Alternatives To Alcohol & Plant Medicine, Growth Through Ayahuasca, A Shower Routine That Grows Your Brain, Is Eating Bugs A Mind-Control Experiment & More With Mike Cernovich.

My name is Ben Greenfield. And on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

You are confronted by superintelligences. Some people believe they're demons. Some people believe they're friendly spirits. Other people believe they're archetypes, apparitions of your mind. Jung wants to call it your own shadow. Everybody has their own take on it. Regardless of that, you're confronted with something far greater than what we think we are. Right. That was one of my larger realizations of plant medicine is, okay, so whatever I think I am, I'm really not that— I'm not that tough. I'm not really anything compared to whatever exists in this realm beyond our normal conscious processing.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to Hack Your Life. Let's do this.

Alright. Well, my guest today is Mike Cernovich. You pronounce it Cernovich, not Cernovich, right, Mike?

Right. Or Cernovich, I guess, is the proper way, but we go with the Anglicanization of it.

Alright. Well, I'm going to go with Cernovich. I think that sounds best. So, if you guys aren't familiar with Mike, he's pretty prolific on Twitter or or whatever you want to call it now. And, he has some really cool kind of off-the-beaten-path discussions of life and culture. And, he also has a book he wrote several years ago called "Gorilla Mindset" that I actually read leading up to this podcast where he talks about culture and current affairs and how to live a better life. But, he's got some pretty cool tips in there that I'm hoping we get a chance to talk about today as well as really interesting idea he has about fear and what is on the other side of fear. He produced a film on media propaganda called Hoax. It was a top 10 independent film for 2 weeks in a row, dominated the charts on Apple TV and iTunes. Obviously, a controversial topic, but Chernovec's a controversial guy. He was also, you might be familiar with his name behind this, instrumental in bringing the story of Jeffrey Epstein into popular consciousness and he filed a lawsuit to unseal hidden court files in a case that was involving Epstein. And, he has broken dozens of other stories of significant interest. And, as a result of all of this, has created a lot of controversy not only on his Substack, which is fantastic, but also on Twitter where he has over a million followers. And, We've interacted a few times on Twitter. This is the first time we've actually talked live on a podcast, but I'm looking forward to chatting with you, Mike. So, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks. I read your stuff a very long time ago and then your controversial, depending on how you want to describe it, discussion of ayahuasca I thought was very cool and promoted another important conversation. Which I found—

which I found. Oh yeah, the idea of plant medicines. Yeah. So, by the way, regarding the ayahuasca thing, is that something that you've messed around with much?

Yeah. No, pretty extensively. That's why I always find it— that's why when people call me controversial, I always find that interesting because I like controversy even in things that I disagree with or that I like. So, I've had positive experiences with plant medicines. And when I read your articles, I read the books that you recommended, it didn't offend me or make me feel attacked that, oh wow, that they believe something about this that's completely negative and see it as detrimental. I wasn't offended by it, even though I have maybe a different point of view. So I always find it interesting that when people get angry when their own views are challenged, when I'm constantly challenging my own views and always promoting information that contradicts things that I've said. And then, people can decide for themselves where they lie.

Yeah, totally. What was your experience with ayahuasca like?

Yeah, I've had multiple and I've had different realizations through multiple encounters over about 10, 15 years. And my experience was very transformative in terms of opening up my other senses and opening up first the realization of a spirit world, that what we see here is clearly not it and not even probably the most interesting part of living. And then reliving experiences or re— framing experiences not through the context of the mind, but through the context of heart or feeling, emotion, whatever, whatever word people want to describe it. So it taught me a lot about being more of a compassionate person and being more of an empathetic person, even if that doesn't always seem reflected in what I say or how I conduct myself.

Yeah, I think I heard you interviewed by I believe it was Charlie Kirk. I feel like he kind of jumped down your throat when you mentioned plant medicines or ayahuasca. Do you guys ever wind up having any more chats about that?

A little bit. And, I talked to Alex Clark who is also somebody who's part of that network, the Turning Point Network. And, I didn't mind that because I understand that under maybe the Judeo-Christian view or the Christian view, it's seen as pharmakeia. And, people could have religious objections to this and nothing like that offends me or bothers me.

