Ben Greenfield moved from bodybuilding to biohacking through data and recovery tools. He maps the ideal exercise dose: 150 minutes moderate cardio or 75 minutes intense work weekly, beyond which cardiovascular damage starts. His stack includes cold plunges, saunas, peptides like BPC-157, heart-rate variability monitoring, and breathwork to optimize the nervous system.
Chapters
Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton.
You know the story of the original biohackers, they were— gosh, they're almost like human cyborgs. They called their bodies wetware and they'd put things on it that was a hardware. It's like a compass that would vibrate every time you face true north that's implanted in your chest. Another guy had some type of chlorophyll-like compounds injected into his eyeballs for night vision. Kevin Warwick, I think he was the original so-called human cyborg. He got implants, I think his wife did too, in his fingers like magnetic implants so you could interact with screens kind of like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. And, these were all way before biohacking became just self-quantification or putting ghee in your tea or something like that. But, I think if you were to go by the broad new term for biohacking, it was probably back when I was racing Ironman. And I started getting into blood testing and biomarker testing. But, when it finally kind of hit the streets and became a little bit more affordable and accessible and began to see that the years and years that I spent studying fitness and so-called healthy nutrition, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, 65% to 85% carbohydrates, healthy whole grains, and lean protein diet was kind of making me healthy on the outside, but unhealthy on the inside. And, that got me sucked down the rabbit hole of hormone optimization and gut optimization and testing the body and beginning to look into recovery modalities, many of which are prominent in the biohacking industry like red light or compression boots, hyperbaric oxygen, et cetera. So, between that and doing the podcast for 17 years and replying to a lot of questions—
Is it 17 years? That's amazing.
Back when you had to code your own RSS feed for Apple and wait a couple weeks for it to get approved. Wow. And, I think there were maybe 5 or 6 health podcasts out there. There's like Jillian Michaels and Robb Wolf and a few of these OGs. Anyways though, a big part of my podcast early on was Q&As. People were writing questions and the questions just got increasingly weirder and weirder. It went from, "How can I bench press more?" and, "How can I train for a triathlon?" to, What do you think about red light in your nose versus red light in your ears? So, a big part of it too is just kind of learning as my audience brought me along for a pretty wild ride.
What year were you doing the Ironman?
I was a bodybuilder in college. So, I was 215 pounds and 3% body fat. Wow. I was just like a lean exhausted piece of muscle who laid on the couch and ate tuna fish and went to my classes and that was about it. And, I remember watching the Coeur d'Alene Ironman Triathlon and seeing these ripped dudes in spandex who I thought were super fit and healthy at the time cross the finish line after going for 8 or 9 or 10 hours. I thought I want to do that. So, I did a sprint triathlon, then I did an Olympic distance triathlon, a couple more of those, and then I think I did my first Ironman in 2007.
How did you get invited to do it in the first place?
It was a bet from a guy who managed the personal training studio that I was working at during college, and he dropped out about 5 months in and I kept training for the show. So, this was the first year that my wife, Jessa, and I were married. So, for the first year, we even went on a cycling trip in Italy when I was training for bodybuilding. So, I remember every morning I would wake up with elastic bands and do my flexing and my exercises and do my little— because you have a little dance routine when you're bodybuilding. My dance song, my flex song was the "Rock You Like a Hurricane" that the Scorpions did with the Berlin Philharmonic. So, I'd cut these poses like, "Here I am." And, just ate a ton of protein, creatine. I didn't have access to and couldn't afford a lot of the fancy stuff. And, I was natty, so-called natty. I didn't use steroids or anything. But, it was something that one of my buddies I was training with told me that we should do together. And so, my wife has always been accustomed to her husband doing weird fitness things. But yeah, the first year is training for the— I think it was called the Empire Classic bodybuilding show in Spokane, Washington. And, uh, that also, relative to Ironman, was, was a pretty unhealthy sport.
They're opposite, aren't they? Bodybuilding is about something different. It's not really about fitness.
They're a little bit opposite. You're right, bodybuilding is aesthetic, but they both they're kind of sports but not really sports. I think sports involve coordination and balance and fine motor skill acquisition like baseball and tennis and basketball. Things like bodybuilding, triathlon, CrossFit, Spartan racing to a certain extent or obstacle course racing or these new HIROX races or DEKA races, they're fitness.
What are HIROX races?
HIROX and DEKA, this is kind of the new trend in fitness. It's running combined with doing different fitness events like a 500-meter row and then you'll run 500 500 meters and then you'll push a sled 50 meters down and pull it back and run another 500 meters. So, the High Rocks is one race and then the DEKA FIT is another put on by Spartan. And, these are all examples of just pushing your body. And, in many cases, many of the people doing them, not all of them, but it's an excuse to work out. Train to eat, eat to train. That's what bodybuilding is. That's what triathlon is. Marathoning can be that way. So, Both are unhealthy. I mean, and by unhealthy, you know, it's this so-called Goldilocks zone of exercise. And this is really, as I've learned about this and done a lot of the blood testing, kind of transformed the way that I think about fitness. There's a researcher named James O'Keefe, and he's identified the so-called Goldilocks zone of exercise, meaning you reach a certain point where the extent to which exercise is damaging your body outweighs the benefits. And the damage primarily manifests itself as atherosclerosis, arterial stiffness, plaque, and calcium deposition in the heart. And it comes out to about 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise and 75 minutes per week of very vigorously high-intensity exercise. Which is very easy to exceed.
Are you describing aerobic and anaerobic or is it different than that?
It depends on your definition of aerobic. So one definition of aerobic is a very fat-oxidizing, easy conversational zone. The ancestral habits we would've engaged in when hunting or building a fence or gardening or walking for long distances to get water or to, you know, go for a period of time without a vehicle. And then there's the aerobic definition that many of us kind of think is aerobic but is kind of like gray zone. That's running on a treadmill for an hour, you know, going on a 2-hour bike ride to train for a triathlon, you know, doing the elliptical training with the frowny face in the gym. Like, these are all— they're more of the moderate intensity that this Dr. James O'Keefe has identified as something that you can cause damage to your body with. Pretty quickly. You know, 150 minutes is not that much.
Isn't— if you monitor your heart rate, that tells you when you're in the right place?
If you monitor your heart rate, yep. So, so you hear people talking about zone 2 cardio, how zone 2 cardio has been good for the body. People hear that, but most people when they go out and do zone 2 cardio are actually doing more like zone 3 cardio, approaching zone 4 cardio. And what the zones mean is as your heart rate increases And as your level of intensity increases, the amount of lactic acid that you produce increases. And you reach a certain point where the amount of lactic acid you're producing can't be removed by the body as quickly as it's being produced. And that's typically when the burn starts to set in. And that's usually about Zone 4. But there's this zone, Zone 3-ish, between Zone 2, purely aerobic and arguably natural and healthy for the body, and Zone 4, which is where most people get stuck in, and that's the moderate-intensity exercise. And 150 minutes per week of that is not that much. And then, the high-intensity exercise is anything that's going way above that like zone 4+, like above that anaerobic threshold. So, if you are lifting weights more than 3 times a week, doing a high-intensity interval training session that's maybe 20 or 30 minutes in length more than 2 to 3 times a week, you're probably reaching that zone where you're doing too much.
So, that'd be overtraining, right?
Oh, it'd be the bodybuilder in the gym like I was for 2.5 hours a day or the Ironman triathlete training 10, 15, 20 hours a week easily.
It was not healthy.
It was not healthy. And, I've had to deal with the repercussions of that. I mean, I've done a CT angiography and I've got plaque in the LVA, which is also known as the widowmaker, is at about 8% blockage. I've had to step way back on the exercise intensity. I do more walking, tennis, pickleball. I still lift weights and I still do high-intensity cardio, but nowhere near the extent of what I did when I was bodybuilding or doing Ironman triathlon or anything like that.
