Smart Drugs, Nootropics, Microdosing With Psychedelics, Enhancing Deep Sleep, Rites Of Passage & Mu

I have a Master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Hey, what's up? I was recently in Austin, Texas. I went to the the fabulous onit facilities down there and sat down with my pal Kyle Kingsbury to talk all things sleep, psychedelics, rites of passage. We had fun.

I talked a lot about nootropics and.

Psychedelics starting this thing off. I was actually not on any psychedelics, just a ketone, peanut butter and jelly bowl and a cup of coffee. But my brain was ticking pretty solid and I talked fast and filled up this episode with a lot of information. You may also find this episode on Kyle's fantastic podcast, Human Optimization. Radio, Radio radio. Check that out. I'm recording these commercials for you right now while I am in Boulder, Colorado in nosebleed country because I'm about to take my wonderful team at Kion out to a big team retreat on the mountains and Kion is the company of which I am the CEO. We produce amazing supplements, we also have books, we have a ton of content articles, even a coach training university over there if you haven't checked it out. One thing you might be particularly interested in is our amino acid supplement. If you have not yet used essential amino acids, you may have heard me talk about them in the podcast episode that came right before this one, the Q and A where we delved into aminos and they are like a coverall supplement for everything. For sleep, for neurotransmitters, for performance, for fat loss, for staying anabolic in a fasted state. They are the bee's knees. Those along with all the other fine fine supplements over at Kion. You get a 10% discount on site wide. Very simple. You go to GetKeyOn. Gosh, I say that all the time. Very simple. I gotta stop saying that. You go to getkion.com get K-I-O-N.com 10% discount code BGF10 this podcast is also brought to you by my wonderful friends at Organifi. They make juice blends that rather than costing you the 11 to $15 you'd pay for a nice cold pressed juice at the hippie juice store, costs you about three bucks a juice. And it just comes powdered in this canister. You mix it up with water or I guess almond milk or coconut milk or anything else you want. And you could even put them in a smoothie. And the one that they have that's super popular right now has 11 different blood building and adaptogenic superfoods in it. It's called Organifi Red. They've got reishi and cordy mushroom extract in there. They have beets. They have a whole bunch of other stuff that I just can't pronounce, but.

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We're clapped in.

Boom.

The return. Once you get that up next to you, act like you've done this.

Get this all up in my face. I got to clean the granola out of my teeth. My keto PBNJ granola.

You can keep that away from your mouth while you clean your teeth.

A great listen for those in a car.

The rest of that stuff out of the cracks of my teeth during this podcast. That was good. I don't know what I just ate, but it was good.

It is good.

It was ketogenic.

The cafes got all the goodies. Well, I mean, I. I have a couple places I want to take this, but you're always into the latest, greatest, and I'm constantly learning from you. He even told me about this. We, obviously, we do the pissing contest on sleep scores, but. And you're always better.

I won.

What do you do for sleep? Because this is such a massive thing, people don't even realize how important it is for fat loss, recovery, cognitive function, you name it. It all boils down to sleep. So. So let's talk about your sleep habits.

I eat some chicken breast and masturbate and lay back and watch that deep sleep score just climb through the roof. It's amazing. It works every time.

It depends.

When I'm at home, the normal sleep hygiene stuff obviously dominates. I get cold, so I sleep on a chilipad and I put it on boost function, so it goes down to 55 degrees. I don't have that when I travel. So when I travel, I take a cold shower before I go to bed.

So chili pad is for people that don't know it's a mattress topper. Tim Ferriss blew these guys up.

And I circulates cold water.

Yeah. Underneath. And it just goes, like, right on top. So if you have a wife that you sleep with who likes it a little warmer, you can still drop it down his and hers.

Like the his and hers towel. You can have the his and hers pad. She has a pad. It's never been turned on. Two years.

Not even interested. But there, if she. She were ever so inclined, but it literally has never been turned on. So underneath the chili pad at home, I like this concept of. Of healing the body while you sleep. I just like to heal my body, you know, no matter what I'm doing, you know, so when I'M working. I've got the. The juve lights behind me kind of shining the red light.

So do you work with like a suit top but no pants on? That way you can get the juice direct light from the juv to your balls with.

With. Screw the suit top. Nothing on.

You have nothing on.

But. But the juve light, you only leave on for 20 minutes. If you do photobiomodulation like that for too long, you actually create excess free radicals. Okay, so you. You don't want to overdo that. It's the same a lot. A lot of these things that make the body better. You know, even nootropics like methylene blue is very popular right now. You do too much of that. You create excess free radicals. You do too much of. There's another device called the violite, which is. Which is great for.