Is that something that's related to the Substack article that you have? I didn't get through the whole thing, but it's something about the other side of fear or conquering fear or breaking through to the other side or something like that. Was that related to your experience with ayahuasca?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It was It was a meditation. So, I— it was a meditation, I guess, on fear and real fear versus imaginary fear and the way that fear holds us back in all areas of our life from making changes in life or from developing spiritually, from being vulnerable. Fear really is the nasty little demon that influences everything we do from when you're trying to start a business. Oh, what if I fail? Well, people are going to laugh. Customers are going to say no. What if I do this thing on the internet? People are going to make fun of me. And you list all these litanies of so-called fears, and then you realize, well, first of all, those would be good problems to have, right? Like, as you know, as you've been around this for a while— me too— the best thing that could happen to you is people are making fun of you because you exist, right? Far more likely, nothing's going to happen, right? To be honest, far more likely it's going to be obscurity for a very long time. It's going to be a very long slog. So, the way that— and I didn't come up with this coinage, other people have said it— but you always want to look at what's on the other side of that fear. And you find that a lot of times what's on the other side of fear is the lack of belief in yourself, a lack of value in yourself, a lack of trusting yourself, a lack of trusting other people. A lot of it, of course, is imagination and stories that you've told yourself. And we, we always want to be probing what's on the other side of that, because at least within the context of ayahuasca— and that's why, you know, I've read the books you've recommended And I read your article. I've talked to other people about it. You, you are confronted by superintelligences. Some people believe they're demons. Some people believe they're friendly spirits. Other people believe they're archetypes, apparitions of your mind. Jung wants to call it your own shadow. Everybody has their own take on it. Regardless of that, you're confronted with something far greater than what we think we are. Right, that was one of my larger realizations of plant medicine is, okay, so whatever I think I am, I'm really not that— I'm not that tough. I'm not really anything compared to whatever exists in this realm beyond our normal conscious processing. And when you're in that situation, it's quite terrifying, dramatically terrifying. In a lot of ways. You're confronted maybe with your own death. And in one case, I experienced what would be the entire cycle of a death and a near-death experience. And for all practical purposes, I, I had died. And when that happens, there's tremendous fear. And then what do you do? What do you do? You, you live in fear, or you say, let's let the fear pass, let's see what's on the other side of fear. Let's see what the message is on the other side of fear. Let's try to see what this fear is. And that's actually something else I, I got out of ayahuasca is, you know, if you read my book Guerrilla Mindset from way back in the day, it's— I still like it and I still stand by it, but it's very much about controlling your emotions and auto-regulation, which, which are, I think, important skills But, I've realized those are like beginner, intermediate skills and that as you really get into development, spiritual and emotional development, there's a lot to be said for, "Man, I'm really angry. Okay. Well, why don't I just go be in a room by myself?" Assuming you have the time and just sit with this anger, right? Why am I so afraid of being angry? Why do I not want to be angry? Why do I not want to feel this way? Why do I want to go eat a cookie or an ice cream bar or go drink coffee or go tweet or go distract myself or turn on the TV or watch sports to distract myself from this feeling? Right? And I think that's because as men, we were never really taught, "Hey, man, so just sit with it. It's okay. Just go in a quiet room by yourself or maybe listen to some music." drums, whatever your vibe is, and just sit with it and let the waves flow and see where it takes you. And, I've had a lot of realizations about where maybe certain feelings come from. And, that process began primarily through excursions into plant medicine.

Ben Greenfield: Do you think it's the fact that— well, let's say you use the example of men and anger. I suppose we could just also say human beings in general and our lack of ability refinement of the skill to identify our emotions and to ask ourselves why we're experiencing those. Do you think that's a result of upbringing? You mentioned men not being taught to do something like that. Or, do you think it's also distractibility? Because I've thought about this a lot. I mean, I even recently heard someone, I forget where, I believe it was in a podcast, talking about how back in the day if say you were some ancient hunter and you took a shot in an animal with your bow and arrow and missed, you'd have the next 4 to 5 hours to just sit there and dwell upon that and analyze your mistakes and process the emotions of that failure or disappointment. And nowadays, you can just move on to Netflix or Twitter or whatever the next primarily digital distraction is. Do you think it's an era of increased distractibility that might also be ripping us from being able to just sit with ourselves?

Yeah, but it still links back to the original root cause. So, we are running from ourselves. That's something that I came away from understanding with the plant medicines is I'll give you an example. I was really deep under. And I was experiencing some really horrifying scenes with my eyes closed. I had the eye mask. And then I said, this is terrible. I took the eye mask off to try to look and orientate myself to reality. And I heard a voice say, you can't run from yourself. Stop, stop running from yourself. And that's not something that I had ever thought about myself. Oh, maybe a lot of my Ego-seeking activities are a way to distract myself from running from emotional vulnerability or running from trauma, which is unfortunately taking on too much of— it's being a little bit overused now, but running from pain maybe that we had from childhood. And I think that the reason we do that as we get older, because one, it's easier to distract yourself, but two, is we never learn these skills. So, you know, if you think back to childhood especially with your own kids. I remember as a kid, if a kid cried in my parents' generation, what a parent would say was, "I'll give you something to cry about, right? Stop crying or I'll really give you a reason to cry." And, especially if you're a boy, that was sort of how you were raised. And, why? Right? Why? Why? What's the problem? What's the problem? Your kid's sad. Your kid's, your kid's gonna cry. Why, why do you need to just make that stop? Or why do you need to, to tell them, hey, quit crying, quit making a scene, quit making noise, quit having emotions? But that was the default, I think, that of parenting for most of modern times. And certainly it was how I grew up and how my peers were raised.

It's interesting because I think that A lot of that time spent in something like ayahuasca or plant medicine, in many cases in a somewhat sensory-deprived state sitting with yourself, I think it does result in some pretty incredible breakthroughs for people. And, I've experienced similar ego death and even full-on really truly thinking I'm dead and I've passed away and the emotions and breakthroughs that accompany that in my own past forays with plant medicine. But, despite me not even anticipating us going deep into this topic, yeah, I should probably link in the shownotes to the articles that I wrote about that. And, I believe that book that you mentioned was "Pharmakeia," the book that got me thinking about, "Well, gosh, these things are opening us up to this spirit world that we got to be really careful with." And now, primarily my use of a lot of those compounds involves microdosing for creativity or for mental enhancement or neurogenesis or neuroplasticity or the like. Have you messed around with that much, this whole realm of smart drugs or nootropics or microdosing with plant medicine or anything like that?