But you look as fit as you've ever looked. I mean, you're not losing anything.
No, I'm as fit and arguably fitter hormonally. My thyroid, my testosterone, my gut, my inflammation, my joints, you know, more time, feel less beat down. So, yeah.
So, what does the current schedule look like for you?
If you step back and you look at fitness like a blueprint, because my background is exercise physiology, that's what I studied in college. So, if I'm going to create a perfect week of exercise that's also natural and healthy but that allows you to stay fit, especially if you, like most people, are working a sedentary job or you're not a construction worker or painter going up and down ladders or building fences or hauling rocks for your day-to-day existence, in which case you probably don't really need to go to the gym at all, there are certain boxes that you want to tick off. For example, one is strength, how much force can you produce? One is power, how explosive can you be? So, those two elements would be, for example, for me, lifting weights a couple of times a week. I do super slow training. 2 to 3? 3 max.
3 max.
Yeah, 3 max. It kind of depends how much time I have available in the gym, but it's one single set to failure, super slow training.
One set to failure.
Yeah. And, there's a book called "Body by Science" by Doug McGuff, and he goes into the science of time under tension of the muscle and how if you get anywhere from 90 seconds to 2 minutes of time under tension and you do all of that in one set, then one set will suffice. To maintain muscle and in some cases build muscle as long as you're going heavy enough. What that style of training does not do is build the quick explosive wiry muscle that is actually more heavily associated with longevity than strength is.
Tell me more about SuperSlow training specifically, like how many exercises will you do total?
So, I choose multi-joint exercises because you're going to be more efficient in the gym than if you're doing leg extensions, leg curls, bicep curls, et cetera. The way mine looks is deadlift, chest press, pulldown, squat, overhead press, row. I can simulate that with free weights. I can do it with, you know, Nautilus machines if I'm at a hotel. I have this machine at my house called an ARX, which is— it's like a 2-horsepower engine machine that's like fighting a giant robot for the 2 minutes, but you get super strong. And the idea is you're moving the weight very slowly with a lot of control. It's anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds up, 10 to 20 seconds down. But, the nice part is once you're done with that one set, you're done. So, that's a couple of times a week. And then, for the power, for the quick, wiry explosive stuff, I like to use kettlebells and body weight. So, kettlebell swings, box jumps, quick push-ups, monkey bars in my backyard, anything that is a little bit more faster and more explosive.
And how many kettlebell swings would you do typically?
Oh, like 10 sets of 10. 10 sets of 10. Quick, heavy, long rest periods. You try not to build up a lot of lactic acid. It's just fast and explosive. So, the strength and the power, if you do the math on that, you might be spending 20, 30 minutes max on the strength training for one session. So, 2 full strength training sessions, maybe an hour. And then, the power, you've got maybe another 40 minutes or so. So, those are about 20-minute sessions. So, for cardio, we were talking about—
And you don't do them on the same days?
No, no, preferably not. I mean, there's one variation of super slow training where if you don't have the time to do the power training, you finish that one set to failure and you kind of bounce at the end range of the motion, you can do a little bit of power training with that approach. With the cardio, that also you can kind of like blueprint into certain categories of cardio. So, we talked about one, the long, slow, easy fat-burning cardio. For me, that's just walking. I walk on a treadmill during consults, Zoom calls, podcasts. I walk outside. So, 10,000 steps a day. That's easy as far as the fat-burning, fat-oxidizing aerobic cardio. Then, there's 3 other boxes to tick. One is your lactic acid tolerance. So, we covered lactic acid, but the idea is that similar to fast explosive wiry muscle, Similar to grip strength and similar to VO2 max, which I'll get to in a second, lactic acid tolerance is another variable that's associated with longevity and overall fitness. So, for lactic acid, it doesn't take long. All you do is you do a quick burst and then you recover for a shorter period of time than you exercised. So, this would be— have you heard of a Tabata set before? Yeah. Like a classic Tabata set where you do 4 minutes of 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, couple of times a week. So, I like to use that as a warm-up or a finisher for a strength training workout. So again, you're attacking just a little bit extra.
And, is the 10 seconds important?
The important part is a fast effort that's sufficient to build lactic acid quickly with a shorter recovery period than the effort. So, that 2:1 work-to-rest ratio, and this was something that I think his actual last name was Tabata, the researcher that developed this, that was shown to actually increase your lactate tolerance. So, there's other There are other ways you could do it. I mean, you could probably do 30 seconds, 15 or 10, 5 or whatever, but 20, 10 works well. And also, there's even a lot of the Concept2 machines and the rowers and the bikes, they even come pre-programmed with a Tabata set right in there. So, it's easy to do if you have one of those machines. You've got, in addition to lactate tolerance, mitochondrial capacity. It's the ability to engage in mitochondrial proliferation to build new mitochondria, to maintain mitochondria. For that, it's different than lactic acid tolerance training and all it requires once per week, but it's explosive 30-second-ish efforts with luxuriously long rest periods, like 2 to 4 minutes in duration. So, this would be like 5 30-second sprints with 2 to 4 minutes of very easy recovery or easy light pedaling or walking between each. And again, that's just once a week. And, a lot of people hear about building mitochondrial density or building lactate tolerance. And, as is common in the fitness industry especially, people will do something like that every day or think they have to do it multiple times per or think to build my fat-burning capacity, I got to ride a bike hard for 3 hours 3 times a week, but it's much easier than that. So, mitochondrial training, what I just described, 5 30-second efforts with long luxurious rest periods once per week, that's doable. And, I've done the math on this. And, when you put all this together, you aren't exceeding this Goldilocks zone of exercise, but you're ticking off all the variables.
You're talking about less than an hour of exercise daily.
Without the walking. The walking would be extra. And I encourage people to just engage in that, uh, non-exercise activity thermogenesis need. I classify walking in that category, right? Like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking far away from the grocery store, etc. So the walking doesn't count with that, but everything else would be within an hour. The last piece of the aerobic is the VO2 max, and this is probably the hardest part of maintaining good overall cardiovascular capacity, but it's the one that you need to do the most seldomly. So VO2 max, this would be once every 1 to 2 weeks. It's 4 to 6 minutes of maximum sustainable pace cardio, as hard as you can go with good form. So let's say you're on a bike and you have it set at level 12 and you're pedaling at 90 RPM. You would not want to be at 80 RPM at the end of 4 minutes. You want to be able to maintain 90 RPM but still have a feel like about an 8 on a 1 to 10 scale. And then, the work-to-rest ratio is 1 to 1. So, you'd go for 4 to 6 minutes and you'd recover for 4 to 6 minutes and you do that 4 to 6 times through.
Wow, that's hard.
And this is the gold standard way to improve VO2 max. The nice part is that's only once every couple of weeks. When I was super into VO2 max training, I would program songs where I'd I'd have one song that was really upbeat and intense for 4 to 6 minutes and one that was relaxing for 4 to 6 minutes. So, I didn't have to watch the clock, which is one way to do it. You can just program in a playset to get you through a VO2 max workout. But, that is combined with a couple of times a week a Tabata set, once a week a mitochondrial set, walking throughout the day, a couple of strength sessions, a couple of power sessions. And, the only missing piece if we're not counting things like Heat tolerance, cold tolerance. I jump in the cold plunge when I get up. I do a sauna a few times a week where I'm reading or stretching. Is mobility and maintaining what I call young muscle. So, working out fascial adhesions, cross-linking of fibers, all those things that can cause you to become injured, especially with age. So, I don't really base what I do for that on deep science of how often you should do mobility training, but every morning. I give myself 15 minutes to just make love to a foam roller and stretch and use the exercise balls and the percussion gun. I usually do it within an hour of waking up. And, if you do the math, every week I'm getting the equivalent of 75 to 90 minutes of self-inflicted deep tissue therapy. Since I started doing that, I've had far fewer injuries. You get the mobility done with early in the day. You combine that with the strength, power, walking often, lactate, VO2 max, mitochondrial training. And, if you step back and look at that, that's a full system for hitting all parameters of fitness but doing so in bite-sized pieces that don't exceed that Goldilocks zone.