Is that the intranasal one?

Intranasal light, little, Little laser light cap. It's really good for amplifying mitochondrial activity and nitric oxide production in neural tissue. But you leave that on for too long, and you create excess free radicals. You know, any of these things act on the same principle as hormesis almost. You know, you stay in a cold shower for. For two hours, and you might be kind of fucked up from that. So you want to. You want to be careful. So photobiomodulation, I'll do that for. For 20 minutes, and that's it. Or when I'm writing my book, I'll go sit on one of those pulsed electromagnetic field chairs and flip on. There's. There's another device. I know that this is sounding kind of. Kind of nerdy called a nanov. And it's like a DNA repair device, and it circulates this water. They're actually down here where paleofx. And they. They had a booth at the expo. But I'll stick that. That kind of wand or has a nasal cannula you can put into your nose. And where a nasal cannula should go based on this.

Not an anal.

Based on the title.

Nasal cannula. So, you know, a lot of times when I'm. When I'm working, I just do things to make my body better. So same thing when I sleep. So I have the chilipad, which can also help out with your nervous system repair and recovery when your body is cooler while you sleep. But it also amplifies your deep sleep cycles. Anything you can do to decrease core temperature will do that. So the rooms at 64 degrees, the chili pads at 55 degrees. I don't load up with a lot of blankets. But I am getting into this idea of weighted blankets. It kind of activates your parasympathetic nervous system when you have something just slightly heavy on top of you holding. So they make like these. Yeah, they make like these 20, 25 pound weighted blankets. And now I forget the brand I have on my bed, but they actually breathe really well. They're not stuffy and warm as you would expect them to be. And when I travel, what I do is I'll just have like a top sheet, but then I put pillows on top of the top sheet and you almost feel like you're weighted down and it gets this, this really kind of cool feeling. Underneath the chilipad I have this device called a body balance mat. And that is, that's a PEMF device. So it's the same thing as if I were, I were camping. Right. So you're grounded, you're earthed, even if you're in a high rise condo or whatever. And I spoke with the people who make that mat and I spoke with Chilipat and they've actually talked to each other. And apparently water in the chilipad kind of amplifies the effect of the pulsed electromagnetic fields that come off this body balance mat. So I basically just got two mats underneath me. And you can't feel them. I'm like the princess in the pea when I sleep, so I'm pretty, pretty particular. But you can't feel any of this stuff. It's just kind of like laying on your bed. So I sleep on this bed at home called an intellibed. It's a very good breathable mattress. It doesn't get really warm, so the bed doesn't heat up either. And it's extremely comfortable. It's designed be like memory foam, but it's a little bit more firm so it supports your body. You don't sink into it. You don't wake up with hip pain or anything like that.

So cold is the first thing. And when I travel I just take a cold shower. I make sure I don't go to bed warm. Sleep at the top sheet and throw some pillows on there for a little bit of white. Keep the room dark. So when I travel I use one of those mindfold masks. I think that's the best sleep mask. I was using the, that wrap around sleep mask for a while, the sleep master sleep mask, which is another really good one. But the mind folds even better. It blocks out even more sound is another in addition to light. So I always have some kind of an app that's playing sound by my bedside. And if I'm sleeping in a house with a bunch of other people or there's a lot of commotion going on, I've got noise blocking headphones that I put in and they have headphones that work for side sleepers called sleep phones. So if you want to sleep on your side, they're like soft headphones that don't kind of dig into your face like whatever, like a Bose noise blocking headphone would. And the two apps that I typically use are, one's called Sleep Stream. It's like a DJ for sleep. It'll play binaural beats, it'll play pink noise, white noise, brown noise, whatever.

I've heard of white noise, but I think most people, what the hell is king noise?

So it's different, different frequencies and they just give them different colors. And based on the latest research, pink noise, if you're gon choose, choose a color, is the best noise for deep sleep. So I set that in pink noise mode. And what that does is just covers up ambient noise. But then you can also, if you, if you want to, you can put little piano tunes in the background or you know, spa noise or even kind of like these almost, almost psychedelic ish sounds that are, you know, like a wah wah, wah wah, that'll kind of lull you off to sleep as well. And they also have binaural beats in there. So like I'm saying, like you can, you can just put your own mix together and binaural beats will play a frequency in one side of the headphone and a different frequency in the other side of the headphone. And the, the delta between those two frequencies is the brainwave that it elicits. So if it's playing 295Hz in the left ear and 305Hz in the right ear, you'd get a 10Hz frequency if you're going for like a, like an alpha brainwave zone. Or you could choose delta or theta or whatever. Go a little deeper. Yeah. The other app I like, especially if I'm using any kind of psychedelic or anything like that for sleep or something like we were talking about ketamine the other day is there's an app called Ziz P Z I Z Z and that thing's really cool. It's got like 30 different tracks that I find are just amazing. If you have like a mindfold sleep mask on and some noise blocking headphones, you just go to this whole different landscape while you're asleep and that One's really cool. Cool if you're, you know, if you're. If you're toying around with, you know, whatever, you're hitting a vape pen or you're taking some ketamine or something like that. Before sleep, you just have this. This amazing dream sequence while you're asleep. So you got your temperature, you've got your light, you have your sound. And then last thing is just my. You know, my laptop doesn't come near the bed, which is always a temptation when I travel. I want to work in bed now. The laptop's always somewhere else in the hotel room or somewhere else in the house. Never comes near the bed. And then, you know, the phone, there's. You can Google.

