hotel and kind of go out my bare feet and,
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you know, stretch around a little bit, do some arm swings and leg swings, maybe a few yoga moves,
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any type of physical movement, preferably outdoors in the sunshine. The earth actually
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emits this electromagnetic field. And I learned this from a guy who coaches a tour de front cyclists
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and kind of helps them recover in between stages. And he always gets them outside barefoot or else
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laying on, on these type of mats called earthing mats or grounding mats. My strategy is I'll just
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go outside barefoot and go for a walk, walk out to a good sidewalk where it looks like there's not
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like, you know, glass shards or anything like that in the ground. You got to be careful. Like if I'm
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traveling to Bangkok, for example, I can't do this, but, but you get outside barefoot, preferably in the
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sunshine. That's a big one too. So it's usually a barefoot walk out in the sunshine or some like
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barefoot yoga on whatever grassy patch I can find or else water. Like if you can hunt down like a
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really clean, good body of water, I'm not a huge fan of chlorine. I try and avoid it. It doesn't
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really agree with me and dries out my skin. And you get these, what are called chlorogenic amines
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that form on the surface of the water and heavily chlorinated pools. And those can just disrupt your
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lungs a little bit and they're mildly carcinogenic. And I, I'm just careful with heavily chlorinated
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pools, but if I've got access to like, they're aware of this and they're using more things like
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minerals to clean their pools or going chlorine free. But if I can find a good body of water,
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or even if I'm going to California or Florida or something like that, just like a clean lake or
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river or ocean and oceans are especially nice because the minerals I'll get in water and I'll
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just do my workout in the water, you know, go for a swim, do some underwater training, you know,
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even just tread water a little bit, but water does a really, really good job as a form of movement too.
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And those are two ways, food and movement, but then probably the biggest circadian rhythm Q is light
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kind of coming full circle to what we were talking about. When you asked me that question about
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bright light, I make it a point to get as much natural light as possible, especially when it's
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morning, wherever I happen to have traveled to, you know, let's say I fly into Vegas, I get there at
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8 PM. I'm presenting at, let's say 10 AM the next day. I've got no chance to go outside because,
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you know, God knows it's freaking, they make it, they engineer Vegas to make it hard to get outside,
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to get out of the casinos. Yeah. They wanted the same light wherever you are, whatever time.
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Yeah. Sometimes it can add like 20 minutes to my morning routine to get out through the maze of
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the casino, get outside, find a place where the sun isn't shielded by all the tall buildings. And so,
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you know, a little biohacking comes in and I've got, like you mentioned, you know, this little device
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called a human charger that just blasts your ears with light. There's another device called a re-timer.
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It's like these glasses you can wear and blast your eyes with light. There are ways you can kind of
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simulate sunlight to reset your circadian rhythm. And so, you know, returning to travel,
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pack some of my mobility stuff, I pack a little tiny, you know, red light therapy. And then I'll
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usually pack a couple of these devices that give me more bright light in the eyes or bright light in
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the ears. I have a article on my website, bengreenfieldfitness.com called sunlight makes
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you skinny, blue light makes you fat. And it's just the whole article is like how I light my home,
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what kind of lighting I travel with, and just the importance of light in general is something like
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that. And then for me, I mean, honestly, like sleep's one of the biggest things when I travel. It's
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just, it can be hard to maintain your sleep rhythms when you're on the road a lot. So I just have little
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tricks up my sleeve that I use. Like I have an app on my phone called sleep stream. It'll play these
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things called binaural beats that kind of gently lull your brain into more relaxing brainwaves, less
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stressful beta brainwaves, more delta and theta brainwaves. And I have like a good set of Sony
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headphones, like noise blocking headphones, and use those during the night along with a good set
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of foam earplugs. And that'll kind of lull me to sleep those sounds. I always have a really, really
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good light blocking mask. I use one called the mind fold. It's kind of funny because it was developed
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for people who go on psychedelic. I have an ayahuasca, but it is because it does such a great job blocking
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out all other sensory stimuli. I'll put that on the eyes and you can just grab on Amazon. And so I
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always have one of those. Just to interrupt real quick, have you ever experimented much with any of
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these psychedelics? Yeah, I've used about every psychedelic known to man. What is your general
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consensus? I mean, it seems to me that it does unlock some sort of maybe sensation or I don't
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know, because I haven't experimented with it at all. So I'm just really curious on your thoughts about
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that. That's a can of worms. I'll kind of derail us from the travel stuff, but I'll go down it for a
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little bit if you want. Let's hit the travel stuff and then we'll circle back to it. All right, remind
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me. We'll come back to it. So the sleep. So I've got like the sleep stream app and the headphones and
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the light blocking mask. You know, I talked about earthing and grounding and the fact that the earth
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emits these natural electromagnetic fields. Well, you can use those same fields to help lull your body
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into sleep. And so there are different devices now you can buy. Like there's one called a flex pulse.
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There's one called an earth pulse. There's another one called an ICS. And these are like tiny little
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devices. You can kind of put them under your pillow or under your sheet. They basically simulate what
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you get if you're camping outside. You know, you can use them like in a hotel room and it's this
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natural electromagnetic frequency that also helps to lull your body into this sleep mode. And then I
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always have like a little bit of CBD oil. I like, you know, compared to any other like sleep supplement,
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it just, it burns clean for me and it helps to calm my racing thoughts. I'll take about 60 to 100
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milligrams of CBD at night to help me get to sleep. So I usually have that in my travel bag,
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some CBD oil or some CBD capsules. The thing I was going to mention about technology, one of the
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things I wanted to mention was a lot of people don't know about this, but you have this vagus nerve.
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It activates your parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest nervous system.