Do you feel like there's a hierarchy to that within it or it's just they're all equally important pieces of the puzzle?
If I could choose one based on the most amount of literature, it would be strength training because you're hitting a lot of variables, right? You're hitting grip strength. You are increasing peripheral blood pressure, which can also improve your cardiovascular capacity if you're going hard enough. You've got bone density and bone loading. You've got the idea— Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has made this idea popular lately, her concept of muscle-centric medicine, muscle serving as a metabolic sink. So, it's something that can store glucose, socked away as glycogen, so you improve your ability to be able to maintain a good glycemic index. So, I think if you had to choose one that has the most things going for it, it would be strength training, but that's with the caveat that there's other research that shows that if you strength train but then you're sedentary, you know, for 8 hours a day and you strength train the beginning or the end of the day, you don't really see an appreciable decrease in all-cause mortality that you'd be looking for from exercise. So, there still needs to be movement throughout the day, but assuming that you're doing a good job taking Pomodoro breaks, standing up, stretching, walking like we talked about, I would say Viychys 1 would be the strength training.
LMNT, Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add Element Electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps. Element Electrolytes. Drink it in the sauna. Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermelon, and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. LMNT Electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com/tetra and stay salty with LMNT Electrolytes. LMNT.
Let's walk through the history of biohacking because you were at the forefront of every new iteration since the beginning.
When you say I was at the forefront, let's not count these old-school extremists who are really the original biohackers who were doing this stuff before I was born in terms of implants and extreme upgrades or hacks to the human body.
I didn't even know those existed.
Yeah. A TEDx talk that I prepared for months for. Have you ever given a TEDx or heard how these go? You have to rehearse. This team came over to my house 3 times, just grilled me and changed certain things that I said and walked me through everything from proper place to stand on the red dot in the middle of the stage to showing up to Coeur d'Alene, an hour from my house, the day before to rehearse, going home, coming back. It was 3 months putting this TEDx talk. And, the TEDx talk was about biohacking, the extreme things that people do to their bodies and some of the tools and devices that are expensive gadgets out there and how to achieve a lot of the same things naturally. You don't have to strap yourself with red lights or stand nude in front of a red light panel every morning. You can go out in the sunlight. You don't need to shock yourself with a pulsed electromagnetic field mat. You can go outside and do some grounding and earthing. You don't have to go in a hyperbaric chamber. You can saturate your body with oxygen by doing breathwork regularly. And then, the technology definitely enhances the process. But, that was the thrust of the TEDx talk. It was never published. I don't know if the right word is banned because it was never published in the first place, but they didn't put it on the website because I also gave the examples of the extreme things that people used to do like the compass in your chest and the chlorophyll in the eyeballs and the magnetic implants. And, they said that they were afraid that people would actually go out and do that stuff after hearing the TEDx talk. So, Interesting. So, I never actually ever got that published, but the biohacking industry, it really hasn't, in my opinion, gotten that extreme from the original days of ice baths, red light therapy, electrical mats. In a sense, all a lot of biohacking is doing is taking what we'd normally go out in nature and get. Sunlight, fresh air, grounding, earthing, et cetera, and concentrating that inside an office or inside a home or in a post-industrial setting in which we're often relegated to these jobs where we can't necessarily be outside all the time, but we want to recover faster or feel better or get fitter faster by having access to these technologies. Hence, you've got red light therapy as an alternative or adjunct to sunlight. You've got hyperbaric oxygen instead of breathwork, and you've got grounding and earthing mats and PEMF mats because you're not outside, ice baths because you're not subjected to the extremes of temperature in a modern air-conditioned and heat-controlled environment. Same thing with sauna. We're not working outside in the hot sun in the afternoon, so we're bringing that same technology indoors. So, I think a lot of it is really not that extreme, but there are things that I think are pretty fun that you can do with biohacking when it comes to stacking certain modalities. For example, this is something I've been doing about 4:30 a.m. in the morning when I wake up. There's this idea that when you're awake, you're still in kind of this delta theta brainwave state. It's almost as though you wake up meditating to a certain extent. Beta brainwaves aren't activated. Hopefully, you haven't turned on your phone yet. The world isn't coming at you like The Matrix. And, it's a beautiful time to meditate or to pray or to sit. And I have a chair now in my basement. You put on a heart rate monitor on your fingertip that monitors your heart rate and your heart rate variability. And the chair vibrates in correlation to your heartbeat. It's called a Shiftwave. But it vibrates at a pretty high intensity. Like, you can feel your whole body shaking. And the idea behind haptic sensations like this is that they can shift your body into a state of relaxation or excitation or whatever it is, whatever state it is that you want to achieve. Before I got the chair, I was kind of accustomed to this idea because of this little device. You may have seen it. It's called the Apollo. It's a little vibrating wristband or ankle band that you can wear, a mild sensation that you can barely feel, but you can set it in focus, energy, calm, love if you do it with a partner, whatever state that you want to be in. But, this chair is like that for your whole body. So, that's the first thing that I do.
The purpose of the Apollo would be the subliminal activation when you were in a state that you want to be in, you want to train for, let's say, your body would learn unconsciously how to get into those states?
Well, it's less marketed as training wheels, like you described to get into a certain state and more a shortcut to get into that state just by putting the thing on. So, shifting your body more rapidly into a state of relaxation. You get on an airplane, you're stressed out but you're tired and you want to take a nap and you can't because you don't sleep well on airplanes. You put something like this on, it helps to shift your body into a more calm, less stressed state without using drugs or supplements or something like that.
And it pulses you at the desired place to signal your body to go there. Exactly. I understand.
It's different than I imagined. Yeah. There's another device that's called a Sensate. It's like a cat purring on your chest. And, this one is purely designed for relaxation or meditation. It cues to special audio tracks and vibrates in conjunction to the audio. And, it's kind of a cool little machine. They update the app every month with new audio so you can play around with different settings and never get used to a one. But this idea of vibration is interesting because if you look at an animal after it's been chased by a predator, I think they even talk about this in Robert Sapolsky's book "Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," it'll shake to shake off stress. It'll tremor to shake off stress. I'll sometimes do this if I'm speaking on stage. I have the audience stand up and just shake their bodies and take a breath and just kind of bounce up and down. And, it's a good way to release stress and just shaking things off, tremoring. And, this is similar. Instead, you're wearing something or sitting in something that's vibrating you and shifting you into a similar state. This is also interesting because if you think back to somebody like Nikola Tesla, he said, "If you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy frequency and vibration." So, I began to sit in this chair, and then this is all considered an example of biohacking, cool ways that you can combine some of these hacks. And, I thought, well, what else could I do that would also shift my body even more deeply and rapidly into a state of relaxation? So then, I got my hands on one of these light sound machines. You lay underneath almost like an LED blinking light. The one that I have is called a Roxieva. And the lights flash in conjunction to a set of headsets that are playing sounds. And it uses light frequencies to, again, shift your body via your into whatever state that you want. This one could be used for getting more excited, meditating, relaxing, whatever. But, I took the AV cable from that and plugged into the chair. So now, I've got light, sound, and vibration. And then, the only last thing is electrical frequencies. So, I mentioned earlier the idea of PEMF, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. This is like when you're standing outside, On the ground, every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet or solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it collects negative ions and you're soaking those up when you're outside, which is why it feels so good if you've been flying on an airplane or wearing big built-up rubber-soled shoes to go outside and feel the ground. But, the ground also emits a mild Hertz frequency like 1 to 100 Hertz. And, some people say it's just 7.8, which is the so-called Schumann frequency, but it's more than that. It's all sorts of different frequencies. Frequencies. And pulsed electromagnetic field therapy concentrates those frequencies. So, it's almost like earthing and grounding but more powerfully, similar hertz but at a higher amplitude, higher power. So, there are mats that you can lay on. There are coils. There's one that's just like a ring-shaped object. It's called a Halo. And you can set it for digestion, inflammation, meditation, jet lag, whatever. So, I put that in my lap. And so now, I've got electricity, sound, vibration, and light. And I do this at about 4:30 in the morning for anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes. And it's incredible. It's incredible. There's even one that is called "Rebirth." And you can hear the fetal heartbeat, the whooshing sound in the mother's womb. It's dark with occasional flashes of light. And as it crescendos towards the end, you have the entire birthing experience, bright lights, the music crescendos. It's almost like a heroic-like experience. And I have not done that session ever without sitting up from the chair crying. I mean, it's that emotional and it's that profound how you can actually hack yourself into these states. And I think some people who are pure meditators, I know that you've been doing Transcendental Meditation for a long time, it almost seems like a little bit of a bastardization or a hack or a shortcut. And that's kind of the bad rap that biohackers get sometimes is you're getting dropped off by a helicopter on the top of Mount Everest instead of climbing your way up. But, it actually is a pretty cool experience. Yeah, it's incredible. That's great.
