Joe Rogan Experience #1069 - Ben Greenfield

Pack goats are supposed to be amazing. They hang out with you.

Yeah.

5, 4, 3, 2. Ben Greenfield, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, yo. So it's been a lot of fun hanging out with you for the last 44 minutes.

That's a sick game you have out there.

Yeah, it's pretty fun, right?

I need to build a really, really big, like, 67-yard-long living room to put my big screen in now.

Yeah, that thing is crazy. This— we're talking about this game called Techno Hunt that we were just playing. So dude, you, you are an interesting fucking guy. You do a lot of weird shit.

No, Thank you, I think.

Yeah, no, it's good. Yes, it's a compliment when I say it. Yeah, interesting is a good thing. But you're like, your background, you were just telling me, this is very fascinating. Like, you, you live way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere.

Well, it's kind of, I mean, it's Spokane, right? Spokane, I mean, we have like a theater off the grid and we have restaurants. Yeah, there are actual people there, restaurants. Yeah, there's a theater, there's a little five-and-dime store and a general store.

Spokane's a normal place. It's pretty normal. You're totally You guys are off the grid?

Well, up at our house we are. We're solar panels and well. And the way I have it set up is we eased in power from the local municipal power, but if that goes out, then it hits the solar inverters and we're full solar. So, and then there's like a battery panel in the garage that stores the solar, 'cause we're on like a north-facing slope. So you get sun from 10 to 2. Right, right. So we can't collect a lot of solar, but you store it in the battery, so it's there.

So you gotta be very judicious with your laptop use.

Yeah, well, we— If you wanna go off the grid, totally. It's a stupid home. So there's no Wi-Fi, there's no Bluetooth. So everything's like, it's hardwired metal shielded Ethernet cable. That's through the whole house. 'Cause I don't like to have Wi-Fi signals bouncing around. Really? I just don't, I don't feel good.

I've always wondered about that. Like, what is that doing to us?

Well, apparently— I actually just read, there's a really good new book that came out. It's called like, The Non-Tinfoil Hat Guide to EMF. I think is the full title of the book. But it goes into this idea of what are called voltage-gated calcium channels on your cell membrane and how those actually get affected by Wi-Fi. And apparently you see like a change in the electrochemical balance across the actual membrane in response to things like Wi-Fi. Apparently Bluetooth affects red blood cells. And I haven't seen a lot of like actual in vivo research on that, but I know that I feel better when I don't have like the Wi-Fi router going or, you know, I turn off all my, all everything at night. There's kill switches in all the bedrooms. So it's, you walk into the house and it's just super clean. You know, everything's HEPA air filters, negative ion generators, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. We structure all the water that comes in from the well. So it's the same. It's got like that, have you heard of structured water before?

Yeah, I've just heard about it. 'Cause Eddie Bravo just got that installed in his gym.

Yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean, the idea behind it, there's this, this cat up at University of Washington named Dr. Gerald Pollack, and he has done this research that shows, like, in plants or vessels, like blood vessels for example, there's an exclusion zone of water. I mean, there's like a positive charge on the inside and a negative charge on the outside. And that might be backwards, might be positive on the outside, negative on the inside, but either, either way, it causes fluid to move through vessels in a way that allows it to move more easily, like, like the water is actually charged. So apparently when you drink structured water, it hydrates the cell a little bit better. Huh.

Yeah. Sounds like it might be.

That's apparently how water moves through plants.

That's one of those things that you hear and then like you talk to a scientist and they go, "No!" Yeah. And they get mad, so I don't know.

Well, I interviewed that guy Gerald Pollack, and he has compared, basically what he's compared is like how it moves in glass tubes and how if you structure it and you watch it, like the water moves up through the glass tube way, way better. And then I interviewed this guy Thomas Cowan. And he talks about how the heart is not really a pump or doesn't act as much like a pump as we're led to believe. And so if you, if you drink structured water, apparently the blood moves better through the vessels. So I haven't seen a ton of research on it, but I structure my water just because it's cheap. It's like a, it's like this tiny little like plastic piece that you put on, on your, on your water.

What exactly is it doing?

So the water passes through a series of glass beads, like it vortexes it So after it, so it comes out of my well and I've got, I tested my water and I've got like a bacteria-based iron and high levels of manganese. Like I thought well water was just all like pristine, clear, like, you know, like if you drink out of a spring on top of a mountain. But apparently there's crap in the well water. So I filter it and then after it all filters, it passes through the structured water filter.

I would imagine that you would get some stuff in the water because if somewhere along the line there's like a dead animal or beaver fever, Yeah, there's dead animals all over my house, just piled everywhere, carcasses.

But I mean, you know, very careful. No, but outside the woods— well, then the other thing is like what I get concerned about is, you know, you see like glyphosate and herbicides and pesticides, they get spread all over the crops. And I live in farmland territory, right? So I'm on this north-facing slope and there's all like these farms above me. So I figure if that's dropping down through the ground into that water, I might be getting some of it. So I filter.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I know a guy who got bone cancer because he lived off of a golf course, and, uh, the golf course is constantly spraying stuff on the golf course, and it got into the water supply, and a bunch of people—

how do they know that?

Give him bone cancer?

Oh really? Like it happened to more people?

Yeah, a ton of people in the neighborhood got cancer.

Wow.

Yeah, that's scary.

That's crazy. No, what I tell people is, um, like people who don't have a well and who just live off the municipal water supplies, you use a reverse osmosis water filter. 'cause it's a really, really fine filtration, but it takes everything out. Like it takes the bad stuff and the good stuff out. So you wanna add minerals back in after you filter the water. So you get a reverse, and you could buy these on like Amazon. So like a reverse osmosis filter with what's called remineralization, or you can just use reverse osmosis and then use like trace liquid minerals or sea salt or anything else that add electrolytes back in your water.

I know a lot of people put like a pinch of Himalayan salt in their water.

Yeah, I go through so much salt. I use this stuff called Mexican salt. Kalema salt. I was actually at a steakhouse last night. People make fun of me because I pull out my big white bag of salt and I just sprinkle it on everything. But I'm a fiend for salt. I love salt.

It's very good for you. And unfortunately, there's been a terrible myth that's been perpetrated a long time ago that salt gives you high blood pressure and kills you. And that's a real tragedy because that's one of those ones that it was spread in like probably, what was it, the '60s or the '70s when they started telling people that salt causes high blood pressure?

I have no clue.

People still repeat it today and they don't understand it. It's an essential mineral.

Well, there's a, there's a new book out about this. I forget the name of the book about salt. Have you heard of this book? Yeah, I've heard of the book, but I don't know the name of it either. But it depends too, because, um, I used to do racing for Team Timex. I used to do these Ironman triathlons and they'd bring people in to test us and they would do sweat sodium analyses where you actually get a patch put on your skin and it measures the amount of sodium released over X surface area of skin. And then there's an algorithm that determines like how much total sweat you lose, say per hour during exercise, and some people lose a copious amount of sodium in their sweat, and some lose barely any at all. So you have like a sodium conservation mechanism that differs from person to person. So there might be some people who store salt really well who might actually get higher blood pressure if they consume a lot of salt.

So if you have a massive excess of salt in your diet.

Yeah, my numbers were off the charts though in terms of how much sodium I was losing, which is probably why I feel so good.

Well, that makes sense. You're sweating so much, right? I mean, it's just going right through your body. Now, going back—

Plus it tastes amazing. Yeah, I'm happy to die of high blood pressure just because the salt just makes it taste funny.

I know, I'm a big fan.

I love kosher salt. They used to pay— didn't they pay like Roman soldiers in salt? Sure.

Oh yeah, people went to war for salt. Yeah, yeah, they used to carry—

I'd take salt.

I mean, it's really kind of amazing that it was just less than 200 years ago that they figured out how to like make refrigerators, you know? I mean, what was a refrigerator from the 1930s? I think it was when they first invent those things. And then before that, they had ice boxes. You'd have to get a chunk of ice from somewhere, right?

I have to get it to store stuff. And before that, they just use salt. Yeah. And I've heard— I don't know if this is true, but I heard that if you come from an area, like, if your ancestry is from an area where they did a lot of that fermenting, pickling, curing, salting, that you have more robust sodium loss mechanisms. Like, which would make sense for me, like, I'm Northern European heritage. They did a lot of, like, pickling, salting, curing. So I would lose more salt than somebody who might have come from, let's say, like a sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian or somewhere where they might not have been using so much salt.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah. So this Wi-Fi thing, I want to go back to that, um, because I've always wondered— there's, there's not a long history of use of human use of Wi-Fi. And one of the things—

it sounds so— stem cells we're talking about, right? There's not a lot of, a lot of studies on that either.

90-year-old dudes running around, they've been doing stem cells. Exactly. Yeah. But the Wi-Fi Like when it sounds hippie dippy, but if you go somewhere like Prince of Wales, Alaska, and you're on a mountaintop, it feels different.

Oh, totally.

There's no radio, there's no Wi-Fi, there's no DirecTVs getting to you. There's nothing. And that it feels different up there.

Yeah. Well, you're also, I mean, like you're grounding and earthing, right? And you're, you're, you're breathing a lot more negative ions because you're outside in the fresh air and You don't have all the emails jumping out from your inbox. There's a lot of confounding variables, but I mean, all I know— and I test— you ever tested heart rate variability? No. Like it's the— do you know what that is, HRV? A lot of athletes use it. I've heard it, but I don't know much about it. What does it mean? It's the interbeat individuality, like the variation in the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. So it's not like how fast your heart is beating, it's how much time is in between each heartbeat. So you can measure that and you're supposed to have like slight beat-to-beat variation in how much time is between each heartbeat. And if you have that, that's high heart rate variability. So you can use that to track your readiness to train, your recovery, right? So I use, you know, I use like a ring like this, or I'll do like a heart rate strap in the morning. So Oura, Oura ring, actually. Have you heard of this thing? No, but dude, just going out of it, I got it out of a Cracker Jack box. It's a, it's a power, it's a power ring. It's a mood ring.

I have seen one of those. Someone, someone sent me something. They don't just use rings, right? There's like other methods of measuring measuring it as well?

Or just range? Oh, yeah. You can use a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor strap. That's what I used to do is you wake up in the morning, you put on the strap and you test your heart rate variability. And it tells you if it's low, you might say, "Okay. Well, today is going to be like a yoga day or an easy swim or a walk in the sunshine." And if it's high, then that would be a day where you'll do kettlebell training or a WOD or whatever it is that you're going to do. Really? And then the other thing you could use it for is you'll sometimes purposefully get it low. I have some athletes that I train where we'll work them into a state where they've got really low heart rate variability. And then what happens is you taper, right? Like, you recover, you rest, you supercompensate. So you see a bounce back of nervous system recovery, and you, you can use that to purposefully adjust the training.

Huh.

Yeah. And if you train through a low HRV for too long, you can predict illness, you can predict injury. So it's a cool way to, to track training. And you can even— you can look at, um, there's a high frequency and a low frequency. When you're saying you could predict illness and injury, like, meaning, meaning like my HRV is low, but screw it, I'm gonna go train anyways. And you do that day after day you get injured. And the weird thing is that you can have no musculoskeletal soreness, right? Because a lot of time that subsides, you know, delayed onset muscle soreness. You see that disappear after like 48 hours. And if you've crushed yourself— like, I— we can talk about this later if you want, but I've been doing single set to failure, right? Single set to failure exercises where it's just like a 15-minute long workout, but it's just full-on isometrics as hard as you can go for 60 seconds to 2 isometrics. Isometrics. So you're pushing against— it's a— it's like this force plate machine that you push against, and you just generate as much force as you can, and it ties to your iPhone, and it alerts you when you've dropped off 60% of what you're originally producing at the beginning of the set. And then that's it, set's done, game over. So you might do deadlift, squat, press, overhead press, pull-down, and that's the whole workout. And then you're just recovering in between each of those sets.

So this plate— I mean, how are you doing a deadlift with a plate?

It's a force plate. So for example, yeah, standing up, you'll have like a bar, okay, that you're holding on to, and the bar is attached to the force plate via two stands on either— like two pillars on either side the bar and you pull the bar and then the force plate detects how much force you're pulling.

In what position?

So let's say deadlift, you're standing on top of the force plate, right? You're supposed to choose the hardest position of each exercise.

So like halfway?

So if I'm, if I'm bench pressing, it's like my elbows are slightly bent, just near the top. Or squatting, it's like the knees are bent at about 30-40 degrees. So, so you get into that position, then you generate as much force as possible for 60 seconds or not. When I first did it, I was at 30 seconds. Now I can go a little bit over a minute where I can continue to generate as much force as possible before it drops off to just 60% of what I was originally producing. It's a, it's a cool, efficient way to train, but you don't get that sore afterwards, right? So musculoskeletal soreness is not a good indicator of recovery in many cases. And that's where this HRV thing comes in, is your nervous system, right? Your central nervous system, your neuromuscular system can be really beat up after a workout, even if the soreness has subsided. So that's where you use something like HRV and you can say, okay, well, I'm not sore, but my HRV is still low. So this is gonna be an easy day for me.

I'm sorry to act like a moron, but explain that one more time. So if you're— if your body is not sore but your HRV is low, it's— what is it showing? What's an indication of?

So if your body is not sore but your HRV is low, HRV is measuring your nervous system recovery, right? So, so you might not be fully recovered. So what I'm saying is like musculoskeletal soreness or discomfort is not necessarily the best indicator of whether you're fully recovered. You have to test the nervous system too.

That's so weird.

I'm hearing someone like an HRV measurement comes in, and coming full circle, I've noticed when I do those morning measurements and I'm traveling or I've got the Wi-Fi enabled at my house, my HRV is low. So it's affecting my nervous system somehow. Is the—

why do you think the Wi-Fi is a mindfuck? Do you think it's really doing something to you?

I think it's doing something, but then there's— in this room, there's a placebo effect. I feel it.

Do you feel this room?

I feel really— I feel See, that's—

I'm trying to feel it.

That's why you're a moron right now. You got the Wi-Fi going.

What's going on, Jamie? What do you got there?

HRV off of my— I, uh— Oh, you just— what'd you use? Did you use the fingertip? No, I have my Apple Watch.

Oh, what? The Apple Watch tests your HRV?

Yeah, so it's been doing it the whole time I've had it on. But it's paradoxical because the Apple Watch is making Wi-Fi.

Jesus Christ, you can't win.

It's so confusing. Goddamn it, Ben Greenfield. Yeah, no, that's what I was talking about. This, this ring, uh, I bought this in Finland like 3 years ago. Because I wanted like a body tracking device. I want to track my HRV and I want to track my sleep cycles, but I don't like sleeping all night because like I sleep with my kind of like my hand tucked down by my dick, you know, like in by my crotch. I don't want something just like—

sleep like this.

I kind of sleep on my side with my hands tucked like underneath me and they're— and literally like my right hand is right down around my balls basically while I'm sleeping. And I didn't want something just like blasting me. That makes sense. Sleeping. So yeah, so because if it was on my wrist or my finger or wherever, so this has like a built-in computer and you could put it in airplane mode and it'll still collect all the HRV data and everything else. Then when you want to take it out of airplane mode and sync it to your phone and upload all your sleep data or your HRV data or anything else, you can do it. So, but so that's, that's why I wear this ring instead of like a Fitbit or Jawbone or, or Jamie's stupid Apple Watch.

I never know whether or not I'm being ridiculous with this stuff. Stuff, like with worrying about phones being in your pocket. I mean, like, if you get butt cancer, you know, because some dude told me that once, that he got cancer. I think it was testicle cancer on his right side. And the guy was saying, do you keep your phone in your right pocket? He's like, yes, I do. And the doctor was telling him that. I was like, how the fuck does the doctor know? Like, this is not proven stuff. This is all real speculation, right?

I mean, it's tricky because, I mean, you could say about the bone cancer on the golf course, right? But a lot of people—

but I think there was a class action lawsuit there because I think they tested the water and there was whatever the fuck the stuff that they use for fertilizer or pesticides.

That's what I was telling you, I was concerned about the dick cancer thing because of the stem cells.

Right, well, you shot stem cells into your dick.

Well, for the past 3 months, Men's Health magazine just had me write this article called "New Year, New Dick." I'm serious, it's the issue with Marky Mark Wahlberg on the COVID How appropriate. Yeah, like how to make a small dick bigger, right? And you put Marky Mark on the COVID And now he can, he can beat me with his, with his 4-foot-tall fisticuffs. Anyways, though, so they had me go around doing everything that a guy could do to enhance sexual performance or increase the size of your dick or increase blood flow or increase orgasm quality. Or, you know, they just wanted to find out what everything from like fricking gas station dick pills to which, by the way, those things do not have in them what they say they have in them.

What do you think?

So they, you know, they say like epimedium and Eurocoma Long Jack and like horny goat extract. Yeah, it's basically frickin sildenafil, right? The active ingredient in Cialis or Viagra. And then ephedra and copious amounts of caffeine. So I would take these things and just literally feel like my head was going to explode. I mean, it's like drinking 10 cups of coffee.

Yeah, we have a friend of ours who predicted accurately that Jon Jones was taking those things when he pissed hot because he was like, those things have everything in them.

And he's like, "Jon Jones does coke?" He goes, "I guarantee you he's taking dick pills." They're actually pretty entertaining to read, 'cause it's all like the, it's like reading a Chinese fortune cookie. It's like maximum potency, vigora, and everything's spelled wrong. But the, so they had me doing that.