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And they use this for a long time and kind of like psychiatry and mental therapy. But you can
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get these devices called vagal nerve stimulators and they work like gangbusters. It's like an
00:20:19.580
electrode that goes on either side of your head. And I don't go to sleep with that. But if I want to
00:20:23.400
take a nap in the middle of the day when I'm traveling, or if I want to sleep on an airplane,
00:20:27.660
I put one of those on. There's one made by a company called Fisher Wallace called a circadia.
00:20:33.760
And then the other one that works really well is made by a company, New Calm and You Calm. And you
00:20:40.080
can just like toss these in your travel bag. And if you need to sleep in a situation where
00:20:43.980
there's a lot of thoughts racing, the reason I wouldn't wear it during a night of sleep is they
00:20:48.960
just kind of like fall off as you're in bed, you know, the electrodes and everything should fall
00:20:51.800
off your head. But if you just want to nap, you know, you lay on your back or, you know, sit back on
00:20:59.160
It's actually like an electrical signal that you place over the nerve. Usually they'll go like
00:21:03.220
right behind the ears or right over the temporal lobe, like on either side of your eyes. It's
00:21:08.520
literally like an electrical signal, usually run by a little alkaline battery that stimulates your
00:21:15.020
How do you know what to experiment with? Because, you know, like the reason I enjoy talking with you
00:21:19.040
is because I think you and I are so opposite in our approach to this. Like I tend to be
00:21:22.880
extremely, well, I'm dolling it up, but minimalist, you know, when it comes to this stuff,
00:21:27.460
but really at the end of the day, it's just like not experimenting with this stuff. So I'm
00:21:30.380
wondering how, you know, what to try, what not to try and how it helps and whether it doesn't
00:21:38.380
Well, that's why I'm kind of privileged because a, it's kind of my job, right? Like I'm an
00:21:42.480
immersive journalist. People send me shit. They ask me questions. They hire me to test things.
00:21:47.180
I'll get like beta testing, you know, for devices. And I also do a great deal of self
00:21:52.020
quantification, right? Like I use this ring called the aura to track all my sleep cycles and,
00:21:56.740
and my nervous system activity. And I do blood tests literally like about once a month,
00:22:02.580
I'm doing some big comprehensive blood test, gut test. And, you know, that's, I don't think
00:22:08.120
everybody should do that, but that's the stuff that guys like me get paid to do. So you could
00:22:11.960
just, you know, go read up on whatever I write after I've tested all this stuff on my body. But
00:22:16.980
I mean, part of it is that's my job is to test out the stuff. And then part of it is too, like
00:22:21.740
my master's degrees in physiology and biomechanics. And, you know, I've been immersed in human
00:22:27.600
science for the past, uh, I mean, I graduated in 2005. So, you know, about 14 years I've, I've just
00:22:34.540
been, you know, applying this science to the human body, whether on the field of competition
00:22:38.320
or just in, in terms of sleep or mental performance or whatever. So I just combine what I've learned
00:22:45.480
and, you know, from my degrees and from my research. And, you know, I spend a good two hours
00:22:49.880
every day, just reading books and PubMed articles and, and science. And so, you know, I, again,
00:22:55.360
I'm not saying I think everybody should do that, but you know, that's my job is I test rigorously
00:23:00.460
and I research rigorously. And I also get access to a lot of kind of like the early versions of many
00:23:05.200
of these devices just to try them out and give companies feedback. And I'm often paid to advise
00:23:09.840
a lot of these companies in terms of their technologies, in terms of what I'd include,
00:23:15.040
what I wouldn't include, what should be tracked, what should be stimulated. So this is what I do.
00:23:19.560
It's my, it's, it's my shtick. It's my gig. So.
00:23:22.240
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's good too, because quite honestly, guys like myself would
00:23:26.420
never on their own research to the degree that you have, which is why I think it's so powerful
00:23:31.460
that you take someone like you who's educated and not only that willing to implement this stuff and
00:23:36.140
then distill the most valuable information so that we can implement what's going to move the needle
00:23:41.380
the most in our own lives. Do you feel like any of the people that talk with you or have
00:23:46.200
conversations or follow what you're doing, use it in a way, I'm trying to think about how to word
00:23:51.720
this, but use it in as a way not to like secure the fundamentals, to secure the basics. Cause you
00:23:57.080
have that stuff locked down and this is all like supplemental to that.
00:24:00.280
Yeah, exactly. That kind of leads into your question about psychedelics, which I can comment
00:24:06.380
on, but yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that kind of give this whole idea of biohacking.
00:24:11.480
They're like, Oh, I could inject, you know, Tessa Morlin peptides into my abs and stand on a
00:24:17.980
vibration platform and do my, my two minutes of high intensity interval training each day.
00:24:23.420
And I will magically grow six pack abs. And it's like, no bro, like you got to go lift heavy shit
00:24:30.380
and sweat lactic acid out your eyeballs. And you need to taste a little blood in your mouth every
00:24:36.120
now and again, build stamina sometimes not with some kind of electrical stimulation device that
00:24:41.000
you put on while you're on the couch watching Netflix, but maybe it involves, you know, whatever
00:24:45.240
like you and I did, Ryan, like go to Kona and hump for a week and walk 60 miles over five days.
00:24:51.200
And you have to get out and do the hard thing. I mean, that's what the human body responds to.
00:24:55.940
And there is this concept of hormesis, right? Like there are things that are good for you in small
00:24:59.840
amounts that will kill you in large amounts. I'm not saying, you know, if you decide you're going
00:25:03.620
to start doing like cold pools and underwater cold soaks to enhance your stress resilience,
00:25:09.480
that you should do that for like two hours a day, but you have to get out and do the hard thing.
