What Happens When You Combine BIOHACKING And Deep Spirituality

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, since the realization that most of your melanin is not in your skin but is in your mitochondria, yeah, instantly it like totally changed my relationship to things like Chaga, where they're talking about melanin and all this stuff that kind of seemed too abstract or too woo woo, too much stretch for me.

Dark blue and the dark blues of the plant kingdom tend to increase melanin production. Chaga is one of them. Shilajit, methylene blue and chlorella or spirulina. Any of those massively increase mitochondrial activity of cytochrome C oxidase, especially if you're in the infrared sauna or under sunlight.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right, so usually I record the bio for my guest all by my lonesome, but my guest and I just finished recording a fantastic podcast for you and he's right beside me, so I figured I'd let him tell you who he is before you dive into his weird, far reaching brain on all things biohacking, endurance and beyond. Anthony, you're on an elevator for 30 seconds. Who are you?

Well, I think someone else would use race results and things like that to establish me as some kind of expert, but I think all the value that I would add to whoever wants to listen's life, I think it's in there. So at this point, instead of a summary of race results, I feel like I'm just a curious seeker of some kind. And scratch the itch with biohacking and whatever, sacred sexuality and, and psychedelics and diving down all this stuff, just. I'm a flow junkie.

Anthony Kunkl is a flow junkie. You heard it here first. And he also, as you'll hear later on in this episode, has unlocked how to feed your brain chocolate cake. Enjoy this show, folks. All the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com Kunkel K U N K E L so, Anthony Kunkel. First thing I told people when I put out the word that we were going to be recording the podcast was that you were just going to run to my house from the airport. You actually. You made it.

Yeah, yeah. Smooth sailing. It was like 18 and a half total and ran the 14 to your local grocer at the bottom of the.

Hill and then 18 and a half miles. Yeah, you know, we have some listeners who might think kilometer. So.

Yeah, yeah.

So you just like, do you do that a lot you just like flying somewhere and just kind of jog, you know, almost a marathon to where you're going.

If I can. I mean, it seems. It seems kind of wasteful to. Not if I'm, like, building all this endurance and all this ability to travel through time and space, it's like, it seems silly to get here. Hop in an Uber or something.

I know you get a real good.

Feel for the place as well. Like, I ran through downtown Spokane.

Good point.

Yeah. I mean, I definitely felt like I kind of communed with it a little bit right off the bat.

Yeah. I tell people, like, when I'm traveling and I get to my hotel, especially if I don't have time to hit the gym or whatever, I'll look up whatever the nearest good grocery store is. As long as it's within three miles or less. I'll walk or run or walking, lunge or stop and do burpees or whatever to the grocery store, buy all my groceries and do a farmer's walk back, you know, with all my avocados and sardines and, you know, pomegranates and whatnot. And it's a great workout. But I've never actually. I do have an employee. His name is Joe Hashi. Shout out to Joe. A lot of times when he travels, if his hotel is any closer than a marathon distance from the airport, he walks, he rocks. With all of his luggage to his.

Yeah, that is the one thing is I was limited. I was like, all right, I'm not gonna bring the micro USB charger. I'll loan one. I'm gonna bring that short iPhone cable.

Yeah, yeah. And not buy any watermelons at the grocery store on your way up to here.

Yeah, I mean, I did buy a rotisserie chicken.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of nutrition, I think I originally knew your name because, gosh, I forget how many years ago. Probably like six or seven years ago. Whatever. I was part of this study at University of Connecticut called the Faster Study, where they took a group of athletes and they fat adapted them, fed them a high fat diet, anywhere from six to 12 months. Very high fat, like 80 to 90% fat, very low carb, strict ketogenic. And then did muscle biopsies, took blood and biomarkers, did gut analyses, and had us do a VO2 max and run on a treadmill for three hours.

Three hours.

And you were part of that study too?

Yeah, yeah, I was in that cohort of people, I think. I think all of us that knew what a ketone was whenever that was. 2012 or something like. Like early.

It was early.

Yeah. Yeah, I think. I think they pretty much got all of us in there. So it was pretty easy to find one person and then ask them about their friends.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, a few of us in the Denver area were already playing around with the low carb stuff and kind of trying to figure that all out. And so, yeah, it was. It was pretty smooth. And then, yeah, it is kind of funny looking back at it, just how like that study actually stood for. Something like that gets referenced all the time. The faster study, the fat adaptation, substrate utilization, and trained elite runners.

What's your take on that study? I've talked about it before. But like in your own mind, what was the best takeaway from that study or your experience with it?

Our VO2 maxes weren't stifled. And that's pretty cool.

Meaning compared to people who are eating a traditional higher carbohydrate or carbohydrate loaded diet, we were able to achieve the same intensity at high intensities.

Yeah, I mean, I guess we wouldn't. We wouldn't really know, right? You wouldn't. Unless. Cause I was. I was one of the people that was already doing the thing when they found me, so it's not like I had VO2 max data before that. But yeah, I mean, I was, I don't know, 70 or something at the study. And that was after flying all day. And then the, I think the, the implications for people. It did, it opened the conversation, made people start thinking, okay, this is viable. Like the, the amount, the number of calories you can burn per minute out of fat is, is faster than you'd ever want to have to run for the hours and hours and hours you'd be able to do it then on fat. And it's been really cool for me. Like, I did. I did participate in a different one recently enough out of Phoenix that I was on like 300 to 350 grams. They just storied a little thing on herb. 300 to 350 grams, net carbs a day.