You mentioned heart rate variability. What are the different things you can do to train heart rate variability?
So, heart rate variability, most people or a lot of people now know what it is, but in brief because it is sometimes confused with heart rate, your heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute. Your heart rate variability is the the amount of time in between each of those beats. If the variability is consistent and even, so your heart beats and there's 0.8 milliseconds and your heart beats again and there's 0.8 milliseconds and another 0.8, that's actually indicative of poor nervous system regulation. Basically, your vagus nerve, part of what it does is it stimulates the pacemaker cells of the heart. And if there is poor balance of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, then what you get is an inability to be able to do mild fine-tuning between each beat of the heart. In somebody who is well recovered, well slept, not underneath a lot of stress, et cetera, you tend to see mild beat-to-beat variations in terms of the amount of time in between each heartbeat. And this, if you using a watch or wearable or a ring or something like that to monitor your HRV or heart rate variability would usually be reflected as a high HRV or a high readiness score or a low strain score or something like that. It's just basically a really good way to measure non-invasively the balance of your nervous system, the balance of your fight or flight and your rest and digest branches of the nervous system. So, It can be trained specifically to increase it because a lot of people under a lot of stress who are poorly slept or not recovered or exceeding that Goldilocks zone of exercise or whatever, they do have low HRV. Some of the less technical biohacky ways to increase it would be yoga, meditation, chanting, singing, humming, gargling, which is interesting because those are all vibratory sensations. And, it turns out that this type of oming or toning helps to tone the vagus nerve. And so, again, again, we're back to the idea of haptic sensations kind of shifting the nervous system into a certain state. Thermoregulation, particularly around the face, the head, the neck, like dunking the face in cold water or doing a cold water bath. This is also one of the reasons that I like cold water immersion instead of cryotherapy because cold water immersion, especially if your head goes under, I do it with my sons and I always tell them, "Put your head under. You'll do 5 or 10 face dunks because you're activating the mammalian dive reflex and that helps to tone the vagus You know, and being aerobically fit can keep it increased, exercising but not too much can increase it. But there are also, you know, back to the, the idea of biohacking, some other ways that you can address heart rate variability via the vagus nerve. For example, electrical nerve stimulators. And there's several of these in the past, I would say, 2 years really hitting the markets, like small direct-to-consumer vagal nerve stimulators. There's different branches of the vagus nerve. One is called the auricular branch and it's right underneath the ear. You can hold one of these. It's a very small amount of electricity, but it feels like a little bit of a buzz, just a little bit of a shock. You can hold it up to one side under the ear for about a minute or two and then the other side and see a near-instant decrease in feelings of stress and an increase in heart rate variability. There's another one that you wear that kind of hits a little bit more of the cervical branch, but it's behind the carotid. And that one you can wear as almost like a wearable around your neck same thing, it stims the vagus nerve. Examples would be there's one called the TrueVega and another one called the V-Relief that hit the auricular branch. There's another one called the Pulsetto that kind of hits a little bit more of the cervical branch. There's another one made by the same company that makes the V-Relief that's a pair of headphones and you can play meditative sounds, relaxing sounds, et cetera, but there's two little electrodes that come off the bottom of the headphones that trigger the auricular branch right there. So, you can literally listen to some kind of Headspace or Calm or one of these meditation tracks and simultaneously stimulate your vagus nerve so you get an increase in heart rate variability. And then, probably like the, the top of the totem pole for a nervous system reset is there's a few doctors, and you want to make sure it's, it's a doctor that does a lot of these because as you can imagine, this is going to be right by the carotid artery. They will literally put a needle in and inject like a prolotherapy solution or stem cells or PRP or something like that on one side of the neck and then Typically, you got to wait 1 or 2 days because you get a little bit of throat swelling and it can be hard to swallow, hard to eat. And then, you come back and do the other side. And, it's called a stellate ganglion nerve block or a vagus nerve block. And, that injection just resets everything. And, I've done it a couple of times and it's crazy. It's like you've smoked a joint and had a glass of wine all at once and you sit up from the table and you feel this low level of stress and it lasts for a couple of weeks. I've done it just out of sheer curiosity, but you'd normally do this in someone who's had PTSD or trauma and nothing else is working to kind of reset the nervous system. But those are some of the ways you could increase HRV. I wouldn't start with the needles.
Yeah. It's interesting that HRV is more variability. I guess it's called variability, but it seems like most things, if they're running consistently would seem to be the preferred state. So, it's interesting that the better heart rate variability means higher numbers, meaning it's more variable.
Yeah, kind of. But, in biology, and this is interesting, I don't think I've ever really thought about it or voiced it this way before, but you hear about like glycemic variability, right? The, the constant up and down fluctuation of blood sugar is something that could be indicative of poor insulin sensitivity or poor blood glucose management or a bad diet too high in sugar and carbs. But if you didn't see any variability at all, that could also indicate poor function of the liver, you know, poor pancreatic production of insulin. You know, low glucagon production, you know, something else going on from an endocrine or a pancreatic standpoint. So even with something like glucose, you'd kind of want to see variability, just not extreme variability.
So how well you adapt to the new situation, if you adapt better, you're healthier.
Right. So, 'cause I'm wearing this blood glucose monitor right now. It's not that I wear it because I don't know anymore what spikes my blood glucose or what lowers it. It's because what gets measured gets managed, right? Like I'm just less likely me to eat sugary food on an airplane if I know I gotta look at that score later on. But if you look at some of these things that we do to get healthier, particularly to get healthier to increase insulin sensitivity or to stabilize blood glucose, while we're doing them, we can get a huge increase in blood glucose. And then this is something that's confusing to a lot of people when they first start to use a blood glucose monitor or track their blood sugar. You get in the sauna and it goes through the roof. You do a cold plunge, it usually goes really high. You exercise, especially if you exercise with a lot of intensity and you get the cortisol release and it goes up. You get out of bed, you have a cup of coffee, you get a big dump of glycogen from the liver and the glucose goes up. But then you look at cold therapy, sauna therapy, exercise, even coffee to some extent, and you see that all of those things help to, in the long term, stabilize blood glucose. So it's a short-term stress resulting in an adaptive response that allows for better control of the variable that you're trying to control for a longer-term basis. It would be like people saying—
Same as exercise.
Same as exercise. Some people will theorize that the heart is like a battery and it has a certain number of beats and then you're just out. And so, you shouldn't exercise because you're just using up those beats more quickly. But, even if that were true, and I don't know if it is, the extent to which an exercise session within moderation lowers the heart rate, the the other 23 hours of the day outpaces the actual extent to which you increased it during that, you know, 30 to 60 minutes you were exercising.