00:25:14.620
I'm not on the same page as a lot of these guys. Like there are certain people in the fitness
00:25:19.280
world who have made a name for themselves by inspiring people to get up at 4am and to,
00:25:26.200
you know, to just crush themselves with these really, you know, hard workouts in the morning
00:25:31.420
and to, you know, sometimes short sleep and collapse in the bed, exhausted at the end of the day,
00:25:37.620
you know, so exhausted, maybe you can't sit back and read a good piece of fiction or whatever.
00:25:41.700
You can take it to the extremes. The body does need sleep. It needs rest. It needs recovery,
00:25:47.280
but you need to balance that with also any of this stuff, like the big photo biomodulation infrared
00:25:53.620
panel in your office. You have no business like buying one of those unless you're also getting
00:25:57.640
out into the sun every day, you know, or one of these fancy PMF devices I talked about that you
00:26:02.240
put underneath your mat, you should be prioritizing going outside, preferably barefoot first,
00:26:07.760
like a cryotherapy chamber, right? A cryotherapy chamber, you know, a lot of people step in those
00:26:12.320
three minutes of cryo. Well, anybody knows that if you go and like cut through the ice and jump
00:26:18.820
through the ice of a frozen lake, or even just like if you live in whatever Colorado or Washington
00:26:23.640
or Montana or any of these cold states or the Northeast, you know, take a five minute cold
00:26:28.200
shower. It's actually a lot harder than those fancy cryotherapy devices because there's something
00:26:32.380
about water that just makes it more difficult. I don't think better living through science is bad,
00:26:37.240
but I also think that you need to get out and do the more kind of natural ancestral self-made version
00:26:44.380
before you start to tap into the technology. And then honestly, the technology is very useful. It
00:26:50.140
can be the icing on the cake. It can be the thing where whatever, you know, like I mentioned, I'm in
00:26:54.020
Vegas. I can't get out in the sunshine. I'm not going to go walk around barefoot on the strip,
00:26:58.400
right? So I've got a PEMF device and some light producing little biohacks in my bedroom, but
00:27:04.920
do the work first, which returns to your question about psychedelics, right? So a lot of these
00:27:12.260
psychedelic journeys are becoming very popular these days. A lot of people, even in the fitness
00:27:17.180
and the health sector, it's become kind of a thing. And there are people on their 38th ayahuasca trip,
00:27:22.560
you know, trying to discover themselves and to dissolve their egos and have some kind of a personal
00:27:28.200
breakthrough or solve some kind of previous emotional trauma. And they want to use plants. They want to
00:27:34.400
use medicine. They want to use many of these herbs that God has scattered across the planet Earth to
00:27:38.920
do so, right? And I think everything was planted for a reason. I mean, you can pick St. John's wort
00:27:43.740
and use that for depression. And you can use, you know, mint to cure a tummy ache. You can use hemp or
00:27:50.680
marijuana to, you know, take a toke on that or use some of those leaves to help yourself calm down when
00:27:57.380
you're very stressed out. And in the same way, I mean, you could use, you know, an ayahuasca root and
00:28:02.700
vine to take yourself to a different place than you'd be able to get without it, to completely
00:28:08.240
dissolve your ego and merge the left and right hemispheres of your brain. And you discover things
00:28:14.220
that sometimes you wouldn't discover when you set your ego on the back burner and just open
00:28:19.380
yourself up to listening to the message that I believe that plants to send to you if you're in
00:28:25.200
the proper setting to do so. And some of them in smaller amounts can be used for extreme productivity,
00:28:29.120
like psilocybin enhances your sensory perception and can be used to enhance productivity on a busy
00:28:34.500
day or to do something like hunt better, right? You can see the veins of a leaf, you can smell better,
00:28:39.760
you can see farther. Many of these things have application even in smaller doses, you know,
00:28:44.200
whereas a larger dose of psilocybin would cause you to become very introspective and, you know,
00:28:49.300
and in a very supervised format, you know, sit with a journal and sit back and wait for the messages
00:28:54.560
that God would want to give to you. The problem is a lot of people use these things as an escape or
00:29:02.960
as a shortcut, meaning that we can make our own medicine. Like a lot of these things are causing
00:29:08.820
to produce serotonin and dopamine and DMT and many of these molecules in excess. Well, you can access
00:29:17.080
those same molecules through meditation, through breath work, through fasting, through prayer,
00:29:23.080
through solitude. And by combining a lot of those things, you look at like, you know, the Tibetan
00:29:28.280
monks, for example, they go to these same psychedelic places and they don't use any plant medicines at
00:29:33.320
all. You know, people who do holotropic breath work, you know, and I've done several sessions of
00:29:38.140
that. I mean, you see complete dissolving of the ego, but it takes a lot of work. I mean,
00:29:42.460
you're covered in sweat. It takes 90 minutes to get to that point and it's hard and your diaphragm is
00:29:47.100
sore for days after doing holotropic breath work and, you know, it's tough and you feel like you're
00:29:50.920
going to pass out. And I understand that a lot of people would rather just like sip on some tea and
00:29:55.360
sit back and, you know, wait for it to take over their brain or, you know, or eat a mushroom or
00:29:59.780
speed up that process, right? Speed up the process, take the shortcut. But you probably lose a lot of
00:30:04.640
the benefit when you do that as well. Part of the benefit is the journey, not just the destination.