I've always said for years that almost no one should think about ayahuasca and almost everyone over a certain age should think about microdosing. Psilocybin. And I still believe that. I think, I think micro— once I got into microdosing many years ago, all I thought was, why didn't I know about this my entire life, right? I would never even— I never would have even— I quit drinking alcohol years ago, but I never would have even felt the urge to drink alcohol, which is, I think, why a lot of people are quitting drinking. Because once you do find out what a real brain enhancement is, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to dumb yourself down with liquor. You don't want to feed the ego via alcohol, which is primarily what that's doing is validating your ego. And with microdosing, especially psilocybin, I, I view that as unless a doctor prohibits it or the person's specific medical history prohibits it. That's something I can't imagine not doing, right? Whereas I think with ayahuasca, I think people are getting a little too curious now, and a lot of people who really have no business even thinking about it are making it seem like, oh, this is a cool experience, woo-woo, you know, every— you know, everybody loves this. And not enough people tell the other side of it like you did, which is, hey man, maybe you're talking to demons. You ever think about that? Maybe think about that. For a minute. Maybe talk to your religious leader if you're going to do it. Maybe just don't run into it. Or even someone like me who's more down the middle, and I don't necessarily think— I don't necessarily agree with, um, everything in the books, but I do think that it's a tremendous undertaking. A tremendous— like, I remember the first time I did it many years ago, I prepared at least a month. And for the last 5 days, I took off work and all I did was hiked. I ate fruit, drank water, and all I could think of is like, why am I doing this? What's my intent? What am I doing going into this? Right? And a lot of people aren't doing that. They're not even quitting drinking before doing it. They're not cutting off. They're not following even— the dietas are overhyped, I think, and there's a lot of mumbo jumbo around that. But there are certain practices you should have, and people unfortunately are not really doing that. So then they go in, whoa, they have this mind-blowing experience, maybe assuming it goes well, but then they don't know how to integrate the experience because they didn't, they didn't prepare for it. So you might go into it saying, this is what my intent is, this is what I'm focusing my intent on, here's what I really want to see. In my case, I had said, "I really want to just focus on how fear is holding me back." I'm focusing my intent on my fear. What am I afraid of? It was so fake, but that's how fear tricks us. It's an emotion or a spirit. As I've gotten older and less concerned with how people perceive me, I think spirit is Fear is a spirit, which is as taught in religious context as well. I think it's an actual spirit and it tricks you because once you have gone through the wringer enough times, you think, "That's it? That's what I was worried about? That's what was holding me back? That was the big problem here?" And it's laughable, but Again, then the fear will resurface in other ways. Oh, life's good now. Why would you take on this new challenge? Life is good because you go through multiple phases, right? You go through the phase where you're young, you don't have anything, you got to put your mark on the world, and fear takes on a different meaning. Oh, I'm afraid of failure, afraid of looking stupid, afraid that my friends will make fun of me, afraid I'll have to go back home and live with my parents. They'll look down on me, but I'm gonna go through it anyway because I'm a young man. That's what young men do, go out and conquer.

Great.

But what a lot of people don't talk about is, okay, great, you succeed, woo-woo, you're a success now. And it isn't like you're on Mount Olympus now and everything somehow changes. That's the biggest illusion that I had, and I imagine you had, a lot of people had, is, oh, I've made it, everything is happily ever after, not like in a fairy tale. No, no. Now, you have a new set of fears. What if I lose it? Do I want to take a drastic action? Well, everything is good. Everything is good. Why take on this new challenge? And that's where the fear takes a different kind of form and a different phase in life. But it's always there hounding you and haunting you.

