A Fascinating Fireside Chat with Actor Luke Cook: Cyclical Keto, Ketones, Cold Plunges, Nootropics, Peptides & Living VITAL to the End!

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, if you eat and then work out, or you eat after you work out, as long as we're talking about the same number of calories by the end of whatever that 2 or 3 hour time frame is, it doesn't really matter. I think the main reason to work out fasted is—

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. So, about 2 months ago, I kicked off my Boundless book tour in LA. And, as a part of the big book launch, I hosted a fascinating, funny, and wildly entertaining and educating fireside chat at a wellness club called Hume with my friend Luke Cook. You might know him from Sabrina, Guardians of the Galaxy, and his new series Good Cop, Bad Cop on Amazon Prime. He's also a hilarious Instagram follow. So, Luke Cook and I sat down in front of a live audience, and what followed was this unplanned wide-ranging conversation where he asked me everything from what I eat for breakfast to my thoughts on ketones, movement, cold plunges, peptides, sleep hacks, nootropics, family routines. And, I think you'll really enjoy the mix of practical takeaways, raw open discussion, why my life t-shirt might just read Die Happy. So, without further ado, Here's my fireside chat with Luke Cook recorded live in LA during the Boundless Upgraded Tour. For all the shownotes for this one, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/BoundlessFireChat. BenGreenfieldLife.com/BoundlessFireChat.

Enjoy. Luke and I have not planned this out at all. No. No. He's just going to ask me questions. Yeah. I'm going to reply to questions from you guys. So I have no clue what exactly he has up his sleeve. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, firstly, what did you have for breakfast?

I travel with little oatmeal packets called Meal One Oatmeal. Okay. Yeah.

What's special about it?

I interviewed this guy named Michael Chernow. He's like an entrepreneur. He's a big— he has a whole brand called Creatures of Habit and they make these 30 grams of protein Oatmeal packets. And my jam is I'll just like wander into a Starbucks, get a half cup of hot water and a spoon, and I don't pay for it because I tell them that I am making oatmeal and I forgot to get water and a spoon, and they just assume that I bought the oatmeal at Starbucks. And then I mix up my oatmeal. And same thing when I'm at a hotel, go downstairs by the coffee, grab the hot water. So, and it has nothing to do with like macros, timing of carbs, anything like that. Like at home, I actually don't eat a lot of carbs till the end of the day, but when I travel, I just throw one of those packets. It's like superfood oatmeal, basically. Got it.

Yeah. But generally, you've been through the whole gamut. You've been vegan, vegetarian, you were kind of carnivore-ish for a time, keto-ish for a time.

Uh, 2 out of 4. I don't know about the vegan, vegetarian. Oh, okay. Like very brief stints.

All right.

Yeah, like day-long stints. Yeah, yeah.

There may have been a day where he was vegan.

Tried a juice fast once, that lasted about a day and a half, so. Yeah, I have tried a lot of different diets.

And where are you now?

Probably the diet that I got most into back in the day, like back when I used to race Ironman, keto started to become a thing. Let me try that, like keto, low carb. Generally, it's an interesting idea based on the fact that when you have really high levels of ketones, they're a preferred fuel for the liver and the heart and the diaphragm and the brain. You can go for long periods of time without eating. If you structure the diet right. Um, and it, it actually was almost like a hack for endurance training because you could just go for really long periods of time. And endurance, like Ironman, you're not burning a ton of carbs like a CrossFitter. So that diet was something I stuck to for like a solid 7 years. The problem with, with a traditional ketogenic diet, which is like very low carbohydrate, it's like 30 to 50 grams in some cases, Um, is that there's just not enough carbs for things like thyroid, testosterone, the glycans in your joints. So long term, you start to see some issues, which I started to see. Um, so now I would say if we were gonna like give a super cool scientific name to my diet, uh, it's like a cyclic keto diet besides the oatmeal when I travel. And what that means is I eat pretty much almost no carbs, no sugar the entire day to keep the body in kind of a state of fat utilization. Then at the very end of the day, I'll have carbohydrates. Um, that works out well for a few reasons. First of all, if you're having dinner at night like we do as a family back home, or when I'm out and about, it's kind of like the most wide-ranging meal of the day as far as maybe you're out at a restaurant or you're eating with family. There's a lot of different foods on the table, like, you know, my wife's sourdough bread, or you're out at the steakhouse and they've got the cracker basket or whatever. Um, so it works out well if you've saved your carbohydrate, your sugar allotment, for the end of the day. Um, carbs help your body to produce serotonin, which can also help with melatonin, which can also help with sleep. So I wear this continuous glucose monitor, and I can tell you one of the most common reasons for me and a lot of people to wake up like 1 or 2 or 3 AM, um, besides drinking too much alcohol at dinner, which would be another reason this happens. Let's say you're not doing that, you go hypoglycemic, especially people who are like excessively restricting calories or carbohydrates. So having the carbohydrates at night also gives you a better night of sleep. And then I like— I don't like to work out with food in my stomach, so I do a fasted morning workout. And by having all my carbs at night, I've kind of stocked up the muscle glycogen and the liver glycogen levels, and my body's kind of ready to go in the morning. So you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too, um, literally and figuratively, because you're going the entire day kind of turning yourself into a fat-burning machine. At night you have some carbs, you go to bed, you rinse, wash, and repeat. And that diet works really well.