00:30:08.840
I think in many cases, if you're just using psychedelic, you're skipping sometimes the journey
00:30:13.800
to a certain extent. Like some of it is hard. Like anybody who's done ayahuasca will often say it was
00:30:18.640
horrible. I was vomiting and, you know, and you have to fast before. So there's some self-control
00:30:23.140
there. I've personally never had a negative experience with any of these medicines, ayahuasca
00:30:28.500
or DMT or psilocybin or anything like that. Most of the stories people tell after something like that,
00:30:34.440
they're very dark, often demonic, like screaming, darkness, pain, vomiting, trauma. I think that's
00:30:42.900
because many of the people who are doing that are not in a good place spiritually. Poor relationships
00:30:48.100
or bitterness or anger or hatred deep down inside them. Many of them have no belief in salvation or
00:30:55.880
the hope that comes from prayer and the solid positive attitude that comes from worship or from
00:31:02.180
reading something positive or devotional. And so I think if you are spiritually sound and you also have
00:31:09.220
a good practice of the spiritual disciplines, fasting and solitude and silence and prayer and
00:31:13.840
meditation and study and devotion, well, in the same way that you probably do have business getting a
00:31:21.880
photobiomodulation panel once you've nailed a daily habit of getting out into the sunshine,
00:31:27.260
once you've gotten the spiritual disciplines really nailed down in your life and a big part of your life,
00:31:32.700
then you might be able to make a case for going out and trying these other things, this icing on the
00:31:37.920
cake. But I don't think it should be viewed as an escape or as a shortcut. It's something you do
00:31:42.740
after you've understood how to do the hard work and after you've made sure that you're in a very good
00:31:46.860
place spiritually. Otherwise, I think it just turns into what I see over and over again. People
00:31:51.280
constantly on a search. I'm going to go to Peru now. Okay, now I'm going to go to Costa Rica.
00:31:55.840
Okay, I got this other retreat. Now I'm going to have a shaman come over to my apartment.
00:31:58.980
But they never actually seem to progress. They're just always searching. I think that if you do the
00:32:04.300
hard work that you create an entirely different scenario. So for me, it's always been a positive
00:32:09.980
experience. And I might do something like that once maximum twice a year. It's very seldom and I
00:32:17.180
take it very seriously. And I always have a journal and I've always got one to two days afterwards to
00:32:22.300
just reflect and pray and write down what I've discovered. And I always come out with some very
00:32:27.540
good insight that occurs when I can completely shove my ego aside like that. But I also get that
00:32:33.820
kind of insight when I fast, when I pray, when I'm out in the wilderness, you know, when I'm camping,
00:32:38.540
when I'm by myself for long periods of time. And my wife, who doesn't really use
00:32:42.380
many of these medicines, you know, she journeyed with me one time with ketamine. It was very nice
00:32:47.840
for her. And she actually released a traumatic childhood experience and really became a slightly
00:32:53.680
different person based on releasing that trauma. And in this case, it was the fact that a lot of her
00:32:59.160
creativity had been quelled when she was a child. And, you know, she'd been kind of steered away from all
00:33:03.800
the artistic and creative talents that she wanted to foster and instead just forced to sit and learn to
00:33:08.220
read, even though she was dyslexic and learn to spell and, and do all this schoolwork that she
00:33:12.320
absolutely despised. And she almost kind of got art ripped out from underneath her. And after that
00:33:17.820
experience, after that journey, you know, she began painting again, she began making art again,
00:33:21.740
and she's doing a book now. And, you know, sometimes some cool things happen. When you introduce these
00:33:26.320
type of compounds, why would you do ayahuasca or DMT when you could just fast or do breath work or pray
00:33:32.320
or go be by yourself in the wilderness for a few days? My response to that is very similar to my
00:33:36.680
response to your other question. It's like, I actually like to try it all. Same reason I don't
00:33:41.800
eat a carnivore diet, for example. Like I kind of like the idea that we live in this wonderful world
00:33:47.560
full of all sorts of different plants and, and foods and compounds. And we live in a world where
00:33:53.200
we've got sunshine, but we've also got all these cool forms of technology that we're blessed to have
00:33:57.100
been able to build. And I'm just a curious guy. Like I like to explore it all. And unless something
00:34:02.380
absolutely violates my morals and my ethics, like let's say polyamory, right? Like that to me
00:34:09.360
violates my ethics and the promise that I gave to my wife that I would be faithful to her and that
00:34:14.700
she would be my woman for life. So for me, you know, experimenting with polyamory, even though
00:34:19.940
like I'll admit, like as a horny dude, I'm super curious about polyamory, right?
00:34:25.540
Yeah, it's super attractive. I won't deny that, but that violates my ethics. And, you know,
00:34:30.140
ayahuasca and DMT and things like that, those don't violate my ethics. Some people believe that
00:34:35.140
they are methods used by like the dark side or Satan or, or the devil to, you know, somehow use,
00:34:42.540
use plants to get into your head. And, and I think that could be the case, but at the same time,
00:34:47.220
I think that they can be used for a good purpose too. And that in the same way that, you know,
00:34:52.140
Satan or the devil could speak to us through these compounds, I think God can speak to us through
00:34:55.860
these compounds too. Gentlemen, let me just hit the pause button real quickly. I want to
00:35:02.520
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00:35:06.260
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00:35:24.540
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00:35:42.320
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00:35:53.840
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All right. Order of man.com slash iron council. You can do that after the show. Let's finish up
00:37:00.300
my conversation with Ben. One of the words that you keep using that I noticed is calling it medicine
00:37:06.920
versus what I think most people would call a drug, right? And just your deliberate and intentional use
00:37:13.360
of the word medicine versus drug makes me think that what you just said, that you look at it as a
00:37:18.380
potential positive, not something that's inherently bad or wrong or evil.
00:37:22.180
Yeah. And I don't have anything against drugs though. I mean, humans are smart creatures and
00:37:26.000
we managed to create some pretty damn cool synthetic molecules. I wrote an entire book of fiction,
00:37:31.200
you know, that's now thrilling my kids and my kids' friends and it's at their school library.