Did you do an analysis of the ingredients? Did you actually get it tested?

No, no. We went to all these labs, they wouldn't let us actually test, but apparently the FDA has tested them. And if you go to the fda.gov website, they have like these warnings out about the actual ingredients. Like the 5 that they had warnings about and tested them, and the dangerous ones. Yeah. And they, um, yeah, you don't feel well. You feel like your head's gonna explode and your hands get all cold and clammy. And some of them say that— I don't know why, but they say to take them in the morning, right? Which doesn't to me make sense, but you take them in the morning so you just feel completely screwed up like all day, the whole morning. It's like you're just mainlining coffee. So they did that. They did, um, have you heard of this like acoustic sound wave therapy for your dick? I'm serious.

I'm sure you are.

Okay, so I'm not even gonna answer. No, no, I have not. So this, this is a clinic Florida. It's called Gainswave. And you go down there, you go down there, and, and I walk in and the first thing they do is they hand me this like syringe full of numbing cream and I'm supposed to just like put it everywhere. And so I smeared it, you know, my balls, my— like I just went everywhere because I didn't really know what they were, what they were gonna do. And I wanted, I wanted all, all shields activated going into this thing. So I walk into the room and, and my dick's all numb. They had me lay down and so my legs are splayed. I'm on this exam room table and, and this gal comes in and she's got like this giant wand attached to a machine, and they do this for women too, by the way. They put like a condom on the end of it, and she just basically goes to town for like 20 minutes like a jackhammer. It was like brrr, like everywhere. Just around your dick, everywhere. For 20 minutes, supposedly, yeah. Everywhere. Supposedly it breaks open old blood vessels and builds new blood vessels, and once the numbing cream wears off, you're supposed to perform a lot better, and then they combine this You know how we were talking about like with your shoulder, if you inject it, you should do like electrostim or vibration or something to, to get the injection deeper into the tissue. Same thing, same thing with this. They do the PRP, so they do PRP into your dick and then they follow it up and you get, you get a nerve block first. I actually, I thought, I don't know why, I thought they put the needle just like right in the pee hole, which to me made sense, but yeah, but it doesn't really. I mean, you want it in the actual tit, so they actually go like up where the dick attaches, like the tissue at the top. They do two nerve blocks on either side. Side, and then the PRP. And later on, like a couple months later, they had me do stem cells. They actually extracted a couple months later from my back, and we did a stem cell injection. But this acoustic sound wave therapy, uh, with the PRP, like, it wears off, and you literally just like get boners all the time, like, like all night long for like a month.

So the acoustic sound therapy is supposed to be breaking up blood vessels?

Breaks open old blood vessels. Jamie found it.

Yeah, Gainswave procedure breaks up plaque formation in blood vessels and stimulates the growth of new blood vessels in the Venus.

Low-intensity extracorporeal shockwave therapy. That's going to sell a lot of, uh, of procedures.

I like the drawing. Before and after.

Before, your veins are all tired and skinny. Yeah, before it looks like a, like an old hunched over man, then all of a sudden, vigor.

It looks like a bodybuilder.

Yeah, I used to do bodybuilding.

So is that a horrible sport? Do you think it's real? Do you think that's really doing something?

It worked for me. Okay, it worked for me. In the, um, so yeah, they did the gas station dick pills, they did the acoustic sound wave therapy, but the acoustic sound wave therapy was the best. They had me do like the, uh, no, the stem cells were the best. Stem cells, stem cells. But I mean, not everybody's going to be able to do that, but that was the best bar none. Like, they— so I went down to Florida, and of course again, Florida, I don't know what it— I think it's because all the old people live in Florida. Florida's just crazy. It's like, it's barely Lauderdale. All the people like hunched over the steering wheels, but all the guys have great dicks. They can't drive They have their blinker on for like 2 miles before they turn, but their dicks are primed. So the, um, the stem cell thing was at the US Stem Cell Clinic in Florida, and I went in there and they extract all the fat. For me, they took the fat out of my back, and what they do is they, they have, um, it's called an enzymatic process where they use something that breaks down the collagen. In the fat, and then they have the stem cells that get separated from the fat. And apparently it's very, very high in these angiogenic, like, like vascular vessel-building, uh, compounds. And so then you get that reinjected. It's high in the, um, mesenchymal, the MSC, the MSC cells, which, which are supposedly the very good ones to inject in. So I injected those um, or I had a doctor in Spokane. So they shipped him to Spokane on ice, and they show up at my house at like 7 AM, right? Because you got to get them delivered same day. And then I have my appointment at the doctor at 9 AM, and I went to the doctor, and, you know, very— it was like déjà vu from Florida, right? Like I go in, do the numbing, you know, you're gonna do this. Oh yeah, it was kind of friends with the doctor. Yeah, yeah, there's a picture. I think there's a picture of him in the magazine because they put all sorts of crazy pictures in the magazine because they had me doing like infrared light on my balls. And, you know, like I have like this big thing called the Juve Light that they had me standing in front of every day.

Like, I jackknife.

Like, no, I'll tell you about the stem cells.

Okay, yeah, let's go one step at a time.

It's crazy. Um, so the, uh, the stem cells— I went to this doctor in Spokane and he injected these, these stem cells from my fat after they'd grown for like several— in this case, I think they were down there for like 8 weeks. But I mean, they can do same-day injections, but for me, I didn't have enough fat because for me it was right in the middle of— I raced professionally in obstacle course racing, so I'm just lean as hell as I go in there. So they could, they could barely get enough fat, so they had to grow them for a longer period of time. A lot of times they can inject same day. So I went into Spokane at this clinic in Spokane, Lanoue Integrative Clinic. It's like this osteopathic medical clinic with all these, you know, nice receptionists when you walk in the door. And this, this, this doctor who, he's done stem cell injections before, but he never actually injected them into someone's dick. So I was kind of like the guinea pig for that.

Do you have to explain to him what areas you're supposed to inject into?

He researched it, and I think he actually talked to the folks at the stem cell clinic. Beforehand to make sure that they were on that, on the same page. I don't want to fly all the way back down to Florida, right? That's super inconvenient, and it's just a dick. They'll make more someday. They're growing kidneys and ears. Yeah, they'll grow dicks someday. So, um, so I got it injected, and that was, um, first of all, it looked like it got like run over by a semi-truck for like 2 days. It was like all black and blue where the injection site was. Were you nervous? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I'd be super nervous. Like, what if I got infected?

It could have gotten infected. Oh, what if you got MRSA in your dick? Cancer. I've had MRSA, and I would not wish MRSA on your dick.

How'd you get MRSA?

Uh, a triathlon. I, I got it— this was at the, at the Wildflower Triathlon. Like, coming back, my flight got delayed, and I was covered in all these— because like an off-road triathlon, and I had all these scrapes and wounds. And I think, I think my layover was in Vegas. I don't remember where, but I had to check into a hotel. Flight got delayed, and I slept in this hotel room that I swear, like, there must have been something on the bed because within a few days, like, it was all, you know, it gets all nasty and cakey, and then it was eating a hole. I wrote a whole blog post about this on my website, and there you can see.

I need to see this.

Yeah, pull up the hole in the back of my leg. It's nasty.

Marissa scares the shit out of me.

Just search for, like, Ben Greenfield staph, and you'll see the pictures. But it was eating a hole in the back of my leg, and my kids roll now once a week, and I buy, uh, I get the defense soap from Onnit as soon as they come, as they come back in the door, I'd have them go into the shower upstairs.

Defense. Yeah, yeah, they have a bunch of different wipes and stuff for people that train in a place that doesn't have a, a shower. Yeah, you got to be careful.

That and Thieves essential oil. Like, it's like gonna— like, it's a whole bunch of companies make this version of essential oil called Thieves. It's like clove and— it's named after these thieves who apparently never— yeah, clove, cinnamon, eucalyptus, which is really good for staff, and rosemary. It's actually named— there's like this story of like these four thieves that apparently traveled around the world and they would rob homes and, and, and they never got sick. Like, that's basically the story. I'm sure this was, this was some board table at a multi-level marketing essential oils company. Somebody came up with this story. Yeah, or it could be true, I don't know. But the, um, yeah, the, the stem cells into the dick, that, that was an interesting one. But it did, um, I think from what I can tell looking in the mirror, it got bigger.

I'm pretty sure.

How much?

So half inch?

Oh, like maybe that much.

Like quarter inch?

Like enough to tell. And my erections got bigger and my orgasms got a lot better.

For how long?

They, they're still like that. Still?

Yeah.

So it fixed— so I think the stem cells kind of like stick with you. Whoa. Um, well, last week I got them— I told you I'm training for the RKC kettlebell cert, and I was doing the, the 100 reps in 5 minutes snatch test with the, with the 1.5 boot, and I felt something just go.

Go.

I was at 84 reps and I felt something go in my back. And I got stem cells injected all up and down my QL, my multifidus, my erector spinae, into my psoas. But then they also sent them to my— to my house, and I did that same fat cell, the stuff that's rich in the mesenchymal stem cells, into the bloodstream. So I did a push IV into the bloodstream. That's the one that you would have to go out of the country to do. Normally you're not supposed to do that. Like, that's tech— it's technically not legal for someone to inject you with your own stem cells into your bloodstream. But if you get your stem cells extracted and they're stored and they send them to you, you can technically inject them if you do it yourself or you like have a friend who's a nurse or whatever. Right. And you— it's literally just like a push IV. It's like 30 seconds. We, we caught it all on video for, uh, Men's Health films. So they'll publish a video at some point. But I was super nervous cuz it's like a few thousand dollars worth of stem cells that, you know, I'm, I'm trying to hit the vein and make sure that they go in the right way. Yeah. And then inject. It's a very, very small amount.

What, you had to be the most nervous getting them shot into your dick though, no?

I was kind of nervous, yeah.

Yeah, that seems to me like super experimental.

I do a lot of that though. I mean, like, that's kind of my shtick, right? Like, I do a lot of immersive journalism, a lot of self-experimentation, a lot of guinea pig type stuff. Yeah. And I'm not dead yet, and I still have my dick, so— Oh, you look great. I'm happy. Yeah, thank you.

You look very healthy.

Thank you. I'm 22.

Oh, there's a hole.

Oh yeah, that's Is that— yeah, is that him? That's one of them. That is— yeah, that's an image from my website. That's not as deep as it got. I don't think that's the worst photo.

The worst one I've ever seen is Kevin Randall.

You have to stuff it with iodine. Like, they—

have you had it before?

No. They have like these long iodine strips when you get the MRSA, and it's like— it's flesh-eating bacteria. Yeah, there's— that's me too. And they stuff— see that hole in the middle? Yeah. They stuff like an iodine— it's like a stick in there, like a strip that has— but they literally stuff it in there, and you can feel it. You got— you were telling me you got dry needling done, and you know, like that weird pressure. It's not like pain, but it's like a weird pressure from dry needling. This is like that except pain, right? Like it's both the pain and the— it was horrible, horrible.

Like, yeah, I've had some friends have them down the back of my leg, staff in their leg, where they have like a small golf ball-sized hole in their leg, and they literally had a packet full of that kind of gauze covered.

I don't like how you say small golf— golf ball is a big hole for the back of the leg.

Golf ball, but it's like smaller than a golf ball, like a large marble.

Any hole in the back of the leg, in my opinion, is too big. The worst I've ever seen is Kevin Randleman's see if you could find Kevin Randleman's staff.

He had open holes where you could see his muscle structure under his armpit. It was horrific. Gosh, he never really recovered.

He was dying young. He died?

He died young. From that? Who knows what he died from, but look at the hole.

I think I still have it. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, that's what— that's his muscle tissue. That's Kevin Randleman.

What body part is that?

That's his underarm.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, look at that.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, that's how bad it was.

Us. That looks like he got shot.

He does. Yeah, he was rotting away. And I don't know if he didn't treat it quick enough, or I don't know if it was just really aggressive, but it's a real common thing in gyms.

And once you get it, it stays with you, like it stays in your bloodstream. Like, I still— like, I have an essential oil diffuser on my desk and I put Thieves in it every day, and I just diffuse essential oils in there while I'm working. Into the air? Yeah, it's like a nebulizing essential oil diffuser. And I did just, just to play it safe, right? I just want to be breathing that in during the day just in case. Fuck. But that's, um, and that's the other thing is I stand in front of this light, this infrared light, and this is that— it's a dick light. Yes, it's called a Joov. And, um, so they've done these studies on testicular and sperm production, and they found that there's a wavelength that's like 600 to 800 nanometers wavelength of light that if you expose the testicles to that for 5 to 20 minutes a day, it's based on this concept of photobiomodulation. So I originally got into this whole photobiomodulation thing when this company— because I, because I blog and people just send me these weird things to my doorstep to try— and they sent me this like nasal probe that you put up your nose and it's got like a helmet on it. You could, you could look it up, Jamie, if you want. It's called a Vielight. And and it produces this light that supposedly activates a part of your mitochondria. So you have like your electron transport chain in your mitochondria, and there's a part of that called the cytochrome c oxidase, and it apparently activates more activity in the cytochrome c oxidase, so you produce more ATP, in this case in neural tissue, 'cause you have it on your head, and they were using this in dementia and in Alzheimer's patients, but it turns out it's almost like a nootropic for your head. Yes, that's me at my desk.

Whoa, you got it up your nose?

Back when I was a young Chinese woman working at my desk. Up your nose, on your head. I like how that guy's just like looking pensively off the wall. This girl's reading a book. She's reading a book.

She's reading Twilight.

See, that's what I originally did. They sent me just the nose one and I felt shorted because they had like the full head, so I asked them for the full head one. This is so fucking weird. I know, and you can feel it like pulsing. And what's the, it was, I think it was NPR. It was either Radiolab or what's the other science one? I think it might be Radiolab. They did a study on like, or a story on like this 10 to 40 hertz frequency. 9-volt neuron.

No, no, no.

Yeah, we talked about it. That's TDCS.

Oh, that's right. The 9-volt stimulation. Yeah.

I have one of those too, the transdirect cranial stimulation, that Halo device that you wear before a workout. Yeah. You use that thing? No.

Well, it's one at a time.

Let's get to the Halo thing. One at a time. So this photobiomodulation, I'm putting this thing, the probe in my ear, and you're not even supposed to use it too much because it produces so much ATP that if you amp up cellular activity in neural tissue too much, you produce too many reactive oxygen species. Like that's a byproduct of cellular metabolism. It's just like if you eat too much, you produce a lot of byproduct of making energy. And that's why— it's one of the reasons why fasting is good for you. It cleans up the system and you don't make as many free radicals. The same reason like ketosis is good for you, right? You're not burning as much glucose, you don't produce as many free radicals. Same concept with this. You don't want to use it all the time because you get too much activity, you produce too many free radicals or too many reactive oxygen species. But every other day use it.

So new year, new dick, how often did you use it?

Well, this is for my head, and this was like a couple years ago.

It's the same thing.

This is a couple years, and it was like a cup of coffee for my brain. Like, every time I'd wake up, I put this thing on while I'm working at my desk. So then this company that makes these lights that are very similar activates cytochrome c oxidase, activates release of nitric oxide. But if you do it on your testicles specifically, the cell that it works on is the Leydig cells in the testes, which are responsible for producing testosterone. So you're basically stimulating the Leydig cells on the testes the same way that you'd stimulate like neural tissue using this one for your head. So I'd had success with the thing for my head. So I tried this one for the balls and the dick. And what I did was I would just jack my pants down for 5 to 20 minutes a day while I'm sitting there, you know, I'm diffusing my essential oils and I got the thing on my head. And it works, like you actually get more blood flow. I mean, I didn't do a control study, just pulling my pants down and standing there for 5 to 20 minutes without the light on. I should do that at some point. 'Cause maybe it's just like the whole, you know, It's like supposedly going combat style is supposed to be good for your dick too.

Just going combat style?

So there's you with your balls out. Yeah, I'm standing on my Wobble Board. I got my ball light. And that's actually not my office. I was at one of my friend's houses because he had one. And anyways, and obviously I'm not naked, but normally I would be nude. And yeah. And you just nuke your balls. And you just basically nuke your balls.

Yeah.

And what was the effect? It's like a warm teddy increased vascularity, better size, better orgasms. I mean, like, like all this stuff seemed to have a— so all this stuff seems to make your dick bigger, it has some kind of an effect. Yeah, so, um, PRP injections, acoustic sound wave therapy, stem cells, the infrared light, uh, gas station dick pills— and that's the one I would not repeat. Um, and then they had me do some Ayurvedic stuff, like the no ejaculation thing, which is horrible, like where you have sex but you pull out. Yeah, like the, uh It's a book, it's called "The Multi-Orgasmic Man." So I read that and learned how to like, you know, pull back, like not actually orgasm. And you like pull it inside and then you finish up and you're just like pissed off the rest of the day. You can't sleep at night 'cause you're all, you're just all wet. So you could see how it would work. But for me, it's like, I got kids and my wife and I sneak away to get it on. Like I want to— Get it on. I want the full meal deal. So I didn't like that, the no ejaculation reverse orgasm thing.

What's it supposed to do? Like when you internalize the orgasm, when you keep it inside.