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up that part about intentional time prior to engaging with something like say ayahuasca or psilocybin or something like that. I'm in the same boat, Mike. I always approach that stuff with a great deal of reverence. And again, despite me not really using those compounds in those type of doses or settings anymore, I would have weeks of Bible reading, prayer, soul searching, fasting from certain compounds, meat restriction, alcohol restriction, cannabis restriction, and basically total cleanup mentally and emotionally and biologically followed by making sure the calendar was totally cleared for anywhere from 3 to 7 days afterwards for integration, for journaling, for allowing new habits to become ingrained without the distractions that pull you back into what Napoleon Hill might call that devilish hypnotic trance that we all get pulled back into once we become less aware, less mindful of where we're at based on just life's busyness. So yeah, I totally agree. I'm glad you brought that up. I think that's one reason people get a so-called bad trip or bad journey is just that lack of integration and cleanup and a real seriousness and somber and reverence about the whole experience. But then, I mean, I think it's kind of interesting that you also brought up the alcohol piece. And, I think it is true that a lot of people go to alcohol because they aren't even aware of all these other ways that you can spin the dials, socially lubricate, relax, and increase creativity in that relaxed state without necessarily having a couple of margaritas. And, when you look at the fact that there's the byproduct of acetaldehyde that you see built up with alcohol, which you can mitigate, I mean, there's things like milk thistle extract, dihydromyricetin or DHM is one really popular one a lot of people aren't aware of that works like gangbusters to digest acetaldehyde. There's another one that's a newer product. I actually just did a podcast on. It's a genetically engineered product or probiotic called ZBiotics that can work similarly, you're still potentially dealing with calories, preservatives, pesticides, herbicides, et cetera. So, I mean, there's so many interesting alternatives. You talked about psilocybin, microdosing with that. I have a ton of friends now who literally when they go out instead of drinking alcohol, they're doing club soda and lemons and bitters and they've got a microdose of psilocybin. And, I think that works pretty effectively for a lot of people are looking for when it comes to alcohol. Alcohol also makes GABA. That's one reason why when you drink a bunch of alcohol and it wears off, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So, once that GABA is out of your system from the alcohol, you wake up. That's that 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. I had 3 beers when I was out and about wake-up time. That can be pretty annoying, but you can instead get a slow release of GABA. One example of that would be there are GABA creams now that you can get and you can apply them right behind your vagus nerve by your upper jaw. There are GABA troches. There's one called TroCalm made by the company Troscriptions that works really well. There's also a nootropics company I think it's pretty cool. They have some pretty cool compounds. They're called Nootopia. And, one of their products called Upbeat literally gives you that same kind of surge and feel-goodness and social lubrication and a GABA kind of not a flooding but a definite increase in GABA. And, that one's called Upbeat made by the company Nootopia. And then, one other I think that's interesting I've been experimenting with a little bit lately that if you're a fan of microdosing with psilocybin, Mike, you might like. It's this new smart drug/nootropic company called WooQio and they have one product called Bliss that's a microdose of psilocybin blended with all these other blood flow agents and neurogenesis-enhancing compounds as just one tiny little white capsule. And, that thing's pretty amazing. Tell people now if they are interested in something like an ego-dissolving type of what you might call a journey or that merging of left and right brain hemispheric activity or slight ego dissolution that you might be looking for via some kind of a breakthrough with ayahuasca or high-dose psilocybin. Nowadays, most people I say, "Well, if you don't want to engage with some of the cautionary experiences like entities or elements of the spirit world, et cetera, but you want something similar, I think ketamine is a decent option. It seems safe. It's synthetic. Some people don't like that, but I've never had anybody experience entity or weird spiritual activity with something like a ketamine journey. And then, the other thing is they kind of fly under the radar, but there's a company down in Nashville and it's called Klaravida. Klaravida. And, it's basically this cocktail of smart drugs and ketamine and nootropics and all sorts of stuff that you take via pills and capsules and an injection into your shoulder. And then, if you want to call it this journey for 4 or 5 hours, but it's not, again, something that has the same spiritual dimension feel as something like ayahuasca or psilocybin. It's kind of clean, it's a little bit more in your head mental, but it's kind of being on a smart drug and being kind of laid out on ketamine all at the same time and you're recording the whole thing with a digital voice recorder. And so, I tell people if you want to do a Peru-like ayahuasca experience without the potential baggage. I like that Clara Vida place down in Nashville. So, there's all sorts of interesting rabbit holes we could dive down here, Mike. But, one of the first questions that I had written down that I wanted to ask you was whether you're still doing this crazy gorilla mindset morning routine that you talk about in your book that a few people on the internet have written articles about. It's like cold shower and counting and reciting and memorizing. But, are you still doing something like that?

The cold shower unfortunately went away because my water doesn't get cold enough where we ended up moving. And, the brain warm-up is when I'm in gear 100%, do the brain warm-up. And, I can tell when I don't do it because I haven't done it recently. And that is one of the best ways to get your, get your mind going, get your verbal dexterity going. And especially what is interesting, and that's one of the things that I noticed about microdosing, is one— so for those who don't know, there's a whole brain warm-up in the book that I found in another book that I credited the other book for, obviously. And part of it is you want to link a letter to a number, you want to think of different words on the alphabet. So you'll go down like A, and you start off real simple, like, okay, A, apple, B, butterfly, C, cristal, D, whatever, right? And you, and you go down your vocabulary words until you start to get down, of course, X, Y, Z, which are harder. And what you're doing is you're warming your brain up, the verbal part of your brain, People say hemisphere stuff isn't valid. I don't really— not really interested in that debate necessarily, but you're getting your mind working. And then what you'll notice on a microdose, especially if you— you would— if you stack it with lion's mane, is there are words that you haven't used since high school, and you think, I didn't even know that I knew that word still, as you're going through that warm-up. Because what you're also doing is you're you're doing an inventory of your vocabulary and you're realizing, oh, I've been saying these same ones for the past 3 days. I got to come up with a different one for B. I had to come with a different one for N. I had to come with a different one for O. And then you find with the Lion's Mane, I think they call it Stamets Stack, Paul Stamets, I think was one of the people suggesting it, as you go, oh, there's a nice word. There's a nice word that I haven't even used. And then, what's even stranger is then you can remember, "Oh, I remember where I was sitting in high school when I learned that word." So, your mind, it's like a Marcel Proust book, Remembrances of Things Past. Your mind starts to take you back to these deep linkages to where I was sitting here in this desk and I remember that was my teacher and this is where the book was open.. And that's when I learned that word. So with the microdosing, you're able to— because I know I've read some studies and people have their doubts about it, which is fine because it's not, not on me if people microdose or not. But I, I've had so many experiences where I've been microdosing and had realizations that were always there, but they weren't accessible to me because my brain was on the current track. And that's, I guess, how I describe microdosing is you, you get into a pattern of thought. Okay, I'm gonna wake up, kids. Okay, I got the, you know, because I got 3 kids. Okay, wake up, kids, they got to be here at this time. Here's this breakfast, this. Okay, this. Okay, this. And you're so occupied all day, as you have to be, that you have to be to be an involved parent and spouse. There is, there is a lot of routine and a lot of which just scut work But then your mind becomes so zeroed in on those areas that you, you forget how to shift. And then with the microdose, it's just subtle. You don't even notice. That's, I think, another misconception. Microdose— people would, would take more than a microdose and then go, whoa, I'll never do that again. Or they'll take a microdose and say, I didn't feel anything. Yeah, yeah, you're, you're not, you're not supposed to necessarily feel anything.