So it's kind of cyclical throughout a day rather than throughout a week, like your cyclical throughout a day.

Yep, yep. Less active people will sometimes do something similar, but they'll just like have a bunch of carbs once a week to kind of keep a message going to the thyroid that it doesn't need to downregulate metabolism. I'm just so freaking active, like I can't go a whole week, you know, being ketogenic. Now it's— you, you can almost cheat your way into the same stage. They may try like these drinkable ketones like Ketone IQ or KetoneAid or, or any of these like liquid jet fuel tasting shots. They don't taste great, but those are kind of a cool advancements in science because they allow you to drink your way into a state that your body would normally achieve through long-term carbohydrate restriction or even fasting. You don't get some of the metabolic benefits of carb restriction, but you can feel a lot of the energy and the endurance and the appetite satiation that ketones or ketosis can give you just by drinking yourself into that state.

And when would you use ketones? In the afternoon after lunch, a little pick-me-up instead of a second coffee, or—

You do it then. I like to use them anytime I'm planning on not eating a lot of food, or I want the option to not eat a lot of food. Uh, before getting on an airplane, that's perfect because airplanes, you know, you're sedentary most of the time. Um, the food's— news flash— not all that great on airplanes. And so you have one of these before you get on a flight. And the cool thing is it keeps the appetite satiated, just like a little liquid shot. But ketones are also anti-inflammatory, so it helps you to battle some of the inflammation that you might experience during airline travel. Another example would be before a fasted morning workout, um, because ketones do kind of like keep you still in a fasting-like state but give you some energy for something like that. Um, and then like sometimes like on a trip like this to LA, I'm here, you know, 9 days doing a lot of podcasts and meetups and things like that. And, um, I don't do as well cognitively with a belly full of food. Yes. I've already had 2 shots of ketones today.

Did you notice that actually when you eat a big meal and then you go on a podcast or you go and meet people? Oh, it's horrible. Yeah. What do you think that is?

Yeah. Oh, it's the blood shifting to your gut. Right. Away from your brain. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. You know, you got to strike a balance because if you go hypoglycemic, then you're kind of foggy. But the cool thing is if you're hypoglycemic, you can still feel pretty functional on ketones.

You mentioned how much you move. Can you give us an idea of a general day, how much you move? Like, what's the go?

What's happening?

That depends on how you define movement. I mostly sit when I'm being interviewed or sit to eat or sit on an airplane. I guess in a car too. I'm pretty active. I have a treadmill workstation. I got a kettlebell on the floor of the office. I got pull-up bars all over the house. I'm moving. Like, my goal, and I think this is a pretty reasonable idea, is to structure my workday so that hitting the gym at the beginning or the end of the middle of the day is an option, not a necessity, because I've just kept myself moving all day long. Everything from a treadmill at the workstation to weights scattered around the house to— we live out in the sticks in Idaho and I could take the four-wheeler or the bicycle down to the mailbox a quarter mile down, but I'll instead jog down to the mailbox and walk back with the mail. So,. I just kind of structure the entire day to be moving. So average day, I'll usually get about 18,000 to 20,000 steps. And I still do work out most days. And what that looks like is typically I've got 3 or 4 days of the week that I do strength training and then another couple of days of the week where I do cardio training. So yeah, so I move a lot.

That's a lot.

I move a lot. I mean, I typically on an average day, we're not talking about like sitting a lot and doing podcasts and things like this and trying to have the empty stomach. I'm usually eating like 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day. Wow. Just, just to not lose weight.

Yeah. Wow. That's amazing.

Yeah.

And then do you find that walking and working on a treadmill— so you're at a desk, you're at a desk that's a high desk and you're walking. Do you find that's good for thinking? Do you find that kind of moves the blood around the brain?

