From Warrior to Wizard: Ben Greenfield on Discomfort, Dads, and Designing a Resilient Life

You have to be uncomfortable to a certain extent. Interesting. Our ancestors had to deal with the acute stressors and we now deal with the diseases of modernity. It's nice to be able to sit indoors and make money on a computer in the air conditioning, but you have to fabricate discomfort.

Yeah.

If that's the, the comfy modern lifestyle that you've chosen.

Ben Greenfield, welcome to the show.

Ooh, thanks.

Nice to see you.

I've warmed up from your frigid, frigid, frigid pool.

I know. You know, listen, we were gonna tape tomorrow and then you came on pool training day. I know. Cause you came with Dr. Chestnut.

Super happy about.

Yeah, it was cute. It was like watching, watching, uh, boys going like, try to swim this down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The basketball and the volleyball and the water polo ball, that's actually— so the one where you put the ball between your legs and then swim down upside down, that feels incredible on the back. Yeah, the whole time I was doing, I'm like, oh, I just found a new exercise to traction the spine. Yeah, because you can hang from gravity boots and from an inversion table, but like something about moving your upper body gracefully. Not—

I don't know how graceful mine was.

It looks so vicious right now. I look like a monkey trying to like transport a watermelon to the bottom of a pool. And then, um, when you're pulling with your arms like that, then the, the buoyancy of the ball is kind of like tractioning, I think, like the— it feels like the sacroiliac joint or something right around like the lumbar sacral joints. Yeah, it felt amazing. Doing 5 minutes of that, I got out after, you know, sitting in airplanes and Ubers and everything, and my back feels Great.

Yeah. And it has the form of play in it too. Yeah. It's like kind of a play task.

And all you need is a really deep cold pool. Yeah. And some balls.

And some balls. Yeah. You guys have balls. Yeah. I, uh, before we started rolling, we were talking about that you've had your podcast since 2007. And I used to teach a class on Kauai, and a lot of guys would be like listening to you, uh, and asking me, do you know who Ben Greenfield is?

Because I was like one of the only ones to listen to There were a lot of options.

And also you were doing a lot of interesting things. You've always sort of said, hey, I'm willing to put myself out there and kind of be a human experiment. And I'm going to— I'm curious, you know, going from a high-level competitive athlete and into sort of this world of hacking and like, does this work and that work? But actually, where I want to start today is because you have twin sons who are becoming young adults.

Yeah.

And I was really curious for you as a parent what this transition has been like? Because when they, when they graduated—

you mean the transition from me needing to be first in line for dinner so that I actually have food?

That, well, that's probably been that way for 3 or 4 years, right?

Yeah.

But just, just this notion of, you know, these— the boys are, are kind of starting to do their thing, uh, because I'm going through the same thing. My— I just dropped my daughter, my youngest daughter, off to college, you know, 8 weeks ago. Just for you, what has it represented and, and how has it been for, for the two of you as a couple and just what has this experience been like?

I still face that thing that I think a lot of modern dads face that we were talking about in the sauna, just pushing your sons out to do dangerous things because it's so easy for a young man especially to just be super comfortable sitting in the basement or the bedroom fulfilling a lot of their needs via VR and screens from their adventures to romance, all the things that you'd normally leave the front door to do to go slay dragons and get into trouble. It's a lot easier for boys to just be sitting at home now. So that's probably been like the biggest part is just making sure that, like, my pastor gave me some really good advice. He said, your sons need to get into bed exhausted at the end of the day, just like tire them out, channel that testosterone. So our understanding at the house is like room and board. You got to be doing a couple hours of farm work and manual labor on this property that we're developing every day. And then they're working on their business and then I'm dragging them into the gym and then they have lacrosse practice after that. And so we fill everything up as much as we can to the point where, A, they don't get into trouble and B, they can kind of like blow off some of the teenage boy steam. But I think even bigger than that, like starting all the way back when they were about— not like from birth because I didn't even like really realize that I needed to step up and be a real leader in the home until they were 7 or 8 years old. Up until that point I didn't have. Like, I didn't grow up in a home where we had a lot of like traditions and rituals and things that a young man or woman can depend upon as, as like something, something safe in their life, but also something that unites and knits the family together on a regular basis. And when they were 7 or 8, I realized that like everything was just kind of loosey-goosey. Like, what time do we go to bed at night? And, you know, when do we connect as a family? And what does our family stand for? And what are our values? And I took a deep dive. Um, so I see my book Boundless on, on your shelf, and that's actually authentic.

That's where that book lives.

This culminated in, in like a book that came later on that not a lot of people even know about called Boundless Parenting. It looks like that one. It's kind of blue. And so, I started to interview all these parents. I took the family down to a cabin in Utah and spent a couple days with this business branding expert who runs a foundation called Legado that teaches you how to brand your family in the same way you would brand a business. So, we have this 100-plus page Greenfield family constitution and it is all of our core values, our mission statement, what we do on Thanksgiving, what we do on Christmas, what we do on Easter, when the boys go on their 12 to 13-year-old rite of passage into adolescence, when they go on their 17 or 18 years old, which they just got back from, rite of passage vision quest into adulthood. Everybody's got their obituaries and their end-of-life wishes and memorial service mapped out in the book. It's a full handbook that I can hand to my sons when they start their family for them to build on. Adding things like, you know, what do young Greenfield women do, right? Because we don't have any daughters, you know, things like that. So interesting. As a part of that process, we just started implementing a lot of day-to-day activities that, back to your question, I think has kind of like kept them on track, kept them kind of like taking pride in the family name and what we stand for because we have a constant reminder of that every day. So 7 a.m. Like clockwork, we meet in the living room for a family huddle and everybody's just there and everybody knows it's going to happen and nobody's planning out phone calls and emails and work and a workout and whatever at that 7:00 AM time slot. And, the whole family gathers and I lead everybody in 10 to 15 minutes of Bible study and then we pray together and then we just talk about the day, like who's going where and who's got the car and who's got practice and what time and who's making what for dinner. And, Then we have a clap and huddle up like a football team and do one big hug. And then we just go conquer the day. And we're still seeing each other at different points throughout the day because I work from home and they were homeschooled. And then same thing, 7:00 PM, like clockwork, we all gather around the family dinner table and I say a prayer and we sing a song. And my sons and I do book club. We've been doing book club since they were 7 years old. So every day we all go through the chapter of a book together and then we talk about it at night. And when I'm traveling, we just text each other and then we sit down and we crank out games like card games, board games, Scrabble, Monopoly, Exploding Kittens, like you name it. And we play games for like an hour and a half and then clean the kitchen together and, you know, dance and tell jokes and go to bed. And that, like, it's almost like bookending the day with some really precious family time. I think that's been one of the keys to them, just like feeling seen and loved and heard, knowing what a young Greenfield man stands for and should take pride in. And I feel like it's kind of like kept them on track. Like we have these constant touch points where you never feel like you just like haven't connected with your kid for a few days. Yeah. And I realize that that takes sacrifice, especially in athletic families, because a lot of practice happens in the evening and you got to like, well, your family dinner time might be 5 or you might have family lunch or it might be like family bedtime stuff, you know, whatever. Our sons mostly played tennis and jiu-jitsu, and then they've got seasonal lacrosse. So, they're home 90% of the time for family dinners. And same thing with me, men's tennis league and pickleball and whatever. I'm kind of careful about when I schedule what just because the most important thing to me is the nucleus of the family. I can find, for me, a lot of my sports are between 5:30 and 7:00 PM. Then I come home and organize family dinner.