Yeah. Sub, sub-perceptual, right?

Right. But if you're doing work involving especially verbal work, or you're doing the brain warm-up, or you're playing little brain games or word puzzle games, you'll find yourself re-accessing vocabulary that had been long since forgotten. And then as you do that over the years, you'll start to have these trippy flashbacks where you'll remember where you were when you learned something was something specific.

I would imagine I'd certainly get to a point at which I quit using the word xylophone every time I got to X and come up with something better. It'd probably be a pretty good way to become more proficient at Scrabble, I suppose, as well if you did this warm-up each morning. But, my notes just to clarify for people listening, and of course, I'll link to Mike's book, "Gorilla Mindset" in the shownotes, which are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/GorillaMindset. Chernovich, BenGreenfieldLife.com/C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. So, I'll link to his book, "Gorilla Mindset," but my notes are you get in a cold shower or you do a hot-cold contrast shower if you just don't have the nuts for the cold and you count backwards from 100 to 0 and you're trying to go fast. And, the next thing you do, like Mike just said, you find a noun that fits each letter of the alphabet, A through Z, and you imagine some type of word or you say some type of word related to each of those letters. And then, you say 10 female names out loud and you can't repeat the names. Then, you say 10 male names out loud and you can't repeat the names. And then you close your eyes and you take 10 deep breaths, preferably trying not to huff in cold shower water. And, according to what you wrote in the book, Mike, I think it's only 10 minutes or less to go through that. I haven't actually done it yet. I'm very interested in doing it and just seeing related to what you were talking about with the Stamets stack, that mix of lion's mane and niacin and psilocybin. How it feels as far as activating my brain and how it might even feel if I were to take a stack like that, which it appears there's some evidence could increase neuroplasticity or back to that controversial topic you brought up, activation of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. And, by the way, I think that's interesting because I think some people are a little bit more left-brained analytical Some people a little bit more right-brained creative. And I do think that you can train yourself to use both regions of the brain simultaneously a little bit better. And I mean, you even look at sports that lend themselves well to anti-aging or longevity or even staving off of Alzheimer's and dementia. And the working theory here behind these sports I think Dr. Daniel Amen has talked about this a little bit, by the way, pretty cool brain researcher with the Amen Clinic, is that sports like ping pong, tennis, pickleball, and generally racket sports, and then also the sport of swimming both help with longevity because both of those involve a lot of left and right brain hemispheric activity. Meaning tennis, you're swinging, you're moving, you're engaging in multiple patterns, and you're kind of playing chess at the same time. And then swimming, you're using left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg, certain breathing patterns. And that also would cause for some of these merging of the hemispheres of the brain, so to speak, or at least using different brain regions simultaneously. But is that the kind of controversy you were talking about when you mentioned the hemispheric activity research or the questionable idea behind that?

Right, exactly, because there's always people who listen to stuff like this and they'll be in the comments, so you need a source for that. It's like, bro, we know there's controversy, you know, that we, we get it, you know, not everybody agrees, which is why frankly it doesn't bother me because most of what research is turning up is rediscovering ancestral knowledge of what people know. And yeah, adding to your list, like outdoor cycling, other than the risk of getting hit by cars, the same way because you're engaging in, you're engaging in 3D space. And that's because for me, I definitely fall into the, the left brain person. I'm, I'm wrapped up in my mind, highly introverted. I'm the kind of person who— there, before I had children and stuff, this happened to me multiple times where I would be by myself for so long that I would go to order coffee or something and I would, I would forget how to talk. I would try to order from the coffee— oh, wait, wait, I want, I want coffee, right? Because I can be with myself in silence forever, and in some ways that's strength because most people can't do that. But that also makes me bored, myopic, self-involved. You sitting with yourself for too long can There's an expression, "Do the work," which I like. We all need to do the work, but that can unravel and become its own form of self-imposed trauma because you spend too much time with yourself. And then, you can find stuff wrong with yourself all day and nitpick yourself all day and drive yourself crazy. So, for me though, yeah, I'm very left-brained, verbal. Had to, over the years, work harder to get in the 3D space because it was the same thing like when I trained jiu-jitsu, mediocre. Any kind of sports, I played sports. I was a stronger guy because I lifted and especially a lot of people that lift. But, nobody thought that I had unique athletic talent or even being inside your body, which I think is another controversial concept. Unless you're an athlete, in which case you're like, "Duh." The idea that people like me are— I don't live really inside my body. I have to think and sort of tell my body what to do, right? "Okay, body, we need to get up and we need to kind of walk around and we need to kind of move." And if you try to show me an athletic movement, I have to think about it. What does that mean? I have to put into words. Whereas a natural athlete will watch you swing a tennis racket, and they'll grab the racket and they'll, you know, and they'll just swing it. Or they'll hear music and they want to dance. So my, my younger daughter, for example, she's very— lives in her body. So the music turns on and she jumps and she's dancing. And I'm kind of jealous in a way because she's so in tune with different frequencies that I'm not. Which was with me, even as a kid, as a small kid, music would go on and the other kids would start dancing And I thought, what? I don't get it. Why? Like, you know, you're in grade or first grade or whatever, and the teacher puts on a record album and the kids are getting up and running around, and I'm sitting at my desk thinking, what are they doing? I, I don't understand this, right? I, I don't get it. Okay, I guess I'll stand up and move my arms around a little bit. That's how wrapped up in my own head I guess I am naturally.