In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean, something precise. Athletic nicotine. Not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters, Not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity. Athletic Nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available, made entirely in the USA. No artificial sweeteners, just pure purposeful elevation. Athletic Nicotine is a performance nootropic. Athletic Nicotine is a tool for for shifting mindsets. Athletic nicotine is a partner in pursuit of excellence. Slow release, low dose, gradual lift, sustained energy, soft landing, inspired results. Athletic nicotine, more focus, less static. Athletic nicotine, more clarity, less noise. Athletic nicotine, More accuracy, less anxiety. Athletic Nicotine. From top athletes pushing their limits to artists pursuing their vision, Athletic Nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athleticnicotine.com/tetra and experience next-level performance with Athletic Nicotine.
Warning: this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive Chemical.
Considering you've done the needles behind the ears to turn off the vagus nerve. Yeah. Have you had any mishaps in your biohacking adventures?
Oh my gosh. Nothing too extreme because I'm not much of a daredevil. I've got mild skin burns from electrical muscle stimulation and gotten close to hypothermia by spending too much time in the ice bath. Overdosed with certain injectables and taken too much of them. One example would be there was a growth hormone precursor. I think it was the peptide ipamorelin. And, a lot of these peptides, they precisely target different variables. And, in this case, there's a couple, one called ipamorelin and one called tesamorelin that can increase growth hormone. And, I was off by a digit and used basically 10 times too much ipamorelin, got the skin flush and was up till 1:00 a.m. I would say the only time I wouldn't really call this biohacking per se, but I got into microdosing with plant medicines for a little while using this so-called Fadiman protocol developed by James Fadiman where you take a little bit of— well, there's a little bit of variant on that protocol, but it was a little bit of a cactus extract called huachuma on one day, a little bit of psilocybin the next day, and a microdose of LSD on the third day. And I was getting these in little packets that I bought and that were sent to me. And, the LSD one was a little white capsule that you were supposed to dissolve in 10 ounces of water. And, 1 ounce of water if you were to drink that was 10 micrograms of LSD, which is considered a microdose that— and, I've done a microdose of that before and it increases focus and it's kind of like a cup of coffee and then some, but it's a real good creative focus. But, I just happen to have all these capsules and the wachuma one, one of the things that it does is it just kind of makes you relax. So, I was getting a massage one night and I have the massage therapist come to my house about once a month and work on me. So, this is at 7:00 PM and I took my capsule and I got on the table to get the massage. And, I got 20 minutes in and I could not relax. And, I got 30 minutes in and the music was getting really interesting and producing almost a kinesthesia and I could see colors correlated to the sounds that I was hearing. And, And then, it started to get really mathematical and fractal. And, you know, all I could see was geometric patterns. So, I made it through the massage not really knowing what was going on, but I remember finishing it and standing up and the entire wall was geometric patterns. And, I went up and I opened the refrigerator and the whole refrigerator was just fractal patterns. And then, I went to bed and I closed my eyes and all I could see was cartoons like old Tom and Jerry cartoons and the dude pounding the dude with the sledgehammer on the head. And, I remember rolling over and saying to my wife, "I think my brain is broken. I don't know what's going on, babe." And, it took me until about midnight to realize that I'd taken the LSD capsule, the 100 micrograms of LSD instead of the tiny microgram of cactus extract. So, that's probably about the worst mistake I've ever made as far as being up all night listening to really interesting music until about 5:00 a.m.
Ben Greenfield: Tell me more about peptides.
So, it's a relevant question because right now, they're under a lot of scrutiny by the FDA. I suspect it's probably because of some kind of pharmaceutical lobbying because they're very precise and relatively safe unless you're a decimal point off. Not really medications, they're small chains of amino acids and they're natural and they can't be patented, at least at least not yet by anyone. And they're relatively accessible and affordable and they can target different organs or different systems in the body with a lot of precision and relative safety. So, many people might have heard of some common ones like BPC-157, which is normally a gastric peptide that you produce in your stomach. Body Protection Compound 157 is what it stands for, but it's also used for joints, for inflammation, for healing up an injury more quickly, Another similar one is called TB500, thymosin beta 500, and this is one that can be used in tendons. In the case of both of those, you can literally inject it with a subcutaneous injection very similar to how a diabetic would inject insulin, like just to the left or right of the belly button, and you get a systemic healing effect. You don't even have to necessarily inject near the joints to get the effect. And then, oh my goodness, like you've got peptides for brain function like C-Lanc and C-Max, which can be administered as an intranasal spray or as an injection. You've got deep sleep-inducing peptide, which people will take a few hours before sleep to increase their deep sleep levels. Another similar one is semirelin, which is also a peptide that can increase sleep. There are peptides like the ipamirelin and the tesamirelin that I talked about for growth hormones if you're looking for anabolism or muscle gain. There are even very small peptide chains called peptide bioregulators. And, there's years and years of research in Russia on these peptide bioregulators to decrease all-cause risk of mortality. And then, they've got crazy studies in both human and rodent models on lifespan increases with these peptide bioregulators. And they are typically things that target specific organs like pinealon for your pineal gland, and they have one as testolone or something like that for the gonads, and there's one for the liver, and there's one for the thyroid. And the theory is that by stacking these throughout the year and taking different doses of them throughout the year, you're maintaining rejuvenation of all your organs with these peptide strategies. And interestingly, the peptide bioregulators, even though those can be injectable, they're also available orally. The problem is that just about every week that goes by, some new peptide is no longer allowed or is banned or is more difficult to get. Or if you try to get it, you're getting some cheap knockoff version that has lipopolysaccharides and other damaging compounds in it. And so, it's getting riskier and more difficult to find peptides. And there's still some physicians who go through compounding pharmacists who get decent versions. But even doctors are getting access to fewer and fewer peptides. So, I think they're incredible compounds just because you can kind of pick and choose and take off the shelf whatever it is that you want to choose for a specific function, but they're also increasingly difficult to get.
How long have they been available for?
I would say I started hearing about them a lot more maybe 8 or 9 years ago. But, I mean, like I said, the Russian research. And I know in Russia particularly, they've been using them for a long time. Dr. Kavintson actually is— he's a doctor who just recently passed away several months ago, but he was a guy who headed up a lot of that research on peptide bioregulators, and they're incredible. The other thing that I failed to mention is mitochondrial rejuvenation peptides like epitalon and MOTC. You know, you— there's all sorts of ways to rejuvenate the mitochondria or build the mitochondria, not just doing the 30-second effort with the long rest period, but, you know, methylene blue, and carbon-60 and red light and hyperbaric oxygen. But there are peptides that are, again, like some of the most powerful compounds you can use for the mitochondria. And when you look at the idea that one of the prime causes of aging is mitochondrial degeneration, they're actually really powerful for that too.
It sounds great.
Yeah, yeah.
Where do you get them?
Well, it's, it's tough. It's I remember the old day, I used to have a CBD company. And, this was back when CBD was heavily regulated and you'd constantly be having to change your credit card processors and your website URL and your company name. And, it seems like it's the same thing with peptides. I'll find a good source and it'll disappear. Until recently, a few of the sources that were good as far as lab certificate of analysis and good sources of peptides without necessarily going through a doctor, limitless life type Peptide Sciences, one in Canada called CanLabs, but I don't think they're around anymore. Another company called Anti-Aging Systems, they still have the oral peptide bioregulators.
Do they work as well orally or no?
No, injectable is better unless you're talking about something that you're using for gut function. There's a company out of Australia called Level Up Health and they have something called Gut Repair Formula. It's got 4 or 5 different peptides in it including BPC-157. It's developed for leaky gut, gut inflammation, And I've interviewed the formulator of that company a couple of times, and he does a good job making orally bioavailable peptides. But they're only going to be as powerful if they're specifically peptides for the gut. You know, if you're going for, for something more systemic, usually you'd want to inject.
And would most doctors prescribe them or no?