I'm just curious, like when I, when I hear this, and it's so funny because I have daughters, and daughters are— I, I do think it's maybe a little bit of a different experience. Probably experience is the listening part. I'm just curious because you, you do have— your family has a very unusual and, and thoughtful, and this is on purpose. Like a lot of times people go, oh well, you can do that because your kids are— it's like, yes, but you and your wife have created this environment. Yeah, right. So it's not like, oh, we just fell into this.

So I think sometimes And we didn't start with that either. Right. It's like, 'cause a lot of parents tell me this and I'll be like, well, the best time to plant a tree, right? 20 years ago or today.

Right now.

So I don't care if they're 12 or 13 or 16 or whatever, just like start something.

Yeah, and this is what I think is so important. But I'm curious as a parent, you know, you have to go through periods of your life and in your growth where you question things and you really try to take the opposite stance to try to understand, well, why do you believe that or follow that? How do you navigate? I'm just curious. I'm always curious about the technique as a parent on just holding space and listening, you know, even though sort of like manuals are being built, if that makes sense. How do you— how are you able to do that for them?

You're gonna hate my answer.

I'm— I don't— I'm not attached to any outcome.

Hasn't happened.

Really?

Has never happened. I've like— I'm, I'm totally not joking. I haven't— I believe you deal with that. Like, they've always just like rolled with the punches and we're just like one nuclear family. Like, I'm sure, like, maybe, you know, teenage angst, rebellion, whatever. They're 17, so they're kind of getting to the point now where I'm like, well, like, they're gonna rebel. They better do it pretty soon or else they're just gonna be gone.

But maybe their radical was like, oh, we hunt, we do all these kind of nature things. So maybe their radical was expressed that way. I was just, I was just curious. And I often wonder, maybe because your boys are twins, like, if somehow there's an internal checks and balance between them.

There's always like the insta-friend component and some of that going And back to the wilderness thing, I think that nature immersion is also a really good way to blow off steam. There's just like the unpredictability of the outdoors. And they started Wilderness Survival School when they were 6. They're now mentors and teachers at that school. So they're teaching multiple camps on like fire making and shelter building and animal tracking during the summer. Yeah. And sleeping under the stars and being cold at night. And, you know, they just got back a couple months ago from that thing I mentioned, which was their rite of passage into adulthood. So, they had 10 days in the Idaho wilderness and 4 of those were solo, no food, backpack, knife, wool blanket. And, I mean, they came back with— One of my sons got convinced at 2 days in that there was a cougar hunting him. And so, he literally set up his bed so that his head was like— He would sleep sitting up with the tree behind his head because he knew the cougars could just come at your neck and he had to protect his body. And just like things like that that sound silly in retrospect, but those are the thoughts that go through a young man's head. My other son told me he just like made a fishing pole and fished off the edge of a cliff, like not in the water, right? Just like the edge of a cliff, just like over and over and over again for like 4 or 5 hours. And it's weird, like when a young man doesn't— or young woman, you know, would fit in this category too, even though I don't know what I'm talking about with young women. Like if there's no phone, you know, what they fill their heads with and what they find to do. And I mean, you've probably heard this before, like boredom to that extent is good.

Best, you know, that's right.

During that time. So yeah, I think that a big part of— and that's the privilege of growing up in North Idaho too. It's like that's right in your backyard.

Yeah. You just go, hey, you're going to go do that. Yeah. So for a civilian, like a householder and people who, you know, they— you again, you guys have created your life this way, and it's even— you've taken some new creations and as an extension of that life that we're going to get into. But for low-hanging fruit, for, you know, sort of people who live in, let's call it, the real world— even though I feel like you live more in the real world than— uh, if people are living in cities and 9-to-5ing it, that is starting to feel more like The Matrix, I think.

Yeah.

What's the low-hanging fruit? It, you know, is it time connecting in the morning and in the night? Like, where do you see that we collectively as a culture could just do it better and sort of given what people are navigating?

With kids? Yeah. Yeah. I'm more of a practical guy than like an esoteric big picture kind of guy. And so my mind goes to something that we do that I think anybody, especially like in an urban environment, could do, and that's monthly one-on-one date nights. And I realize that could be tough if you've got like 7 kids, but We've got two, so it's doable. And you would be surprised at how seldomly you actually have time to just sit and have one-on-one chat with your child in an environment where there's not the social interplay that occurs when your spouse is present or when one of their siblings is present. It's a different level of conversation. It's more vulnerable. And the way that we do it is we just schedule at the beginning of the month because my schedule's all over the place. It drives people nuts, but I don't have that thing where it's like, Oh, we go on date night, 7 PM every Thursday. I'm like, no, that doesn't— like, I'm gone half Thursday. So we switched to Friday, whatever. But we schedule it at the beginning of the month and Mom takes one of the boys somewhere and I take one of the boys somewhere and we usually meet up for ice cream or gelato or whatever afterwards and hang out and chat. But just setting up something like one-on-one date nights, this is obviously old school spousal advice too. You got to carve it out, systematize, and calendar the time. But my wife and I have 2 a month, a month at minimum, and my sons and I have one a month. And that's simple. I mean, like, you can do it. Who doesn't like to just like go out to a restaurant and eat? And yeah, and be heard with you.

Yeah, you know, I think I'm an only child, and so I think I never fully understand all the dynamics of birth order and siblings and all of these things. And like you said, just to have the one-on-one with that particular parent and child, and it's like, well, what do you talk about?

And I think like, like So this is not my idea. This was another super cool parent and he was actually in my book and I think he even wrote this in the book. So he starts off the conversation like this, and I do this a lot. So what's life like for you on a scale of 1 to 10, like 10 being the best, 1 being the worst. And then they give their answer and you say, so what would make it a 10 or why is it a 7? And that just like opens up the next hour of conversation.

Yeah, I feel that. I really feel that. So, you know, you've been notorious for high performance, right? And then, and then sort of seeing what's out there, looking under, you know, what's this, what's that is, you know, what's this supplement, what's this treatment? And I'm just curious, where does this give you explosive diarrhea? I'm sure you've been there. Oh my gosh. Laird and I often joke about, you know, less, less data, more experience, right? I'm curious now that you've had a really significant amount of time doing this, what still stands true as things that you sort of spend time, and I'll say it as a hack, that you think, you know what, there's this, I feel like there's some real legs here. And maybe the opposite, maybe what are some of the things that you thought, hmm, maybe this is gonna work. And then you thought, oh, in the long run, maybe not so much. It doesn't move the needle so much.