Red phone or red light, iPhone. And there's a little button you can push in your iPhone if you program it right, to remove all the blue light from the screen, even beyond what the sleep mode built into the phone has.

Yeah, you showed me that on our. On our hunting trip in Hawaii. Yeah, it's a pretty cool function.

It just gets rid of all. All blue light on the phone, period. So you can't. You don't get anything. It's like Firelight, which is really nice. If you do want to whatever, look at Instagram before you go to bed or check a few things before you fall asleep. So those are a few of the things. And then I think I like this concept that a good night of sleep begins when you wake up. Like, that's when sleep architecture begins. So what I mean by that is I'll travel back up to Washington State from here, and when I am traveling from east to west and I'm at home, I wake up at, let's say, 4:00am at home, because for me, having come from back east, that's 7am that can be annoying. I would rather not wake up at 4am because then I'll just be dragging later on in the day, you know, falling asleep at the dinner table with my family. So what you do in a situation like that is you wait to cue your body until the time that you actually do want to begin to wake up. So your main cues for your circadian rhythm are light, movement, and food, right? So you'd wait to eat breakfast until it's actually breakfast time in whatever area of the world you happen to be in. So, you know, if you do wake up at 4am, you don't. You don't get up, you don't have coffee, you don't have food, you don't have anything.

Right?

So you don't prime your body from a digestive standpoint. You also don't prime your body from a light standpoint. Meaning a lot of people will wear blue light blocking glasses at night. They think the blue light blocking glasses make sense. They do to wear them at night to limit your blue light exposure at night. But you can also wear them in the morning, right? So you put on something like a blue light block or glass. You don't turn on a lot of lights in the home. You keep your phone in that, that night mode. If you have one of these light filtering pieces of software on your computer, you make sure that's in night mode too. And you just treat the morning like it's the night, until the time of day that you actually want to wake up arrives. Then you blast yourself with light. You have a meal, you get an exercise or mobility session in. And that works very quickly to reset your circadian rhythm. I mean, you can do it in one day with that type of strategy. So that's what I'll do when I'm traveling is use light, movement and food strategically to reset my circadian rhythm. Because I, you know, I travel a lot. Like, I'm constantly on the road two or three weeks out every month. So I'm always having to reset my circadian rhythm wherever I'm at in the world. And then from a supplementation standpoint, I'm very careful with caffeine or anything like that after about 4pm so I've had my genetics tested. I'm a fast caffeine oxidizer. If I were slow, it'd be closer to noon based on the half life of caffeine. But anything after about 4 or 5pm I avoid caffeine. If I need a stimulant, I use nicotine because it's in and out of the system very quickly. Like, you can use nicotine up to an hour before bedtime and still be just fine. So if you had a dinner party or whatever, you want to stay awake, you use nicotine gum or nicotine droplets instead of a shot of espresso or something else that has caffeine in it.

Or the Swedish Snooze, I'm a big fan.

Or the Swedish Snooze. Yeah, those. Those are closer. Those are pretty high. Those are like 10, 20.

They started, I think eight Goatsberg rape. But yeah, I've got them. I got the 20 volts.

I don't like the way they taste. I like to taste the tobacco. I like more like kind of a Minty Gum or there's a company called Blue Brain Boost. They make just straight up pure nicotine droplets.

Same great company too, for the methylene blue, if you're interested in that.

They do methylene blue as well. And actually a wonderful, wonderful stack for earlier in the days. You take methylene blue and you microdose that with CBD and nicotine. That's a very clean burn and you can get it like a, like a sublingual troche. Now there are some companies that sell this that's a mix of methylene blue, nicotine and CBD. So it's like 5 mgs of CBD.

I want a, I want a link to that in the show notes. So if you can send that to me, I definitely want to try that out.