I think walking is— it's an incredible hack for, for cognitive function. I mean, and I'm not making that up. Walking actually increases vascular endothelial growth factor and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So even like back to like Greek philosophers who would teach their students, they would often engage in basically the equivalent of what would be called a walking university where you do a lot of the lectures while strolling. I think it's great for kids as well just because they're so fidgety to be able to move as much as possible in the classroom. But yeah, I mean, you stay way more focused, you know, even during a podcast. Now I will— I do a better podcast when I'm walking than when I'm just like sitting there starting to fidget. My ADD starts to kick in. Like, moving actually helps a lot.

Yeah, totally. I've often thought that men should walk because we're better side to side than we are face to face. Have you ever heard about that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard the same thing about conflict resolution amongst couples. Like, if you got an argument, like, go on a walk together. Yep. So you're kind of staring off in the horizon rather than like giving demon eyes to each other face to face. Yeah, unless you're on MDMA, then that just fixes everything. Just sit there and stare at each other.

That fixes literally everything.

There's nothing that doesn't fix.

What about that morning workout that you do fasted? Is there a metabolic advantage, or you just enjoy working out fasted? You prefer to not have anything in the system?

There's a lot of people in the fitness industry who would tell you there's a metabolic advantage from a fat loss standpoint to working out fasted. There's no actual research. To back that up. Um, really, like, if you eat and then work out, or you eat after you work out, as long as we're talking about the same number of calories by the end of whatever that 2 or 3 hour time frame is, it doesn't really matter. I think the main reason to work out fasted is there's a little bit less blood flow to the gut, more blood flow to the brain and the muscles. Um, And for a guy like me who just gets princess gut if I exercise with a stomach full of food, it's just, it's just easier digestively. But you, you won't like burn more fat or cut or lean up better if you're doing your, your main workout fast, at least based on research. Now, some of you who have read my book might know there's a section in the fat loss chapter where I talk about as kind of like a cutting strategy to wake up in a fasted state and to consume something that will increase fatty acid oxidation. That's typically like green tea or coffee. Not like an orange mocha frappuccino, but like just like black coffee. And then, you go and do 20, 30 minutes of something aerobic like take the dog for a walk or ride your bike or go for a swim or do a yoga class or whatever. And then, the third part of that is finishing with about 2 to 3 minutes of cold therapy. So you're almost like shifting some of the white adipose tissue into metabolically active brown fat and amping up the metabolism just a little bit more when you get out of the cold. Um, I'll do that with like, uh, everything from like a celebrity getting ready for a movie role to, you know, an executive who wants to lose 30 pounds, and it works pretty well. There's just no research on that strategy. Um, I think one of the reasons it works is people can just do it— like, not a lot of people are going to go do like a fasted hard hour-long CrossFit session or hard weight training session in the gym on a consistent basis. But most people who just wanna lose some fat, they'll get up, have a cup of coffee, go for a walk, come back, take a cold shower, and maybe hit the gym later on.

Let's talk about the rules of that because my ears perked up. I wanna know all about that. What are the rules about the coffee? It's gotta be black, green tea, gotta be black. That's gotta be, you know. No milk or anything, you know what it is.

Like what takes you out of a fasted state?

Oh, so that's it, it's a fasted state. So it could be butter in the coffee if you did that kind of thing.

So calories are calories. Right. I mean, if you have butter in your coffee, your body typically has to burn mostly those calories before it's gonna tap into its own fat. Now from a cognitive standpoint, putting butter in the coffee, there's different parts of coffee like kahweol and cafestol that will cross the blood-brain barrier if they're mobilized with fats. And that's why coffee kind of seems to hit your brain better if you blend it with, with MCT oil or butter or something like that. But it is— I mean, you can easily have a 300-calorie cup of coffee, and that's 300 calories you gotta burn before you start to burn your own fat. Um, that being said, like, there are other little things that really aren't gonna— they're gonna be like a speed bump from a fasting standpoint, like a little bit of creamer or, you know, a touch of sugar or something like that. It's not that big of a deal.

And that first piece of exercise, it should be generally not too high intensity, about 20 to 30 minutes, like a walk is perfect?