Yeah, I would say, like, tackling the, the last part of that question first, like, I got pretty on board with the whole, like, ketogenic is going to cure all of humankind's problems bandwagon. So I would say the extent to which most high performers and athletes need a certain amount of carbohydrates, I would say like around 30% or so, which is still considered low carb according to Gatorade Sports Science Institute or whatever, but having, um, like not having like a carb-phobic mentality towards food. Because even when I was racing Ironman, you know, I was one of the, you know, the athletes who was like the low-carb guy and taking in, you know, like literally like for a year at one point I had 10% carbohydrate-based diet. And yes, the byproduct of that is more ketones, and ketones can be a preferential fuel, right, for the liver and the brain and the heart and the diaphragm. And that's great, and it's especially great if you have metabolic disease, um, you know, type 1 diabetes or epilepsy or something that really thrives on low glycemic variability and low glucose. But if you're an athlete, I mean, like, your thyroid takes a hit and testosterone suffers and the joints need like proteoglycan based on glucose to make up the joints. And, um, you can kind of like fall apart if you just never walk into an Italian restaurant. So I went from full keto to now, like, I'm a huge fan of ketones as a hack, like those liquid ketone bottles.

Yeah, I did like a couple of those. Yeah, congratulations.

With ketones in it, the Boundless bar. And I don't eat a lot of carbs most of the day, and I kind of stay in more of like a fat-fueled state. So thank you for the access to your liver pâté and scrambled eggs as my pre-podcast snack. So that's like how I eat during the day. And then at night when carbohydrates are something that winds up a lot of times at the dinner table or at the restaurant when you're going out where carbohydrates can help to or they serve as a precursor or a trigger for serotonin, which then leads to more melatonin and also give you a way to sock away liver and muscle glycogen. So, I can do— that was the first meal that I had just now. But, because I had carbohydrates last night, we ate at what, maybe 11:30 a.m. I had that meal. We had a pool workout and sauna and everything. But, if I was just low-carb all day yesterday, I probably would have been really, really hangry. And just by the fact that at dinner I sock away liver and muscle glycogen, that helps a ton. So that dietary switch. And then the things that work are the things that wouldn't surprise you work, because it's all based on the idea of ancestral mismatch theory, meaning we drive and live and fly in temperature-controlled boxes, so we're not subjected to the extremes of heat and cold. And we tend to have low dietary diversity, so we're not subjected to the mild poisons and toxins and so-called xeno, X-E-N-O, hormetic stressors that we get from a wide amount of dietary diversity. And even though I think the carnivore and the paleo diet have a place, kind of like a keto diet does, the absence of dietary diversity doesn't do our microbiome or our cellular resilience any favor when we're not getting exposed to those mild poisons every day. Even alcohol, like I have a little glass of wine at the end of each day. I consider that to be a poison. It's a metabolic stress, but it can induce cellular resilience. And then, of course, loading bones, loading muscles, doing things that would cause your kidneys to suffer if you did it long-term, but small bouts here and there sprinkled throughout the week, putting your heart under stress, and then getting subjected to solar and photonic light stress and getting subjected to mild radiative earth stress. And none of these would come across to a lot of people as stressful. It's like, "What do you mean walking outside barefoot is stressful?" Well, no, but you're getting exposed to mild geological radiation and a little bit of that negative ion conductivity up through your feet. And when you are outside, you get a little bit of UVA and UVB radiation. When you're laying in a red light bed or using a red light panel, you're getting some infrared and red light. So, when you stack all this stuff together, I'll look back if I were going to do some kind of nerdy biohacker's end-of-day self-examination, and there's a lot that goes on every day that's inducing mild stress on my body. My sunlight exposure, getting cold, getting hot, getting in touch with the planet, having had an overnight 12-hour fast, eating a wide variety of plants, lifting weights, sucking wind on the Aerodyne. A lot of people might be able to name 1 or 2 stressors by the end of the day. And you and I live in a world where people almost sometimes do too much stress, too much hormesis. Like the average person just want to get healthy, you have to be uncomfortable to a certain extent. Not masochistic, but uncomfortable. And that's just like what I come back to over and over again is just like Cameron, our friend Cameron who was just here too, he says the same thing. Gary Brecka says the same thing. I think he has a saying like something like death is the slow onset of comfort or some bastardized version of that. It's basically like comfort kills.

Yeah.

And there's that whole book called The Comfort Crisis. But yeah, it's just this idea that we live in an era that like a caveman, if we want to use that dumb analogy, or like our ancestors would've killed to be in, right? We have all the world's library in our back pocket and the equivalent of like 1,000 servants on our iPhone, and we can get Amazon delivery and open our refrigerators or freezers and have 24/7 access to hyperpalatable food. But our ancestors had to deal with the acute threats of famine and starvation and disease and saber-tooth tiger eating out the back of your neck if you're not sleeping with your head behind a tree and all of these things that were acute stressors. And we now deal with the diseases of modernity, the chronic diseases, gout and diabetes and heart disease and obesity and all these things that come with largely comfort. So, we fabricate comfort, which is fine. That's what a gym is. Normally, Soldiers, athletes, Olympians, those would have been the people in the gym. And now a lot of people are because we've realized, "Oh, we have to fabricate discomfort in this fake place because we're not out building fences and hauling rocks and doing construction and working on—" And that's great because it's nice to be able to sit indoors and make money on a computer in the air conditioning, but you have to fabricate discomfort if that's the comfy modern lifestyle that you've chosen.

So it's interesting because I, I always say at one time I, I never felt more, you know, more like sort of an idiot than I was at a Spartan gym in Miami at the bottom of the One, and they were doing construction and these guys are lifting these huge beams going to and fro in the weight room, and I'm sitting there with a kettlebell and a dumbbell. And in that moment it really showed up. Yeah, you're just like, oh brother, I have to be in here and fake it. And these guys are doing this all day long and doing it for real.

I've had ironic moments like that where I'm out doing like farm work and yard work at our house and I'm like, I'm not going to have any time to hit the gym like this is going on. And then I'll have that moment of like, wait, this is, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Well, that's what they say.

What do they say? Farm strong. Like all those wrestlers where they grab you and it's like you're not getting away.

This hay bale is not as symmetrical as my barbell and I can't get underneath it and these strings are hurting my fingers. I got to shift it to my shoulder.

Yeah, I know. Sometimes you look outside and you think, oh, we have really— it is, parts of it are funny, silly. But, you know, listen, it's one thing when you're training for your sport and what have you, and so there's certain measurements, right? You have to do. But just as you're saying, getting that, that, uh, amount, the right amount of stress, um, I'm always kind of— I do have to laugh at myself. And even thinking about like, oh, I'm taking these supplements, it's like, yes, because we, we live in this world where this is what it's going to take to be human.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and yeah, like the supplements things, like, you know, people say, well, you know, why do you need all that stuff? Couldn't a human just be healthy on regular food? It's like, well, yeah, if you move to like the Dolomites or some pristine Himalayan mountaintop. But we live in an era in which we've got soil depleted or mineral depleted soil from monocropping and poor agricultural practices, and we're bombarded by EMFs which strip magnesium and minerals from our cells. And we a lot of times are eating more processed and ultra-processed food where there's less vitamin absorption. And, um, and, you know, there's a lot that we don't get from our diets.