I'll find. I got a few in my bag too right now. Awesome. Or my, my five. Fuck.

You're the first of five podcasts today, so I'm gonna need to run that.

Yeah, I'll drop you on. You have a blue mouth all morning and in, in the evening though, what I'll do is CBD oil. And then typically what I like is something that's got just a little bit of like 5 HTP or a microdose of melatonin in it. And right Now I'm using Dr. Kirk Parsley sleep remedy. So I'm a serving of sleep remedy and pretty high dose of CBD. I'll take about 100 milligrams of CBD, which seems like a lot, but most of the research on CBD and enhanced deep sleep cycles pushes closer to 300 milligrams. So which is a lot when you consider that when you get a dropper bottle of CBD or a CBD supplement or whatever, like a serving is 10, you know, there are some companies pushing close to 30, but you know, that's, that's 1/10 to 1/3 of the actual dosage. That helps you to sleep.

Yeah, for me, I mean, I, I'm. We get a lot of free stuff, as I'm sure you do. I know you do. But yeah, the highest end CBD products that I use are still 30 mgs per full dropper. So that's. I'm taking 10 full droppers to hit that dose. I haven't done the 300 yet. I've done the 150 and that's something I totally feel. Whereas with, with one or two droppers still 30 to 60mg, a lot higher than most recommendations. I don't necessarily feel that the way I would do the 150, but I'm interested in trying the 300 now.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then if you wake up during the night, anything that enhances the release of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called gamma aminobutyric acid acid or GABA, that works well, if you wake up, let's say 2 or 3am and you want to get back to sleep, CBD doesn't do that so much. Passion flower extract is very good. Valerian is very good. I think you guys have a couple.

Of GABA precursors in new Mood Valerian's in there. 5 HTP.

Yeah. Yeah. The only issue with that is it's a capsular delivery and so it might take a little while to hit your system. Typically I'll just have like a little passion flower dropper. So you just put it sublingually. Chamomile works pretty well too. Like you can keep like a little bit of chamomile powder or chamomile tea next to your bed and sip on that if you wake up during the night.

That's really good.

Yeah.

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Let's talk about psychedelics. We touched on this ketamine nasal spray which now, I mean you can get from any cool doctor, functional medical doctors, any cool doctors will hook you up with this. And obviously it's available on the street, but I want to touch on some of the ways that you optimize psychedelics for performance and whether that's sleep performance or, or you know, just hacking creativity and energy systems. Like what are the different ways that you found to be effective for that?

Yeah, I mean we, we need to of course couch this in, in terms of legality for any, you know, water.

Only when you're in Costa Rica.

Sanction athletes or off season athletes, like just, just, just know, know the boundaries, you know, use, use, use. GlobalDrow.com and make sure any of this stuff's legal for whatever, whatever sport you're competing in. So a few of the things that I find particularly handy of late, one we've already touched on is ketamine. And I'd done ketamine infusions before, overseen by an anesthesiologist for typically that would be used to, to release childhood traumas or to simply be able to relive elements of your childhood Pull those back up. And it's very good for pulling things up from a historical context, reliving those and releasing them. Right. So, like.

You know, I'll use my wife as an example. Has. Has also done it. And she had a very difficult childhood when it came to schooling, right? Like, she grew up dyslexic and was forced to learn spelling and reading and writing in a manner that was very, very difficult for her. Like, she sees words as shapes. Like, she sees the word, the word, the. It's not T, H, E. It's just the shape of the T, the shape of the h, the shape of the E forms, the shape of the wor. And that's how she reads. And so she had a very difficult childhood trying to be forced outside the box or forced into, like, you know, the box of how you're supposed to learn to read. She didn't realize that was traumatic for her, but it actually suppressed her creativity. So when she did ketamine, like, one of the first areas she went back to was either her teacher or her mom. I forget, like, trying to force her how. How to learn to read the right way over and over again. And she was crying and she. And she was frustrated, and she, like, her brain just didn't work that way. And, you know, she came out of the. Came out of the ketamine experience crying and having never really realized how traumatic that was for her. And after releasing that trauma, the very next day, she started painting again. You know, it had been a long time since she'd broken out her art supplies and really tapped into that creativity, but she was able to release that and begin to work on her art again, you know, and now she's painting and she's making these amazing murals and pieces of art, and that's what triggered that for her. Now, what I've found with ketamine is with this new intranasal ketamine, you can put a few doses of that into each nostril, and you snort it in. And I like to do this at night as I'm laying asleep to go to bed. And you'll put in one of these apps, like that Pzizz app I was telling you about is very, very good for this. So there's a track on there I really like called Heliophoric. And you put this in and you. You do the ketamine and you lay back and you just think of anything from your childhood that you can vaguely remember. You don't have to direct your thoughts that specifically, you don't have to Try and think of something traumatic or think of something painful from childhood, but you just think of something, you know, like whatever, playing, playing. Playing ball in the driveway when you were a little boy, or, you know, maybe taking your. Your dog for a walk or whatever, and you start to play in vivid recall. All these experiences from, you know, for me, specifically, from my boyhood, not traumatic experiences because I, you know, I didn't have a very traumatic childhood. I was just like, pretty plain Jane homeschooled in Idaho. Like, I had a pretty, pretty easy.