So this is all based on Chinese medicine principles, like your— I think it's called your jinn or your jing or something like that. But you have this, this energy, you know, your chi, your, your prana, your chakra, your life force. And apparently orgasming is— and, and coming, like ejaculating, is supposedly one of the ways that you give some of that life force away. Like you release some of your vitality and by having sex but then not coming, you're actually creating that same hormonal response of oxytocin and testosterone and all these things that we release when we're having sex or when we ejaculate, but without actually giving up that vitality, that life force. There was even like— I found like tables where like based on your age, there's a certain frequency with which you're supposed to ejaculate. Like the younger you are, it's like every 2 days or every 3 days, and the older you get, like it gets to a certain point where you're like 70 years old, it's like every month or something like and so it's, it's, it's kind of interesting. But again, I don't, I don't like that. Like, I want, I want to, I want to finish.

Yeah, I wonder, but I get it. Preconceived prejudice that you have though. Like, I wonder if you just went into it like completely objectively, if it would have some sort of a benefit.

Or maybe you just get like mineral depleted and you lose all your zinc and everything else you need to make sperm and you start to cramp up. I don't know. To me, you'd have to be ejaculating a lot, I think.

So when you were doing all these different things, how much of a time time, like how much of a buffer did you give yourself in between each thing?

It was not a well-controlled experiment at all. It was like 3 months of just like, hey, do that, hey, why don't we try this, hey, the article's coming out soon, we should toss this in there too.

So they probably compounded.

It was not a well-controlled experiment, and I did a lot over 3 months. Like it would have been a lot better to just try one thing at a time.

But I— I would be so nervous.

But I am well hung and very vascular now.

Congratulations.

From the whole experiment, so there's that. Wow. So yeah, it's called New Year New Dick.

And it really did make your dick bigger?

Bigger.

So do you think there's any help out— hope out there? Asking for a friend. Guys who have micro dicks.

Micro— what's a micro dick?

Guys who have really small penises.

I, I would imagine there's hope. I'm sure they could be like great politicians or very influential. It's just that there's got to be some kind of trade-off, right? It's like if you, if you have, uh, sickle cell anemia, apparently it keeps— protects you from malaria. So maybe if you have a small dick, it protects you from some kind of horrible accident later on in life. So I don't know.

I I just wonder like if there's a way to fix that in people, if maybe this is the way. I've always felt like that's got to be one of the saddest things.

It, um, again, like you never know. There could be a bunch of 90-year-old men walking around with dick cancer 60 years from now who, you know, heard this and all went and got injected. So I will not attest to the safety of it, but I can attest to the efficacy of it. Um, so yeah, maybe some of those things would work for all those people walking around there. All of your listeners with small dicks.

Mm-hmm.

Gave them salvation. There's hope, fellas. There's hope. So, so yeah, that's—

um, is that, you know, you know, like, you're saying it still works? Like, it's still— how long ago did you do this experiment?

Oh, I mean, like, the— this— the magazine is still on the shelves. Like, it just—

okay, so it's—

but how long was like— so it was like starting— I got the stem cells extracted in August, okay, of 2017. So this is like the end of January. I'm sure 8 weeks later I got those shot into the dick. So 6 months later, after they'd really grown a lot of these mesenchymal stem cells, I got them injected into my bloodstream and into like that injury that I'm fighting in my back right now. Um, and I'd done some other things before that for, for the back and for tissue, like peptides, like this, uh, the BPC-157 that we were just talking about before the show. Yeah, which is really interesting stuff. I mean, it's not, it's not intended for human consumption but it's also not banned by WADA. I mean, it's— it's actually— it's legal to use, and it's a peptide. It's called Body Protection Compound, BPC-157, and the 157 refers to, like, the sequence of amino acids that makes up the actual compound. But you can buy it and reconstitute it, and then if you inject it into an area— and it doesn't even have to be, like, a painful intramuscular injection. It can be, like, a subcutaneous injection. BPC supposedly stimulates angiogenesis, and it's a, it's a natural compound. You find it in the human gut. So they took this same thing that helps to heal the human gut, which is why if you were to consume this in drinking water, it supposedly— and this is in rodent models— it apparently works to like heal up an inflamed gut, you know, colitis, IBD, IBS, stuff like that. But you can inject it into a joint or subcutaneously into an area around a joint and it supposedly stimulates the, uh, I feel like this is a repetitive phrase on this show, the growth of new blood vessels. So angiogenesis. And then there's another one called TB500 that they use in racehorses, thymosin beta. That one is banned by WADA, but similar principle, except that one acts on the actin and myosin fibers and actually causes regeneration of those. So you could do both and you get angiogenesis and then also fiber regrowth. And that, that's that's a strategy that would be like pennies on the dollar compared to stem cells. And also, you know, a far less, um, a far less intensive procedure in terms of like collecting your stem cells, right? Yeah. And then there's, um, so there's the fat for the stem cells. And from what I understand, if you're going after the anti-aging effect, like the bone is better, like the marrow, like a bone marrow. So I had mine, I had my bone marrow extracted at this place called Forever Labs in Berkeley, California, and they store that. And then what I can do is I can just inject the 35-year-old me into my body every year or every 5 years or whenever I want to put that back in. So I've got bone marrow and fat marrow stored.

Let me stop you there real quick. Yeah, so they take the bone marrow, and how do they have enough to just keep going? Do they— is something another replicator?

I, I don't know the, the protocol that used to grow this. Like, I know the fat one, they use, uh, like a collagenase procedure that enzymatically breaks down the collagen from the fat and somehow concentrates the stem cells. And you can actually grow them, like you can actually multiply them. I'm assuming it's something similar for bone, huh? And the bone would be more for like longevity and anti-aging, and then the fat would be more for, for joints.

I know a lot of people who got the bone marrow done for injuries. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's supposed to be very painful.

Was it painful for you when they extracted the bone?

Not compared to the dick injections. No, it's all relative. But I'm, I've been, I've been obstacle course racing, and I was, I was triathlete before that and did bodybuild, so I've always done all all this, you know, masochistic shit. So again, I think my pain tolerance is, is high. No, I'm sure, uh, the, the bone marrow didn't hurt that much. No, it was like they numb it, they go in. Um, the dick one was where there was like that weird pressure, a little bit of pain. I would say that the iodine packing into the staph infection that you're talking about, that was, that was up there.

Well, Daniel Cormier, UFC light heavyweight champion, had it done with the bone marrow, and he was telling me it was painful as hell, and he's about as tough.

You mean getting injected or getting it? Reacted. I mean, it's, it's a big needle.

I'm just limping around for a while.

When I did the stem cell injections, that was cool because they used, they used a digital thermography. So you can— it's like an ultrasound. It's like what you would use to look at a baby. Yeah. But you can, you can see the tissue. You can see the areas where there's swelling or there's like a black area where the tissue is torn up or where there's edema or inflammation. And you can— and, and, um, uh, he showed me the video after he did all the injections. You can see the needle like going into the— you can, you can micro-target exactly, exactly where you want to put the cells. Yeah, I've done it. Very, very cool procedure. They use that thermography. Yeah, yeah, it's a cool procedure.

Have you ever done Regenekine? No. You aware of it? You know what it is? It's, uh, it's one of the things that a lot of pro athletes are going to Germany to get done. It's, uh, it's a form of platelet-rich plasma where they heat it up, and by heating up the, uh, the plasma, it produces this radical anti-inflammatory property. It's like they extract it into this yellow serum, they spin it in a centrifuge huge. So if you're going to get it done— I've had it done on—

how is that different than just normal PRP?

More powerful.

More early because it's heated up. Yeah, because I've done PRP before.

Yeah, I have as well. Yeah, it, it's— I mean, obviously I'm not a doctor, but, uh, according to these doctors that do it, and there's a place in Santa Monica that does it called Lifespan Medicine, I've had it done. Really? Yeah, for the longest time you had to go to Germany. Like, uh, Dana White flew to Germany to get it done.

Uh, why? Because it was illegal in the US?

They hadn't—

yeah, they hadn't— interesting.

Yeah, but now it's legal. I'm going, uh, I'm going over to Venice Beach.

I'm gonna be down by there. I'm going to these cats at the place I was talking about, the Human Garage. That's an interesting place.

If you really want to talk to the guy who does it, my friend Dr. Ben Ruhi is the guy who performs the procedures down there. He's a great guy. He would love to talk to you too. Yeah, sure. Cool. You'd get a kick out of it.

It's pretty interesting. I'm sure someday I'll run out of stuff to inject into joints, but for now—

For me, it really helped me heal a bulging disc in my neck.

Really?

They go right into the spinal cord. It's great for people that have pretty serious neck injuries and back injuries.

Have you tried this thing? I think it's, it's Peticon is the company that makes it, but it's like a neck traction device. I have one hanging.

I have one.

So I have that and a yoga trapeze. And so I'll hang— yeah, I'll hang by the neck. I do this when I get up, right? I get up and I put like a bunch of magnesium on my neck and my back to relax all the tissue. And once you get really relaxed, and I have this, uh, this, this vibrator, it's, uh, it's like a car buffer for your body. So you can vibrate your neck and your back and you get really, really relaxed. And it's, it's perfect for, you know, for like doing your own deep tissue therapy. But it vibrates. So I'll do that on my body and I go hang from this neck thing. Yeah. And you get all these pops up and down your neck, and it apparently realigns the atlas and the axis and some of the cervical vertebrae. And there's probably a bunch of chiropractic docs who are, who are, uh, really, uh, pissed off right now because I'm describing this incorrectly. But it, it feels amazing. Like, it just adjusts everything. And then I hang from the yoga trapeze.

Well, when it definitely just hangs like 5 minutes, yeah, definitely decompresses your— I don't know about all a little bit of the nonsense, but it definitely— it's stretching out those muscles and alleviating some of the stress that comes from bad posture. And for me, it was a lot of grappling, a little getting your neck cranked and squished and, yeah, you know, resisting things.

It's like, um, it's kind of similar to traction, and I've really been getting into that. Have you heard of ELDOA? E-L-D-O-A?

No.

It's like a form of stretching where I actually had a guy come to my house for 2 days, and he stayed in my basement, and we wait— we wake up. I've done this a few times. I'll have people come over to me and and just like teach— there's, there's another guy who mashes, like use a walker and just like mash up and down your body. And, but this is eldowa. So eldowa, you'll like push a joint out this way and then out this way, and then your feet will be splayed in both directions. There's like 20 different poses that you do, but it's a form of self-traction, right? So it's like, it's similar to like if you were to use a monster band to traction a joint. Have you ever done that? Like traction your hip with a— where you'll tie a monster band around your hip and then attach it to—

I have Not— no, I've seen, I've seen people do it.

Yeah, that's ELDOA. Is that Adam from Mind Pump? Is that the Mind Pump video? I think that's my buddy Adam.

It says Spinal Health ELDOA. E-L-O-D-O-A.

Yeah, so that, that's one of the ones I do in the morning. That's L5-S1. So they, so they all work on a specific like part of the back.

Let me say it again. E-L-D-O-A.

Yeah, ELDOA.

L5 or L5.

I forget what it stands for. It was invented by this guy named Guy Voilier, a French guy. And dude, you feel amazing. You hold these poses for like a minute and it introduces a bunch of new blood flow to the joint. They see how he's doing that. Mm-hmm. He'll like put his hand up and traction the fascia. And so he's getting this intense pull. If you were to do this, you get this intense pull on your back. I do this one so I could show it to you after, but you feel amazing. I do this when I wake up now. And who invented all this stuff? This goes back. This is like some, some French guy guy invented it. And, uh, I don't remember how I heard about it, but I— or I, uh, I interviewed this guy named Jacob Schoen on my podcast, and he taught me all these moves and came to my house. And, uh, it's, it's another one of those really cool forms of stretching.

It's like, how often do you do yoga?

I have a, uh, I have a sauna. Do you do like an infrared sauna?

No, we have a regular sauna.

I use, uh, like a, like a near-far infrared sauna, and I go in there because your, your tissue is very pliable and hot. So I had a crane drop a 19-foot endless pool out in the forest back behind my house in Spokane, and I keep this thing just like super duper cold, right? So it's like 45, 50 degrees. So that's like my cryotherapy.

How do you keep it that cold?

Well, during the winter and the fall, it just stays that cold. I just keep the lid off. And then during the summer when I'm coming back home and I'm going by the gas station up the hill before my house, I stop and I buy ice bags. And I just dump them in there, so it stays relatively cold. And what I do in the mornings when I'm home is I do this sauna. And you asked about yoga. I go in there and I'll— this is when I do a lot of this stuff, right? Like I'll do some of my yoga moves, some of my Eldoa. There's another really good form of stretching called Core Foundation, a doc named Eric Goodman, and it's like a form of decompression for the spine. He works with a lot of athletes. It kind of like turns on your glutes, decompresses your spine. So I just use a mashup of all these little moves and I'll be in my sauna for like 30 minutes. So I'm producing all the heat shock proteins. I'm getting the nitric oxide, getting the blood flow, and you just feel good when you're in the sauna. So I get all sweaty and I get kind of woo-woo. I'll sprinkle essential oils in there and I'll burn like Palo Santo incense and put on— You burn incense inside the sauna? Yeah, it smells really nice. And you put on beats, like binaural beats? Yeah, like binaural beats. So there's this guy named Michael Tyrell, and he makes these CDs and these tracks that—

Even when you said his name, you lowered your voice.

Michael Tyrell. Michael Tyrell. He makes these amazing tracks, and they vibrate at specific hertz frequencies, right? There's this whole idea that like your root chakra, like your fourth chakra, your heart chakra vibrates at 528 hertz, and there's different hertz frequencies associated with different positive aspects. Mix of, of your, you know, it's, it's this, uh, it's like a, uh, a chakra, like, right?

But is that bullshit? I mean, have you tried to debunk any of that?

I feel really good. I'm trying to— if I feel good, I'm gonna try to debunk it. I just do it. Yeah.

Why not? Are you doing this with headsets on?

No, the sauna has like surround speakers, and so I just, I play that through the speakers. No Bluetooth and no Wi-Fi, Jamie. Just like, it's just like my little shitty little iPod shuffle that I plug in and play. And, um, so I play that while I'm in the sauna and I'm doing all my moves, and then I walk out of my house, go through my office, walk through the forest, and I go and jump in the pool. And I'll just like swim in there for like— it's like 50 yards.

So you just jump one to the other?

Yeah, you jump one to the other. And no, it's too much to go back and forth. Like, I've tried to just— I got to keep things somewhat— because this is getting kind of complex between like the light and the balls and the essential oils. Like, you gotta, you gotta draw the line somewhere. So sometimes I'll have friends over and, and we'll vape or we'll smoke in the sauna, and then we'll go out to the pool and then go roll around in the snow, then get back in the pool, then go back in the sauna. Sauna, and my— I do this and my wife is inside making dinner, and we just feel amazing. Like, we got the hot, we got the cold, right? And then we go in and we eat dinner. It's, it's amazing. It's my favorite thing to do with my friends.

Wow.

But in the morning, I do the sauna and then the ice, and then— or the cold pool— and then I finish with a quick dip in the hot tub out in the trees, because I put a hot tub next to the cold pool, and everything's like super clean, you know. It's cleaned with ozone and minerals instead of chlorine, and so you just feel really, really clean, and I walk in and start my day.

I feel like 9 bucks.

So I do yoga, yeah, but it's in the— it's in the sauna.

Well, it sounds like you're just stretching. You're not doing like the strengthening poses.

I do actual like, you know— well, what do you mean? Like standing Warrior 1, Warrior 2, Warrior 3?

Like, like standing bow pose, head to knee pose? Like, I do very strenuous—

I'm not doing like old person yoga. I do the legit shit.

Listen, I know you're a fit guy. I'm not questioning—

I do a head stand.

I'm just wondering what you're doing actually in the sauna.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, different. I make it up as I go. I don't have like—

I was just based on how you feel.

I was speaking in— in code. That's why I'm down here. I was speaking in Costa Mesa a couple days ago, and there was like this, this banquet dinner as part of the event. I was sitting next to this guy. I'm like, well, what do you do for your fitness routine, etc.? He does Bikram yoga every day, but like the Bikram yoga, like all of the poses that are part of Bikram yoga, because it's a set series of routines. You've done Bikram before? Yeah, it's like 90 minutes. He does that every single—

did it 9 days in a row.

Yeah, yeah, he's been doing it for like 8 years every day.

I'm impressed because we did it, we did Sober October. We had to do 15 of them in a month, me and a bunch of my friends. Yeah, I wanted to burn it out, so the last 9 days— well, I had a few days to go, but for 9 days I just said, let me just get these out of the way. And every day I did 90 minutes, and it was like, wow. But it's interesting because you realize that your body can do that. It is. You just force it.

I don't like to overdo it though because it's static stretching, and we know that can decrease force potential, like it can decrease power production if you become too pliable, too flexible.

Isn't that the case though pre-workout?

Like pre-workout, well, it's the case pre-workout, but chronically if you elongate tissue— and I don't know if they've actually done any studies on people who have done yoga for a really long time and compared like their, their vertical jump right before and after— but I just feel almost too stretchy if I get too into it. Like I feel like when I run it's a little bit more like Gumby running versus limiting the amount of yoga.

That's interesting.

That's definitely, definitely static stretching prior to force production. Yeah, is not a good idea, right?

Like prior to things like squats or something like that.

It was like when the, when the lights went out during the Super Bowl a few years ago, you remember that? And you could see on TV both teams were just like standing on the sidelines or sitting on the sidelines doing these long hamstring static stretches. And, and I wondered why they were doing that because they were about to get back in and, and engage in a very, you know, powerful explosive sport. So yeah, it's, it's dynamic stretching, definitely, prior to force production activities.