And I think that's the way we look at it. I, I think for me now, part of the hacking isn't actually just about longevity or performance. It's actually about surviving, you know, kind of the things that, that you just mentioned, because we're not supposed to be all day long.

It's that. And so this is interesting because there's like this surge of interest in the whole biohacking and longevity sector and immortality, the whole don't die thing and I'm going to make it to 160 or 180 or 200 years old. And it's almost grasping at the straws of the materialistic life on this planet because at the end of the day, game over, baby, and we're all just a bunch of chunks flesh and blood flying on a giant rock through space and there's no afterlife, there's no soul that goes on to— because I'm a Christian and so I believe I'll be with God for all of time, which is incredible. So even though I want to do my best job here on this planet and take really good care of my body and my brain in the process, that's not the ultimate end goal for me. And, if if you look at this quest for immortality, people do a lot of things that I think can be decent if you want to just be on the pointy edge of longevity. And I've done a lot of this stuff like gene therapy and human plasma transfers and blood filtration and stem cells. And I think that stuff is interesting and it can help you to feel pretty good even though it's a lot necessary to be a fully functioning human being. It, like, you do feel really good after you use some of these like fringe protocols, but I don't do it for immortality, right? I just want to be as healthy as possible, as close as possible to the day that I die. Um, you know, I joke that like I just want to like die, whatever, after a day of, you know, hella skiing in the mountains when I'm 91, making love to my wife. And yeah, she thinks that'd be creepy and like logistically awkward and it doesn't like that idea. Um, but yeah, I mean, just being in more simple way, like throw football around with your grandkids or just be able to be vital with age. And I think that's something to think about too because a lot of people look at biohackers and almost think that we're all just transhumanists trying to live forever when in fact, I think there's a certain reasonable use of technology and self-quantification and supplements and maybe even stem cells and things like that that allow you to just have really good above-par health with a little bit of better living through science. And as the name even hacking implies, right, you're just like helping your body to do something more efficiently and quickly than it might have been able to do in its native state, comma, uh, in its native state now in like this post-industrial toxin-filled era where some of this stuff can really, really help out a lot.

I think that's an interesting point. So is there anything in your practice, um, that would be considered, you know, more of the fringe but that you do on a semi-regular basis as a this little tune-up. Are there things that you have in your practice?

I'd love to know. I mean, yeah, but a lot of that stuff would be kind of more extreme, you know. I'm talking to you. So stem cells? Yeah, yeah. Um, I right now I'm doing the full body, like toe, and now they're all the way up into like the— it's called the, uh, well, it's basically like a cranial nerve stem cell injection for the brain. So the toe all the way up to the brain now for just a full body stem cell takeover.

So I do that in Utah every 4 or 5 years with the Dr., uh, Dr. Adelson.

Yeah, so umbilical-derived stem cells from a really good manufacturer that's got like super clean cells. They screen them for like vaccinated people and COVID, so you're getting super clean stem cells. Protein in your, in your blood. Yep, exactly. And I also do a stem cell infusion yearly. How long does that— stem cells, exosomes.

Okay, how long did the— like, tell me like how long one of those treatments would take.

First the TOTA The toe to head used to be like a 4 to 5 hour long procedure because it was autologous. Okay, that means they would tap into your own bone marrow or— oh yeah, and that's liposuction, your own fat, and then that goes in. And now they use umbilical-derived stem cells. So, uh, they— so on me, the last time I did it, it'd normally be an hour, and mine was about an hour and a half. And actually have the whole time-lapse video of it. Super cool because they're now using this special laser, and they'll go into certain joints that history of arthritis or being really beat up and use the laser to direct the stem cells to that source. So, you can use electricity like electrical muscle stimulation. Then, other doctors will use photobiomodulation like red lights actually or lasers to draw the stem cells into the tissue that they really want almost attract it like a magnet to. So, stem cells would be one. And that's—

so, it's an hour and a half and that recovery is fine because you're not using your own stuff, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's— well, it's pretty quick, but, but part of stem cells, and a lot of people might not realize this, is they initiate a healing response that results in almost a little bit of like flu-like inflammation, swollen joints from old injuries. You don't feel incredible, you don't feel like Superman when you finish stem cells. Like, you're a little bit out of it for a while, and you have to be careful loading the joints and re-injuring areas, you know, while you have all these new baby cells in your body. Um, but that would be one. And then kind of a new thing for me in the past couple of years has been this idea of cleaning up the body, like oil changing the body. The method for doing this that most people are probably familiar with and have access to would be some form of plasmapheresis or plasma therapy. Um, for example, like here in LA, like Next Health does therapeutic plasma exchange where they take out out some of your plasma. They replace it with synthetic albumin and IVs and nutrients and minerals, kind of rebuild your plasma. And then you can also do something like ozone plasmapheresis, where your blood comes out and it gets ozonated and it goes back into your body. And people will do this for mold, for Lyme, for— some people think it helps with microplastics, but I don't think you remove that many microplastics using using this method. Maybe you make a little bit of a dent in them, but there are stronger filters for that. I'll talk about those in a second. But some type of plasma exchange, I'm usually doing something like that a couple of times a year just to clean out the body. Again, for me, if I was just up on the farm in Idaho and never leaving, I probably wouldn't need to do that. But I'm all over the world. I'm on planes and Airbnbs and hotels and airports. And yeah, I'm just like, I'm absorbing stuff. I'm getting toxic. And I realized some of this stuff that we're talking about, like back to the accessibility, affordability piece, it is tough.

No, I'm asking you to extreme stuff.

Accumulate microplastics and okay, so you got to fork over cash to get them out of the body, which doesn't seem fair, but it's just the era we live in. And then, now you can also get your blood. So, for example, I did this in Tijuana, Mexico, which I didn't realize was like a destination hotspot for health now. But, they've got luxury hospitals and luxury hotels. So, I was in a hospital bed for 3 days and the blood was removed from my body just vacuumed out from the jugular vein via catheter that they install. And, at the end of every day, you just get wheeled in a wheelchair back over to your hotel room and then you show up at the hospital the next day for round 2. And, this filter was originally designed to remove COVID spike protein, meaning the medium that the blood passes through is almost back to the magnet analogy, like a magnet for spike proteins, and the blood goes back into your body. So they've been using this very successfully for long COVID, but people with, you know, mold, Lyme— by the way, I'm not a doctor, do not take this as medical advice— cancer, etc. They're now going and doing these blood filtration protocols. There's a company now in London that does it. There's one in Vienna called HHO. There's Lumati in Tijuana. And you can go and just like do, instead of a plasma exchange— interesting— or, well, yeah, It's more of like a— yeah, the plasma exchange is called an exchange. It's not a replacement. You can do a full blood filtration. And anytime I've done anything like that, you feel incredible afterwards. But at the top of the totem pole for anything I've tried yet, because I did the follistatin gene therapy 2 years ago and put on 11 pounds of muscle just from this intramuscular— took 2 minutes— intramuscular injection in the shoulder. In Cabo. Um, and, and this is overseen by a company called Mini Circle. They make Klotho now that will help out with neural degradation, and they're developing one for your own testosterone production. So gene therapy is another area that's, that's interesting. It's all reversible. But the top of the totem pole was something I did in Texas like 7 months ago, and I'm taking my wife back down to visit this clinic at the end of December. It's not plasma replacement or— I'm sorry, it's not therapeutic plasma exchange, it's plasma replacement therapy. And for this, what I did was they pull out some of your old plasma the same way that they do with a therapeutic plasma exchange, but instead of putting albumin and vitamins and minerals back into your body, I literally had 10 1-liter bags of 18-year-old human healthy male donor plasma dripped back into my body. And I walked out of that clinic after 3 days, and Texas is the only state where this is legal to do. I felt like super, and then the results have persisted, just like sleep and brain function, just like felt like what you'd expect from doing something like that. It sounds kind of like vampirish, but I mean, these people get paid to donate plasma. It's all filtered. It's all screened. Yeah, it's still a little bit of a fringe procedure. But that one of like anything that I've done is something I like mentally. Oh gosh, if I didn't do anything but just did like this every year, interesting, just feel incredible.