I think the type of doctor is going to prescribe them is like a, like a functional medicine doctor or a regenerative medicine physician or someone like that. As far as names, I know that Dr. Matt Cook, still uses them. Dr. Craig Conover still uses them. Cook's on the West Coast and Conover's on the East Coast. Those are a couple of guys that I know are doing it, but they're becoming less and less available.
What are the other keys to recovery?
I like the idea of gradated compression. Have you seen the NormaTec or the Hyperice or the Therabody boots?
Where it squeezes one part and then the next part and then moves through your body.
Exactly, yeah. I mean, if you look at cardiac rehab, They have these machines that are counterpulsation machines that do something like that for your whole body. But, these boots, especially the graded ones, they just pump blood almost like an extra heart that starts in your feet that pumps the blood up towards your heart. They're amazing. You set up and your legs feel light as a feather. And, I didn't want to get too into the weeds, but when I was talking about that Shiftwave, Roxyva, Halo protocol that I do, I often wear the recovery boots when I'm doing that. I'm sitting there for 45 minutes anyways. So, recovery boots, hyperbaric oxygen, I'm a big fan of that, or exercise with oxygen therapy, which involves breathing a combination of high oxygen and low oxygen. And, you can do this when you're doing something like the mitochondrial workout that I was talking about or the VO2 max workout. So, I've got a machine in my gym called a Livo 2, and it's a giant bag. And I go out there, you know, an hour before I'm going to exercise and flip it on. It fills the bag with air, and then there's a little switch. And while I'm exercising, what I do is when I go hard, I flip it to full oxygen. And then when I'm going easy and recovering, I recover in hypoxia. And you get tissue saturation of oxygen that's kind of similar to what you'd get if you were under pressurized oxygen, like in a hyperbaric chamber. But you can do it while exercising. Exercising and it feels fantastic, especially when you get the fresh breath of new oxygen while you're exercising. There's another machine called a Cell Gym and that falls under a different category. These are all acronyms, but you've got hyperbaric oxygen, HBOT, you have exercise with oxygen therapy.
So, hyperbaric oxygen is where you get into a cylinder and it fills with either air or oxygen.
Exactly. And, you're usually breathing from an oxygen mask. And, the idea is that the only situation in which the tissues are going to become more saturated with oxygen than they would under normal conditions is A, if you're under pressure, and B, if the tissue is in a hypoxic state and then gets a flush of new oxygen. Those would be the only two ways that you could actually do it. So, hyperbaric is one, HBOT. Then, you have EWOT where you're inducing a state of hypoxia while exercising, then hitting your body with oxygen and doing that over and over again to saturate the tissues with more oxygen than they would normally you normally get. And then, the last version would be IHHT, intermittent hypoxic training. There's one machine called a Cellgym and you just sit there. And, a lot of people will combine this with meditation, relaxation, and it cycles the oxygen up and down. It'll go high oxygen, low oxygen, but instead of exercising, you're just sitting there as you do it. So, anytime you're flushing the body with oxygen, it's a good recovery modality. That's interesting because that'll go as far as cancer therapy modality because there's two ways to make chemotherapy more cytotoxic or to increase overall cytotoxicity to cancer cells. That's oxygen and heat. So, in many cases, you'll see a combination of chemo with oxygen and hyperthermia or some people even using things like ozone and cancer hyperthermic units even in the absence of chemo for something like cancer because oxygen and heat can produce that toxicity to cancer cells.
How does ozone work differently than hyperbaric?
Ozone is O3, and that is creating free radicals in the body or reactive oxygen species that can act as antiviral compounds, antibacterial compounds. They can serve as signaling molecules. It can also be done in excess. You can get excessive reactive oxygen species. This is why you wouldn't want to do, not that anyone thinks about doing this too much, but daily rectal ozone or a hyperbaric session and then an intermittent hypoxic session on the same day. So, you don't want too much oxygen. There's a Goldilocks zone that's a little bit more difficult to define than something like the well-researched exercise Goldilocks zone. But ozone is more like a creation of reactive oxygen species that people would use for immune system, antibacterial, antiviral, et cetera. Usually, you know, rectal ozone, ozone water, people will do like, you know, vaginal insufflations for yeast overgrowth. You know, you can get ozonated olive oil capsules for gut issues like a fungal overgrowth in the gut. So, not used for recovery as much as for medicine. So, you've got oxygen, you've got compression, red light therapy would be another. The idea behind red light therapy is you're not only bombarding the skin with photons of light that are in a spectrum that allow for absorption of that light through the skin that will then heat the tissue and increase blood flow, but there is an endorphin-producing painkilling effect that you get with the red light. And then, and this is what I think is most interesting, if you look at a plant, water molecules are split in a plant, and chlorophyll in the plant facilitates this process to create electrons, right? Now, that's basically how photosynthesis is occurring. In a human, you can get a similar water-splitting effect when sunlight light hits the body if you have a high amount of melanin in the blood. And so, there's actually a book I read last year, it's called something like "Human Photosynthesis." And, I think it was like a Russian translation, it's a little difficult to read, but it goes into this idea of having dark melanin-rich compounds in the blood and then hitting the body with sunlight or red light to produce electrons in the absence of calories, right? Normally, we'd burn carbs, fats, proteins, et cetera, to generate electrons. And, this instead splitting water molecules to produce H2O2 and 4 free electrons per 2 water molecules that are split. So, this is kind of cool, but you can use any of the dark greens or the dark blues or the dark black pigmented compounds of the plant kingdom in combination with red light to generate ATP.
So, that's why methylene blue and sunlight or red light or—
Methylene blue would be one. What would the others be? Shilajit, the dark black tarry compound, that's another. And then, any of the photosyanins that you get from algae like a spirulina or a chlorella or a blue-green algae. Not a ton of actual research on this. It's pretty theoretical. So, this is anecdotal, but if you were to try shilajit, methylene blue, spirulina, chlorella, or even make yourself a little cocktail of all three and then go out in the sunlight or do infrared light therapy, it's incredible. You get this, you know, non-jittery feeling of energy, and I think it's because of the increased shuttling of electrons because they're in a greater amount on the electron transport chain. So you're increasing the production of ATP. And so this is something for both energy and for recovery.
Aren't blood and chlorophyll very similar?
Yeah, yeah. I forget what the actual— the structural composition of it is, but I believe it's that hemoglobin is somewhat similar to the chlorophyll molecule in terms of its carrying capacity.
So it would make sense that if chlorophyll works for photosynthesis in plants and if blood is extremely close to it, I think one electron different, it would make sense that it would have some effect with us.
Yeah, but I'm still not a breatharian.
Let's talk about breathwork.