00:37:38.400
And I wrote that every Friday, microdose with LSD, because it helped me tap into my creativity
00:37:43.640
and it merged my right and left brain hemispheres. And, you know, I'm not talking about me being on
00:37:48.460
a trip, slobbering at the mouth, like, you know, but just a microdose, you know, just enough. And that's
00:37:53.760
a synthetic drug. Like I didn't go out and harvest that from a pine tree outside my house. That was made
00:37:58.200
in a lab. It's lisergimide, right? Like it's a synthetic molecule. And, you know, the same could be
00:38:04.020
said for if I'm sleep deprived, I've been traveling a ton and I come home and I need to be there for my
00:38:08.620
family and I'm operating on like four hours of sleep. I'll pop a modafinil. It'll keep me awake
00:38:13.380
for 12 hours. Hyperproductive. That's a drug. It's not a plant, but it works better than a cup
00:38:18.140
of coffee. I mean, but again, you got to be careful with drugs. They're processed by the liver. You can
00:38:22.340
become highly dependent on them. They can produce a lot of neurotransmitter imbalances. So I'm not
00:38:27.780
against drugs either if used responsibly. And there are certain drugs I'm just in most cases, not a fan
00:38:33.580
of like, you know, thimerosal and vaccinations or most antibiotics, unless there are some pretty
00:38:39.280
extreme cases. You know, I, I think some drugs really are pretty harmful across the board. And
00:38:44.420
I think others, if used responsibly are blessings. So is that how you distinguish then the difference
00:38:50.840
between medicine and drug is, is a drug is considered synthetic and then medicine would be
00:38:55.960
organic and natural. Is that the only distinction that you make there or how do you determine that?
00:38:59.700
Not necessarily. I mean, like a nootropic and a smart drug, a smart drug technically is a synthetic
00:39:04.780
molecule designed to enhance cognition, make you stay awake for a long period of time, enhance
00:39:08.860
productivity, et cetera. But it can result in some negative side effects because it has a relatively
00:39:13.980
unnatural effect on the human body in terms of a real intense surge in neurotransmitters and
00:39:19.960
serotonin and dopamine imbalances compared to something like say, uh, you know, ginkgo biloba or
00:39:27.660
yerba mate or coffee, which tend to be a little bit more clean in terms of the way they're processed
00:39:35.300
easier on the liver, et cetera. So one's a more natural substance, or you might say a natural
00:39:41.020
medicine. One is a less natural substance or more of a drug or a synthetic medicine. But there are ways
00:39:49.060
around this stuff. You look at like Tim Ferriss, for example, I know he's popular among a lot of our
00:39:53.560
circles. He just published on his commentary about a high MDMA therapy, very effective treatment for
00:39:59.300
PTA, for trauma, for war veterans, et cetera. Well, that's a synthetic lab based molecule. They're not
00:40:05.700
getting that from, you know, the dirt, but it causes this huge, huge release of serotonin. There are ways
00:40:14.220
around that. Like you can load up with amino acids prior to it. So you have a lot of serotonin precursors
00:40:19.360
in your system. And then after you've gone through like a high dose MDMA journey, you can buy like,
00:40:24.420
you know, five HTP off of Amazon and you can just resupplement with a whole bunch of five HTP to
00:40:29.740
restore all that HTP that you burnt through and mitigate a lot of the damage, right? In the same
00:40:35.000
way that you could take an antibiotic, but then afterwards, you know, drink a lot of bone broth,
00:40:38.900
take a lot of probiotics, use a lot of colostrum or glutamine and kind of heal the gut, right? So a lot
00:40:44.980
of the synthetics, they have their intended effect, but in many cases, you kind of have to fix some of the,
00:40:48.980
some of the side damage that can occur. Right. Well, it just seems like a lot of work to me.
00:40:53.060
I hear it. I'm like, Oh my goodness. Like I have to know all the intricacies and do all this
00:40:56.400
additional work in order to balance the potential harmful effects of that thing. It seems like it'd
00:41:00.320
be just better to, in a lot of cases, just avoid some of that. I don't know. Say the same thing
00:41:04.600
about squats, right? You go do German volume training. You can't walk out. Like you got to go
00:41:08.640
hit the ice bath later in the day and maybe say, take some turmeric and wear some compression pants
00:41:13.860
and do a walk afterwards and cool down and warm up. I mean, you can say that about anything.
00:41:18.360
Yeah. Good point. No, that's a good point. I guess it's just finding what's going to work best for
00:41:22.100
you, which is what I like most about what you do is this process of experimentation and really
00:41:26.020
trying to determine what's going to be best in your routine. So, which leads me to, to question,
00:41:31.700
how do you know what to potentially permanently adopt into your life? Like what type of results are
00:41:38.340
you looking for? How long are you giving these things an opportunity to show results in your life?
00:41:45.040
Well, you test, you quantify. So, I pay attention to my sleep cycles. So, I wear this ring called an
00:41:50.100
aura ring. Some of my clients will wear like a wristband, like a Fitbit or a Whoop or an Apple
00:41:55.520
watch. And so, you pay attention to effects of certain things on sleep. Take a sleep supplement
00:42:00.940
and let's say you have a good night of sleep, but your deep sleep percentages drop to like 2%
00:42:06.200
showing that, yeah, you slept, but it was more like taking a sledgehammer to your head. It wasn't
00:42:10.680
real true sleep. Well, you wouldn't know that without quantifying, right? You just wake up
00:42:15.920
and be like, huh, I slept. But, you know, by quantifying, you can get a little bit better
00:42:19.800
insight. Or, you know, let's say I decide, okay, I want to try high dose fish oil. Well,
00:42:25.280
I'll go test my blood before and I'll look at how many omega-3 fatty acids I have. I'll look at my
00:42:31.100
inflammation. I'll look at some other things that could be impacted by that, like testosterone,
00:42:35.260
for example. I'll try it for four weeks and then, you know, walk back into the safe way that's a
00:42:41.440
couple of miles from my house and, you know, give them my blood again and wait a week for the results
00:42:46.280
to come back. And if everything looks good, let's say my testosterone goes up 200 points, my omega-3s
00:42:51.560
go way up and my inflammation drops. I'm like, oh, all right. I'm a high dose fish oil enthusiast,
00:42:56.580
you know? So, yeah, a big part of it is just quantifying.