Yeah, yeah. I wonder why they're doing— maybe they just have really old-school trainers or something like that, are not aware.

Yeah.

Or maybe they're just doing it on their own.

Before I do that isometric training for power production, I've got two things. I bought this stuff called Nose Torque on Amazon.

You heard of this?

It's like smelling salts on steroids. No. So yeah, a powerlifter told me about it, and he would sniff it before he'll go like, you know, rip a 700-pound bar off the ground. And you, you snort that. You open up the cap on this stuff and it's just like releasing a wild animal into the room. And it— so you release the cap, it's like smelling salts on steroids, and you smell and you just want to go kill somebody or find somebody. Yeah, it's called Nose Torque or Nose Turk. It's something like that, like Nose Torque. Yeah, T-O-R-K. T-O-R-K. Yeah, there you go. And so I do that. And then the other one that I, I just made this— you can buy this for like pennies on the dollar on Amazon. Yeah, you can get these essential oil inhalers.

So here's some guy just smelled it.

Here we go. Yeah.

Oh, he can't even get it near his face. He's got it away.

Oh, it's hard. Like, it packs a punch. What is it supposed to do? Did he just do it, or is he getting ready to do it?

Just opened it up.

It's like smelling— it's ammonia. So it, uh, I don't know chemically, like, I would imagine it just puts your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive when you sniff all that ammonia. Like, he's been really ginger.

He's I know, I've done it with some of my friends at restaurants.

I carry it around sometimes.

Oh Jesus, you bring it to a restaurant?

I have some out my bow case actually.

You can smell it.

Go get it. Um, right now you want to sniff it right now? All right, let's do it. All right, nose twerk. It's out in the car.

Oh, it's in the car.

It's in— you know what, we'll do it. Okay, we'll do it after. It'll be boring podcasting. Plus, if people really want to try it, they can just buy it on Amazon.

Um, so the other one is system up and excites you and allows allows you to— so they should be on the field doing that before they, uh, I don't know if I would recommend that.

There's probably some guys like nosebleeds and heart attacks.

That fucking smell.

Yeah, they, they, um, the other one is, uh, uh, peppermint. Have you ever used like peppermint oil? And they've done studies on this, on peppermint oil and athletic performance. And what I have is this little, uh, it looks like a little tampon. You can buy these on Amazon. They're called aromatherapy for inhalers, and it's like this little cotton wick, and you put it— you put essential oil on the cotton wick, right? So it absorbs into the wick, and then you put the cap on, and you can carry this around in the gym in your pocket. Or I play tennis on Wednesday night, so I bring it to my tennis matches, and while I'm playing tennis, I'll stop sometimes and sniff this thing, kind of stay like awake and alert. And dude, like, it's just peppermint. It's just peppermint, but it has this amazing effect. It's like this wakefulness-promoting effect.

Wow, peppermint.

Yeah, peppermint's amazing. I put like— if you get bloating or gas, you can smear that around your stomach and it makes it go away. It goes through my skin. My favorite oils to use. Yeah, it gets absorbed through the skin. I mean, you know this, the skin is— skin is a mouth. Yeah, but I mean, it gets all the way in your internal organs. I don't know if it actually goes into the actual stomach, like in— like, like through the— through the epithelial lining and into the— into the actual intestine, but like, it— it has an effect for sure.

You know what I just started using recently is topical CBD. I got some topical CBD and like a roll-on, almost like a deodorant roll-on kind of a thing. It's amazing. Yeah, CBD.

There's, uh, there's One, I use this stuff called BioCBD, and it's turmeric or curcumin with CBD. And yeah, it's the same thing. It's like a topical. They also do THC, like THC roll-ons. Yeah, they do this now. That's another thing. Speaking of the sexual performance thing, you can actually buy like THC sex lube. Whoa. And I mean, it's like a high for your crotch. Literally, you apply it locally, and it's like your crotch gets it's a high. You can do the same thing with these little, uh, coconut oil THC suppository— well, they're not suppository, they're meant for swallowing in the mouth. That's, that's a normal route of delivery. But you can shove them up your butt like 30 or 40 minutes before you have sex, and you actually get like this amazing high for your crotch as just like these THC coconut oil capsules.

How'd you find out about that? Just shove stuff up your butt?

Take notes? Yeah, just put it up there.

Actual bath bath salts, not bath salts like the drug, but the stuff that you put in the bath now that's THC.

Really?

Yeah, they're doing everything out here now. It's crazy. They've gone hog wild.

Out here, you mean like California? Well, same thing in Colorado and Washington.

Washington's legal. But the guy that I get my stuff from in California just started giving me this stuff to put in the bath.

Yeah.

And he's like, you gotta be careful though, 'cause you can get way too high in your bath.

I believe it. Your skin's way too porous. With skin absorption, yeah, you're literally just like bathing in it, like people bathe in wine at these fancy spas.

Yeah, what, they bathe in wine?

They have wine baths, yeah. There's this place I go to in New York City, it's called Aire Spa, A-I-R-E, and they have like one of the options to go there is you can just take like a bath in wine.

That sounds so like Caligula.

I know, I was like, freebie, the wine and a few virgins and some feed me grapes. Yeah, oh look at this lady.

She's taking a drip of it.

This bath is full of wine.

Oh, that's so strange.

It's kind of cheesy though, she looks like a news anchor.

Yeah.

He does. Yeah, this is like for— yeah. Oh my gosh, grapes! There we go, I called it. The grapes. You could— so yeah, that— it's actually a cool spa. I've never done the wine.

That sounds wild. It sounds—

I want to get really fucked up. I don't know if you'd get drunk from the wine. I don't— I don't know if it would actually wind up in your— in your— but they use antioxidant-rich Tempranillo grapes.

Well, how could you not get some sort of absorption?

I'm sure you would get something.

One of the things about the sensory deprivation tank is that through the Epsom salts, your body absorbs a lot of magnesium.

Right. I like the magnesium chloride, like using actual magnesium instead. And I like that because you can get it for— I mean, that's what they use to melt ice. Like, you can just buy this stuff like rock salt. Yeah, I know you guys don't melt a lot of ice in California, but like in Washington State, you can buy magnesium chloride, but like a freaking like concrete size bag, a concrete mix size bag of it. And it's the same stuff that they sell on these expensive websites as like magnesium salts. It's just magnesium chloride, really. And you can dump that in your— you get way more magnesium than you get from Epsom salts. Oh wow. That's really what you want is the magnesium. Like, that's that's displacing the calcium, that's producing the relaxing effect. That's, you know, it's—

maybe I should add that to my tank.

Magnesium?

Yeah, because I've already got this.

Like, first to make sure it's not going to mess up the— is there like a filtration mechanism on the tank?

Yeah, there's some pretty heavy filtration system, but it filters out the Epsom salts.

I have an idea for float tanks. You want to hear my idea? Oh, of course, because that's why you're here. I just get— I get really bored in float tanks. So yeah, I just said— you ever go in with edibles? And I, uh, no.

That's the move, going with edibles. You went out before.

I've only done it 3 times, every time in Austin, Texas, and it's always been like I've been with my wife. Yeah, a lot of people do with ketamine, don't they?

Yeah, that's the, um, the guy who invented it, John Lilly's method.

Yeah, I, I have an edible that I make at home, uh, with, with kratom, which is an opioid-like painkiller. That's freaking amazing. It induces this euphoria like like high. And then I add CBD, THC, copaiba oil. Have you ever heard of this? No. Copaiba oil acts on the endocannabinoid receptors very similarly to THC and CBD, but it has what's called like an entourage effect, meaning it enhances the effects of CBD and THC. So like if you're, if you're vaping, you can add like a couple drops of oil over the top of the herb, um, or you can mix it into like an edible.

Sleep cakes that you make? Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

Amazing. Yeah. Wow. My sister accidentally took one last week and said she had the best night of sleep of her life. Really? And, uh, I don't travel with them because they, they just smell like you just open up a whoop-ass can full of weed. So you don't, you know what, you don't want those in the bow case when you're traveling.

Dogs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Every time, like, just a whole line of dogs following me through the airport, running like O.J. Simpson. Anyways though, the, um, the The mix I use is coconut oil and ghee and dark chocolate and a little bit of stevia. Like I have this butterscotch toffee stevia. It's amazing. I travel everywhere. I put it in sparkling water. I put it in coffee.

Wow.

It's like an organic butterscotch toffee stevia.

Where you getting that?

I'm addicted to it. It's a company called Omica Organics. I actually get it, I get a 3-pack, O-M-I-C-A. I get it off Amazon. It's vanilla, butterscotch toffee, and plain. Like if you just don't want, if you wanna sweeten something but you don't want those extra flavors. Best, best stevia ever. So I put all this in the edible, and I have this countertop immersion blender called a, uh, Magical Butter Machine, and you blend this, and it blends on top of your counter for like 8 hours, and all this stuff mixes together, and then you pour it into molds, and you can just put it in the, in the freezer. And then I keep it in these like little miron glass jars so it doesn't degrade, and it's just like the best, best edible ever. So I should try something before a float tank. Oh Yeah, yeah. Return to my float tank idea. Okay, so I get these ideas when I'm in the float tank, and I want to— and usually it's like 5 or 10 minutes in, so I spend the next 50 minutes trying to remember, like, don't forget this, don't forget. And I try like these little mnemonic techniques where you imagine like, you know, that like an image of what you remembered is waiting for you outside the door as soon as you open the float tank. So it might work for you to remember And, but basically it just kind of screws up my whole ability to be able to just like let thoughts come and go and relax. So my idea is this: why not have some kind of a recorder? Yeah, like a digital recorder.

You thought of voice-activated recording? You can get those.

Shit, I thought I was the first one. Glue it to the wall. No, screw it. I've been doing that forever. So like a voice-activated recorder? Yeah. Do you have one?

Like, do you keep— I never did because—

and then you walk out and you just get an P3 playback. Yeah, whatever you thought of.

I've been trying to figure out what a good one would be and how to set it up in there with all the salt and not have it degrade. Mm-hmm. But I think you could—

what you do, you figure it out.

I mean, here's my thoughts. My thought is a Velcro, like a Velcro patch, slap it in when you go in there and then activate it. You ever see those voice-activated ones with the red light?

I've seen voice-activated recorders. Yeah, I don't want the red light. Super easy. Yeah, well, they make these LED You know, they're like, you know, 'cause when I travel, I don't like to get all the blue light in the hotel rooms and I'll unplug things, try to make the hotel room dark, right? 'Cause when you flip off the lights in a hotel room, it's just like fricking Vegas, right? There's blue lights on the TV and stuff flashing, you know, all over the place. So they make these and I had it for a while. I don't travel with it anymore, but it's like a black tape you can put over things that light up in a room. Well, if you light something up, phone that flashes blue lights. Yeah, it's like a, You can, they're like LED light blockers. It's like tape basically, but you just put it over the COVID of anything that lights up. You can do something like that on the digital recorder.

Wow.

You could sell this for millions of dollars.

Well, I think the digital recorder thing is a really good idea, and someone needs to, I need to.

Thank you, it was my idea. It was not your idea. I'm sure I thought of it first.

When did you first start doing it?

Oh, I thought of this like 2 years ago.

Oh, so it was me too. I got you, dude. One of them. I've had a tank since 2002. Really?

Yeah. So yeah, I raced Ironman triathlon for 8 years and just got tons of sensory depth in the water, just staring at that black line at the bottom of the pool. It's hard for me to just like get in water and relax and not feel like I have to swim, right? Just, I've never been able to get that relaxed.

Oh, that's interesting. So you associate like water with the movement?

Because I associate water with swimming. Like I get in water and I want— and I love water, right? Like I free dive and I spearfish. I read this book, um, Deep by James Nestor. Amazing book about all these cool things that going— when you go down deep. And he talks about how Olympic athletes are using this now to enhance their performance because your spleen compresses and you produce more erythropoietin, more red blood cells. Same thing that you produce actually if you sauna. Like if you do a workout and you get really hot and then you go in the sauna after. They've done studies on this and they found that 30 minutes of heat therapy after you've already gotten the body hot, you produce EPO the same as if you were to use the performance-enhancing drug. It's like—

Yeah, that's interesting. There was a study that just came out about cryotherapy, and this is— this echoes something that Rhonda Patrick was saying, that if you do cryo, her advice was you should wait at least an hour after a workout before you do it and allow your body to have some sort of effect from, from the exercise. But sauna, they're saying you should do almost immediately after.

So the idea with this this. And there was a brand new study that just came out like 3 days ago where they showed that heat post-exercise enhanced the effects of exercise, whereas cold blunted the hormetic response to exercise, which makes sense.

It's the same thing inside of a window though.

It's, it's a window of time. So, so the deal is you don't want to blunt the hormetic response to exercise. High-dose antioxidants, cryotherapy, cold immersion, all of that can do this.

That's a problem with, with fighters because a lot of fighters are getting into cold immersion like immediately after Workout.

Exactly. So wait, so you'd want to wait till later on in the day. There's no research on the amount of time. For me, what I do, same thing when I do like a hard afternoon workout, I wait a couple hours afterwards because you get a bigger testosterone and growth hormone response when you wait right after workout to eat. I was actually— Mark Sisson was the first guy who told me about this, and it turns out that there actually is a better hormonal response when you fast post-exercise. Same thing with antioxidants, and there are a couple exceptions I can tell tell you about. Same thing with cryotherapy. Not the same time. If you finish up a hard afternoon, or especially like an early evening workout, you have a very high body temperature. So my theory is that a brief dose of cold— like, I'll jump in the cold pool and get out. Not, not a full— just enough to decrease the core body temperature, which is one of the ways that you enhance deep sleep cycles. So I also sleep on this thing called a Chili Pad that circulates like cold water underneath my body.

Yeah, tell us Starrett sent me one of those things.

Yeah, and the cool thing is like your partner can put their temperature on and I can put my temperature on and you can, you can sleep at whatever temp you want. So I sleep with this thing. Doesn't it make noise though at 55 degrees? Yeah, but it's not— it's like background noise because I sleep with all these, you know, binaural beats and everything. Anyway, I use this thing called SleepStream. It's like a DJ for sleep. So I put my phone in airplane mode and then I have these, these noise-blocking headphones. And if you're a side sleeper, you can use these things called sleep headphones, which is like a headband that goes around your head. Um, anyways though, back to the, to the not doing the cold after exercise. So you wait a little while, but I think decreasing the body's core temperature is good. So like a cold shower, cold water immersion also beats out cryotherapy because, yeah, it's actually more— and there was a study they did last month on this that cold water immersion was very effective in reducing post-workout muscle soreness and that inflammatory response to exercise compared to cryotherapy.

But again, you should wait a little bit before you do it.

You should wait a little bit before you do it. But I think part of that is due to— you get like this hydrostatic pressure of water against the skin, right? So it kind of pushes the cold against the skin a little bit better. Uh, and then the other reason is that when your head gets wet, when your head goes under, you know, same thing as you would get with a cold shower, you get like this mammalian dive reflex, right? Like that sharp intake of breath. And that activates your vegas nerve. So we talked about HRV and heart rate variability tracking. Anytime you do something like that that improves the tone of the vegas nerve, you would actually improve your ability to recover, improve the strength of your, of your nervous system. And they sell like vagal nerve stimulators, and they've looked into like chanting, humming, singing, uh, uh, jaw— they call it jaw realignment therapy, apparently removes the pressure that the trigeminal nerve can place on the vegas nerve. There's all these things you can do to enhance the health of your vagus nerve. And that's one of the things that improves your HRV or your heart rate variability, allows your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system to be in balance.

But when you're saying tone, like, what do you mean by that?

The tone of the nerve, it would basically be synonymous with like the health of the nerve. I don't know what's actually— I don't know if it's changing like the, you know, what do you call them, the myelin sheaths of the nerve or something like that when you're increasing the tone of the nerve. But more or less it's healthy for the vagus nerve when you get your head wet or underwater. So when I go in my cold pool after workout, I put my head under and then come up like 5 or 10 times just to go up and down and up and down. Then I get out. And if I'm going to do a longer cold soak, it's not right after workout. The, um, the 2 studies I found on antioxidant use after workout, right? High-dose antioxidant like vitamin C, vitamin E, et cetera. That supposedly blunts the hormetic response to exercise. Exercise. But there was one study that shows that green tea polyphenols don't do that. So green tea will allow you to fight off the inflammatory effects of exercise without blunting, for example, satellite cell proliferation or building of new mitochondria or all the things that you want to happen in response to a workout. And the other one was, uh, and this is, this is a new thing, like not a lot of people are talking about this now, but it's like hydrogen-rich compounds. Like they call it hydrogen-rich water and there's these companies now. There's like 4 or 5 of them. They sell like these tablets that you can dissolve in water. And there's a, uh, the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation. They do research on, on this hydrogen, and they're not— they don't have a financial affiliation with any of these companies. So I respect some of the research that they do, and they've found that it actually blunts the— or it allows for anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects to shut down like the inflammatory response to exercise. Without blunting the hormetic response. So it would be like green tea and molecular hydrogen would be the two things that I know of that you could do post-workout to blunt that inflammatory response without actually blunting the hormetic response to exercise.

So it'll enhance without the—

Right, exactly, exactly. Have your cake and eat it too.