Yeah. I don't think it's any secret that people who are highly intellectual tend to be often somewhat spastic when it comes to body or spatial awareness. They're not the first people who are doing front flips on the trampoline or even learning a dance move as rapidly as their more body-aware peers. Of course, the trade-off there is that you do tend to have a little bit better intellectual firepower, it seems. I know I'm stereotyping between the meathead jock and the perhaps the hyper-intellectualized, I don't know, cross-country runner. But, I think there is something to that. It's interesting that you said that about cycling, by the way, because I've seen some of that data on cycling and longevity or cycling and intellect. And, I've always wondered if it's a chicken or an egg thing because cycling is an expensive sport with the carbon bikes and the nice shoes and the cool aero helmets and maybe attracts a slightly higher-income demographic of executives who like to ride bikes together and chat about business, kind of similar to golf. But then, at the same time, I used to race back when I went to University of Idaho, obviously did a lot of Ironman triathlon and racing with that. And, there is a lot as far as reaction time, as far as awareness of your gearing, as far as looking ahead and anticipation. So, I would imagine there is a little bit of a brain-training effect. There is, of course, as you alluded to, the head injury potential. It's kind of funny, total rabbit hole, Mike, but I was reading a study a few weeks ago where they looked at cyclists who wore helmets compared to cyclists who were helmetless. And while you'd assume that the former is probably the least intelligent way to ride a bike, they actually found that the attitude of drivers in terms of the areas of the brain that lit up in drivers who saw the cyclists wearing helmets showed far less activity in the human recognition regions, meaning when you wear a helmet, you look less personal and less human to a driver, thus dictating that perhaps if you wanted a driver to avoid and swerve at all costs to keep from hitting you or pay a lot of attention to this, this human coming down the road, you could not wear a helmet. I'm not advising that, but at least It's interesting to think about.

Yeah, I've seen those debates on the cycling forums too, and I, I find it interesting because I think there was one— it was a rideshare company, maybe, you know the details— that kind of got in trouble because they had read that research and they didn't include helmets with their bikes, and then that caused a big controversy among cyclists. And yeah, you see— yeah, because you see the logic both ways, and there is a sense that a person on a bike is robotic. You— all you see is the little green. You don't realize there's a brain under there. So you have to weigh the risk of you falling down and hitting your head without a helmet, in which case you're donezo, versus it's usually cars that are going to put you in that position in the first place. And it's a difficult, difficult choice either way. But that's why I don't do any road cycling myself, because I see how drivers treat cyclists on the road. And, I mean, if you read what people are saying on the internet, it's pretty gruesome stuff. So, there's— it's one thing I would like to do is do outdoor road cycling, but I definitely don't want to risk my brain to do it.

Yeah. I still do quite a bit of commuting and road cycling, but I'm absolutely in Camp Helmet. Of course, walking is a safer activity arguably for the chronic repetitive motion, a low-level zone 2 cardio type of approach. And, you actually, you talk about walking in your book and how much you pair that to mindfulness and how critical it can be to forming increased mindfulness. Are you still doing a lot as far as mind-muscle connection and certain mindfulness exercises that you do when you walk?

Oh yeah, more, more than ever. So walks are for me because when I wrote the book, phones weren't that as cool as they are now. There's just much less to do. So I did Guerrilla Mindset 2015, and back then you had some primitive Instagram app, you know, a little bit on Twitter, but it wasn't the, the distractibility factor was much lower back then. Like, nobody was talking about cell phone addiction in 2015, or almost no one was. But so now especially, yeah, it's cell phone-free zone as long as I can. Uh, 3 hours is a good day if I can get those in, which is harder with the kids, making space. But you— yeah, the mindfulness element of it was, and, and remains, is just hearing the sounds of your shoes on the ground. Because I have these hiking trails that I go to and just click, click, click, click, click, and it forms this sort of routine. And then, and then as that's happening, I'm not necessarily trying to direct my thought, although sometimes I am. You know, I guess the thing I like about walking, why I've always been obsessed with it for, you know, 25 years or whatever, especially as you get older and it's harder to recover from those intervals, right? It's a lot harder to recover from hill sprints at 46 than, you know, when I wrote Gorilla Mindset or when I was, you know, 32 or whatever, because you want to get as much walking in, is if you have a problem, if you're mad at your wife, put your phone down, take a walk. You probably won't be mad by the end of the walk, right? Probably not. So, you're having a bad day, go take a walk. You're having a business problem, just walk and think about it and dialogue with yourself and interrogate the situation, look at it from all angles and and, and reflect on it. And then the pure mindfulness, the stillness, is another aspect. And you can, you can have all of the above sometimes in the same walk, where you, you get, you know, it's like calm being like wound up. You're just, you know, you got a bad call or something happened and you start walking and you're a little pissy. Finally, after 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe you calm down a little bit You're a little bit sober now. And then the last latter part of it, you're in a state of walking meditation and walking mindfulness and lack of judgment, total perception, everything's calm. And then you're like, wow, that was where, you know, then you're like, where'd the time go? I didn't even, it's almost like when you've been on a long road trip driving and you forget that you've been driving for an hour and you get home and think, how did I get home? What? Did I just zombie out that much?