Breathwork is interesting because it is a free and easy tool that's built into all of us that we can use to tweak our nervous system or our physiology pretty rapidly. When we go back to the nervous system and the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system balance, the longer exhale triggers an increase in parasympathetic nervous system activity. So you see an increase in vagal nerve tone and increase in HRV with the longer exhales. But breathwork goes beyond just the nervous system. We could look at the immune system. When you breathe through your nose, you're going to produce more nitric oxide. You're not only humidifying and filtering and warming the air better, but you're producing nitric oxide. And, you'll produce even more if you hum. This is another of the ideas behind OMing or humming as you do breathwork. And, that increase in nitric oxide can have antiviral and antibacterial properties in addition to vasodilating your vessels. So, it's almost like you're producing an increase in blood flow with the nitric oxide that you with doing something like nasal breathing and a long exhale through your nose and a 4-count inhale through your nose. Another example would be playing with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide therapy is now a thing. You can actually breathe carbon dioxide and they're using this to induce stress resilience, increase stress resilience because as you get exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide, back to the example we were using with glucose or with your heart rate. There is a short-term increase in stress that results in a long-term stress adaptation response. So, for example, there's a machine and I've tried it. It's called a Carbogen. And you'll breathe about 7% carbon dioxide for 5 to 7 minutes and you get a little bit stressed out when you first start using it. And by the time the session ends, you're a little bit more zen. Anders Ohlsson, who's written the book "The Power of Breath," he has a machine that you connect to a carbon dioxide tank that does it. So, just a mask coming out of the machine and the other end goes into the carbon dioxide tank. But, you don't need fancy machinery per se because if you are doing— let's say you're doing the Wim Hof protocol. All right, big breath in, and out and in and out and in and out. The big breath in is giving you a whole bunch of oxygen. The relaxed exhale is breathing off less carbon dioxide than you'd normally breathe off with a full exhale. So you're getting oxygen and carbon dioxide retention simultaneously. So that would increase the amount of oxygen that you could deliver to tissues. So it's almost a way of hyperoxygenating oxygenating your tissue when you're playing with oxygen and CO2 like that. Other forms of breathwork, you're doing big exhales, so you're blowing off CO2. And this would be more like a hyperventilatory state, but CO2 serves as one of the body's triggers to take a breath when you're low on oxygen. So, when done correctly, and this is something you have to be very careful with, but I've taken freediving courses, for example, where you're blowing off a little bit of CO2 with a certain breath cycle before you dive so you're able to hold oxygen for a longer period of time, which again, if you're not doing this under supervision, could be dangerous, but it would be a way to hold your breath for a longer period of time. So, it's pretty cool how many different things that you can do with breathwork all the way down to Wim Hof is probably one of the more popular breathwork instructor. He's showcased, he and his students' ability to do things like fight off E. coli, enhance the immune system through their form of breathwork. And, I don't know if that's the carbon dioxide if it's the nitric oxide, if it's some other type of endocrine or immune response. But, considering that there's apps now like Othership, Breath Source, there's a lot of them now.
I don't know those.
Probably the coolest one I think is Othership. It's almost like a DJ for breathwork. It's a bunch of different instructors all timed to music and it's everything from a quick 5-minute session designed to be done in a cold bath to help you get through a cold plunge to 75-minute holotropic-ish breathwork sessions. Not to kick the LSD horse to death, but Stanislav Grof, one of the developers of holotropic breathwork, developed it as a way to shift the body into a near psychedelic state using breathwork. And, that's obviously more intense and it's quite a long haul to get through that. But, Othership has musically guided breathwork sessions that pretty cool. Othership has couples breathwork sessions too, which are kind of cool. They're like 20 to 40-minute routines that you would use for making love or for romance, and then you're literally like breathing in and out of your partner's mouth and moving your body in correlation to them. And so, it's a cool app.
So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace This is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in-depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online. Create a blog, monetize a newsletter, make a marketing portfolio, launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com/tetra and get started today.
Let's talk about EMF, dirty electricity, and other toxins.
Oh boy, yeah. You know, when I built the house that I'm in right now, I was lucky enough to be a little bit aware of, of a lot of the issues with non-native electromagnetic fields and their impact on the body. So I'm lucky in that my house is, is really clean. The sound system is all hardwired. All the internet is Cat7 metal-shielded Ethernet cable. There's no Wi-Fi. All the lighting is low EMF, low flicker, circadian-friendly lighting. There's dirty electricity filters in every room. The solar panels have a switch on them that reduces the amount of dirty electricity that gets kicked off when it does the DC to the AC or the AC to DC conversion, I forget. There's kill switches in every bedroom. And so, I live in a pretty clean environment. I'm building a home in Idaho now where I've taken that to the next level to where the floor is grounded and we've amped up the air quality, the water quality, the lighting quality, everything. But, the reason for that is because when you look at the body and specifically the cells, there's a specific electrochemical gradient that is across the cell membrane, a slightly negative charge on the inside, slightly positive charge on the outside. So when the body is subjected to high amounts of non-native signals that go way beyond the hertz frequency of the one outside that I was talking about, like the planet Earth makes, and we get up into the megahertz and gigahertz frequencies, you see a calcium influx into the cell that results in the cell being in a constantly almost like polarized state. I mean, if you look at the cortisol release that occurs, let's say, you know, I bow hunt a little bit, and if an animal gets shot poorly or is very stressed out when it dies, you get a big release of cortisol. That sympathetic nervous system response can cause a calcium influx into the muscles, and that's one of the things that not only causes rigor mortis but a tougher cut of meat from the animal. So, the idea with your body is that if your cells are not electrochemically tuned because they're constantly exposed to the bombarded by all these non-native EMFs, then you feel as though you're almost in a state of like baby rigor mortis. You're stressed out a little bit, you're tight. People when they get that combined with the flickering from overhead lights will get a little bit of low level brain fog and fatigue during the day. You combine that with things like metal overload, which almost can turn your body into a little bit of an antenna. You look at poor detoxification, people not having as many methylated compounds in their diet, and you create this storm of issues that primarily are related to electrical abnormalities in the body. You could talk till you're blue in the face about all the scary things that do this, Wi-Fi routers and VR headsets and smart homes, not to mention flying in which you're completely disconnected from the surface of the planet even more than people who are just wearing big built-up rubber-soled shoes all day. But basically, you're creating an environment in which the body is just fatigued, tired, and fighting an uphill battle against levels of electricity that we really haven't been exposed to until the past 100 years or so. So, even though, again, you could talk about all the scary stuff for a long time and the effects that it has on the body, I think it's more important to focus on what you can do to feel better because most people are not going to move to a pristine Himalayan mountaintop and in many cases even unplug their Wi-Fi routers or get away from dirty electricity in the office et cetera. So, the number 1 most important thing to understand is that there's arguably 1/3 of your life during which your nervous system has a chance to repair and recover from all of the electromagnetic stress, and that is your bedroom. If there's one place where you can focus on low amounts of electricity and a low EMF environment and preferably a low blue light environment, it would be your bedroom. So, this would mean getting some dirty electricity filters and plugging them into 1 or 2 outlets in in the bedroom, getting a Wi-Fi timer or figuring out a way to turn off your Wi-Fi just during the night when you're sleeping, which you can time to go off between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, making sure that there's not a lot of things that are turned on in the bedroom when you're asleep. Even me, when I walk into a hotel room, I unplug as much as possible because I just don't need the TV and the coffee maker and the microwave or whatever else is in there on while I'm sleeping. And then, you can also during the daytime do things that allow your body to get grounded and to kick off some of that electricity. This would be like a grounding mat or an earthing mat at your desk or doing some of that morning stretching on a PEMF mat or getting outside barefoot, or they even make earthing and grounding shoes now with a little bit of metal in the bottom that will keep you grounded. Understanding that you can kick off a lot of that charge if you're getting in touch with the surface of the planet or something that's bringing a grounding or an earthing environment into you. When you look at the calcium influx, you can also address some of that with magnesium, like a good amount of magnesium intake, you know, low inflammation diets, even the use of things like ketones, for example, to help address some of the issues that occur, particularly when you're doing airline travel. But I think really the number one place to focus on is the bedroom.
Is there any technology that overrides the bad waves?
There are, as you're probably aware, a host of wearables that claim to harmonize the EMF or block the EMF or alter the body's response to it or transform the signal, you'll find very little research that's good clinical research showing that these things work. The only one that I've seen really good research behind is called a Waveguard. It's a pretty large cylindrical object. It's filled with some kind of a conductive liquid. And, I have a couple of those in in my home, not because I've got a ton of electricity in my home, but people send me these things to try.
And what does that do? Explain what that thing does.