00:43:00.800
Are you just introducing then one new variable or one new component? Or are you looking at multiple
00:43:08.000
variables that maybe just impact a certain aspect of your life? For example, inflammation and then
00:43:14.020
compartmentalizing testosterone production, for example.
00:43:17.580
Well, that's the tricky part, isn't it? Because when you look at, you know, whether or not something
00:43:22.240
is going to be accepted as respectable research, you know, published in a medical journal,
00:43:29.080
they often want to see one thing in isolation, double-blinded clinical research study that
00:43:36.340
shows that one item with no confounding variables. Problem is, we know, for example, if we look at
00:43:42.520
the work of Dr. Dale Bredesen in his book, The End of Alzheimer's and the hundreds of case studies
00:43:48.020
that he has published publicly on patients who he has cured of Alzheimer's, he's using fish oil,
00:43:55.860
ketones, high dose DHA, hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers, you know, photobiomodulation on the
00:44:02.920
head, huperzine, different types of neurofeedback, right? It's a complete multimodal approach.
00:44:09.820
Just imagine if you had to take each of those patients and spend eight weeks doing this,
00:44:13.460
then eight weeks, they'd be dead before he even, like, got halfway through. So, he just takes all
00:44:17.740
this stuff and puts it all together and lo and behold, it works, right? It's probably the same
00:44:22.140
reason that if you take a lycopene supplement, it's not as good for your prostate as eating the
00:44:26.800
whole tomato. For some reason, there's a whole bunch of other stuff in the whole tomato that
00:44:30.440
makes that lycopene work more effectively and we can't necessarily take every single one of those
00:44:34.980
thousands of molecules in a tomato and study them one by one to see what interacts best with lycopene
00:44:39.360
or at least if we could, it would be a very, very long study and frankly, I don't have, like,
00:44:45.180
10 years to study one supplement of my life. So, I basically combine a lot of things and I pay
00:44:51.720
attention whenever I introduce something significant, right? Like doing a daily red light
00:44:56.520
therapy or completely changing up my workout from endurance training to high intensity interval
00:45:02.340
training or something like that. But if I introduce, like, an extra 100 international units of vitamin D,
00:45:08.200
I'm not going to do a whole formal self-research study on that. Sometimes I'm just kind of paying
00:45:12.680
attention to how that seems to interact with the other things I'm doing. So, it's an art and a
00:45:16.340
science, you know? Sure. Well, it makes sense too because when you introduce new things to your body,
00:45:21.680
you're experiencing new things with your body. It's impacting multiple facets. You know, you look
00:45:25.060
at testosterone, for example, is impacting muscle growth and also sex drive and a thousand other
00:45:30.720
things that it could be impacting. We can't fully compartmentalize what's going on with our bodies.
00:45:35.900
Right. Speaking of muscle growth, I know that just over the past, what, maybe, I don't know,
00:45:41.760
a couple of months or so, you've really been working on muscle gain, more so maybe than you
00:45:46.540
have in the past prior to, I guess, going back to bodybuilding, of course. But tell me a little
00:45:51.100
bit about that process and what you're incorporating in your life right now to facilitate that muscle
00:45:56.980
growth. Muscle is not necessarily conducive to health and longevity. We could even say that large
00:46:03.600
amount of muscle mass cause excess strain on the heart. They cause the body to need to produce
00:46:08.200
more antioxidants. But at the same time, from a functional standpoint, it allows you to be able
00:46:15.260
to lift heavier objects or useful in physical situations and even harder to kill and more
00:46:22.320
resilient to cold. And after years of endurance racing at what I would consider to be about 10
00:46:27.540
pounds below my really normal, healthy body weight, I decided, well, you know, I'm done with,
00:46:31.660
you know, racing triathlons and stuff, at least competitively. I want to put on some muscle
00:46:35.640
and I want to do so in a far healthy way than I did when I was bodybuilding, which basically
00:46:39.260
involved, you know, protein shakes out of a can and five cans of tuna fish a night and
00:46:44.960
lifting for like three hours a day. So instead, what I'm doing now is from a fitness standpoint,
00:46:51.800
I'm simply lifting heavy three times a week, a full body training routine each five days a
00:46:57.800
week, like a chest press, shoulder press, some sort of pulling motion, pull up or pull down,
00:47:01.900
deadlift, squat, that type of thing. Right. Basic foundational stuff.
00:47:06.360
Yep. Along with a little bit of high intensity interval training, like a Tabata set at the
00:47:09.400
beginning and a Tabata set at the end of that strength training routine.
00:47:14.820
Like getting on an Airdyne or a Concept 2 rower and going 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy for
00:47:21.340
Right. So just like a brief spur of high intensity.