Yeah. I think I was probably maybe 38 or 39 when I had that light bulb moment that I really liked walking a lot more than I liked running and I felt just as good afterwards with far fewer injuries or aches or pains. So, I'm now on the 10,000 steps a day bandwagon and sometimes hit up to 20,000. I'm walking here while I'm talking to you during the podcast. I don't do as much silent walking as you do even though I do have this phrase if my wife and I do have a disagreement or if I'm going through a difficult time emotionally is that I pray on it, I walk on it, and I sleep on it. And, if I can do all three of those when I'm in an emotionally or spiritually or mentally difficult situation, it helps a ton. I walk on it, I sleep on it, and I pray on it. But, when I walk, a lot of times I'll use little 5-pound hand weights. I like to use weighted vest. Sometimes I'll use a breath restrictor device like the Relaxator is a good one to teach myself, hey, how to nasal breathe and to get some inspiratory and expiratory muscle training. I'll sometimes drop and do calisthenics. I have this one walk by my house where there's telephone poles every 4 minutes or so. And so, I drop and do 20 push-ups every telephone pole. So, I'm constantly mixing things up when I walk. But yeah, I mean, it's fantastic especially for the catharsis type of effect that you were alluding to. And I'm just curious for you, Mike, you've got to have people who piss you off on the internet or who troll you or say bad things about you. I know that you're probably not doing things right in life if somebody on the internet isn't saying something bad about you. But, how do you deal with that emotionally? As prolific as you are on Twitter and all these controversial topics that you dive into, what do you do about the nasty comments and the trolls and people saying bad things about you?

There are a number of things, some tied in a higher space of mine and then some in a lower. And, depending on my mood, I vacillate. Between the two of them. So when I'm in, when I'm in a good space and higher vibrating, then I just think, you know what, I was that person at one point. I was a young man uncertain about life, maybe a little bit mad at the world, maybe mad at myself. And I would read something and I want to demonstrate that I'm smart or impose my imagined power on this person. And that was me, man. I'm getting karma payback for me. I was a reply guy, now I have reply guys after me. How am I— how am I gonna judge that person when I'm just getting back what I put in? And then of course, when the, the worst side of me, the lower side of me comes out, I think, what— I mean 'You guys haven't done anything in your life. How dare you even talk to me this way,' right? Which is— I don't, I don't like that part of myself when it surfaces, but, you know, occasionally it does. Which I'll, I'll look at someone, I'll think like, 'What do you— like, what do you think that you have to tell me,' right? Where, where in your mind does that register? Because although I, I certainly have a lot of opinions on things, if you check your notifications Mike Cernovich has never told Ben Greenfield how to do an Ironman triathlon because that would be the stupidest thing in the world that I could ever write. It would just be stupid if I'm, oh, I can't believe you're doing an 80/20 blah blah blah. And imagine I just start typing, your training is— you would think, Mike, you're out of your mind here. You know, you've never done a triathlon, you don't know what you're talking about. Like, what do you do? You know, what are you doing? And that's often the case with with people who are interjecting on things. It would be like somebody telling you how to do a triathlon and you think, oh man, you've never given this issue any thought at all. And it can be a little bit annoying sometimes, but I've been through— I've been through the wringer so many times. And then especially with plant medicine journeys and everything, you realize how, how like lost people are, how lost, you know. That's another thing I guess I took from The Plants is getting over myself, which again, it might not— it might— people might not always perceive it that way based on my writing style, which has a certain kind of punch to it, because a lot of people don't, don't understand that there's, there's a way to get a message out. And that's probably— and that's also probably why it doesn't really bother me when people yell at me as much on the internet, because I understand that what they see is an avatar and not reality. They see a very punchy point of view where you might not even be sure what I'm saying, and you're wondering if I'm implying something that I'm not implying it, and whose side are you on, and what are you really getting at. And, and I know that that's what you have to do to penetrate the thought bubble and to provoke a conversation. And, and I know this, but I know that that's not my heart. Like, I know when I insult someone who insults me, I'm not doing that maliciously. That's just kind of like part of the show. It's part of the show. And having the spectacle is in a lot of ways what brings people to conversations like this, which is more real. Like, what's the real me? This conversation is insofar as there's a real you that exists when you're engaging with other people in a social manner. There's always going to be aspects of front-facing your best self. But to the extent there's a real me, it would be this conversation, right? It wouldn't be a one-dimensional kind of rant occasion. Although we do, we do have a lot more vulnerable topics, I guess, on Twitter too, so that's not necessarily fair. But, but even the nuance that you're going to hear this podcast is not the way you write, because that's not effective writing style, especially for short form. So I just have to understand and charge it to the game that people are going to misunderstand me and people are going to believe things about me that aren't really true. And you know what, that's fine. That's the other side of the energy. I'm putting out an energy and I realize that I'm doing it for a good reason, for a good cause to try to help my country and try to help humanity. And people are going to misinterpret it and code it a certain way. And you have to love people enough to know that they're going to do that and accept it.

Yeah, I'm glad you decided not to be the fake you on this podcast, Mike. Just in the spirit of perhaps generating even more mean comments for you maybe in the shownotes for this show, I did notice you tweeted out, and we do have a lot of people who listen who are interested in nutrition, so I figured I'd ask you about this. You tweeted, "Eat bugs, live in a pod." What exactly did you mean by that?