Boyhood, pretty standard K through 12 homeschooling.

Pretty standard K through 12 out in the middle of nowhere in north Idaho. Like, not. Not a lot can go wrong. There aren't a lot of gangs and drugs. So what I found, though, is that by doing that, and I'll just do that one or two times a week, it's brought me closer to my boys because I've been able to recall my boyhood in vivid detail, relive these memories from boyhood that I'd almost forgotten. You know, what. What I enjoyed to do, you know, having my friends over and playing basketball in the driveway with our old school boombox going till. Till midnight, or, you know, fashioning myself a little spear and making a bow and arrow and going out with my little boxer Bruno, and going through the forest and hiding and, you know, shooting at stuff or, you know, digging giant holes and building these amazing underground forts. And I'll wake up and I'll be like, oh, I gotta go out and do this with my boys. Or we gotta go out and start work on that tree fort, or we're gonna play family basketball tonight after dinner in the dark with the floodlights on in front of the house. And so it's really cool because by being able to tap back into my boyhood and remember what it was like to be, you know, my boys are 11 right now, right? What it was like to be 10, 11, 12 years old. I've been able to actually foster a deeper connection with my boys. So ketamine, that's been cool. You know, you ask more about cognitive optimization, you know, and for that, I think it's stuff a lot of people are probably already aware of. I like to, you know, occasionally microdose a little bit of psilocybin.

I went through a period of my life where, you know, I did a lot of Ayahuasca and DMT and psilocybin and LSD and did trip doses and, you know, and journeyed and found myself and dissolved my ego and I'M over all that. I'm pretty disillusioned with that and I actually don't like to lose control over my cognitive function and would rather use these things now just to be sharper. So, you know, one or two times a week I'll take a very small amount of psilocybin, you know, like a, you know, 0.5 gram dose and blend that with lion's mane and take something like a beetroot or some other sort of blood flow precursor.

Okay.

And use that as a cognitive pick me up or as, as a nature pick me up. You know, I've used that during hunting. Use it for, for hiking. Use it for any type of nature experience is because it enhances your sensory perception, your sense of smell, your sense of sight, etc.

Depth perception, a lot of.

Yeah, yeah, it's a very cool plant in that respect. Same thing for, for lsd. You know, there are, there are companies like the website Lysergy for example, that will sell.

You know, something like PLSD very, very easy. Just go online and get, and I'll get like a blotter tab of that and dissolve a little bit of that with alcohol in a dropper bottle so I can dose very precisely and just 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD for a day on which I'm doing a lot of writing because writing is typically for me a process of, you know, I'm banging out a blog post on, you know, let's say sleep, for example. For me that's, that's a mix of creative and analytical work work, you know, it's a merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. So for something like that, LSD works very well. So I like that for writing and that's something I'll use about once a week. I'm careful with any of these just because you do amplify dopamine and serotonin levels and so you could, you could potentially exhaust your neurotransmitters or create like a neurotransmitter depletion or imbalance if you overdo this kind of stuff. But microdoses, lsd, microdoses of psilocybin.

What do you find the main differences between the plsd? Because John Beer is a buddy of ours and you know, he's, he's, he was telling me about that website and some of the different things that they offer and there's just, it looks like it's almost like the menu at, at the Cheesecake Factory.

Yeah, DMT and 5meo. DMT and they have all these different DMT derivatives. They have all these different, they're called lysergamides. You know, any derivative of LSD is a lysergamide. I think for maybe a seasoned user of psychedelics, there would be a perceptible difference. I wouldn't even consider myself a highly seasoned user of psychedelics. For me, I get a similar effect from an ACO versus an MEO DMT or a PLSD versus regular LSD or whatever. So I don't notice that much of a difference. If you go to the Wikinaut page for a lot of these psychedelics, they'll list the differences between them. And a lot of times when you're reading through these wikis, for each of them, it's essentially the same thing. The only difference would be.

The symptom or the effect onset can sometimes differ in terms of the amount of time, 15 versus 30 versus 40 minutes, where the peak occurs. You know, whether it's two or three hours down the road, how fast it's out of your system or what the half life is. But the effects.