One of the things I think that's probably really good about cold immersion therapy also, I think there's a meditative aspect of getting into that incredible incredible cold and just relaxing and calming. And I think it does something for your mind.

It does. And it's the nervous system, right? Like, what I tell people is you have a strong— and I take my kids out there, right? And I've trained them since a very early age. They go out there, they jump in the cold pool, but they'll stand in front of the cold pool and calm their nervous system, calm their heart rate. I'll have them— like, one of them visualizes a sea otter, right? And the other one does a polar bear. So they'll visualize these animals that are just like impervious to cold, right?

Right.

And then they get in the water and they know there's no sharp intake of breath, there's no, huh, huh, huh, like people do when they take a cold shower a lot of the time. If you can get your body to that point, I think that it probably has a pretty, it's a good indicator that you're building that nervous system resilience, right? Like if you can just get in cold and not freak out. So that's what I think people who do cold should train themselves to be able to do.

I've heard that argument about the sauna as well, that it also builds like a mental toughness to be able to just sit in there and calm yourself and get used to the adverse.

Get to the point where you want to bang down the door and climb out. And yeah, that's what I like to get myself to in the sauna, because obviously you get a bigger expression of heat shock protein and more blood flow when you get really hot. But yeah, there's a mental effect too. Same thing with the water. I was talking about that book, about the, the book Deep and how I got into like freediving, spearfishing. How deep? Which I think you would love. I would love it. Dude, you would, you would. I, I told you I'm gonna go hunt.

Well, Aubrey was telling me it's like hunting underwater.

Yeah. Um, uh, actually, yeah, Aubrey and I— Aubrey and I spearfished in, uh, in Kona, uh, last year. Uh, he and Whitney and I went down there and we were just using like the little 3-prong guns. It wasn't full-on like 80 feet deep, you know, big-ass guns after tuna.

But after tuna, Jesus Christ, people go out there like deep.

I've, I've never done deep.

Like, I'm not good enough underwater attached to a tuna.

Well, what you do is you have a reel, and the reel is attached to a float, right? And so after you shoot and you spear a big fish like a tuna, it's not dragging you, it's dragging the float. Oh, so all you have to do is wait for that float to pop back up wherever it's going to pop up. And that's how— but I haven't done that, but that's like on my bucket list big time. I'm going back to Kona. Big tuna. I'm going back to Kona in April, and that's going to be more shallow water spearfishing. We're going to hunt for scrub cattle, sheep, goat. You know, the pig there is amazing.

They have scrub cattle.

Yeah, and the pig feed on like macadamia nuts and avocado and scrub cattle. I don't know what scrub cattle is, but apparently it tastes amazing.

What scrub bulls are, they're essentially domestic cattle that have gone feral. So some time in the past, whether it's 10, 20 generations back, whatever it was, they busted through some fences, now they're wild. And in Australia, they hunt them, and they, they're very dangerous. Apparently they are the most aggressive bulls.

Bring it on, I can't wait.

Got to be real careful. One of Adam Greentree's buddies got gored real bad, and he had to to, uh, be medevacked out of there. He was in the, the northern country.

I'm just gonna play a shitload of Techno Hunt. I'll be ready. So, so, so the book— I read this book by James Nestor, and it— and I had him on my podcast. I'm like, dude, I want to learn how to do this. I want, I want to learn how to like compress the spleen and go under and learn how to hold my breath and get all these nervous systems.

The spleen just gets compressed.

I want to learn how to get deep enough because I couldn't— even as an Ironman triathlete, I couldn't go deeper than 15 feet without freaking out because like my, my ears would get the pressure them, and I could do the— what do you call it— the, um, when you equalize, not the Frenzel technique, but the— it's the, you know, when you, when you go— yeah, yeah, I'm forgetting the name of it.

Pop your ears.

Yeah, the pop your ears technique that most people do when they get into the water. But there's another technique called the Frenzel technique where you'll, you'll pull the— it's like—

and you see, you're doing it, you see like your nose go—

see how my nose goes out like that?

Mm-hmm.

If you do that, you can equalize it like 20 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet. So I said, who can I go learn from? He's like, you got to go see this cat down in Fort Lauderdale named Ted Hardy.

Of course, Florida, you got to go back to Florida.

Everything— absolutely. Spleens, dick shots, do the stem cells, go learn how to do the spleen thing. So I go to— fortunately my grandmother lives in Florida, so I have a place to stay when I go there. So there's that at least. And I take this freediving course, and he gets me from holding my breath for about a minute and 45 seconds. He got me up to 445.

4 minutes and 45 seconds.

Took me from 15 feet over 5 days down to 80 feet where you're like trapped. You, you actually, they put a rope in the water and you go vertical and you have like your bit, you know, the big fins, like you have the big fins and you have— come on, I've seen those on people, but they're, they're like half as long as that flag. What's that, like, like 3 or 4 feet? But yeah, they're like these big carbon fins. And I said, dude, just tell me all the best things to buy. And I contacted the editor of Superior carbon, so they're stiff. They're carbon, they're stiff, and you just swim so fast in them. And I contacted the editor of Spearing Magazine and asked him, what's the best gun to buy? What are the best fins? So I, I got outfitted with all this stuff, and then I went down there, learned how to hold my breath, learn how to equalize. And now when I spearfish— and I still, again, I haven't got to the point where I've gone— like, I go after the grouper and the parrotfish, like the, the little ones. I haven't gotten to the point now where I'm hunting big fish.

Groupers, but it's pretty fucking big.

Very similar to— I know the first time I went after my— I got 2 at once, 2 groupers at once, and apparently it wasn't grouper season, so they had me put them, put them back. Yeah, it's not as big of a deal as like if you shoot an elk and you don't have a tag. I mean, like, but, but yeah, they have a grouper season. I mean, I'll put them back. I didn't like take them down to their little grouper nest and take them away, but they're dead.

So you leave them alone? Yeah, you just can't keep them?

Yeah, you just leave them. That seems ridiculous. Well, I mean, they just didn't want to get fined. They didn't want to get in trouble, right? So, so anyways though, spearfishing, amazing. And this whole like freediving, you know, we got on this topic from the float tanks, similar experience. Like you're just at peace under the water, you're not wearing all the scuba equipment, so fish swim up to you and you can kind of like lay on the bottom of the water and, you know, shoot something as it comes. And I go with my kids and they like sit on the shore with like buckets and, and knives and, you know, they'll help, help brain the fish. And then we take it back and you have like fish cook-offs. And oh wow, it's amazing. It's very similar to— very similar feel to bow hunting, except it's like that peaceful setting in the water.

It's probably intensely physical too, right?

Well, it's a great workout because you're not only are you cold, so you're getting all the benefits of cold thermogenesis, you know, like the white adipose to brown fat conversion and the shivering and then the calorie burning and, you know, the angiogenesis and all the stuff you get from cold, but then you're also— you're freaking hunting, right? You're not sitting on, on the edge like with a, with a fishing pole over a boat, which I find intensely boring. You're actually in there and you're doing it all while you're holding your breath, doing it all while you're holding your breath. No scuba equipment. And people will do like— like I do breath hold walks, right? Well, I'll go on a walk and every time I pass a telephone pole, I'll just like take a breath and I'll hold my breath as long as possible when I pass the telephone pole. And then I'll breathe through my nose to recover. And then when I get to the next telephone pole, I'll hold my breath. Probably gonna die someday, like, passed out next to a bus stop, like, by a car, blue in the face. But yeah, spearfishing, like, you'd like it. I'm sure I would think you'd dig it.

Yeah, it seems like an interesting mental exercise too, because you have to keep your shit together while you're under the water and you want to take a breath.

You do. And people die. People do shallow water blackout. And this is what I learned. That's why I— this guy sent me down to Fort Lauderdale, because this guy, he teaches safety, right? You don't do like the Wim Hof breathing and blow off all the carbon dioxide so you can hold your breath longer, which is great for holding breath longer, but carbon dioxide is your body's signal to take a breath, right? So if you breathe out all your carbon dioxide, then you're, you're, you pass out, you get shallow water blackout. So, so for example, you're floating on the water before you're going to take a dive down. So you're kind of like watching the water, you're watching the fish, and you might do like a 2-count breath in, 1, 2, 2-count hold, and then 10-count breath out, 2-count hold. And you're just like getting the heart rate down, You're getting the nervous system calm. You're not even supposed to do like a lot of caffeine, which jacks up the nervous system and causes you to not be able to hold your breath as long. Dairy makes the mucus more thick. And so you can't hold your breath as long if you do a lot of dairy. So you don't do a lot of dairy, don't do a lot of caffeine, and then you just dive down. And I did, I brought ketones down. 'Cause a lot of like Dominique D'Agostino has, you know, he's done research on like divers and reducing a lot of the effects of like reduced flow of oxygen to the brain that apparently these Navy SEALs SEAL divers get, and he does research on, on the use of ketosis and ketones. And one of the days that we were out there, I actually took ketones and they increased my breath hold time, just using like these, these exogenous ketones. Really? So apparently they have an effect as well. I don't know if it's because the brain is using more, more of the ketones and the glucose, but they increase breath hold time.

That— yeah, they, they came up with that for rebreathers, right? Like that's when they started getting people— yeah, Navy SEAL divers, when they're using rebreathers, apparently a certain percentage them are susceptible to seizures.

Yeah, and they use, uh, you know, well, two things, you know, ketosis and CBD are two things that are used for the— for like epilepsy and seizures.

Yeah, yeah. Ketosis supposedly has an amazing effect with kids, kids that have seizures.

I did 12 months of like strict ketosis. Really? Uh, for a study, for a lab study in Florida. No, I'm just kidding. University of Connecticut, this guy named Jeff Volek, he does a lot of like ketone research, and he had one group of athletes follow just a normal endurance athlete diet for 12 months, and another group follow like a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet for 12 months because he wanted to see if you would maintain your glycogen levels and if you would— if your performance would be synonymous to the group that did not eat the high-fat, low-carb diet. What would happen to inflammatory markers? Is what would happen to the gut microbiome. So, but he wanted— like, a lot of these studies on high-fat, low-carb diets, they'll follow people for like 2 weeks or 3 days and have meat, like, high-fat, low-carb, and then see what happens when they go jam on a bike for 30 minutes or exercise. But they want to do like a long-term study to see if the body can adapt to burning fats as a fuel with long-term utilization of a high-fat diet, which I don't do anymore, by the way. I, I, I like— I save all my carbohydrates for the evening, then I eat a bunch of carbohydrates in the evening.

Like, what kind of, what carbs you eat?

Oh, like, uh, red wine, dark chocolate, tubers, starches, yams, sweet potatoes. You know, my wife's a cook, so she does like this amazing, like, slow fermented sourdough bread, which like pre-digests all the gluten and lowers the glycemic index. And it's a, like, pretty much quinoa, amaranth meal. I don't follow a specific diet in terms of, like, restricting certain food groups. My philosophy is you just make them digestible, right?

So they say that about eating carbs at night, that it's a good thing to relax you as well.

Well, Technically, you're more insulin sensitive in the morning, but you can make yourself more insulin sensitive in the evening, and the advantage of that is if you consume a bunch of your carbohydrates in the morning when you're in an insulin sensitive state, what are you going to rely upon as your primary fuel during the rest of the day? Carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, right? Instead of teaching your body how to be a fat-burning machine and tap into fats and generate ketones, so you save your carbohydrate intake for the end of the day, but I I also save my hard workout for the end of the day, which is when your body temperature peaks and your grip strength peaks. And you can do a hard workout. Anybody who rolls out of bed and tries to do a CrossFit WOD versus doing it, you know, 5 PM in the afternoon knows this. Like, you can do a pretty good hard workout like in the later afternoon or the evening when you're warmed up. But that also upregulates insulin sensitivity and the activity of these GLUT4 transporters that can, you know, shove glucose into muscle tissue, for example. And so then you can have your cake and eat it too, right? You create your own insulin-sensitive state, and then you go off. And typically I'll finish that workout around like 6:00, 6:30, right? And like I mentioned, I don't eat dinner for a couple hours after the workouts. Like 8:00, 8:30, we sit down to a family dinner, and I'll just eat as many carbohydrates as I want because I'm in an insulin-sensitive state. By the next morning— and I tested this for a while, I did like the blood ketone and the breath ketone testing— I'm back in a fat-burning state by the next morning. But also, even with the bread, I've also replenished my glycogen stores in my liver and muscle to be able to do the next day's hard workout, right? So I like this strategy for athletes because they can get all the benefits of a fat-burning state, the reduced free radical production from excess glucose intake, the reduced, you know, glycemic variability, which is honestly, it's, it's a pretty big marker for, in my opinion, like, like your risk factor for a host of chronic diseases, like spiking your blood glucose multiple times during the day. So instead, you just don't eat carbohydrates carbohydrates all day, do a hard workout at the end of the day, and then have your carbohydrates to replenish all your energy levels. Then you go into the next day.

And what's your primary food source during the day? Do you have like standard foods that you choose?

We have a lot of like really good wild plants that grow up on our land. So I have 10 acres up there in Washington State. We've got like wild nettle and mint and plantain and Oregon grape roots and comfrey and all these amazing plants. So we also have 8 raised garden beds where we grow kale and bok choy and, you know, Swiss chard.

And so you raise them so that they don't— they're not as susceptible to ground frost.

Well, when you raise a garden bed, you can just add whatever type of soil that you want to versus digging down, because my wife does a lot of composting. So we have chickens and goats, so she used a lot of the— a lot of the dung from the chickens and the goats and the leftover food from inside and does composting. And so we use a lot of this in the raised garden beds. I started gardening this year indoors. I'm growing something called spilanthes, which I can tell you about later. It's amazing. I found it in Kauai. But the, um, the— what I do during the day is eat a lot of wild plants, right? So, so I'll come in— when I'm coming in from like that cold pool in the morning, I'll like gather some plants and I throw those in a blender with like some, some fats like coconut milk or coconut oil. Uh, I'll do like some bone broth and some lemon because when you mix vitamin C with collagen, you make the collagen a lot more absorbable. So I'll mix the vitamin C with bone broth. I'll put that into the blender, a whole bunch of superfoods. I'll blend it for like 2 minutes because if you blend it for a long time, it gets like a texture like a Wendy's Frosty. So it's like— and you can like eat it with, with, you know, one of those long— you've had a Wendy's Frosty before, right? Yeah. You look confused. No, no, no. I said Wendy's Frosty.

It's strange that it—

what kind of horrible life have you led? What did your parents do to you? You never had a Wendy's Frosty? So, so it gets like this Wendy's Frosty-like consistency. It's just a bunch of wild plants and fats and And I put like that stevia in there. I put a little bit of cacao in there. Sometimes I'll do like a little bit of whey protein, like a good like grass-fed whey or some kind of protein source. And then I put like crunchy things in. So I put it all in a bowl with a spatula. Crunchy? Yeah, like coconut flakes and cacao nibs. And like I use like these little spirulina and chlorella tablets. And so it's like eating a— it's like when you go to a yogurt store and you get the yogurt and you get the toppings on top of it, but it's like this amazing ketogenic superfood-rich meal. And by blending it all together and blending the fats with all the, all the ingredients, you're actually enhancing the absorption. Wow. And so, so that's what I have for breakfast.

Dude, you should open a cafe. That sounds good.

I'm trying one right now. Well, I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to make it into like a, uh, like a drinkable, a drinkable form. Something that'll stay in that form. That, um, yeah, I'm going over to see, uh, uh, Rick Rubin after this over on Malibu, and he does the same thing for breakfast. And that's actually one of the things we're talking about over there, how we can make this. No, so random. Like, we, we go sauna together over there in Malibu, and we were, uh, we both do the same thing. Like, his is, his is a little bit different. Like, he put some different things in it, the same thing. And it's an amazing breakfast because you can sit there and like, I do a lot of dictation on my computer, so I'll sit there and I'll dictate emails, but while I'm eating my, my smoothie with a spoon. Wow. Amazing. And then I do a salad for breakfast— or for lunch, a big-ass salad. Again, a whole bunch of wild plants, and I'll put like sardines, seeds, nuts, you know, just good, good fats on there. And then I have like these nori wraps, right, which is like a seaweed wrap, really good in iodine, really nutrient-dense. And then I use miracle noodles. Have you had miracle noodles before? So they're made out of Japanese yam. They call them shirataki noodles.— my kids make pad thai out of this. They have like a cooking podcast where they do all these crazy, crazy meals. And one of the things they use a lot of are these shirataki noodles. So I make these Japanese yam noodles, I put them on top of the salad, and then I roll that up in like a nori burrito wrap, and I eat that like a burrito for lunch. And then dinner, like I mentioned, is just, you know, whatever my wife happens— because dinner is like my free meal, right? It's just whatever I want to have. But for this study, for Jeff Volek's lab, it's 12 months strict ketosis, and they brought us in the lab, uh, and me and the, and the group of ketogenic athletes, and also the whole group of, of endurance athletes following a traditional carbohydrate-rich diet, uh, do a VO2 max test the night that we got there. And then the next morning, they punched a bunch of holes in our thighs with needles and did a biopsy of the muscle to see how much glycogen was in the muscle. And then with these big holes in our, in our muscles, we had to go run on a treadmill for 3 hours. So I ran 22 miles. So when you're saying punch a hole, like, like, they wanted to see how much— they wanted to see how much glycogen. It's like a muscle biopsy. It's like a little guillotine, but it's a big deal. You get hurt, especially when you go pound on the treadmill after you've had these, these needle biopsies in your thighs. And then they did fat biopsy because they wanted to look at fat content up on either side of the hips. And then I ran for 3 hours on this treadmill, and it was horrible. There was like no TV, there's no, no kids. There's white wall on the treadmill, but they— and, and I was hooked up to like a, uh, you know, like, like a, uh, a blood collection device because they wanted to see what was happening.