You know, that's a great— I think that's why I'm good at Twitter, because, right, what does that even mean? There's so many different layers of it. But that goes to a number of memes, which the World Economic Forum— you will— there's an organization that's kind of a networking group where all the rich people get together and they talk about the agenda for humanity. And they do this in open, even though that's called conspiracy theory. And in one promotional video, they said, "Well, you will own nothing and you will be happy." Right? And people, of course— most of your people are pretty awake and they understand this kind of stuff, but when you're in the world of people who aren't awake, they will tell you, "That's not true. That video is not real." Okay. Okay, it is. They deleted it. Once people found it and began discussing it, it was deleted, but they said, "You will own nothing and you'll be happy." But, of course, that doesn't include them. They're going to own everything. But you, you're going to own nothing and you're going to accept it. And that's where the pod comes in, where everybody can kind of sleep in pods and the equivalent of being in some kind of weird low-security prison where everyone's in a pod and you get your daily serving of bugs because they're anti-meat. They don't want people eating meat. They want people eating crickets. And bugs, they want people eating bugs and they push that. What was that movie, Soylent Green?

Yeah, Soylent Green.

Yeah, right. So that's been rebranded as bugs. So the meme, I guess, would be almost of a demarcation of a worldview is are you going to be a bug man, which is a, which is another meme. And the bug man is the kind of person who doesn't aspire to any kind of heroism, doesn't aspire to anything beyond being in his pod, eating his cricket chow, playing video games, maybe has a VR headset watching pornography. And that's the extent of his existence, right? It's as if he never had never really lived. And that, I think, is the zeitgeist that we're fighting against.

You know, I, if I would have tweeted that, probably would have said something like, Eat Beyond Burger, Live in a Pod mostly because I've had some damn tasty cricket protein powders and cricket protein bars sent up my way in the past. And, even though we don't actually have, thank God, a cricket or insect-based protein sponsor for this podcast episode that we just lost, I think bugs can actually be pretty cool. I've done some cool cooking with crickets and grasshoppers and bugs and the like. But, you're right, engineered, highly processed, highly palatable food that keeps people living in boxes, traveling in boxes, working in boxes, and in their constant, as Michael Easter says in his book, "Comfort Crisis," certainly lends itself well to people being more controllable or at least less adventurous. If you handed everybody a bow and told them they needed to secure their own protein, you'd see a lot of people growing in a lot of new ways and probably a lot of misplaced arrows randomly getting scattered around the neighborhood.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. The cricket thing is funny because I remember that startup that was a cricket protein bar back in maybe 2011 or '12 and they were good. So, I've eaten plenty of crickets and people would be lucky. That's why I guess it's a funny meme because that's what makes it a meme is it isn't always literally true. It's a broader discussion. People will be lucky if we're getting crickets. You're more likely to get this soup of highly processed canola oil with a soybean or something. That's what you're really— that's the chow you're going to be getting. So, there might come a day when you're lucky if you're getting cricket protein. Instead of this swill.

Yeah. Well, maybe I will try to hunt down a good cricket protein sponsor for this episode. I forgot the name of that one that you mentioned, but yeah, I used to go to this event called Paleo FX in Austin. And increasingly over the years, it seemed like there was more and more— I think it's called etymology. I get etymology and entomology mixed up. Anyways, the eating of insects seemed to be quite popular because it's very primal and ancestral. Hey, Mike, where's the best place for people to follow you? Is it Twitter or actually I should ask you this. Do you call it X or do you call it Twitter? Million-dollar question. Most important question of the show.

Well, I call it Twitter, but to try to push the name change, I do call it X on— I do call it X whenever possible because if Elon put up that amount of money to protect and defend free speech, and he wants it to be called X, the least that I can do as a mere mortal is call it X as well. So I do try to be disciplined in calling it a post instead of a tweet and X instead of Twitter. And hopefully, you know, hopefully we can push that language forward. I think the Substack, mikecernovich.substack.com, is a good place to start because it's a little bit more longer form, a little bit more nuanced. Reading my Twitter, if you've never read it, can be a pretty jarring experience. I don't recommend it for a first impression.

I've got some brave and courageous listeners. They can give it a try.

If you go to my Twitter, wait a couple days and you'll see that there's a vibe. You can't just jump in on one. And that's the biggest mistake people I think make, which is also why I can't take it personally when people make certain assumptions about me is if you only read one tweet, you think, what, what is this, right? This is an insane person and I don't even know what I'm doing here, right? But as you read more, you go, oh, there's kind of a flow to it. All right, I— okay, okay, okay, I get it. He's still an insane person, but there's at least a methodology to what he's doing and it does kind of make sense. And now I at least understand it a a bit.

Yeah. Well, I dig following you. You've got some interesting takes and I agree with much of what you say on there actually. So, I'll link to your X profile in the show notes if folks go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/Cernovich, C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. I'll also link to Mike's Substack and his book, "Gorilla Mindset," even though like Mike mentioned, it's a few years old. And, he's even grown since he wrote the book to perhaps being a little bit less programmed with each and every part of the day and kind of more expansive in terms of self-introspection. I think that the book's a handy little read. I just got it off Kindle and read it in a couple of days last week. There's some cool tips in there. So, feel free to check that out as well. And, Mike, thanks for joining me, man. I'm glad we were able to connect.

My pleasure. Glad it was able to happen. Thank you.

Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield along with the great Mike Chernovich signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com. Have an amazing week.

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