Aside from, from the time they take to kick in and how long they stay in the system, are pretty similar from, from, you know, lysergamide to lysergamide. So I, I don't think there's that big of a difference. And then, you know, and then a lot of things that are easier to get your hands on or, or more within the bounds of legality I think are still really effective.

For example.

What'S one that, that, that I found recently that worked really well.

Racetam, like any of these racetam or piracetam or aniracetam type of compounds combined with methylene blue like that, that's another very, very good pick me up. Gives you good clean high for about five to six hours. Caffeine, nicotine stack, you know, the old school writer stack, I mean, that works very well for a long day of writing. It's easy to get your hands on a, on a nicotine toothpick and stick that thing in your mouth and sip a cup of black coffee.

Have you found much difference between the racetams? Because one thing I noticed was, you know, aniracetam can be better for anxiety and it has like a calming, clean high. Oxyracetam is very energetic and it can make people a little racy if they're already prone to anxiety.

But I always, you know, you got to stack these with some form of alpha GPC or some type of choline, but tartrate just Anything that can exactly upregulate that I loved. And it's funny, I didn't even realize that I was stacking this before, but I used to stack methylene blue with oxyracetamin alpha gpc. And that's a, that's a hell of a stack.

Yeah, yeah, and that's a good point. You make a lot of these things. If you stack them with any acetylcholine precursor or have a good, good Mesopotamia of scrambled eggs and walnuts beforehand for a more natural form of choline, you get less of a crash afterwards and you get less long term choline depletion if you're using these type of things regularly. Another thing, speaking of choline, that's a really good one two combo. If you tend to be more sympathetically driven or have a low HRV or vagus nerve issues. Is Huperzine mixed with acetylcholine. Because a lot of times your acetylcholine levels tend to, to be depleted. If you're highly sympathetically driven, always in fight and flight mode, you have poor vagus nerve function or low hrv. And you can take, I believe. Doesn't alpha brain have Huperzine in it?

Alpha brain has alpha gpc, Huperzine and.

Yes, you got both in there. Yeah. Using a blend of Huperzine and acetylcholine is very, very good for vagal nerve function. And there are people, I recently discovered this, a link between acetylcholine depletion and gut function. Meaning that a lot of people who have constipation or IBS or lower GI issues, what happens is the ileocecal valve can get stuck in a closed position. And one of the things from a chemical standpoint that can open that back up and relax it is Huperzine and acetylcholine. So you can actually use this as a strategy. Like in the morning when you first get up, like you, you have a bunch of Huperzine and acetylcholine, have a cup of coffee and that can a lot of times initiate a bowel movement in people who are constipated. Especially if you blend that with like the use of the, you know, like the pso Rite device that works on your psoas, or use any type of like vibrating massage tool over the ileocecal valve. You can have an amazing bowel movement in the morning. And I've used that with a couple people who are constipated and works really well.

We've had a lot of podcasts in the last Few days. But we've had, you know, we had our buddy, Dr. Michael Russio on, we had Sharon from Bonafide Provisions on. And you know, they spoke a lot on gut health. I wanted to see what your thoughts were on, you know, product. I didn't really get into products, but obviously, you know, you're a supplement guy. What do you think of the product restore and different things like that for like really healing leaky gut syndrome, which seems to be an issue for quite a few people.

Yeah. So restore Dr. Zach Bush's products.

And I have zero affiliation with these guys.

Soil based extract of lignite that specifically seals the leaky gut based on its interaction with the zonulin protein in the gut. And it was specifically designed to mitigate the issues with leaky gut brought on by glyphosate exposure. Because that's one of the issues with glyphosate. That's one of the reasons people will go to Europe and say that they're able to meet more, eat more bread and pasta in Europe. And a big part of that is not because there's kind of this myth going around that the grains in the US are bred for high yield crop and therefore higher in gluten. And it's higher amounts of the wheat agglutinin or the gliadin proteins that are in the crops in the US that cause people to be able to do just fine with grains and pasta and bread in Europe but not be able to handle that in America. America, that's not true. The levels of gluten are pretty similar. The difference is that there's more glyphosate in the crops in America. And so what happens is the gluten is able to cross that gut blood barrier more readily and also contribute to the leaky gut issue more readily because the glyphosate is essentially poking little holes in the gut lining. And lignite or this active ingredient in the product restore is supposed to mitigate those issues?