Not— well, it shouldn't be super high intensity because there's science that says that doing low intensity is better than high intensity. As a matter of fact, you hear— does everybody hear about like zone 2, fat burning zone, aerobic conversational zone burns more fat? It does. Like my formal background is exercise physiology. And so one of the things that I did in the lab for like 6 years is people would come into the lab and they put on this massive like gas mask device, which, you know, now has been replaced by devices you can just like have in your own home. Like there's one called the, the Lumen that does this. It's just like a little tiny device that you breathe into. But the reason people would put this mask on was you'd measure inspired oxygen and expired carbon dioxide, and you'd be able to approximate how much fat somebody's burning, how many carbohydrates somebody's burning, and what their overall metabolic rate is. And of course, what the ratio of fat to carbohydrates being burnt is. And that ratio of fats to carbohydrates— you guys are all gonna be super smart cookies when you leave today— it's called the respiratory quotient, the RQ. And if you're working out at a really low intensity, your RQ is lower, and a lower RQ means you're burning more fat than you are carbs. But at the same time, you're also burning a lot fewer calories., right? So if you're burning like 70% fat but you're burning 100 calories every 30 minutes, you're still going to burn more fat if you're burning 50% fat but you're burning 500 calories every 30 minutes because you're working out harder. So there's not a huge amount of magic behind like the whole like fat burning zone low intensity thing from that standpoint. The reason I think it works is it's just like super simple for people to do. Like, I don't have a lot of people who I've coached who resist the idea of getting up, having a cup of coffee, and like taking the dog for a walk, or literally like walking around the neighborhood while they're checking their emails and coming back and taking a cold shower. So it's just doable for people.

And the caffeine before it, does that kind of boost the fat burning process?

Yeah, yeah, caffeine boosts fat oxidation. Um, again, like, that doesn't mean if you wake up and you have a cup of coffee, you're just gonna like melt fat off your body, or if you get any of these, you know, thermal burners that you can get at GNC, if those are actually going to work to any significant extent. But it's just a little bit of an edge, especially if you're doing exercise afterwards. It's usually exercise with caffeine where you see more fat oxidation than just caffeine all by itself.

Got it. You've remained bullish on the cold plunge. It kind of came into fashion, then went out of fashion as fast as it came up.

Yeah.

But you've remained somewhat bullish on it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on, on why you think it's fantastic and why you should be doing it.