00:47:23.680
20 seconds on an assault bike is not, sounds like it's not a big deal. It is a big deal if you're
00:47:28.740
going full speed. Yeah. Depends how hard you go. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. On the in-between days,
00:47:33.660
I'm doing a lot more functional stuff, like some core moves, some kettlebell swings,
00:47:37.000
a lot of walking, sauna, cold therapy, playing a little tennis, getting on the paddleboard or
00:47:44.540
hopping in the pool. So I'm like lifting heavy Monday, Wednesday, Friday with a little bit of
00:47:48.260
high intensity interval training. Then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday is a lot more kind of like
00:47:52.100
body work, hot, cold work, active recovery stuff, but still stimulating muscle growth.
00:47:57.640
Sure. Weekends are kind of free, depending on how, how beat up my body feels. I'll go,
00:48:01.960
you know, play tennis with my wife and twin boys, which is super easy, but still kind of
00:48:05.840
moving or, or I'll go on a long hike or go play a sport, like, you know, go shoot some hoops or
00:48:10.860
something like that. But, you know, the, really the foundational is those three really hard,
00:48:15.460
you know, we're talking like a good hour and 10 minutes, you know, an hour of weightlifting and
00:48:19.920
at least 10 minutes of high intensity interval training. By the time we warmed up and cooled down,
00:48:22.980
like pretty significant work put into your body Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
00:48:26.100
like a five by five or five by three type program. Is that what you're incorporating?
00:48:30.240
No, no. My body responds better to kind of like that eight to 12 rep range for putting on muscle,
00:48:35.820
right? Putting on strength. Yeah. I respond pretty well to like five to eight reps, but for muscle,
00:48:40.020
like more of a hypertrophic range, I'm trying to build muscle and maintain fat at the same time.
00:48:45.560
So thus far I've gone from one 74 to 184 pounds, but maintained 5% body fat through that entire
00:48:53.860
five weeks of putting on those 10 pounds of muscle. Interesting. Yeah. Wow.
00:48:58.420
I think the reason for that is the nutrition and also the movement. Like I walk a lot. I take all my
00:49:03.020
phone calls when I'm walking, walking isn't very catabolic, but it just kind of keeps you in mild
00:49:07.600
fat burning mode during the day. Like just while you and I have been talking, I've already walked almost
00:49:11.580
two miles on my treadmill right now as we're talking, you know, but it's kind of low level
00:49:15.320
physical activity. Right. And I didn't fully understand that until we spent a little time
00:49:19.320
together and just realized like how active you are. And it's not always intense, but it's always
00:49:25.260
moving. I remember, for example, we were, I can't remember where we were driving, but you've got those
00:49:29.800
little forearm muscle grip things that you were doing, you know, literally while we were in the car.
00:49:34.200
So it's about constant movement. It seems like for you. Yeah, exactly. From a nutritional standpoint,
00:49:39.440
I've kind of been doing a bastardized version of a carnivore diet, meaning I'm eating a lot of
00:49:44.500
meat, primarily a lot of ribeye steak and a lot of salmon, but I'm also including quite a bit of
00:49:50.000
organ meat to cover all the micronutrients I don't get from flesh, taking desiccated liver capsules or
00:49:55.500
eating liver, doing a head cheese, Braunschweiger, liverwurst, a lot of these cuts of meat, drinking a
00:50:02.740
lot of bone broth, even taking amino acids, which are very similar to collagen, except more highly
00:50:07.500
absorbed. And I'm lucky that I own a nutrition supplement company. And one of our top selling
00:50:11.920
products is our amino acids. So I've been doing like 40 grams of those a day, just because that's
00:50:16.400
easy for me to get my hands on those. I actually haven't been doing a lot of roughage or a lot of
00:50:20.180
vegetables because of the volume of, of food I'm eating, you know, close to about 5,000 calories a
00:50:25.360
day. Roughage is pretty tough on the digestion. So I've cut out like kale smoothies and big salads and
00:50:31.280
stuff like that. I'm trying to eat just meat. And then most of my other compounds are very,
00:50:36.100
very simple. Like I do a coconut yogurt for the probiotics that I just make at home with coconut
00:50:41.280
milk and some probiotics that I put in the food dehydrator. I'm doing a lot of like mashed sweet
00:50:46.100
potato and mashed pumpkin puree because that allows me to have some carbohydrates on board for those
00:50:51.780
harder workouts, but it just digests super easily. I'm doing a little bit of a raw honey and a little
00:50:58.040
bit of nut butter, but no like seeds, no nuts, no roughage. So I'm not getting gas and bloating and
00:51:03.760
intestinal issues. And I'm really absorbing very well, a lot of these calories that I'm eating.
00:51:08.640
So it's essentially like a carnivore diet with coconut yogurt for a little bit of added probiotic
00:51:14.680
effect, some bone broth and some organ meats for the added glycine and things that my tendons and
00:51:20.360
my cartilage needs. This isn't the carnivore diet, but still having a cup of coffee in the morning
00:51:24.560
and usually a glass of red wine at night just for enjoyment. I'm a pretty patient guy. I'll eat the
00:51:29.440
same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If I have a specific goal, I told my wife who makes
00:51:33.480
these wonderful meals and these amazing salads and who makes sourdough bread and puts together
00:51:39.420
these really wonderful dishes at night. I just told her, I love your cooking, babe, but I've got a
00:51:44.560
goal in mind. So just bear with me. I'm going to make my own dinner and sit with you guys and have
00:51:47.380
family dinner. But so last night they sat down to like a tuna melt on sourdough bread that she had made
00:51:53.500
with a wonderful like spinach goat cheese beet salad. I had a ribeye and a little squash. So, you know,
00:51:59.740
I'm just kind of doing my own thing right now. Yeah. Well, that's good too. You have those lines
00:52:02.900
of communication and it's cool to, to see you and your kids like engaged in this whole lifestyle
00:52:09.420
together. You know, you're talking a lot about these little experiments and little biohacking
00:52:13.220
tricks that you're using, but then also I see you guys out on your property, you know, running. I think
00:52:18.400
you guys have, do you have an obstacle course or something like that on your property? Yeah. Yeah. So stuff like
00:52:23.320
that where you are all doing it together. I think that's so powerful. It's a good life. I actually
00:52:27.640
just sat my kids down and told them, Hey, look guys, they're in fifth grade right now and go to
00:52:32.660
this little local private school. If you guys are game, you don't need to start sixth grade. You can
00:52:37.800
just start staying home, writing down a list of all the things you love to do. You're passionate about
00:52:41.880
that you want to study in life. That'll support that. And he'll, he'll find ways for you to go and
00:52:45.480
live that life that you love travel where you want to travel, make a dream list for me of
00:52:49.660
different places around the world. You want to go to dream list of all the skills you
00:52:53.240
want to learn from building a tree fort to jujitsu, to soccer, to watercolor painting.