I think it does. I've seen some of Dr. Bush's data. I use it, I give it to my kids, My kids take a few different supplements and that's one of the ones that they take regularly, particularly if they're eating grain based or bread based products. And the other reason that I use it is because even though we grow all our own food or the majority of our food, I hunt a lot of our meat. We get our eggs from our chickens. I do have well water and we live below a bunch of farmers fields. And so I'm Concerned about glyphosate runoff in the well water. So before breakfast, lunch and dinner, my kids have a shot of restore and I do too.

So I am a fan of that stuff. I think that you could probably also do things like, or approximate the same type of activity with colostrum, which also acts on the zonulin protein. So you could use a colostrum powder or colostrum capsule. Yeah.

Dr. Thomas Cowan, who you've had on the show, really is a big proponent of colostrum. When I lived in California, I used to be able to get like fresh colostrum from. It was raw colostrum from grass fed grass finished cattle from a company called Organic Pastures. But most people in the country, and now that I'm here in Texas, you can't. You have very difficult time time buying any type of raw dairy.

Yeah. And breastfeeding mothers are going out of supply. They're just getting, getting exhausted from, from the demand for colostrum.

High demand.

Yeah.

So, I mean, what are some of the ways that you found, like, really good colostrum that's actually beneficial because. And maybe, maybe you do take capsules. But, but going from having this really fresh, raw, organic source of colostrum to now have to buy it in capsules just seemed a little bit off to me.

Yeah, we have goats, so we're fine. So we have nine Nigerian dwarf goats. So, I mean, you know, there's plenty of colostrum to go around. But before that, and this is, this is the company I typically recommend to people, is there's a little organic goat farm in western Washington called Mount Capra that's a really good bioavailable colostrum.

And it's even.

It's a smaller protein than what you get from a cow, so it's even, even better absorbed. And the same way goat's milk is better than cow's milk, just based on the protein thermodynamics, but they're very small. They go in and out of stock, so it's tough. There's another guy interviewed who has a pretty good colostrum that I didn't realize that the growth factors and some like the lactoferrins, other protective compounds in colostrum, become activated when they contact salivary amylase in the mouth. So he does like a powder that you dissolve in your mouth and then swallow. His name is Niraj. I think it's Niraj Nalzic.

You could find my interview with him because we talk about colostrum for like an hour on my podcast. But he has.

Send us the link. We'll link to it.

Yeah, he has his, his own brand as well. He's called it, calls himself a renegade pharmacist. And I, I don't know where he's getting his colostrum. That's a bovine colostrum. Okay. But yeah, Mount Capra is the goat place. And then renegade pharmacists have, has, has colostrum or you know, if, if you, if you want to go out and buy a Nigerian dwarf goat and milk its little teats, that's an option as well. Yeah. But you, you've also got, you know, glutamine, bone broth or there's some other ways to skin that cat. So. Yeah, that, that is one of the few supplements my kids take though. I had them genetically tested. We did a, like a, we tested a lot of their SNPs. We went through a company up in Canada that cont test more SNPs than 23andMe. Initially, they're the twins. I just wanted to find out whether they were identical. And aside from, from one snp, which is the SNP for aromatizing testosterone into estrogen, so, so Taryn's got the man boob gene. Aside from that, they're completely identical. So he, he can't drink out of plastic bottles. But they also.

They have the gene that is responsible for slightly lower amounts of brain derived neurotrophic factor production or BDNF production. So I've educated them about the importance of things like especially as they age, aerobic exercise, sauna exposure. They drink a couple lion's mane tea before they go to school. Now because that's really good for amplifying BDNF production.

Okay.

They like me, lack the gene that allows for efficient production of endogenous vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure. So they both take like a liquid vitamin D, vitamin K blend. And they also have the gene that is responsible for lower levels of superoxide dismutase or SOD production. So they also take like a sublingual glutathione. So they take glutathione, they take lion's mane, they take vitamin D and they take that restore supplement moment. That's their stack.

That's a good stack.

Yeah.

And your boys are 11 now? 12.

Yep, yep.

Super good brother. Well, one of the last things that I wanted to chat with you about, now that I've got you here, we're in, we're in a small men's group that you organized. Yeah, for, for dads raising boys.

Yeah.

And the importance of which it can't be overstated. You know, look around in our modern society and everything going on and really just.

It's.

It's not something that happened overnight. But we're in a spot now where I think we're at a critical point in our history for how we raise our boys. And I wanted to ask you and kind of pick your brain on, what are some of the different ways you're looking at rites of passage and things to make our boys turn into men and to allow them to foster into the best possible human beings.

They can be an actual mark, marking or recognition of the passage into manhood, the passage into responsibility, the fact that a woman, when she goes through her period, has a distinct passage into womanhood, and that's her mark. And when we look at a lot of.