Walkman? What am I in the '90s?

I had a Walkman and, uh, I had my— I didn't even come out of my mouth— my aerobic socks on, like Jane Fonda back in the day. Exactly. Yeah. And my running suit. So you just run for 3 hours staring at the wall? Just run for 3 hours.

That's got to be the worst part of it.

It's horrible. Yeah. I didn't know going in. I walked in the room and I'm like, oh shit, because I would have brought something to wash. But I ran and they were testing fat oxidation rates at rest and at exercise. So I'm wearing this mask. It does what's called indirect calorimetry where based on the carbon dioxide that you breathe out and the oxygen that you consume, it approximates your carbohydrate and your fat burning rate. It's kind of like the gold standard of metabolic testing in laboratory testing situations like in an exercise physio lab. Physiology lab. And so you're, you're testing how much fat you're burning during exercise, how much carbohydrate you're burning during exercise, something called your, your respiratory exchange ratio is what it's called. And the prevailing, uh, research in the literature suggests that you can burn about 1.0 grams of fat per minute during exercise. Like, that would be about how much fat you would burn, 1.0 grams of fat per minute. When they tested— this is called the FASTER study, F-A-S-T-E-R They found that the folks who followed a high-fat diet like me and these other people who are eating high-fat diet, we were burning 1.5 to 1.7 grams of fat per minute during exercise during this 3-hour treadmill run. We had no deficit in performance. Our VO2 maxes were just as high and we, we maintained our levels of muscle glycogen. And so basically there was no— we didn't go any faster. I'm not saying like, like a ketogenic diet is gonna make you better at endurance sports because I've never seen any evidence of that. That's going to happen, but we did go just as fast and we actually turned our bodies into fat-burning machines over the course of 12 months. It was actually a really cool study.

So the benefits would not be necessarily performance, but the benefits are more health-wise, cancer prevention.

The benefits would be, yeah, it's like, you know, a lot of people, like, they get gut rot and fermentation from eating a lot of fermentable carbohydrates. Some people get small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Some people get blood glucose fluctuations. Fluctuations, you see a drop in what's called the first phase insulin response. Like normally, you're supposed to produce a lot of insulin when you eat a meal or at least enough to be able to shove that substrate into storage tissue. And normally, you'd be able to produce this. And by getting a lot of glycemic variability during the day, you eventually produce insulin insensitivity, right? Like you don't have that normal first phase insulin response. And you can restore it. You can use things like bitters and chew your food a lot and strength train before you eat a carbohydrate-rich meal, things like that. But ultimately, yeah, it's more of like a health and longevity thing. It's not like eating low carbohydrate makes you faster. It's just that you avoid a lot of the potential issues, the potential health issues that would come with a large amount of glucose fluctuations. But there's exceptions to that rule, right? Like you could go get your genetics tested and you might find out you have, let's say, familial hypercholesterolemia, right? In which case, if you eat like a ketogenic diet, you'll produce a lot of like oxidized cholesterol. You'll see people with cholesterol like 400, 500, really high LP and all these issues with a high amount of fat consumption because their bodies are unable to deal with that amount of cholesterol.

That's a big point. That's a big point. We can't stress that enough, is that human beings vary so widely.

Huge, huge amount.

Like, there's a great book that Brian Callen turned me on to that I'm reading right now called Sapiens. So the, the origins of, of human beings. It's completely Fascinating.

It's, it's crazy. There's another book called Biochemical Individuality. It's like an old book, but I was looking through— it's fascinating. Like, like, there's like 12 different shapes of the stomach and like 7 different ways that the heart is shaped. And certain people will excrete copious amounts of vitamin D and need a lot more vitamin D intake, and other people develop vitamin D toxicity in response, like the 2,000 or 4,000 international units that a lot of people are popping these days. Certain people develop high cholesterol and high triglycerides and high inflammation in response to a ketogenic ketogenic diet and some people don't. And so like, we live in an era where it's like, it's cheap to get your genes tested and it's only gonna get cheaper.

Well, it's also— there's— you'd have to really find a good expert that really understands what the difference in the genetic variabilities are. Yeah, I mean, like, otherwise you're just testing, like you're trying a ketogenic diet, testing out your blood work and trying to figure it out. It's very complicated to the— for the layperson.

It is. But I mean, like, in very simplistic terms, I've told some people this, right? You could at least test your genetics. And there's actually a really good book about this called, uh, um, The Jungle Effect by Dr. Daphne Miller. And she goes into how, like, she'll put, like, her, her Hispanic clients on, like, a traditional Mexican diet comprised of, like, you know, uh, soaked and sprouted legumes and low glycemic index, you know, tortillas and non-GMO corn, and take them back to what their ancestors would have eaten. Like, she'll literally take, like, what the Tarahumara Indian tribe eating in South America and put her Hispanic clients on that, or she'll put like her African-American clients on a fiber-rich fermented like Cambodian diet, right? And, and you could easily do like— it's not rocket science, right? You go get your genetics tested, you see where your ancestors came from, and you try to approximate, right? And obviously we're a genetic melting pot in America, and there's going to be some people who are just like, oh crap, I came from— I come from Japan and Europe and Ethiopia. You know, like there's some people who, who come from all over the place, in which case you would have to take a deeper dive, right? You can get blood work, you can get— what I tell people is get your genes tested, get like a comprehensive blood analysis, get your gut tested, right? So you could look at your bacterial balance, presence of parasites, yeast, fungus, all those kind of little things that, that affect gut health and personality and everything else that the microbiome affects. Uh, and then like a, like a urine test for hormones, which is more accurate than a blood test. And that's a lot of testing, but I mean, if you really, really truly want to dial things in, it's genetic testing, it's blood testing, urinary testing for hormones. There's a test called the Dutch test. It tests like your testosterone all throughout the day, the metabolites of testosterone, your cortisol all throughout the day, the metabolites of cortisol. So you could actually see like, you know, do I really have high cortisol or am I just not breaking it down quickly enough, for example.

I just wish there was a place you could go that was very comprehensive that the an average person could go to where they could do all this stuff for you and break it down for you. It seems like there's more and more of a market of that.

It costs $10,000. It's the— actually, there is a place like— it's like the human— there's, you know, some of these guys who are like trying to live forever, like, uh, uh, I think one of them is, is Peter Diamandis. Uh, Craig Venter, I think, is another guy. Where are these? Like the Human Longevity Institute, I think it's called. Yeah, like some of these, some of these rich dudes, right? Like a lot of these billionaires, they're going to these places and getting like the comprehensive blood testing and done. I'd, I do a lot of that myself just by ordering it, you know, from like direct labs or these—

well, you have a deep understanding and knowledge of all this stuff.

It's different than the average person injecting stem cells into my— into my—

but I think for the average person that's listening to this, it's a, it's a little confusing and maybe a little frustrating because it would be nice if there was a place you could go that's like the dentist. You know, you go to the dentist, hey Bob, you've got a cavity, right?

It's all pretty straight.

Exactly.

And that, that will— there's companies working on that right now, like, like an actual dashboard where you get a test kit done. And, and they're like— they're actually like microneedles now that you can attach to the skin, that you, you patch it on yourself, you send off a tiny, tiny amount of blood, and you get a host of blood values back. And then you would be able to see like what you have deficits in. And I could totally see them pairing that with like food delivery companies, or like, you know, even just like printouts, like, here's your protein-carb-fat ratio, right? So yeah, it'll happen.

Now, when you were on the strict ketogenic diet for 12 months, what was your diet? Like, what did you basically eat?

No Italian. Yeah, the first thing you ate when you got off was order a pizza.

I don't remember.

I don't know. I remember what I ate. Yeah, it was like my bodybuilding days where like you go way in like in the morning before the show, and then the rest of the day you eat like freaking ice cream and bread, and you look like just like a, an Olympic god when you get up on stage because everything's popping, right? Like all that glycogen gets restored after about 8 hours. Uh, the— how does that work? My first meal is— well, you— when you don't eat many carbohydrates, you upregulate levels of something called glycogen synthase, which is an enzyme responsible for helping to get glycogen into muscle tissue.

So this would be a process that you would do before a show?

Glycogen depletion followed by glycogen restoration causes this big surge in glycogen. Plus, going into a show, you're restricting carbohydrates anyways because it's hard to get very, very low body fat. That's why you see bodybuilders builders eating freaking like chicken and broccoli, right? So, um, the, the same thing is something I did when I did triathlon, right? You'll like carbohydrate deplete the weekend before a race, and then I used to do this— you'd eat like no carbohydrates on Saturday and Sunday for a race that follows the next Sunday, and then Monday you'd start to eat more carbohydrates, Tuesday even more, and by like Saturday before the race you're eating like 90% carbohydrate. This is what I did before I kind of trained my body to like, you know, ketosis and function well on a low-carb diet. But you're just— I mean, you're jacked up, chock-full of glycogen because you upregulate that enzyme. It's called— what's it called— carbohydrate— it's just basically carbohydrate depletion, carbohydrate loading.

So now, was there any benefit of that performance-wise versus what you're doing now?

Mm, there's, there's not necessarily a benefit in that you, you go faster if you've trained your body how to operate well on a low carbohydrate diet. I've never, like I said, seen any evidence that like a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet makes you go faster than if you were eating like a regular, like, carbohydrate-rich diet. But I also haven't seen that if you do like I did and follow it strict for a long time, there's not a lot of evidence that makes you go slower either. So it's kind of like, it's like even.

So, right, so it's just a health longevity benefit.

It's more of like, hey, if I can live a longer time and feel better and produce less reactive oxygen species by doing this versus versus the high carbohydrate intake, then why not do it? And I mean, when you look at like the Nike project and how they were trying to break the marathon record in Italy, they were using like these crazy engineered forms of carbohydrate where they went way above like these maltodextrin fructose blends that a lot of companies like, like Gatorade use. And they were using these super engineered carbs. It's possible that some of these newer carbohydrates that are engineered for extremely high absorption could, could beat out— like, if we were to study those in, like, a, you know, a high-fat, low-carb athlete who'd followed that diet for a long period of time versus, like, a traditionally fueled athlete who was eating these newfangled engineered carbohydrates, it's possible the newfangled engineered carbohydrates could make you go faster. But unless your paycheck is on the line and you're a pro, I still say, you know, why, why not get that balance between health and longevity and speed? My thyroid, though, did not like that high-fat ketogenic diet. Thyroid didn't like it? Paired with, uh, high levels of physical activity, my testosterone went down. Like, there issues.

That's fascinating because usually you hear the opposite. People with thyroid disease, they recommend a ketogenic diet to those people.

Yeah, but look at it this way, and I explain this to, to a lot of athletes who I work with who want to do the ketogenic diet thing. You read a, you know, you read a book like, uh, you know, there's some fantastic ketogenic diets out there that are plant-rich, which a lot of ketogenic diets aren't, right? Like, they'll be like coconut oil and butter, and that actually creates a lot of gastric inflammation in the absence of, of like, you know, high amount of polyphenols and flavonoids and high fiber and plant like you want both. I wrote an article about this called The Dark Side of Coconut Oil that gets into the fact that if you're going to do like a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic type of diet, you would want to include a lot of plants. And like, uh, uh, Dr. Terry Wahls has a book called The Wahls Protocol that's got a plant-rich ketogenic version in it. Um, Stephen Gundry has his book The Plant Paradox, and he has like a— he has like a ketogenic version in that book that's like very plant-rich. So if, if you're eating like a, like a plant-rich ketogenic diet and you're following what a lot of these people have written, you'd generally be advised to like 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, which is fine if you have thyroid disease or you have some other issue, you know, pre-diabetes, whatever, and you're trying to control it with a ketogenic diet. But then once you throw copious amounts of physical activity into the mix, right, you're CrossFitter, you're an Ironman triathlete, and you go read one of these books and you read it's supposed to be 50 grams of carbohydrates. Well, you know, the authors of those books, to my knowledge, are not out racing Ironman triathlons and, you know, doing marathons and copious amounts of physical activity. So you have to up the carbohydrate intake. So it's all about, you know, so— for me personally, only like 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates.

And still maintain ketosis.

Carbohydrate feed at the end of the day, I'll still maintain ketosis. And so you, again, you have your cake and eat it too.

That's a radical physical output though you're talking about.

Exactly. So if you have like a thyroid issue and you're highly active and you want to follow ketogenic diet, then you need to include more carbohydrate than would be recommended in, let's say, like a more sedentary type of ketogenic diet.

That makes sense because you're always reading these diets based on just the average person, and the average person is just not going to put out that kind of output.

You want to include a lot of the things that you tend to build up deficits in, like potassium and magnesium are two biggies, and you dump a lot of glycogen, and glycogen stores a bunch of water and it stores a bunch of electrolytes, so you have to figure out how to replace that. And now people are using these exogenous ketones, like the ketone salts or the ketone esters, and the danger with those is now you can get into ketosis but still also have high blood glucose. And that's something that we haven't really studied. Like, that's not like our ancestors out hunting, right, for that. Like, it's not like they were in ketosis because they were burning a lot of their own body fat and generating ketones as a byproduct. And they were, they were in just like a natural state because they weren't eating a lot of food, sometimes just, you know, not stuffing their face with carbohydrates and glucose. But now people are able to eat a normal Western diet and then like buy one of these ketone supplements and also be in ketosis. So you're hyperglycemic and hyperketotic. And I've— like, I did that before a race and I felt like I was on steroids. Like, it was like rocket fuel because my blood glucose was jacked through the roof. But so I did a bunch of like fructose maltodextrin energy-based gels, and then I drank a bottle of these ketone esters, which basically— I mean, they have— if you measure your ketones, you'll, you'll know that this is high. But within 10 minutes, my values were above 7 millimolar, which is just off the charts for ketones. But my blood glucose was also off the charts, and I felt like my cells had like both forms of fuel they'd ever need, both ketones and glucose. And I felt amazing. But I'll bet— I mean, that's similar like diabetic ketoacidosis. Like, if you're in that state all the time and you're using all these ketone supplements and just eating your diet and using these because you're quote in ketosis unquote, I don't think it's healthy.

I wonder if it would be great though performance-wise, like for a fight.

It's amazing. It's amazing. You feel unstoppable.

I would think that. Yeah, I wonder if athletes have tried that.

And as long as you use that, it's like, it's like you use it as a, you know, it's like I heard somebody say once, like sugar is a sometimes drug, right? Right. Because it does, like you can feel and it can give you, especially if you're, if you're not fat adapted, I mean carbohydrates give you a pretty big boost in performance and energy versus not having them on board when you're exercising, and especially exercising exercising hard. And this would be like that, right? If you were to use that as a sometimes drug and be careful with it, um, I could see that being a huge—

like, what kind of a bump were you getting?

Like, um, I didn't quantify it. It was a Tough Mudder in Vegas, and all I know is I felt way, way more dia— like, like I had the cognitive high that you get from ketones, which was the original reason that I started doing— like, I started doing this ketosis thing like 7 years ago when I was getting ready to race Ironman Canada, and I wanted to see what it would feel like to have those readily available fuel sources for the liver and the diaphragm and the heart and kind of the focus that comes with high levels of ketones when you're on a bike for 5 hours. And I had that when I took these exogenous ketones, but then I also had all the energy that you get when you, you know, like after you've had like a, like a candy bar, right? So, so yeah, your high blood sugar and high blood ketones. So you, so you just feel focused, but you also have high levels of energy.

That sounds That sounds amazing.

That's scary.

That sounds amazing.

Just like the stem cells in the dick, right? It's amazing. I hope it's good. I hope I don't die.

That sounds like though if you were doing a big event and if you didn't do it up to the— I like what you're doing in terms of diet-wise. It seems like it makes sense. You've got a really good balance. But for a big event, that sounds like it would be a really good thing to do. Load up on carbohydrates. Load up on the ketone esters.

Right. Exactly. That sounds wild. Ketone esters are expensive. Ketone salts. Sure, I like about the ketone salts too is, you know, I haven't seen a lot of research that the ketone esters are necessarily that much better. And the ketone salts, you get electrolytes with them too, right? And that's one of the things that you get depleted on them, like a ketogenic diet.

You know what, what brand you're using for your ketone supplements, dude?

I told you, I'm like, uh, as a blogger, I get these packages sent to my house every day. Just like you probably get the same thing, it's like cardboard boxes full of boxes and like the occasional little paper bag of something that somebody made in their kitchen that they sent Yeah, that's, that's— somebody gave me, uh, somebody gave me when I was— this was— where was— I think it was in Asheville, doing a race in Asheville.

Of course, North Carolina. North Carolina.

People don't know about Asheville. Freaking great food.

Nashville is a crazy little spot.