Yeah. Well, it is interesting because, you know, like Wim Hof, I think, was largely responsible for championing a lot of the benefits. I mean, here, cold plunge, by the way. Yeah. Okay. So, so a lot of you are masochists. Good, good, good audience. And, and even before, like, he came to the scene or a lot of the science came out, I was just accidentally cold plunging because I raced triathlon for like 15 years. And you just had to swim come hell or high water. Like, you'd be swinging your arms in your Speedo, getting ready to jump into the YMCA pool that was, you know, like 69 degrees when there's a 45-degree draft coming in the door in Idaho in the winter. You'd have to go out and do open water swimming in October to get ready for Hawaii Ironman. And the only body of water outside your house in October in the Inland Northwest is like, you know, 45 degrees. So, I was doing it accidentally before I learned about all the metabolic benefits and then it got pretty popular. And now, kind of like you said, Luke, there's some people starting to say, "Oh, don't do it. It's super stressful for the body. It causes excess cortisol and stresses you out and then your body goes into starvation or famine mode because it thinks it's constantly running from a lion." So, it produces a bunch of cortisol and you get bloating and fat retention. The devil's in the details a lot when it comes to the things that you see in the news or you hear some Instagrammer influencer saying versus what's actually the case. So let's take women, for example. Has anybody heard that there's a new thing going around like women shouldn't cold plunge because it's bad for women? Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting because they've actually done comparative studies of men versus women in cold plunging. And by the way, the argument is pretty much exactly what I just said, that it causes sympathetic nervous system response, fight and flight, cortisol, vasoconstriction, and that that's even more pronounced in women, which is kind of true because if a mammal has higher levels of estrogen and progesterone in the system and that's combined with cold, there's a greater degree of vasoconstriction. And a higher cortisol response when that happens. Now, if you look at actual comparative studies on men versus women in cold exposure, there was one with like 60 men and 60 women where they did that and they tracked metabolic factors related to fat loss and metabolism, things like adiponectin, insulin, lectin, blood glucose, all the things that you'd expect to be kind of out of whack if cold was an issue. Well, the women did have a different response to the cold. They have their, you know, different levels of all these, these metabolites that I just mentioned, but all of them were more favorable than what the men got. So the only thing that study showed was that women actually had a better metabolic adaptation to cold than men did. Um, they did another study where they, they looked at the actual um, cortisol response in women to cold. And lo and behold, just like all the, you know, the influencers are saying, there's a big cortisol spike for 4 weeks. There's a 12-week study. After the 4-week mark, all of a sudden this stress resilience mechanism kicked in and women began having a lower cortisol curve during the day and a lower cortisol response to the cold. Meaning that the cold did what cold is— one of the things cold is supposed to do, like increase stress resilience, improve your ability to be able to move blood around the body, improve your ability to be able to respond to cortisol. So yeah, that like there's a chance that for the first few weeks it might be a little stressful, and then if you do it continuously, it becomes beneficial from a stress management standpoint. And then if you look at the studies on women with higher levels of estrogen, progesterone, which would occur during, during the luteal phase of your cycle, there is a bigger vasoconstrictive and cortisol response to cold when you're in that period. But there's no link between that and anything like more fat gain or adrenal fatigue or any of this. Like, I'm convinced that, like, the people who say that women shouldn't cold plunge are mostly people who don't like to cold plunge and they want some other people along for the ride with them. If you are in menopause or postmenopausal and you have lower levels of estrogen, you would actually operate a little bit similarly to a man when it comes to a cold plunge. You just have less vasoconstriction. So, there is one factor though and that's that women in general there are definite exceptions to this rule, have lower muscle mass than men, and muscle is thermogenic. Muscle helps you heat up. So, women might have a different temperature or time in the cold tub compared to a man in order to get the benefits, maybe not as cold or as long. But, the general rule is if you get out of the cold plunge and you feel cold and refreshed and energized, that's great. If you get out and you're shivering for an hour, you definitely went too too long. And if you even look at, you know, another thing that people say about cold plunging, that if you do it after a workout— has anybody seen this? Like, if you do it after workout, it's not good. Um, cold can suppress the body's own inflammatory response, meaning that if your body doesn't get to mount its own inflammatory response because you shove that down with cold, or even shoved it down with a whole bunch of antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E or something like that, Mm-hmm. Because the body can't mount its own inflammatory response, you don't see as many benefits for things like mitochondrial proliferation or satellite cell generation for new muscle. That is true, but even the studies that show that to be true are using like 10 to 20 minutes of cold, and there's just not a lot of people I don't know about you, Luke, but I don't have the time to go sit in a cold plunge for 10 to 20 minutes. Yeah. And, a lot of people aren't doing that. Even here, people are in there for 2 or 3 minutes and they're out. My sweet spot is 2 to 3 minutes. So, yeah, the devil's in the details. Yeah, if you do cold too long and too hard, it's a problem. If you're a woman, it's really not as big of an issue as a lot of people are saying. And, cold does put you into fight or flight, right? It's, it's a hormetic stressor. And this is kind of interesting because there's so many hormetic stressors out there. It's like if you look at life, we, we were born, and as soon as we're born, we're all of a sudden just having to battle entropy and gravity and, you know, toxins and poisons. And one of the ways that we put our bodies into a state where they're resilient enough to handle all the stressors of daily living is paradoxically to stress our bodies, right? To have mild elements of discomfort spread throughout the day. And so that can be cold, which causes the acute fight-or-flight response, but then when you get out, your body becomes more resilient to stress. Heat, same thing, right? Like, if you stayed in there for 2 hours, you'd get some kind of electrical abnormality and then you get dehydrated. I mean, in many cases, if you work out, your muscles look like World War II after workout depending on how you're training. And that's, you know, that's poisonous, that's toxic, that, you know, it's hard for your body. Um, even a lot of the, the diets, the very myopic diets where you eliminate lectin and gluten and oxalates and phytates, you know, every last plant defense molecule known to humankind. Like, when you eliminate all of those stressors, whether they're dietary stressors or thermal stressors or, you know, gravity stressors like weight or cardiovascular stressors, Sure, like your body is less stressed, but as a result of your body not having to deal with any of those discomforts, it becomes less able to deal with the discomfort of aging. So, so yeah, I mean, inducing cellular resilience in small to moderate amounts, like having little hormetic stressors spread throughout the day, including dietary diversity, is a pretty good healthspan/lifespan strategy. Hmm.

In regards to your own exercise, how often are you going? Balls to the wall, high intensity? And how often are you keeping it, you know, 120, 140 heart rate, slow and low weights, like heavy weights? And how often are you going high intensity intervals? Like, how often are you mixing?

Oh, I was like a total masochist for like at least a couple of decades. Like, you know, starting off with bodybuilding and then Ironman triathlon and then Spartan racing and everything was just like, you know, lactic acid out the eyeballs, which, you know, what's your book called? The Quick and the Dead? Yeah, about how— yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically the idea, Pavel's written some fantastic literature on this about how like when the body's just like constantly having to metabolize lactic acid and you're constantly just like burning tons of carbohydrates because you're exercising at such a high intensity for such a long period of time, that's actually stressful to the body. Another researcher, James O'Keefe, has shown that once you exceed about 70 minutes of high-intensity exercise each week, you start to see arterial stiffness, atherosclerosis, plaque formation. So, you know, even though I exercise pretty hard for a long time, since I hung up the hat on professional obstacle course racing, now it is kind of like you said, it's a lot of super slow stuff or quick and snappy stuff. It's very, very, very seldomly do I ever like go hard. For longer than about 60 seconds as far as high-intensity interval training. I don't go on long runs. I rarely do long bike rides or long swims. Most of my cardio is walking. So, I'm basically lifting heavy typically just for me as a time hack like circuit-style training, walking a lot, and throwing some power moves in here and there.