Indigenous societies or hunter gatherer societies, we see everything from getting hooks pierced through the skin and hung from the ceiling and twirled around and beat with sticks and dropped and then sent out to. This is one of the Native American ones. Then you attach buffalo skulls to the chains that are hooked through the skin, and they got to drag those through the fields for three days and finally get them ripped out or wait until the flesh rots out. And then they come back and they get their. If they want to become a warrior, they get their pinky cut off. Or if they want to prove themselves truly brave, they get their index finger cut off and then boom. They're mentioning. So far, my boys aren't that interested in. In that rite of passage.

They're not doing the bullet.

Yeah. Another. Another one is, you know, you. The. I forget the. I think it's an Amazonian culture where you just stick your. Your hand in a. In like this glove that's full of fire ants and they just eat away at your hand. You got to leave that thing on for I don't know how long.

And you can't wince. If you wince, then you're.

Yeah, you gotta keep a straight face. You can't be worried. Poker face. Yeah.

And then we also see just this idea of silence, solitude, meditation.

Something very similar to just like Jesus Christ going off and fasting for 40 days in the desert, in the wilderness. And maybe that was in a certain way, like a rite of passage for him. And now.

There are many people, people, especially in our health and fitness circle, kind of tapping into this idea of when your boy is 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 years old, taking them and training them leading up to this time to Actually have the wilderness survival skills to be able to go alone by yourself, into a forest or into a desert or into a jungle for anywhere from seven to 10 days. Being left just with yourself, a wool blanket, a backpack, maybe a knife or a bow and drill for making fire. And you survive on your own, you know, in complete isolation, just learning how to find your own independence, how to survive for yourself, how to. How to go through hardship, how to go through difficulty. And then when you come out the other end of that, typically there's some.

Form of a ceremony.

Sometimes it's a plant based ceremony with ayahuasca or psilocybin or marijuana, or that young man's first exposure to the responsible use of plant medicine, which of course is important because that's also accompanied by ego disillusion, right? And so that passage into manhood is marked by that. And there's, you know, kind of, kind of a. A cutting of the cord, right? This idea that after that point, the young man is expected to find a way to help chip in, to support the household, to pay for their own own food, or to get their first job that allows them to begin to save up for college or in some way actually translate that responsibility that they've attained through their rite of passage into, you know, brick and mortar boots on the ground, actually providing for themselves or helping to provide for the family. And I think that something like that is feasible, you know, versus fire ants and getting, you know, hooks pierced through the skin for.

A lot of young men if their parents are able to organize something like that for them. And so in our case, our kids have been doing Tim Corcoran's, who's been on your podcast before, his wilderness survival camp each summer. And typically they'll do some of his overnights during the winter to begin to give them the skills necessary for the rite of passage that they'll do when they're 13 or 14. 14 years old. And I'm personally helping them out with a lot of these things too. Like we have the Spokane Survival School dropping our whole family off in the wilderness next month for seven days, right? Mom, me, the boys, backpacks, wool blankets, that's it. We just survive as a family for a week. You know, they're. They're taking their first animal tracking and butchering course in September. They're doing their first bow hunt for wild pigs in two weeks. So I'm trying to get them to the point point where, you know, probably that initial rite of passage where they're just seven to 10 days off by themselves. In the wilderness is going to be something that, that they're able to handle. So you got to go into these things responsibly. You just don't, you know, rip a kid out of school and drop off in the forest. But, but yeah, having the ideas you're raising a young man, that at some point in their life they're going to embark upon that rite of passage and you're going to recognize their transition into manhood is important. And if you're already a man and you never had a rite of passage like I didn't, there are organizations that, you know, there's like, you know, Kokoro Seal Fit, or maybe for you, it's going to be like training for and completing your first Ironman triathlon or going out to the Boulder Survival School and doing their two week, you know, hunter gatherer course where they leave you out in the middle of the desert. And you got to eventually, you know, hike back into Boulder after surviving out there in the desert. You know, there's a lot of ways to approximate that rite of pass, even if you're an adult. And I know again, the Twin Eagles Wilderness School up by me, they do these rites of passage for adults, too. So even if you're an adult already, I think it's important if you never went through rite of passage to put yourself through something like that to where you can say, okay, I've gone through and I've learned what it really means to be a man and to be able to just survive with my own two hands and not be dependent on. On anybody.

Yeah, absolutely. Massive, dude, you crushed it again. It's been excellent having you on. I'll have you on every time I see you. Just like Paul Check.

Yeah.

I love you, brother. Thanks for being here.

Love you, too. Thanks for the peanut butter and jelly.

You got it.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfield Fitness.com all along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.