I— one of my clients took me to this place called Karate. It's like a charcuterie, like a fine charcuterie restaurant. Amazing meat. Asheville's amazing, apparently. Like, uh, President Obama's like favorite restaurant was in Asheville, and he'd go there. And, and like, you go up and down the street and just— I went there during the Yoga festival. There's like people sitting up in trees playing banjos. It's crazy. It's amazing. I definitely want to go back there. Yeah, the International Yoga Festival in, in Asheville. But the, um, shout out to Asheville. Yeah, shout out to Asheville, baby. Hashtag Asheville. Somebody gave me like wine that they infused with cannabis. I get like this big bottle of like cannabis-infused wine, but it wasn't like one of those old school like kombucha bottles, like the glass. And you're just like, I don't know where this has been sitting. I don't know what's sit here. Um, it was a cool idea, but, uh, no offense to whoever gave me that, but I didn't actually consume that. But the, uh, the ketone salts and the ketone esters, um, honestly, dude, I've tried like all of them. Uh, you know, Keygenics and, uh, Keto— I forget, they're all Keto something.

My friend went to school in Nashville and, uh, he said that they started giving the cows a certain diet to kill the psilocybin mushrooms that growing their shit because too many kids were climbing fences and really, and plucking mushrooms out of the cow shit.

You ever do that? You ever, ever do like the psilocybin microdosing thing that people are doing for, for cognition?

I have psilocybin microdosed. I've taken, and it gives you a nice feeling.

I like it.

It gives you— I have a friend who is a world champion kickboxer who microdoses every day, and he says it makes him almost telepathic. He says it makes his response time to sparring. He said he sees things before they happen.

Your sensory perception improves, especially in nature settings, right? Like there's this, there's like the synthetic chemical LSD, or PLSD is like the one a lot of people are using now because you get it for a lot less expensive and it has the same effect as LSD. It's just, it's a lot cheaper. You get both, you know, like these websites where you use cryptocurrency to purchase the compound.

But the FBI's on it too.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Dun dun dun dun. You, uh, it's very synthetic and there's like a merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and you get very creative and focused simultaneously. What doses are you, uh, for LSD? You, you want to volumetrically dose, which means like if you get a blotter of LSD, it's like 100 micrograms on like a square, and a lot of people cut that into like 10 pieces so that one piece would be 10 micrograms, but you don't know if that piece has like 20 or 5 on it, right? So you take a 100, uh, 100 microgram tab and you put that in like a little, like a, like a glass dropper bottle, and then you would add like 10 milliliters of Everclear or vodka or some kind of alcohol to it. And then you know that for every 1 milliliter of alcohol in that little dropper bottle that you consume, you're getting exactly 10 micrograms of LSD and about 10 to 20 micrograms, like 1 to 2 dropper bottles full, that would be considered a microdose for most people. But you don't— like, returning to psilocybin, psilocybin produces like this sensory perception, very natural feeling, uh, improvement in your, in your cognition and, and your senses that, that it just feels more natural, right? It's like you, you would take it before you go on a hike, or you would take it when you're in like a very, very natural, like a setting, like, you know, for, for something like, uh, you know, day at the office, like, it seems like LSD is like a more natural choice. But psilocybin is really interesting for like, you know, nature-based setting, hiking.

Well, the thing about it is you feel like you, you're, you're getting readings from trees and plants. Yeah, you get a weird feeling from them you don't normally get, like, oh, now I'm tuned into whatever frequency you guys are operating on. Yeah. And they, they feel alive. Yeah. Whereas trees just feel like trees normally. I walk by, like, they look beautiful, and— but I don't feel them in the same sense, right?

Exactly. And I mean, you don't want to— you don't want to make yourself dependent on finding a tree beautiful by whether or not you have psilocybin. It's not even a beautiful thing in your bloodstream.

It's like it's communicating with you, you know what I'm saying? It's like you exactly feel like they're giving you information.

You save it for those settings when you want nature to be really special. Yeah, because my wife gives me a hard time sometimes. She's like, you know, why do you gotta take psilocybin before you gotta go on a hike? Like, why don't you just go on a hike? And I tell her, you know, sometimes it's more interesting. Sometimes you see things you wouldn't normally otherwise see. So that's, you know, I go to bed and I've got like my binaural beats and my sleep mask, and you know, I've got like that little grounding earthing device under my body and my chili pad and, uh, you know, blue light blocking glasses. And you know, I get in bed with all these wires sticking up out of my head. My wife just gets in bed and just like sleeps. She's got nothing on her side. So we're very yin and yang.

Yeah, well, you're so involved, like everything you're doing. You're very involved. Does it ever feel overwhelming that you have all this stuff? I mean, obviously it's what you do.

No, because you systematize it, right? Like when I walk into my office, it's not like I'm spending 20 minutes like turning on the, turning on the JuveLite and putting on the essential oil diffuser. And, um, uh, you know, I've got like, uh, this, this device that creates like special water that you breathe. Well, you know, humidifies the water that you breathe while you're working. And I've got like, you know, blue light generating devices on the ceiling and all this stuff in my office. But when I walk in there, it's just like click, click, click, and I go to work, right? With the thing on my head or whatever. So it's— once you systematize it, it's not exhausting. It's not like you're doing a lot to actually improve your body or, you know, say biohack your body while you're— while you're at work doing a lot of stuff. Just becomes systematized, right? It's like putting on your pants in the morning.

That biohack word is about done. I'm about done with that word. Biohack word gets— it's so beaten up, that word.

Now what I would consider to be biohacking backing is, you know, these dudes that like inject chlorella into their eyes so that they could get night vision. Wow. You should pull that up. Or, or like, uh, Kevin Warwick, like he was like the original cyborg guy who got like a chip implanted underneath his skin. Or the people who will inject like magnets in their fingertips to be able to interact with devices. So they would use the human body as what they call wetware and then install hardware. And like, to me, that's a true biohacker. For me to blend like curcumin with olive oil and bone broth and vitamin C in my smoothie, that's not like a biohack. That's just like health, just like making a meal, right? Like it's like, yeah, yeah. So I think it's overused. I think there are like trendy true biohackers out there who have actually hacked their biology.

But injecting chlorella into your eyes, yeah, it seems super risky.

Actually, you know what, I think it's chlorophyll, which is the, which is the green active component that you would find something like chlorella, but his eyes are all black.

It's really weird.

You should pull it up, James. Like, dude, injected forever, I'm assuming. Oh, I mean, I don't think you could suck the chlorophyll back out, but he has night vision now.

What?

Or the guy who is Goatman. Did you hear about Goatman?

No, hold on, let's one, one step at a time. You're almost manic. You're just like, I got another one, I got another one, hold on. So this guy has permanent black in his eyes and he can see like sort of like a deer. Like nocturnal.

Oh, that guy. Yeah, that's him.

Jesus, motherfucker. Making science more available to the public, have been testing a concoction of chemicals that allows humans to see in the dark, and it works.

That's a true biohack. Like, that's a correct use of the term biohacking, in my opinion. This guy's out of his mind. There's some other people, and you can get like a— what's this on, Nerdist? Yeah, nerdist.com. There he goes, straight into the eye. I'm not gonna do that. I, I will stop at the stem cells. Into my dick. I'm not gonna do things.

The speculum holding my eyes open was by far the worst part. Even the effects themselves were very subtle. It wasn't like, oh my god, I have Predator vision. Nothing like that. You don't get superpowers. This is a tweak, not an overhaul.

It's kind of disappointing that you go through all that for just the tweak.

Yeah, well, your whole fucking eyes—

I want— if I'm gonna do that shit, I want Predator vision. Yeah, I want the full meal deal. I want to be able to hunt animals in the darkness.

This guy's got hands—

works by binding to opsin proteins in your retina, where it's a excited by light, transformational process to occur in the protein segment. See, there you go.

Huh.

Yeah, so you could get the blue light blocking glasses, or you could just inject everything into your eyes.

Allowed him to pick up figures in the dark with 100% accuracy, where non-treated test subjects could only make out to about 30%.

That's pretty significant.

Well, that would be really good.

And I like, I like how the author doesn't know which percentage sign to use, the actual percentage sign or the word percent.

Right, mixes it up.

They got to work on their on their editing. Yeah, that's interesting. You're a writer.

Yeah, 50 meters. Go back to that, Jamie. We're talking 50 meters, over 160 feet apart. Oh wow, that's actually really significant. The following morning, his eyes returned to normal.

Oh, all right, where does it say that?

Right there.

His eyes returned to no apparent side effects. Oh wow, so he's not like that.

No, so they're not injecting, they're dropping. They're using drops. So This would be like— we're talking about bow hunting, about elk hunting, like, like when you're in sort of low light, that might be the move. You could pack your speculum into your, into your bow case, just drop them in there.

Make sure that you have a hunting buddy who is well-versed in the addition of chlorophyll, rubber gloves into a speculum. Yeah, bring the rubber gloves. You've got all that stuff to field dress anyways and just go to town on your eyes.

How did you, uh, get into bow hunting?

Uh, my buddy, uh, Kanta I was seeing Claremont up in Washington State. He was running these Train to Hunt competitions, which are really badass. It's like obstacle course racing. It's like obstacle course racing with a weapon. Yeah, it's a ton. And you could do it out here and like, because you have like, you could carry sandbags and do like cones and suicide sprints and all sorts of stuff with this Techno Hunt setup that you have. But the Train to Hunt, like, uh, the, the first competition that I did, you show up and it starts off with like a 4 or 5 hour traditional 3D shoot. And for people who don't know what a 3D shoot is, it's a bunch of targets, you know, like Reinhardt targets or whatever, that are set up.

Well, explain that. The different locations. Yeah.

Yeah, they look like animals. They're gonna be a fox or an elk or, you know, whatever, you know, a bedded animal or a standing animal. And they're spread throughout this course that you're walking. You could think of it almost like golfing, you know, for people who don't bow hunt. And you'll, you know, one shot might just be like a simple 25-yard shot at a fox where if you get vitals you'll get 5 points, and if you hit a body shot, then it might be 3 points. And if you miss, it's 0. And if you get like a wound, it's actually a negative score, right? Which it should be. Like, it's like a— because if you wound an animal, that's, that's really much, much worse than missing an animal, right? So some of the shots are pretty complex. It might be you got to get off 2 shots in 10 seconds, which is actually kind of hard to do, you know. 2 shots in 10 seconds and one animal's at 20 and one animal's at 40, right? Which is why I use like a 3-pin sight on my bow, because you don't even have time to adjust the dial after you've taken shot to the yardage for the second shot. Um, you might have a shot that's like, run up this hill, there is a target up there, we won't tell you the distance, but you have 30 seconds to make it the 25 yards up that, up that gully, and then you're gonna have a shot at the top, and you gotta run up the gully, sight, and get your shot off in those 30 seconds, right? So, so it's not like a traditional 3D shoot, it's very active, you know, and some shots are, are you draw lunging, and then you stand, and then you got to walk around the tree, and then take your shot. So it's actually pretty fun. It's, it's way different than just like standing out of the range, shooting at targets. And you get a certain score coming out of that, right? Like you might have amassed X number of points or lost X number of points. And then you go into— they actually, they, this year they've kind of like changed it because a lot of people are like getting hurt and blowing out their knees with this next part. But you do what's called like a meat pack, which is 100 pounds in your pack, and it's a 2 to 4 mile course that you got to boogie across as fast as possible.

People were running, right?

And the problem with it was people people, like, when you pack out, like, you, you're taking your time. You're not running. Yeah, you're not like racing your buddy. But this— and it was like the most painful thing I've really ever done in terms of like how high my heart rate got and the amount of lactic acid. Like, just try to go 2 miles as fast as you can with 100 pounds in your pack.

Sounds very—

not only you gotta spend— like, I would spend copious amounts of time just like making sure the pack was adjusted properly, and I'll put like the bubble wrap in the bottom of the pack so it moves the weight that you're using, which are typically sandbags up to the center of the pack. And I worked with this company called Kefaru that makes like these— yeah, yeah, they make it— they make a good pack. Aaron, exactly. And, and, you know, he did some Skype sessions with me where he taught me exactly— because you don't set it up the way that you would if you're just gonna pack out an animal. You actually put it super duper tight up in the shoulder so it's not bouncing around, and then you put the weight down in the hips so it works for running 2 miles really hard, but it's super uncomfortable. It's not biomechanically favorable, right? Sucks.

But, but it's good for running.

Yeah, so they call that the meat pack, right?

And you have to do it that way, or is it just a matter of how much weight you have on your back? Like, if you— could you use one of those Atlas packs? Have you seen those Atlas things from Outdoorsman's?

It's essentially—

it's a pack frame with a traditional Olympic bolt on the end of it where you put the plates on it. What are those things called? The end of end of a weight bar where the weight slide on them. What would you call that?

The end of a weight bar where the weights— like, you know, like the end of a barbell?

Yeah, the end of a bar.

I don't know.

Yeah, well, they have one of those, a post, I guess you call it a post. Yeah, yeah, they have one of those that's hanging out of the back. See if you can find it. It's called the Atlas Trainer, Jamie. Outdoorsmans.com.

Um, and it's a pack.

Yeah, it's a pack frame with, uh, I hike with it on. This is it. Show me a picture. It's pretty dope. Whoa. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about.

They're not a sponsor, but they're cool. Good people.

You could use whatever you want as long as, as long as you have weight in it. You just have to figure out how to— because everybody has to use a standard weight, so you have to use the sandbag that they issue to you and figure out a way to strap it on. You have to use the same object that— so everybody's using a sandbag just so you don't come in with your own, right?

You know, wait, I was just saying, if you did that, your rubber plate that you bought that you, that you painted a 45-pound logo on.

Um, anyways, though, so you do the meat pack and, and you get a certain amount of time for that, and then you do the obstacle course, which is the real hoot, and which they still do, which is, uh, because they got rid of the meat pack, but the obstacle course—

they got rid of the meat pack.

Yeah, it just— well, it's not— it doesn't make sense, right? Like, they designed this whole competition to simulate hunting, to prepare a hunter to hunt, and to train a hunter to hunt properly, and it just flew in the face of everything that is hunting. Hunting, which is, you know, jacked up nervous system, you know, rushing through the woods with a giant pack. And you just— you don't pack out an animal like that, right? And they'd have to figure out a way to put like a speed limiter on, like, oh hey, you're not allowed to run.

So, so yeah, how many guys got their legs blown out?

I don't know, but people were getting hurt and it just didn't— didn't make sense. I'm jacked up my back and I get it. It's cool, like, I get it. I kind of wish they still had it because I was good at that part because like I'm an endurance athlete and I'm kind of strong. So, so for worked out pretty well. And then they have the obstacle course, which is like crawling under barbed wire, stand, shoot. And then you're doing like, you know, like sandbag over the shoulder, 20 reps, shoot, 30 burpees. And, and for the obstacle course, you have a 50-pound pack or a 40-pound pack on your back. They kind of adjust the pack weight based off which division that you're in. But so you're using a smaller pack. So I use the Kefaru pack. I think again they just had like a smaller pack. Same thing, you got a sandbag, it's a lighter sandbag. So you're carrying that through the whole course, but you're stopping and shooting along the way. So it's like you're, you're learning how to— just imagine if you, if you're like rushing up a hill and you got to the top of the hill and you got to calm your heart rate, calm your nervous system very quickly, and get your shot off. And granted, you're not necessarily going to be hauling a sandbag up that hill and doing a bunch of burpees, but it's kind of simulating that, right? Yeah, of shooting with your heart rate elevated. Um, and it's a, it's a hard course. I mean, like, there are, you know, like, legitimate, you know, hardcore CrossFitters and athletes that do this, but it's a combination of being able to shoot well and being able to, to fitness.

Well, that's the interesting thing about bow hunting is that bow hunting really does require fitness.

Well, when I did that high country— yeah, I was, I was wearing this, uh, this, this ring we were talking about when I did that hunt in Hawaii, and I did like 46 miles over the course of 5 days, just like crawling and walking and hiking and sprinting. And I mean, that's That's why I like bow hunting, is it's a challenge. And the, uh, the Train to Hunt guy, uh, Kenton, he told me about these competitions and I was watching them and I'm like, I really want to try this. Because at that point I'd firearm hunted for 2 years. I didn't grow up hunting. I grew up, you know, homeschooled, playing chess and playing the violin, reading books and playing World of Warcraft. Like, I was, I was not like a hunter kid growing up, and neither were parents, right? Like, we'd occasionally go fishing for trout, and that was about it, in the, in the stocked pond. So hunting was new for me. I'd been hunting for 2 years, totally self-taught. Like, I field dressed my first animal with the little, you know, YouTube video on the iPhone.

Wow.

I've got my knife and I'm watching the video because that's the way I— being homeschooled, right? Like, I like to teach myself things. I just grew up as a very independent learner. So all of my hunting was self-taught.

That's a great benefit.

Yeah. Yeah, there are drawbacks to being very resistant to learning from others or having mentors. I think that you also don't play well with others, right? Like I grew up as, when I got to college, I was very poor at like the team activities.

You weren't socialized.

I was very good at creating, at leading, at thinking outside the box, at, you know, kind of being a lot more independent, right?

Well, that's fascinating because that's what homeschooling is formed on. That's what you do.

It is what I wound up doing. And also I read a copious amount. I wrote a copious amount. And that's still what I do because that's what I— that's what I kind of grew up doing, homeschooled. And it was really tennis that got me into fitness. Like, I played tennis in college and I got big into tennis in high school. And in Idaho, where I was at the time, there's a rule that homeschooled kids could play sports at the local public school. So I played tennis and that really got me into sports. And then I studied exercise physiology and biomechanics in college, and, and here I am.

But what's that like, going from being home-schooled to hanging out with public school kids?