Got it. Do you intermittently work out throughout a day? Is that why you've got bars around the house and chin-up bars and—

Yeah. Yep, all throughout the day. My sons do the same thing. My sons are 17. Like, if you walk into our house on any random day, it's like every half hour you'll like hear something clunking around or somebody doing burpees or somebody doing pull-ups because we just like stop every half hour and do something, just move. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's like, you know, back to the discomfort thing. Like, we live in a blessed post-industrial era where we aren't out having to like build fences and run from lions and, you know, go up and down ladders painting and, you know, hauling rocks around unless we're a farmer or construction worker or something like that. So we have to like fabricate these boxes that we go and pick up stuff and set it down in order to keep our bodies, you know, able to fight the entropy. And you have to be mindful of doing that, you know, or else it is very easy to just like sit around and, you know, for lack of a better term, like get soft mentally and physically.

In regards to, you have trained like multiple celebrities to get ready for, camera-ready, Zac Efron being one of them.

Just one of the many. Just for the record, I didn't train Luke for his Adonis-like body for his good cop, bad cop show.

No, you didn't, but I look forward to that.

Maybe vicariously. We've traded tips here and there.

What do you do to get somebody— I mean, Zac Efron, he's probably already in shape before you start working with him, and I guess that's ideal. What would you do if you were taking, you know, a CEO who was looking to get in the best shape of their life? Tips like the one that you said earlier where you wake up in the morning, have some coffee, go for a walk. Can you give us a few more of those?

Yeah, I think similar to how we live in this fantastic post-industrial era where, you know, we can live very cushy lifestyles, we also live in an era in which the same type of self-quantification that would have cost like tens of thousands of dollars, the Princeton Longevity Institute or whatever, like a couple of decades ago, decades ago is now pretty achievable, like, in the comfort of our own homes or at a, you know, Quest Diagnostics or LabCorp down the street. So if I'm working with somebody, I start with a very data-driven approach, especially from like a nutrition and supplementation standpoint, meaning specifically a basic blood test, a micronutrients test. I use one right now called the Metabolomics, a gut test, like a, like a 3-day stool tests, look at parasites and yeast and fungus and bacterial balance, urinary hormone tests, food allergy tests, and a DNA test. So you can make really good progress if you can sit down with that and say, okay, I need vitamin D, I need a higher omega count, I need a higher protein intake, I'm deficient in these 3 minerals, and that can plug up a lot of holes. From a nutrition standpoint. And you can also find out, hey, these are the foods that I shouldn't eat, these are the foods that genetically or biochemically I'm more adapted to. Um, and I think getting that baseline can move the dial a lot more quickly than just like shooting in the dark. If you were going to shoot in the dark, some semblance of a, like, a low-carb Mediterranean-style diet works for a lot of people. Not like unlimited breadsticks and, you know, seed oil salads, like That's not— Olive Garden is not a Mediterranean diet, but it works. It works for a lot of people. So that's one. Consistency is another one. Now, a lot of like, and you know this, Luke, like a lot of actors and actresses can have a little bit more time at their disposal to train, especially if they're being expected to train until the shooting gets hard and heavy. And I mean, and I literally have some people who are just like working out in their trailers. They have the perfect push-up bar. They have the doorframe suspension straps and they're doing like mini workouts workouts in between shoots. Um, but the idea of having a plan where you're very, very consistent and you never get to the point where you've missed so many workouts, you gotta pile a bunch into a weekend— that's another big factor. And that just comes down to scheduling and calendaring. Um, you know, you do see, like, in Hollywood especially, like, there's a lot more use too of things like hormones peptides, steroids. Like, a lot of the bodies that you see, like, there's some better living through science going on as well, often to a pretty big standpoint. I mean, anything from like growth hormone precursor peptides to pile-on mass to, you know, testosterone stints, um, to even Deca in some cases. Like, I won't lie, like, that's, that's a part of it as well.

Well, when you've got everything at your disposal, you should use it, right?