00:52:58.460
And I'll just create a life for you where you can learn that stuff. And so they both made
00:53:03.000
the decision to drop out of school. So they won't start sixth grade next year and we'll
00:53:06.640
just start traveling around with me and doing their own thing.
00:53:09.540
Interesting. How does that contrast with the way that you grew up? Because you were homeschooled,
00:53:14.480
I was homeschooled, but I was homeschooled with a curriculum. Whereas unschooling is just parents
00:53:19.880
and children and usually, you know, some tutors or extra help on board helping to identify a child's
00:53:25.220
passions in life and then use life as a teacher, right? So like, so their math curriculum over the
00:53:30.100
summer will be building a tree fort. Their tests, you know, to learn trigonometry and algebra and
00:53:35.560
math and measurements. And their, uh, test will be whether or not it gets blown over in the next
00:53:40.680
windstorm, right? Right. The tree fort blew down. So yeah, that's, that's the way we're going to be
00:53:46.080
No, I like that. Um, I just brought my son in to, uh, the organization in a way he's doing the
00:53:50.840
shipping for us. So he fulfills all of our orders and things. And man, just that little experience
00:53:55.240
over the past couple of weeks, I swear he's learned more about math and communication and
00:53:59.900
going the extra mile and communicating with other people and the organizational process than he ever
00:54:05.040
learned in the, you know, the past, whatever, six, seven years of schooling that he's gone through.
00:54:11.180
Yeah. Well, Ben, I know you got a hard stop, man. I want to be respectful and honor that time
00:54:15.140
commitment. Um, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I've enjoyed our friendship and
00:54:18.520
everything I've learned from you because again, it's a lot different than the way that I approach
00:54:22.460
my life. And so having this other side and this other perspective helps me balance out what I'm
00:54:28.280
doing. I want to ask you a couple of questions as we wind down. The first one is what does it mean
00:54:34.000
I like the whole idea of the three P's of manhood, right? Be a man is to, uh, to provide, to protect,
00:54:39.280
and to procreate. I think anybody who's jumping through those three hoops is, is going to find
00:54:46.240
Right on, man. Well, how do we connect with you? We didn't talk about your supplemental company and
00:54:50.160
organization Kion as well, but we can address that. Tell us how we connect with you and, uh,
00:54:55.700
Well, my blog, my podcast is at bengreenfieldfitness.com and all the supplements that I formulate
00:55:02.340
for recovery or for muscle building or fat loss or whatever. Those are all over at Kion at
00:55:12.540
Right on. We'll link it all up. All right, man, I'll let you get going. I appreciate you and all that
00:55:16.680
you bring to the conversation. Hopefully we get on another hunt here sometime soon, but, uh,
00:55:25.480
Gentlemen, there it is. My conversation with the one and only Ben Greenfield. I told you this one
00:55:29.720
was going to be fascinating. I told you he was fascinating and I hope you're walking away with,
00:55:33.720
uh, some new ideas and some new insights and maybe even a new perspective into the way that you
00:55:38.780
approach health in your life. I know there was a lot here. There's a lot to digest,
00:55:43.560
but Ben's got a great podcast. He's got a great blog. He's got a great book. He's got so much
00:55:48.980
information out there. So if you want more, uh, certainly connect with him. And I know that as
00:55:53.480
I've incorporated some of his teachings into my life, some basics and some fundamentals,
00:55:58.520
and then some of the fringe stuff that we talked about today, um, I have improved in every aspect
00:56:03.220
of, of my life with regards to, to health guy knows what he's talking about. So connect with him
00:56:08.220
on social media, uh, connect with me on social media as well at Ryan Mickler. As I said earlier,
00:56:13.440
if you would please leave us a rating and review so we can get this conversation and this podcast
00:56:18.800
out to the masses, because this is a revolution that we're starting here, revolving, returning
00:56:23.440
back to the way of men. Uh, and that is reclaiming and restoring masculinity. And I'm glad that you're
00:56:29.480
on this journey with me while we're doing this. We could not do this without you. We've got to have
00:56:33.180
more men in this fight, more engaged fathers, husbands, business owners, community leaders,
00:56:37.500
and that's you. And I'm honored to be standing shoulder to shoulder with you in this revolution,
00:56:41.600
in this fight. So guys, that's it. That's all I've got for you today. Make sure again,
00:56:45.340
you connect with me specifically on Instagram and Twitter at Ryan Mickler, M I C H L E R. And let me
00:56:51.920
know what you thought about the show. Let me know what you think about the podcast. And if you have
00:56:54.680
any feedback or insights or how you're implementing some of the things that we're teaching, I would
00:56:58.240
love to hear that as well. So until tomorrow for our, ask me anything, go out there guys,
00:57:03.080
take action and become the man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of man
00:57:09.020
podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be.
00:57:13.780
We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.