Really awkward. Like, I— because you're not, you're not in class with them, you're not at the prom, you're not— yeah, you're not doing any of the social things that they're doing. But then you might show up at like, you know, tennis practice or whatever. And same thing when you get to college, you're just not used to— I mean, like, dude, I went off the deep end in college because I graduated when I was 15 and I didn't do like a gap year or anything, right? Like, I just started college when I was 16 and I did not have good self-control around, you know, sex and alcohol and drugs and all these things that all of a sudden I was immersed in in college.

So, and no one was there to tell you no.

Yeah. The way I raise my kids is they, for example, there are, there are really no rules in our house, right? Like, they can try rum and scotch and whiskey, and they can take a hit off the vape pen. They're 9, but they also have been educated about what that might do to their liver or to the gray matter in their brain. Or we don't say no gluten. I tell them, you know, gluten is going to affect your test scores, of course creates neural inflammation, can create some gastric inflammation. You get to choose when you go to the birthday party whether you're going to have the gluten. And sometimes it comes back to bite me because we'll go out to a restaurant and they'll bring the bread out to the restaurant. My boys will be like, no, no, we don't want the— we don't want the bread. And I'm like, but I kind of wanted a little— I kind of did want a little piece of bread here. So that— I think that's a better way to raise a child, right? You educate them about the consequences of their decision, and then you let them make the decision themselves. You equip them rather than creating a bunch of forbidden fruit, which is the way that I was kind of raised, right? Right. So, so yeah, it was a little tricky, the whole college thing. Um, but back to, back to bow hunting, it was this train hunting, and Kenton came over to my house and I asked him about like kind of like the spearfishing, like what's, what's the bow, what release do I get, um, what arrows do I get, how do I do this? I went to the, my local bow shop, I took some lessons in shooting. Um, and then I— my first hunt, uh, what was my first hunt aside from my property? Because I'm on 10 acres, maybe a copious amount of whitetail. So I shot my first animal out there. My first major hunt was High Country, Colorado. We did like a horseback hunt with a guide there, you know, and that would— you got me hooked. If this was, uh, this was elk. Came back after 7 days with nothing. That was my very first hunt. So, and then my first actual kill was I hunted axis deer down in Texas. Amazing, amazing. Texas is crazy. I was telling you, they have like freaking zebras.

You can't believe me, I know they have everything.

Yeah, yeah, I've hunted there.

Came back and nilgai and African animals.

And my wife bought us a sausage maker and me and my boys made, made axis deer sausage and the backstrap, and it was amazing. And now, now they're little, they're little chefs, dude. Like, they, uh, that's cool. They made like bone broth, like made baked donuts out of breadfruit flour, and they use bone broth and colostrum, and they made like a cream cheese ginger frosting and a dark chocolate cacao frosting, and it actually tastes like real donuts.

What was this, from a recipe?

Yeah, from a recipe, and they had like donut molds.

How'd they find this recipe?

And you bake them.

Bone broth colostrum donut recipe.

We made it up. Oh, you made it up? Yeah, and they use breadfruit flour, or they did, they do pad thai, but they use those shirataki noodles I was talking about, and they use organic roasted crickets, like instead of shrimp or chicken, and the crickets actually taste really good. They're like nutty and salty.

Are they buying these crickets?

Yeah, they're not raising the crickets. They're not. Uh, I think it's called Akketa is the company that they get the crickets. And they're really good. They like send you these little— crickets are good, man. Baked crickets. Yeah, this is a place I go to in Mexico, risotto. And yeah, crickets are— they're actually really tasty.

Yeah, there's a place I go to in Mexico and they, they give them to you like it's a little appetizer they leave in your room when you go to this resort. Really? Yeah, they're like— it's like a fried cricket.

It's an appetizer. It's like, it's like the resorts you go to with the apples and the mango covered in the cellophane on the bed. But instead it's crickets.

Well, they have that too. They have crickets too. Wow. And they— it's very tasty. They're dark and yeah, they're somehow or another cooked. I don't know what they're—

seasonable, mineral-rich source of protein. Yeah, yeah.

And I don't see the thing about most people that are like, they don't want animals to die, they don't usually give a shit about bugs.

Yeah, not a lot of people find like a June bug super cute and cry when it, when it gets killed.

Or mosquito. Vegans will slap mosquitoes that are on their arms.

Yeah, I read a study this morning, the gene editing mosquitoes now. Yeah, like they're using CRISPR technology to make the mosquitoes less likely to bite you.

I saw that.

That crazy. Yeah, it's very bizarre. Yeah. And if you— there's a little cool little anecdote from that study too where they found that mosquitoes actually have like, uh, like they learn. If you swat at the mosquito, it actually learns to avoid you. And so if, if you, you know, normally I just like put some on my skin like cinnamon essential oil or something that drives a mosquito away. Does that work? But yeah, it does. You You want it— you want to dilute it because it's like a very— it's a burning oil. But cinnamon works amazingly.

But have you ever tried it in like Alaska where they have like really aggressive mosquitoes?

Try it in Hawaii where there's a lot of mosquitoes.

Different animal.

Work for me.

But been to Alaska?

No.

Get out of the fucking car and they swarm you like a pack of zombies.

Alaska doesn't seem like a place I would envision having these like special snow mosquitoes.

No, they just don't live very long, so they're in incredibly aggressive. Hmm. I mean, I'm telling you, it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. We went salmon fishing there, me and my friend Ari, and we opened up the car door to get out, and in the time it takes to open the car door, a swarm of mosquitoes was inside the car. And I'm not exaggerating, several hundred mosquitoes.

My goodness. Show that.

Sounds like that video that you pulled up once we were talking about this with the clouds of mosquitoes in Alaska.

Fucking crazy. Sounds like the grass— like when I grew up, I grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and we would get these grasshopper infestations, like each year. They— yeah, locusts. And they apparently, they plant their eggs in the ground, and then like in the spring or the summer they hatch. Look at that.

Yeah, that's mosquitoes in Alaska. Wow, dude, I'm telling you, it's the craziest fucking thing.

Just like a bird getting eaten by mosquitoes. Look at it.

Oh, little birdie getting jacked. Oh my goodness, dude, I'm telling you, I've never seen anything like it. And we were covered with DDT and all that shit, but yeah, they feel terrible.

The, the the DEET.

Do you know about Thermacells?

Cancer sticks. I do now. I think I've been using them because my kids camp outside sometimes, you know, in the forest, and I'll set one of those little Thermacell things in front of there. They're amazing. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. Oh, is that why the fur is like that? I have no idea. On that caribou? Yeah, the grasshoppers at our house in Lewiston, we would actually go sell them to pet stores. Like, that's how we'd make money in the summers because there'd be so many of them. Me and my brothers would walk around around with cages, catch these grasshoppers and bring them to pet stores. Well, they use them for like tarantulas and stuff like that. And then this army guy who's in the military came to our house and he showed us how they eat grasshoppers. So we started eating grasshoppers and we would like everything, like we'd microwave grasshoppers, just figure out every way to kill a grasshopper. And the way that we got rid of them was we introduced praying mantis and chicken to our property.

Oh, chickens are a motherfucker.

So we introduced a bunch of chickens and then we have chickens at our property up in Spokane now too. I have chickens right Eggs, yeah. Icelandic chickens. They're very, very hardy in the winter. Oh, they're different. And then the goats that we have are Nigerian dwarf goats.

Nigerian?

Nigerian dwarf goats. They're a very small goat and they produce a lot of milk for their actual size. And they're very hardy in the winter. Do you milk them? And they're small and they're cute. And we haven't milked them yet because they need to be, they have to be pregnant to produce the milk. And we've had some issues with like the babies dying and like we're learning. Morning Our Goat game. However, we did have to tie rubber bands around a bunch of their testicles recently to neuter some of the males.

Once you get them in front of that, like, training—

we're training the males to be pet goats.

Yeah, put them— oh, so you have to neuter them, so you're killing their balls with rubber bands, right?

Exactly. Yikes. Yeah, I've heard of dudes.

Very, very cute guys. Oh, they're adorable.

Yeah, those are little Nigerian dwarf goats, and we have like little tires.

Look at them go!

They have little tires that they play on.

They're super cute. My kids love jumping over each other.

They named them after candy bars like M&M and Caramel and Milky Way and Toffee.

And did you buy them just for pets, or did you buy them—

we bought them originally for milk because, you know, goat milk, it's very, you know, the protein is smaller, it's very thermodynamically, uh, compatible with the human body. Apparently the only one that's better is camel milk. There's a company out of California that was sending me camel's milk to my house for a while, and apparently it's super duper healthy for you, and it's— and the protein is smaller, more absorbable, and, and it's less hypoallergenic and friendlier to your immune system.

Well, when my daughter was young, she could not digest actual cow milk. It just really didn't agree with her, but goat milk was fine. It's one of the things we found, and I started drinking goat milk. I just, I feel like it just tastes better.

You know what I like is the, uh, colostrum. You ever use colostrum? Oh, Jamie, we're just basically just like playing— what is this, goat yoga?

Yeah, people do yoga with goats. They apparently find it relaxing.

That does not look relaxing. You're doing you got like a cloven hoof. They like it. On your cervical vertebrae.

It's really popular, man. I think I would get a kick out of that.

It distracts you a little bit. This just like—

That's white people. Yeah.

That's a white people thing. Yeah, this looks like something people who have never been on a farm would do. They're like, goats yoga. Yeah. Seattle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they can walk out of Starbucks with their frappuccino and they go sit with the goats. Exactly. Yeah.

You've got a great system out there though. It sounds awesome.

It's a good setup.

Wild animals out there.

It's a good setup. And then I have an obstacle. I built an obstacle course because I do all this obstacle course racing. And you know what's cool is you can take all these little bow targets and you set them up around the obstacle course. So you'll climb the rope and you come down. And then you shoot your bow.

And then you move on like that.

Is that how you practice?

Do you practice standing still though and working on your form and doing that as well where you're not tired?

Yeah, exactly. It's meditative.

I would like to have John Dudley sit down with you and go over this idea, because you also trigger shoot. You're not, you're not using surprise release.

I haven't. I haven't. I took one class at my bow shop on surprise release, and I like it and I get it. And frankly, I feel like there's a lot less strain in the shoulder when you pull back, because for a while I was getting like some of the shoulder, like some of the brachialis issues from, from pulling back. Why would it be different. Um, you know how when you do a lat pulldown and if you grip thumbs off, use more of the lats, and if you grip thumbs on, you use more of the, more of the biceps and the forearm muscles, right? I felt like it was similar to that. I felt like with the, with the surprise release, I was using more of my back and less of my forearm and biceps.

I don't know if there's something to that, but it doesn't make any sense because the draw is exactly the same way. The only difference is the release.

Yeah, yeah, it felt a lot different.

The thing about archery is it's like martial arts in that if you learn the wrong way, it's very difficult to unlearn. Mm-hmm. Like when I was teaching martial arts, it was way better to get someone who is open-minded, who had never had any martial arts experience, versus someone who had many, many years in a shitty martial art, because those people had these deeply ingrained pathways that were— whenever the shit would get weird or they would get uncomfortable or they'd get nervous, they would go back to their old technique.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah, and with archery, it's, it's very different. There's, there's also a series of instructionals that can show you about surprise releases that John Dudley's done, put online. And there's a guy named Joel Turner that has this whole dedicated thing to avoiding target panic in high-pressure situations. He's got a website, used to be called Iron Mine Hunting, but now he calls it ShotIQ.

I think Iron Mine— is it Iron Mine, the people that sell the Captains of Crush hand Handgrip Strengtheners?

I think that's another, another company. I love those guys. I have, I have a bunch of those. I have those up 197 pounds.

I don't know, my— I think mine might be like 150, but I have two things. I travel with one of those, uh, you know, it's like those power lungs that you breathe in and out of to strengthen the, the expiratory and inspiratory muscles and the diaphragm. And then a Captain's of Crush. And so if I'm on like a long road trip and I gotta drive a long time, I go back and forth between the hand grip strengthener and then the, the lung strengthener. I'll just like work out for like 2 hours while you're driving. That's awesome. That's amazing. You put on a good book and work the grip and work the lungs.

Yeah, I'm a big believer in those grip things. I mean, it just makes your hands so much stronger. And the Captains of Crush, I mean, they don't fuck around.

Those are really hard. And you combine that with the apnea, so you pass out a few times. It's super safe, safe way to drive.

Your hands are going—

no, just like, you got a sweat on, you're blue in the face, you can't even grip the steering wheel because your grip's gone.

Yeah, well, dude, we're short on time here, but I feel I think we could probably talk for about 6 days and you would never run out of things to talk about.

That's fun. Yeah.

How often are you around here, man? We gotta do this again.

Not that often. Not that often? Yeah, I avoid LA. Do you? I like it up in Spokane. Oh yeah. What I do is when I travel, like batch stuff here, like I'm just like back to back. Like I shot 4 documentaries yesterday and then, you know, talk the day before. Like I batch a lot of meetings and then go home. So I'll go out to Malibu tonight and then I'm gonna go to that Human Garage treatment on the 31st.

Yeah, talk about that for a second because I've been following those guys online, the Human Garage, and it seems really fucking interesting and weird. It is.

What do they do there? It goes back and forth. Like I've had some people tell me like that it's like cultish, right? That, 'cause you go in there and you gotta be like a member of their tribe and they, but I have never experienced anything like that. And I'm not quite sure what people mean when they say that.

That's also you. You have a big profile. You're a famous fitness guy. It might be they let you slide on the cult.

I don't, I don't know, but I enjoy it. They like fill you full of like high-dose curcumin before you go in, so your muscles just like melt. And then they have like 4 massage therapists working on you at the same time. And they taught me this, how like if one's like rubbing your head in a clockwise direction but the other guy's mashing on your adductor with their elbow, you you don't feel the mashing on the adductor as much because like the, the movement on your head is distracting you from that. And then somebody else is working on your leg and they have like all these essential oils that they, they fill the air with. They're like special oils that, that cause you to relax and be a little bit more open to the deep tissue work. And everybody there like goes through a special training. I mean, I liked it so much I actually— I, I flew one of their guys up to my house to work on me at my house.

They're doing it right.

Oh, that's What is that? That's it. Is that there? Yeah, that's there. That's there. Yeah, exactly. That's Gary. And he like put on— the first time I was there, he was like working on my back, and he worked on my back by putting on a rubber glove. And I actually have had that intra-butt massage. Okay. They work on it. They know— they work on your pelvic floor. It's pelvic floor therapy inside your asshole. That gets tight just like anything else.

So they go through your asshole to get to that?

They go into your asshole.

That sounds like something that a pervert would do. They do it a lot of times.

No, I had a girl down in Kauai do it. I was Gabby Reese's trainer. Like, she actually— she does like dry needling and intra-butt therapy. Yeah, and she also— she had me buy like this glass tool so I could do it myself. So I do this, I go in through my butt and I do massage. It sounds weird, but actually—

glass tool? Why don't they make it out of metal?

That shit gets tight. What if it breaks? Glass is smooth. I don't know. Hey, it's possible.

The fuck, putting glass in your asshole. Have you ever seen one of those Faces of Death videos?

Isn't that like one of those, uh, my roommates in college used to rent those.

Sounds horrible. Be a way someone would die. No, there's a, there's a video of a guy who stuck a bottle up his ass and then the bottle breaks. It's one of those.

No, I stop at THC suppositories and, and actual tissue devices. Yeah, glass rods. Anyways, the, yeah, the human guards, they went in through, through my mouth. To work on my back. Like, it went into your mouth? They go into your mouth like, like a big old rubber glove, and they're like working on the different areas. You know how different— like, if you work on like your, your infraspinatus or your teres minor in your shoulder, it can actually get rid of pain on the front of your shoulder. Like, there are certain trigger points. Yes. Huh. And it's very similar. Like, there are certain trigger points on the head that refer to like the, the back or the psoas. It's really interesting, like this whole idea behind, you know, fascia and trigger points and how when you're working on one area, it actually affects another area.

Well, I got rolfing done a few times when I had some pretty bad back injuries, and I found that to be pretty interesting. Yeah, very painful.

Yeah, I, I haven't had any rolfing done.

I had it from a giant dude.

I've ever had, I've ever had rolfing. I use a lot of those vibrating foam rollers and vibrating deep tissue devices though. Yeah, I'm a big, big fan.

Most of the time you're not going somewhere to get deep tissue.

Yeah, uh, most of time I, I do my own. And I just started to begin to have a massage therapist come to my house once a week because I think like there, there's a certain amount of relaxation that you get when somebody else is working on you and you're laying down on a table. And I have like this— this— you've used like a BioMat? Yeah, a BioMat like produces a bunch of heat. So I lay down on the BioMat and I put on my Michael Tyrrell beats and, uh, diffuse essential oil and have her work on me for a couple hours. Usually I'll have her come over after dinner, like around, you know, 7:30, 8 o'clock, and, you know, like after the family's kind of wrapped up, and, and she'll just work on me at night and I go to bed.

Amazing. Listen, Ben, you're a fascinating dude. I'm glad we got a chance to talk. Awesome, dude.

Really cool. Really appreciate it. That's a sick Techno Hunt setup.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun, dude. Thank you very much for doing this.

Appreciate it.

And people can find you on your website, wherever, just Google Instagram. Twitter, all that jazz.

All those places.

Ben Greenfield, ladies and gentlemen.

Later.