You know, I can't— Laird is— his testosterone is quite good, but— and he won't— and I feel like because of his, you know, in pursuit still, I have often thought about, you know, him doing hormone replacement therapy. Like, I'm like, you know, you might want to consider but maybe something like that he'd be more open to. Or even that gene therapy sounds sort of interesting.

Yeah, because just, I mean, obviously testosterone is a lot easier to, to get your hands on and do. Um, but it would depend.

I think for him, he doesn't like the idea of something every week all the time. Yeah. And so I, I sort of think that it depends on what you want for rejuvenation and vitality and where you're at, right?

So This is where quantification comes in, right? Anybody that I work with, they do a blood test, they do a saliva test, urine test, stool tests, DNA test, and sometimes there's like a few extra tests that I'll throw in based on their symptoms. So I have them work with their doctor, their clinic, to get those tests. They bring me the results, I go over them. And for some people, fatigue might be endocrine issues, right? Like, like testosterone, or in a woman, low progesterone, or estrogen-progesterone imbalances, or sometimes low testosterone.. And for some people, it might be mineral deficiencies. And for some people, it might be some type of anemic condition due to a copper deficiency. Or this is less common than most people think. Iron deficiency is usually not the cause. It's copper deficiency most of the time. And in other people, it might be some kind of psychosomatic piece, you know, lack of purpose. In other people, it might be like parasite, yeast, fungus, Lyme, mold. So So, you know, if you've got somebody with testosterone levels that are just fine, you know, let's say Laird fits into that category, but he were to get tested and maybe he's got like some gut dysbiosis and some kind of like an impaired methylation pathway or some type of like, you know, um, you know, neurological genetic risk, he would be choosing a whole different lineup than somebody who just needs to get on testosterone. Yeah, that's a great point. It depends quite a bit.

Well, this brings me to— you have taken on a new endeavor with your health. I mean, you've— it's, it's amazing. And then when I hear you talk, it's, it's such an opportunity for people to, to kind of explore their health in a different way. Um, maybe just share, where did you get the inspiration from to sort of combine your life with your quest and then create a space to share it with other people where they can gather and basically have these, you know, high-level retreats.

I host a few retreats. I actually have one next week where I have like 20 guys coming to my house. Yes, biohack, and they mastermind. Yeah, lead circles, and we talk about relationships and health. And, you know, we do like roundtables where they've got questions about their labs and their blood work, and it's kind of like group coaching for an intensive 4 or 5 day experience. And I do, or I have been doing a couple of those a year, just like for private masterminds, and it's usually all dudes, right? And my wife leaves and just goes and finds a cool hotel to stay in.

And so do they have their blood work done? Like, because when you— I hear you talk about blood work, I know for a lot of people it's like they get the blood work and it's sort of like, now what? Yeah. So do they do this specifically to come before? And if they are, do you sort of say, hey, I'd like— could you just get these 3 or 4? What does that look like?

For these, what I do is typically I'll make a recommendation on just like a basic, pretty advanced blood channel. Like, um, I use Rupa Health that I'll send people to where if they can't go through their doctor, they can order a lab through Rupa Health. And like, if you were to Google like Ben Greenfield recommended lab tests, it would pull up. And, um, one of the blood tests that's like a little bit more advanced than the basic blood test that your doctor would order for you is called a cardiometabolic profile. So it just tests for some extras that might not be on a complete blood count and comprehensive metabolic panel that your doctor root order. And some of the guys will just do something like that. Others will just like— they're already working with a concierge doctor and they've got all this stuff, or they're just like a little biohacker and they have, you know, reams of data and a whole Dropbox folder full of stuff. So it's tricky because like part of my job, part of what I still do, is even though I hung up the hat on running brick-and-mortar personal training studios and gyms and working one-on-one with people when my sons were born— we were talking about this before we recorded— and that's when started a podcast, moved into the house, and basically working from my boxers on a laptop. The one-on-one work that I do now is mostly over the phone with people. So, I'm still doing 10 to 12 phone calls a week where it's all just talking about blood work and labs and fitness goals and the workout and the diet. And I also coach 8 people where I'm just working one-on-one with these executives or actors or people who want me to actually write out their diet and their workout. So I've got like a good 30% of my life is still just like coaching and helping people out. So which I like, I like having that touch point.

Well, do you think it also keeps you tuned up?

So you're saying I have to be on top of my game because I'm just fielding questions all the time. So when I have a whole bunch of guys and we've got like an hour and a half lunchtime chat carved out for blood work, what happens is some guy will throw out a question like, hey, you know, I've got like my free to total testosterone ratio looks like "Should I be concerned? What should it be at?" And then, what I have to do kind of creatively, and I do this a lot of times when I'm doing Q&As at events is someone will ask a question about the strange right growth, the strange growth on their right forearm, for example, and you have to somehow make that relatable to the rest of the audience. So then, you just start talking about skin health in general. So, I'll take a question like that from a whole bunch of guys and we're not doing one-on-one consults, we're talking about that one person specific issue at the table, but instead I'll figure out how to make this applicable to all the guys. Okay, so let's talk about testosterone panels and what should your total TB and what should your free TB and what other elements like estrogen and DHT do you look at? And so I'll just kind of like twist the question to make it helpful for a lot of people. So that's how I'll do like group, right, Q&As or group work.

What are most people getting wrong? Like, I know everyone is so different and you have all these different types of people, but what are the buckets that you go So this is pretty, this is pretty basic stuff. And a lot of people, even smart people, are getting it wrong.

So what people are getting wrong? Um, gosh, that's such a good question.

And, you know, I, because my number one, one of my number one things I'm so fascinated is if you haven't grown up in a house with it and you maybe didn't come through sport and you didn't learn how, like, feeling good was, what was, was important. How the conversation is that we have to convince people to make health almost a value. Yeah. And I think somebody said to me once, it's like they think they have so much time, like, oh, I'll do it Monday, right? Um, but I'm just curious because you, you touch and talk to so many people, and I, and I often see that they're majoring in the minors. Yeah.