If if, if you've got like 3 months and you're supposed to put on whatever, something that would technically be impossible, like 18 pounds of muscle, like you're only going to do that with drugs.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. In regards to just general life and general living, I think— so I'll speak for myself personally— getting off the phone and staying present with your family is something that I think a lot of us struggle with, just in general screen time. Any tips and hacks for that, to remain present?

Yeah, um, don't, don't remain present is kind of, is kind of like one of, one of the ways that I pull it off. Meaning like I have deep work periods where if like, and this sounds really bad, but like if I'm deep in a writing phase and my headphones are in, my son comes up to me and tells me he just won the state lacrosse championships, I'll be like, uh-huh, because I do have these deep work periods where I am focused 100%. And then the way that I do it is I bookend the day. I paint myself into a corner of having the time to be present when I know I can be fully present. So a couple examples of what that looks like is anytime I go on a trip, like a trip like this where I'm, I'm gone more than a week, there's always a buffer day when I get back. That buffer day has no work. That's just like pure focused time with the family. That means I build my business more slowly, I don't make as much money because, you know, that's multiple days per year that are just like total day off. But having that built in if you travel a lot is, is one good strategy. 7 AM every morning, no matter what, you know, I typically get up pretty early. I'm up around 4:30, 5 AM at the latest. So I'm, I've already put some work in, I've already put some time in, I've done my own routine. But 7 AM we have a morning family huddle. If my sons are gone, it's just me and my wife. If my wife's gone, it's me and my sons. But we have 20 minutes carved out where we get up, we talk about our day, we meditate together, we pray together, we read the Bible together, we talk about what the plans are and who's going to have the car and where. And it— I found up until the point that we started doing that about 10 years ago that it's pretty easy, especially if you live with spouse or loved one or family members to just like get started with the day. And before you know it, everybody's just like scattered to the four corners of the wind. You might see each other at random points throughout the day and then at dinner time. So having that carved out morning routine— and everybody who has heard me say this and implemented it has reported that, that life just improves automatically because you have this touch point with the family early in the day. Same thing, 7 PM, no matter what. I am in the kitchen gathered around the dinner table with the family starting the evening routine. And when that evening routine starts, it's just pure family time for the next 2, 2.5 hours, you know, songs and games and chatting and talking about the day and cooking together and cleaning together. And by having those bookends, like, I know my whole family will think something's up and Dad must be sick or his leg's broken out in the office because he's not in here in the living room at 7:00 AM. And same thing, 7 PM, I can't be on a Zoom. Like, it's just not going to happen because my whole family is in there waiting for me. So, you know, it's very similar to like, you know, author Cal Newport's book Deep Work. Like, when you're going to work, go hard. Like, don't— pardon the expression— dick around. Like, put the work in like a horse with blinders. But then when it's time for family, like, you're 100% with the family. So I'm either like 100% present or basically when it comes to family, pretty much like 100% non- present.

Yeah. So do you make a, a firm boundary with your work where you're like, 7:00, that's it, don't, don't ever schedule out anything around that time?

Yep. My, my firm boundaries are that buffer day when I get back, um, the 7:00 AM slot, the 7:00 PM slot. And then for me personally, cuz I get up so early, that means typically most nights I'm sleeping 6 to 6 and a half hours. Um, and, and that's technically not enough sleep for somebody who's as active as me and who really wants to be as healthy as possible. So I also have from 2 to 3 PM just like total blank spot in my schedule. Like you can't schedule anything, no calls, no Zooms, no work. And that's my time to just like go meditate, slip away, read a book, just lay back, just do nothing for about an hour. And that's kind of like my middle of the day that allows me to hit the reboot button. And it's nice too, because I don't get to that evening family dinner exhausted. Or grumpy. I can just like charge through and then be with the family until bedtime at 9:30 or 10. So I do have that, that other like me boundary right in the middle of the day to hit the reboot button.

And you find that energizing? Like, what is it that you do during that time? Does it— do you come out of it, do you come out of it raring to go?

Um, or no, you come out of like a little bit groggy until you jump in the cold plunge. Um, so, um, but yeah, seriously, um, So one of the things that's kind of like part of my job is I'm always testing out like the hyperbaric chambers and the light sound machines and all these different meditation devices. And I'm not going to get in bed at night with my wife and have like a bunch of wires attached to my head. So it kind of doubles up as the time for me to try out a lot of the parasympathetic things I'm supposed to be trying anyways. Um, but yeah, like anytime you like stop in the middle of the day, the adrenaline and the cortisol wears off. You do have to jump start the system. And I'm kind of not kidding, like Cold is one of the ways that I do that. And then, I'll typically do some kind of energetic compound. You guys have those Update energy drinks. I have a mini fridge full of those at home. And typically, I'll slam one of those and get back to work.