It somehow blocks the signal using this liquid conductive technology, and I don't fully understand how it works, but they shared some, some good data showing a lower amount of EMF in devices that were around the Waveguard thing when it was being used. The rest of them is purely subjective, at least I would have said this until a couple of weeks ago. I'll tell you what happened a couple weeks ago. But, this necklace that I'm wearing, this Airostek necklace, it claims to have a semiconductor in it that somehow transforms the signal. And, I don't know if it does, but I feel better when I'm wearing it. The question is if someone were to hand me one without a semiconductor that looks exactly the same, could they placebo me and I'd feel just as good thinking that I'm wearing an EMF blocking or transforming necklace? But, I did— something about the tree growth around my house or something changed the ability for me to get cell signal in my house about a month and a half ago, which got pretty frustrating because I had to walk up the farm road and up the hill behind my house to make phone calls. I called Verizon and I got a cell booster, which is like it boosts the signal from the tower so you're able to actually make phone calls. I put it in my house and I suspected that it probably had pretty high EMF. I actually just recently published this video to Instagram and I walked through the house with an EMF meter that measures magnetic magnetic field and electric fields. And I forget the units for the electric field, but the number that you preferably want things below is about 60. And when I walked past the refrigerator, it went up to 100. And when I walked up to the cell phone booster, it went up to 200. So, I thought, "Well, hey, the cell phone booster is going to go up on the roof or somewhere farther away from a living area or sleeping area." in the house. This company has sponsored the podcast before, so I had some of these AresTech stickers and I put one on the refrigerator and one on the cell phone booster. And then, I walked through again with the signal meter and it dropped on both. The refrigerator went down to about 80 and the cell phone booster went down to about 100. I didn't change anything else. The difficult part is whether it's me sleeping better or having higher HRV when I wear one of these or seeing my refrigerator or cell phone booster drop is explaining why because I don't quite understand how something as small as a tiny semiconductor inside a sticker could actually decrease the EMF signal that much, but it's doing something. And so, for me, it's kind of like photonic entanglement or quantum physics or things like that, being able to pray over water and have the structure of it potentially change or being able to send positive energies from far, you know, I'm a man of faith, you know, I pray, I believe in God. And so it sounds a little ridiculous, but I think that there is an effect that these things can have on EMF, but I really can't explain exactly how they're working. And I haven't seen a good explanation for a lot of them either.
The human foot is a true marvel of engineering. With 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscle muscles and tendons. It's built for flexibility, balance, and natural movement. Unfortunately, today's narrow, rigid, elevated shoes undermine this natural brilliance and weaken your feet. Vivobarefoot shoes set your feet free. Feel every step. Move naturally. Allow your feet to function as nature intended with Vivobarefoot. Thin, flexible soles to keep you connected to the ground. Wide toe boxes to let your toes spread and stabilize. Minimalist shoes designed to mimic the barefoot experience. Whether you're running, hiking, or just going about your day, Vivobarefoot has you covered precisely when and where you need it most. Feel the vibration of the earth. Strengthen your feet. Improve your posture, enhance your natural movement with Vivobarefoot. Made from 100% recycled and natural materials, they are as healthy for the planet as they are for you. Experience the freedom of barefoot movement with the protection from the sharp edges of a man-made world. Natural movement for your feet, sustainable choices for our world. Learn more at vivobarefoot.com/tetra and embrace your human nature.
Tell me about your experience with prayer.
Well, I grew up Christian and going to a Protestant Reformed church. I wouldn't say that I had a deep connection to God in terms of my prayer life until about 10 years ago.
What changed?
I was getting pretty successful in business. I was traveling a lot. I was speaking on a lot of stages and getting more popular, and I was neglecting my family life. And things got pretty dicey between my wife and I, and I was not an at-present father and husband I was gallivanting around the globe justifying to myself that the money that I was making with the business was something that was going to support the family and eventually I get to the point where I'd be able to spend more time with them. And my wife and I nearly broke up because we had just grown so distant and that got me on my knees every morning and I prayed a lot and her and I prayed a lot together.
Did she grow up in the same community as you?
She grew up in the same community. We've known each other since second grade Sunday school. Wow. We've been married 21 years. Amazing. But, you know, it's one thing to grow up as a Christian, and it's another thing to be deeply connected to God because you've been through strife or turmoil or some type of trial that has dropped you to your knees. In this case, it was me knowing that if things didn't change, I could lose my my family. I started praying every morning. I started reading my Bible every morning. I kind of reversed the order as far as the priority of life. I went from business being number one to first God and my own spiritual health, then my spouse, my wife, checking in on her, taking care of her in the morning, then my kids. And now we all gather at 7:00 a.m. for meditation and prayer and reading the Bible and talking about our day and our blockers and how everything's going to go in our morning family huddle, and then my health, and then when all of that is done, business. And I bookend the day, same thing. At the end of the day, 7 PM, the whole family meets at the dinner table and we sing a song and we pray and there's a coming together and we play games. It's a beautiful, glorious family dinner party. None of that would have existed 10 years ago, but my prayer life since then has has gotten to the point where it's more of a constancy of prayer. I pray in the morning and I pray before meals and I pray when I need an answer from God about a decision that I'm going to make. And my wife and I, last thing we do before my mouth tape goes on at night and we fall asleep is we say a prayer together. We pray with the kids before we go to bed. And this idea of the hope that's derived from being able to speak to a greater power outside of yourself and to be able to know that you and lay your stresses and your worries as well as your requests for wisdom and discernment at the feet of that higher power is something that gives me so much hope and has been so meaningful for me.
How would you say it's changed your life?
It's brought me to realize that I don't have the power and the strength and the goodness inside myself to be the man that I really want to be, to be the father that I want to be, to be the husband that I want to be, to make impact in my business or my personal life or anywhere else. And that there is a greater power outside of me that I must rely upon and be humble enough to be able to ask ask for help from. It's also changed my gratefulness for life. You know, I think there's a difference— at least I felt a difference— between writing down or voicing or thinking about what it is you're grateful for and actually saying thanks to the source of that good thing, right? It's one thing to identify things that you're grateful for. It's another thing to give thanks to the source from which that blessing came. So a deeper sense of gratitude, a deeper sense of own weakness and need for strength and support. And then also just feeling like when friends, when family members, when other people need help, when they're sick, when anything occurs that I want to help people with, that I can actually not just help them physically, but be able to bring them before God in prayer.
Powerful. How has it impacted the relationships within the family?
When you pray together as a family, there's a certain amount of humility, a certain amount of weakness displayed. When we pray together as a family, we are praising God for who he is. We are confessing our sins. And that doesn't mean that we're all sitting on the living room floor at 7 AM talking about all the bad things we did. It's an actual quiet time reserved for us to think upon and dwell upon things that we want to bring before God and ask for forgiveness for, adoration and thankfulness. There's actually an acronym that we follow, which is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. So we give thanks and we pour out gratitude before God, and then we ask God to, you know, help out with an aunt who is sick or who a friend that we've told we would pray for. We have a Notes app with a list of people who we're going to pray for. So it's a way to bring the family together and It's wonderful for my sons to be able to hear me pour out my heart to God and to be able to ask for forgiveness and for them to see that their father doesn't think that he's perfect and needs outside help. And it's also, you know, it builds faith. You know, in the Bible, there is a book called James and there's a chapter in James 5 and it says, it's an entire section called the prayer of faith. And you know, it says, if anyone is suffering, let them pray. If anyone is cheerful, let them sing praises. If anyone is sick, let them, you know, bring that person before God and pray for them and lift them up. If you need healing, you know, confess your sins to one another and pray to God for healing. And so there's so many beautiful things that can happen when you weave prayer into your life. But for me, probably the biggest is just the sense of hope, just knowing that I can call out for help in a time of need, and it's not out to an empty universe. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.
What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. The avant-garde? Tetragrammaton. Generative art? Tetragrammaton. The tarot? Tetragrammaton. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammaton. Biodynamics? Tetragrammaton. Graphic design? Tetragrammaton. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammaton. Obscure film? Tetragrammaton. Beach culture? Tetragrammaton esoteric lectures. Tetragrammaton off-the-grid living. Tetragrammaton alt spirituality. Tetragrammaton the canon of fine objects. Tetragrammaton muscle cars. Tetragrammaton ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where where you are drawn.
Tetragrammaton.com.
More from Ben
The Solution to Aging Might Be Closer Than Anyone Realizes - With Ben Goertzel