Like, I'll tell you this stuff, I'll tell you like the top— I'll say like the top 3 things that I deal with just like as a coach with clients over and over again. Yeah. Um, and some of them are just like painfully obvious. Or is it mostly men? Yeah, I'm like 80% dudes. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of strange because I used to coach, it would almost be 50/50. It seems like as I get older, it seems like more men. I don't know if that's just— yeah, I don't, I don't know why.

I think men consume that hacking content more than I think so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tinker and engineer the body. Yeah, of course. So I would say that if we were just to pick 3, number 1 would be, hey Ben, I'm sorry, I've been traveling for the past 10 days, so I've really gotten off the program. I haven't been working out. I feel like I'm really not hydrating and I've been eating out a lot and eating out of bags. I'm on the road all the time, and most of these people know they're supposed to tell me when they're going to travel, and I just tweak everything on their program for them. But you still hear this over and over again, and there's— that's the first mistake people make, is that you have to have just like this perfect little routine that's just soup to nuts set up minute by minute to be able to get healthy, and then if you travel, all that just kind of goes out the window. Window. When I travel, I match my routine as much as possible. So, even though that might mean at home I have a red light panel, when I travel I have the sunlight. At home, I have a PMF mat. When I travel, I'm outside barefoot. At home, I've got a gym. When I travel, I've got 2 pounds. I have BFR bands, I have an elastic band, and I have a doorframe suspension strap. And, I don't care where I'm at in the world, in the tiniest little place, if there's a door, I can have a great workout. Out. So, this idea that just everything goes out the window, same thing. I have my little Whole Foods list saved as a note on my phone and it's coconut yogurt, sardines, avocado, cold rotisserie chicken, some mustard, a little bit of dark chocolate, macadamia nuts, blueberries. And, that's just in my hotel room because I'll order it once my plane lands and I know that I'm going to be at my hotel on time. And, that's just waiting for me when I get there. And I don't have to have this whole excuse that, "Oh, all I could eat was whatever was at the minibar at the crappy kitchen downstairs in the hotel." First thing is people get thrown off by travel. And if you have systems in place, that really doesn't have to happen. Number 2 is very similar. I tweaked my knee, I tweaked my ankle, I tweaked my shoulder, I tweaked my elbow, I tweaked my neck. I can't work out today. You know this as an athlete. The idea of substitutes and getting in and doing anything and just the science behind contralateral training, training one side of the body makes the other side stronger. Yeah, 30%. Training legs makes the upper body strong. Yeah, surprising amount of contralateral training occurs. And I'm like, dude, your left hip is injured. You could do the entire workout that I have written for you and instead of doing barbell squats, you can do single leg right leg leg press or leg extension or leg curl or step-ups. I am injured all the time. You probably are too. I'm like the biohacker and the guy who trains, and right now I have a left toe injury. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, exactly. Just my biomechanics in the pool are all off. And so even that, there's certain things I can't do like sprint and strike the ground really hard with my left leg. There are always substitutions, right? There's, I mean, whether it's you can't lift weights at all and So you've got 45 minutes of HIIT on the elliptical trainer, or your hips are out and your knees are shot, so you're doing upper body training and some pool work. This idea though that you're injured and therefore you can't train, anybody— and you specifically said in your question, maybe people don't come from the athletic world. People who come from the athletic world know there are a variety of ways to stay fit through an injury because we're always injured. Injured. Um, so that would be number 2. And then number 3 would be the how much— and I think this is getting better— but how much mobility gets underplayed. Um, this is mine. I love to see this. I've seen like a surge of influencers who are doing mobility, but I literally have— so my, my routine is I get up, I put on Daily Audio Bible, and I play it at like 1.2x speed. Most of them are like 30 minutes long. And so I'll go downstairs, I'll have my glass of water, I head straight out to the gym not to work out. I like to ease myself into the day. I'm working out at 8:30 AM. But, the entire time that Audio Bible is on, I'm foam roller, massage gun, massage ball, stretches. I'm on the PEMF mat doing leg lifts and bridges and twisting legs back and forth and just hitting any body parts that's tight. So, by the end of the week, I've got like 90 minutes of mobility work amassed. My philosophy, and this is kind of linked or yoked to the Ancestral Mismatch Theory. So, my philosophy is that at the drop of a hat, any point during the day, I want to be able to move, I want to be able to exercise. And sometimes, I don't even have the time to hit the gym, but I'm like weighted vest, walking treadmill, kettlebell on the floor of the office, pull-up bar in the door of the office. But as a part of that, like making young muscle, like working out cross-links and fascial adhesions and introducing blood flow and enhancing lymph and all those things that you can do at the beginning of the day, especially with age, is not only great for staving off the injuries that we were talking about earlier, but it is such a game changer in terms of how you move and how athletic you stay with age and how good you feel when you do hit the gym and how much time you have when you hit the gym and you have like 50 minutes carved out for a workout, but it's really a 35-minute workout because you've got like 15 minutes of stretching and trying to get the body ready first. So I just have that non-negotiable 15 minutes every single morning, whether I'm traveling, you know, where I've got my little tools when I travel, or whether I'm at home. So I'd say the top 3 would be, um, getting unhealthy when you travel and having travel being an excuse for that, and then not working out if you're injured because the workout can't be perfect, and not carving out time, like calendaring systematically on a daily basis this mobility.

I'm gonna have to borrow your third one because I, I am really guilty of that. Um, I, I know you have your own routines. Is there a person you like in that space for someone who's like, you know, gonna start unpeeling the onion? First answer is painfully obvious.

That's Kelly. Yeah. Um, I love Kelly. So his stuff, you know, Becoming a Supple Leopard was like the Bible in my foam roller room for a while. You know, I like— I love Joe Miller as well. Yep. Jill Miller is really good.

You know, it's like for people who it's like, where do I start?

Athlean-X on YouTube. I forget his name. Um, he's got really good content. And then, um, he's a little bit more fringe and almost like a little bit too stretchy, but he honestly has some really good protocols. Elast— it's called like Elastaboy. Okay. On Instagram. He's just got like some good stretches that you wouldn't have thought of. Um, those would be some of the biggies. Another guy, John Rusin, he's pretty good. He's like a Pain-Free Performance. He's got an app called Unbreakable. Yeah, like, and I just, I'll just like borrow from the best and string my own programs together. And I've got like 2 or 3 new moves that I'm learning every week and just like adding to my mental library of stretches. So now there's pretty much not a body part that can't be beat up that I don't know how to address. Without the assistance of a massage therapist. Yeah. And I still get a massage once a month.

That's great.

Yeah, let's talk a really, really deep— a deep, a painful one, the one that's not really a massage. Funny story, so get this. So my massage therapist right now, like, he, he's probably like the guy that goes deeper than anybody I've ever worked with. It's like surgery without anesthesia. Yeah. Like, um, yeah, I'm to the point now where I will have an edible before you have to get worked up. I will have like a 10-milligram THC edible before I dive in. Yeah. Um, and, uh, just to relax. And he goes super deep, and he says, just like, oh, Elbow is like, from minute one, you're just like ready to do breathwork for 2 hours. And my wife's never been treated by him, and he came over, and, um, my wife greeted him at the front door. He's like— and as we're walking out to the massage room, he's like, hey, would you think your wife would want a massage? Like, she seems kind of interested because she was talking with him about his work. And I'm like, yeah, just like, you know, give her a massage after me. So as he's finishing work on me, and I'm like, just still tears in my eyes, for— I go, you know, my wife really appreciates like deep tissue work like this. Like, she, she would just love like exactly what you just did with me. Yeah, she's like one of those deeper the better person, so So she comes in after me and then so we have family dinner afterwards and she comes in and she just makes this noise when she comes in the door for dinner. She's like, "Oh." I'm like, "How'd it go, babe?" And she's like, "I felt so embarrassed for him. I told him I don't usually curse like that, but Ben, I was just like, motherfucker, the whole time." And I'm like, "Huh. Yeah, I told him you'd probably like his work.