And, what about focus? When you are in that zone, when you're focused, do you like to supplement with anything other than caffeine or nicotine, anything like that that helps you with focus?

Yeah. There's all sorts of fantastic compounds out there. I bet.

I know you've got some great stuff.

All sorts. You know, back in the old-school biohacking days, I mean, people had all these kind of things like piracetam and Noopept and high doses of choline, all sorts of stuff you'd order from only sold for human research chemical websites and you kind of put your own stacks together. Some of that stuff does work. I would say probably the most powerful would be go to like you can get R-modafinil from an Indian pharmacy and that stuff will just keep you going for 12 to 16 hours with nonstop focus. That would be one of the few pharmaceutical agents that you still kind of have to go out of your way to get. But now, there's so many really, really well-done done-for-you blends that work really well. A few that I've looked at, I've seen the formulas, I've talked to the formulators, I know they're good stuff. Qualia, they have a really good one called Qualia Mind. There is Onnit. Onnit has Alpha Brain. There's another company called Wukiyo, W-U-K-I-Y-O. That's probably one of my favorites for like 12 solid hours of like really good energy even on low sleep. They have a product called Apex. They have another one called Bliss that even has like a microdose of psilocybin in it that you can stack with the Apex one. I don't know how they do that legally, but they do. So get it while the getting's good. And so those are a few examples of blends. Another company is Nootopia. They're kind of cool. You go to their website, you fill out a quiz, and then they customize things like Brain Flow and Upgrade and Extreme Focus and these different blends that they have. Based on what it appears like your neurotransmitter imbalances are or your dominances are based on their quiz. A lot of these done-for-you nootropic blends actually work, and a lot of them work better than a cup of coffee. You know, not that an old-school cup of coffee doesn't do the trick. Like, I don't drink a lot of coffee at home. I might have 1 or 2 cups of coffee a week at home. Wow. When I travel, I have 2 or 3 cups of coffee a day. Because like my schedule is just all over the place when I travel. I don't get that morning nap in. A lot of times I have late night dinners, so I kind of like save my caffeine for when I know it's going to hit me the hardest. Then when I get home, I just switch to like decaf or little morning mushroom blends. And then when I travel, I hit the coffee again.

Brian Johnson has "Don't Die" on a t-shirt.

What would you put on your—

What would you put on your t-shirt?

Die happy. Yeah, I am— I'm not one of the extreme life extension guys. I think it's kind of silly actually to hypothesize that we're going to live to 150 or 160 or 180 years old, that someone living right now is going to live that long when the longest-lived person on record right now is, I think, 117, something like that. Um, and, and Claim that through some hyperbaric chambers and injecting a few peptides and taking some AKG and rapamycin, you're going to push that by 30 or 40 or 50 years, I think is a little bit ridiculous, especially when you consider that even if you could do that, you're going to be spending a lot of the years that you get huddled up cold and hungry and libidoless inside a hyperbaric chamber trying to live a longer time. So, it almost becomes like this relentless effort of grasping at straws when at the end of the day, you're still going to be just like ugly and wrinkled and osteopenic and sarcopenic. You're still going to be old and you're going to die old. So, I think it's a better goal just to live as healthy as possible as close as possible to the day that you die. I would love to just kick the can after a day of snowboarding in the mountains, have a heart attack while making love to my wife. I told her that once, she said that would be really awkward. Um, so maybe not. Yeah, she's got to push me off of her and call the ambulance. Um, but, but yeah, I think the idea is being vital into old age is, is a pretty good goal. And not deceiving yourself that, yeah, you are going to feel old, you are going to have aches and pains, like your body's not going to work like you want. Like, that just happens. That's life. Yeah. And you can certainly fight entropy to a certain extent, but we're all going to get old and die. And I think the main thing is to be as vital as possible, as close as possible to the day that you die. And then also just to understand your life's purpose, to identify your life's purpose, and to make as much impact as possible with the time that you do have on this— on planet. And part of that is like keeping this vessel, keeping this body in good enough shape to be able to be impactful. So a lot of people will be like, well, why would you, you know, inject peptides and go take a nap inside of a hyperbaric chamber and do the cryotherapy. And part of it is I want to be more vital, more productive, more impactful. And if I can do that until I'm 80 or 90 instead of until I'm 60, then that's, that's fantastic.

To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit bengreenfieldlife.com.

Ben Greenfield, MD.

In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items, but the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion LLC, the makers of Kion-branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency recommend in good conscience. I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body, and spirit, and I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.