Oh yeah, people don't— I mean, when you have somebody who goes deep, yeah, and trying to relax into that stuff, that's like a whole going somewhere. Like, goes to sleep. That's how he deals with it.

He's like, I felt bad for him. I'm sure he thought I was just like this nice Christian mommy. And you're dry needling?

Yeah, like the real kind.

Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah, I had it with that gal you hooked me up with.

Oh yeah, Angie. She's— it's no joke. Yeah. As somebody who really is involved? Because you're, for me, you're one of the people that if I had a question about what's coming, for me, you're definitely the person I would call. Is there anything that you see that you think maybe could be really supportive of what we're dealing with, with our health? Is there, or is it still kind of the basic things that we all know, but that we're all trying to look for a different secret.

Yeah, I think, I think there's, there's something to be said for the basics. And then I think, um, here's one interesting example, because a lot of people that listen to us, they might kind of fit into the category of over-hackers, like kind of doing too much. Like, you gotta do the red light bed and the cold plunge and the sauna and the workout and all the things. And you can actually get to the point where and we talked about this even a little bit in the sauna. I don't remember if you were in there, but like the concept of energy leakage. I appreciate it. And creation of excess reactive oxygen species, specifically at a mitochondrial level, and a loss of mitochondrial efficiency, a degradation. It's almost like, you know, fasting is good for autophagy and cellular cleanup, and then you can get to the point where you get too much cellular cleanup. This is why, you know, a lot of popular supplements aren't for everyone. Like a young growing anabolic person, you wouldn't want to give them one of these sexy new like anti-senescent clean up the zombie cells type of supplements because you want young people with zombie cells and senescent cells. And you get to a certain age where you want to limit those. When you're young, you want a lot of that. Another example of that would be like taking a lot of antioxidants after exercise or hitting the cold pool after exercise for a long time. Yes, research has shown that high amounts concentrated antioxidants post-workout can blunt the inflammatory response to the point where you don't get the same amount of mitochondrial building or satellite cell proliferation or what you'd be looking for from the workout. And you could say the same thing about cold plunging. With cold plunging, the problem is, is that most of the research is 10 to 20 minutes of cold plunging. And there's a lot of people not doing their post-workout 2-minute cold plunge because because they're extrapolating the research where you're dropping the muscle temperature by more than 1 degree Celsius, which is like deep shivering level. Like, anything besides that is not going to limit your gains, bro. You know, by— most people who say that just don't like to get in the cold. Get in the cold. Um, but that completely flips when you're old. Like, once you're about 50 to 60 years old, your level of antioxidant, like endogenous antioxidant production, decreases to the point where You taking antioxidants post-workout is good for you. You doing a longer cold plunge after workout is good for you. So, we can't apply a lot of this stuff to all people in the same way. But back to the reactive oxygen species overhacking piece, you can now— and this is kind of like a brand new thing back to what's coming down the pipeline or what's cool, you can now quantify your mitochondria. So, meaning you can look at the entire mitochondrial network and how well mitochondria to each other. Mitochondrial efficiency, how well your mitochondria do with reactive oxygen species, whether they're having to deal with too much, whether you're like overdoing the hormesis piece that we talked about earlier. Um, I just found this test that like they just launched it a few weeks ago. It's called ME Screen. Um, I think ME stands for mitochondrial efficiency. Um, so I think that's going to be kind of cool and eye-opening for a lot of people when it comes to to like the peak performance people who want to know if they're doing too much or too little. The only other way to test your mitochondria is you can do a salivary test of one part of the mitochondria, the electron transport chain. That's all that existed up to this point.

So that's amazing. I'm— I don't own the company.

No, I, I know, I love that. It's pretty cool.

You must have the most— I mean, we get a lot of stuff coming here, this, to our house, but you must get the really the stuff showing up at your house.

This week delivered. I think I was telling you about this. So, the only issue with the red light bed, it's not a huge issue because you're only on there for 20 minutes, but you're laying on a giant motor that's running the thing that's just churning out massive amounts of EMF while you're laying in the red light bed. So, this company figured out how to disentangle all that from underneath the bed so the electrical control is separate from the bed so you're not laying on top of it. And then, they added a cannula where you're inhaling hydrogen the whole time that you're in the bed. What brand is that? Lumati LG-10. Yeah. It's the same company that I originally met them because they do, they oversaw that blood filtration in Mexico. Yeah. And then, they have a San Diego biohacking facility on the San Diego side where you kind of go there and biohack for a few days before you go to Mexico. If you want to get serious, you go to Mexico. Down there, they show me the designs for this bed. Yeah, that is sick.

Um, that is amazing.

Going in the wooden crate soon.

So, and you may not know the answer to this, this is like a genuine curiosity question for me. Um, you know, given what we've all come through from 2020, whether people got COVID or got vaccinated, whatever, you know, we were talking about the spike protein earlier, but the vaccines have SV40 in them, and I know that that might be an issue for people a little bit in their ongoing health. Is there anything that you've seen, whether people have long COVID or whatever the million, you know, end results are, is there anything else that's out there that can be supportive of people who maybe are now navigating some things as a residual effect of any one of those scenarios?

Yeah, I mean, absence of just like filtering out spike protein, you know, via, you know, the smaller version, which would be ozone plasmapheresis or therapeutic plasma exchange, or the bigger version, which would the filter that's designed to do that. It's called a— I don't remember the manufacturer of the filter that they use down in Mexico, but the company that did the procedure was Lumati. But, there's a certain Seraph, S-E-R-A-P-H. That's the filter that was actually designed with the medium to remove spike protein. But, beyond that, if you look at the idea that this is vascular damage, we were talking about the tragic incident of the football player that passed away earlier today. You know, a lot of those cardiomyopathies are based on the vascular damage caused by the spike protein, right? So if you look at the vasculature, anything that would improve the health of what's called the endothelial glycocalyx, which is like the lining of the arteries. It's interesting that a big part of this lining of the vasculature, really all the vasculature, a big part of the health of the endothelial glycocalyx is adequate sulfur, right? So if you look at like glutathione and sulfur intake, and then what strips sulfur from the body— and Dr. Stephanie Seneff has some interesting research on this— is glyphosate, herbicides, pesticides, etc. So you kind of create like this vicious scenario where if you're eating crappy food and especially getting a lot of glyphosate exposure, spike protein exposure might even be be worse for you. So, um, there are— there's a variety of things. There's like algal extracts and sulfur extracts. Um, one company, uh, Calroy, they have something called, um, Arterosil, A-R-T-E-R-O-S-I-L. And that's, that's like an example, um, if you were to like look at the back of the bottle of the type of ingredients that would help with endothelial glycocalyx Sport. Nitric oxide would be another one. You know, there's guys like Dr. Nathan Bryan who have really good like sublingual nitric oxide lozenges. That same company, Calroy, they have, uh, Vascanox, which is a nitric oxide precursor. You know, a lot of guys will be on like a baby dose of tadalafil or sildenafil, um, which, you know, usually for like sexual performance, that's like 10 milligrams plus. But just for like nitric oxide as like a preventive method, it was originally a blood pressure— a little pro-life pressure drug, right? 5 milligrams is like a prophylactic for, for, um, high blood pressure. So anything that's going to help with nitric oxide, anything that's going to help with the endothelial glycocalyx. And then I would say the best book out there from a functional medicine standpoint for Long COVID is Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum's book, and I don't remember the name of it, but he's T-E-I-T-E-L-B-A-U-M. And he's like the GOAT when it comes to— I'll put it on the vasculature and COVID.

Okay. I have two more questions for you. You don't deal with a lot of women. I deal— talk with a lot of women. Perimenopause, menopause. Is there anything that from your view, looking outside, looking in, and I know you can— you're a guy, it's fine. I'm asking you. I'm more asking from perspective that you see that isn't being talked about enough or that you'd be like, hey ladies, I think about this.

I mean, probably the biggest shock for me this year was seeing the data on cardiovascular complications and heart disease that sets in, in perimenopause or postmenopause, and like the huge importance of heart health for women. And that, in my opinion, goes beyond standard lipid panel testing. Um, I used to say that I think it's a really good idea for most guys, especially those with pre-existing cardiovascular disease or family history of cardiovascular disease, to do a Cleerly scan. Um, it's basically like a calcium scan score, but they use software called Cleerly to be able to better visualize like where plaques might be and the percentage of blockage that could occur. So CT angiography, uh, subjects you to a decent amount of radiation, but doing something like that, you know, every 3 years or so to check in on heart health— if I were a woman somewhere around perimenopause or postmenopause, I would consider a, a CT angiography. And this is in addition— this is assuming you're already doing like a really good lipid panel that looks at not just like LDL, HDL, but the lipid size, particle size, triglycerides, etc. And then because of the amount of radiation a CT angiography subjects you to, continued CIMTs after that. So CIMT is super quick diagnostic, pain-free, uh, like takes 5 minutes, ultrasound, uh, bilateral on the neck. It's a carotid intima-media thickness score, and it can correlate with pretty good accuracy to the type of plaque that might be accumulating in the heart. So for me, I do a CIMT every 6 months, I do a CT angiography every 3 years. And now I think— I don't think all women need to do that, but perimenopause, postmenopause, based on— what I've seen recently as far as heart attack risk going up at that stage, it's something I would consider as like a, like a medical diagnostic procedure for sure.

Okay, I love that. All right, this is the last question. EMFs, okay, blue light, all this stuff, you have been taking this head-on, at least at your house. And again, people are gonna be like, that's so extreme. I don't care. I want them to know, yeah, that it's a— it's somehow manageable, or there's things out there So you decided, okay, we're, we're gonna fortify. Yeah. And it's funny because your job is online and all these things, so you have to deal with it.

Yeah. So what have you done? What did I do personally? All right, well, I'm going to focus on what I did. Yeah. Because this, this could be like an hour-long response. So what I did was, and I realized this is, this is not doable for everybody because we had to build this house, but but all of the wiring is metal shielded. All of the internet is hardwired with Cat 8 metal shielded Ethernet cable and multiple Ethernet ports and nice long cables in every room. So you can plug anything in, including my wife has one behind the side of her bed. I have one behind the side of my bed and there's a little Ethernet to USB-C adapter. So even our phones can be plugged into the internet. So our phones are in airplane mode. And they're just hardwired in if we want to have our phones in bed. Whole house dirty electricity filter to limit the amount of AC power surges. Every floor is lined with copper underneath the flooring all the way up to the third floor. So, anywhere you're at in the house, it's the equivalent of earthing or grounding outdoors assuming that you don't have your shoes on. So, all the flooring is earthed, grounded, and then icing on the cake, and we went with this guy from a company called Shielded Healing. We had a building biologist go through every single room and test after it was built, and he found things like crossed wires and areas that the electrician hadn't done up properly. So then we even did a post-analysis after that with the building biology walkthrough, and the end result is like you walk into the house and it just feels like this quiet cave. It's incredible, just like how clear you feel. What do I feel like when I go home after travel? It's just like detox sanctuary. Yeah.

And okay, your light bulb. So let— because there's a lot of people, let's say they live in an apartment building, it is what it is, right? So you can do what you can do, but even— but your light bulbs make a difference.

Your light bulbs make a difference. Oh, and I should say, like, the biggest, or one of the biggest things with the electricity was like, even after we fixed everything, we would be like next to like air filters and things that plugged into the wall and whatever, like the Pulse Center's PEMF. And as soon as you got by the cable, it was like, "Vvvv." So we figured out almost nobody shields their cables. So after doing multiple analyses like this, the guy at Shielded Healing actually just developed a bunch of cables for almost any use and any size and any number of prongs. We just replaced all of our cables. Amazing. So just like two giant boxes out in the garage with all the old cables and replaced them with the new ones that are fully shielded cables. So that's another one a lot of people don't think about. Then the lighting, because a lot of the smart lighting is high EMF like Philips Hue, and yes, those can be adjusted for circadian friendliness and for low flicker, but they're high EMF. We went with a company called Block Blue Light, and it's a bulb. It's called the full spectrum bulb. You flip the light on once and it goes daytime. You flip it on again, it goes twilight. You flip it on again, it goes evening. And then because because even that type of bulb doesn't fully simulate the full spectrum of sun that you get outdoors. At our main dining room table, we have incandescent. And that combined with incandescent, like those OLED bulbs combined with incandescent gives us the closest we can get to sunshine in the main living area of the house.

So, it's really nice. Ben, I really appreciate you and your deep curiosity. And I could talk to you forever. I'm really excited to see— the last time we spoke, you said, I'm Navigating going from a warrior to a wizard. You did. But I think, I think, uh, it's, it's the combination of both that you're taking on now because it's, it's certainly you've got your own physical practice and you're doing all these things that a lot of people can learn from, but it is, you know, sort of the family piece, the spiritual piece, um, and reminding people, you know, it is that rounding out. So I really appreciate that. Maybe just direct people all the places they can find you even though It's pretty easy to find you.

I mean, uh, just Google my name, BenGreenfieldLife.com. Yeah.

And if— and your book, and I've said this before because— and I do have it here— is like a textbook. So if anybody really wants to go deep, uh, Boundless is, is really— it's a book you can go back to over and over. You did an incredible job.

Yeah, there's brand, brand new updated version out on Amazon. Okay, there you go.

Red cover instead of a blue cover. I did see that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Ben Greenfield, thank you.

All right, cool. Thanks, Gabby.