Net net carbs a day. That's not super low.

I was crushing. No, it's high.

Yeah.

And I still went in and still had very comparable data where I was burning, you know, gram and a half a minute, which is 50% of fat, which is 50% more than is physiologically possible. They say you can burn one gram a minute of fat.

That's what they said all the way up to the Volek study. The maximum amount of fat in all my college courses is 1.0 grams of fat per minute someone can burn. And this study that showed by eating a high fat diet and engaging in carbohydrate restriction, it rewrote the textbooks by showing 1.5 plus grams of fat per minute could be burnt during exercise if you change your diet.

Yeah. Which I think even has bigger implications when you see even if I'm 1.3 or 1.4, 1.5, and there's people doing 1.8, if I'm 135 pounds or 130 pounds on the treadmill, that's a whole lot of calories to move my body around with. And so, yeah, that was, that changed. That changed the dialogue quite a bit, I think. But it's been really cool to see that I could do, you know, 300 grams, 350 grams. Really feel like I'm fueling the work of the day, or fueling marathon training, as the case was, and still be just torching body fat.

Now is the way that you're able to burn 1.5 plus grams of fat per minute, even on a day where you're eating or a period where you're eating 300, 350 grams of carbohydrates. Net carbs because you have such a history of carbohydrate mitigation that your body has learned how to burn fats very efficiently.

That's my thought is it's years and years and years of doing this and dipping in and out of really deep honest ketosis. And then at the beginning of the season, I'll do a real, real low carb reset for things where I'm doing whatever 20 or 30 grams net a day, like basically zero. Right.

Yeah.

And while doing 100 or 120 miles a week or, or more. And I don't feel like it really cost me anything. It doesn't, it doesn't really ruin the whole week, but there will be three to five days in there where I feel like a zombie as far as.

Yeah.

Energy and, and maybe even sleep and libido and all that.

Yeah.

All that stuff.

Pure, pure glycogen depletion.

Yeah, it definitely sucks a little bit, but I. Until it's horrible and then I'll keep going until it's not horrible again and then I can start trickling the carbs back in and then it's lit. Then it's like.

Yeah. And part of that is you get a huge up regulation and expression of what's called the glycogen synthase, meaning the ability of the body to Take that glucose and sock it away into muscle and liver glycogen for the workout goes through the roof. Like we actually did that when I used to do bodybuilding. We go low carb as a trick for the muscles. Because by going low carb for one to two weeks out from the competition and then leading up to the competition, beginning to introduce a ton of carbs. The body stores more carbs than it would normally. So you get bigger and fuller than you normally would if you hadn't restricted carbohydrates.

You can suck some fluid out of skin with the same thing, right?

Yeah, exactly. You combine that we did like dandelion root extract for peeing out excess water. So you got a whole bunch of carbs, not much water and you look freaking huge and ripped. There's your tip for going to the beach two weeks out from the beach day. So as far as the diet goes, I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean fricking like one strawberry a day for your carbohydrate allotment during that Volek study was pretty horrific. But did you settle upon or do you still have in your own diet like certain things that you rely upon to keep you in a, in a high fat or ketosis like state for these periods when you're not doing the.

Bigger carb loads like food staples or.

What are your top tricks to get enough calories in and stay in ketosis? Like do you use certain supplements or certain food strategies?

I don't eat carbs outside of dinner, very, very rarely. So that then shrinks the carb. Even if the eating window is 1pm to 9pm, which is typical for me, the eating window for carbs is like maybe 6:30 until 8:30 or 9. So I think that helps even when I am bringing carbs back in. But by and large I mean that, that would mean that I would run twice in the day then right before I, before I refeed, if you will, which might be 20 grams. Right.

So you're pretty depleted by the time you do that second workout of carbohydrates.

Yeah, certainly in theory. But then, I mean my training is so gentle. I do a lot of nine minute pace or, or whatever it is. Nine minute mile pace?

Yeah.

So I'm not in any kind of rush unless I'm doing something on purpose and then I'll hit the, the speed work come hell or high water. I don't, I don't really, I don't grade things for altitude. I don't, I don't give Myself a whole lot of leniency with the hard work. And that's over the years I've met myself where I am. So it's not as harsh as it sounds because I kind of know exactly what I'm capable of doing and what I need to do to prep for the next, the next push.

Would you say it's more like a polarized training approach that you see a lot of the world's elite endurance athletes do, where it's about 80% aerobic, long slow distance, extremely easy, nearly a conversational pace. And then 20% is like balls to the wall no matter what, way above like a zone 4 lactate threshold heart rate.

It's certainly 80% very, very easy. Like, like as easy as I can possibly make myself go. And then probably about 20% of it is, is any kind of intent. But I might do a workout that's at 100k pace. So like 6 hour race pace that's still not very vigorous at all. It's just mechanically it's hard because I've spent so much time training so gently that even just to get my, even at a. Oh, hey, see that guy looks really cool. Bug back there.

That was a praying mantis.

Yeah, the real solid praying mantis. But yeah, so I think, I think that that 20% ish is spread over still very aerobic paces and then a little bit of strides where it's, it's all open or like 20 seconds on 40 seconds moderate, where you, where the 40 seconds is the hard part. Cause you can lie to 20 seconds, right? Like I can go as hard as I possibly want and I'll do this uphill on gravel where it's unbroken uphill. And the 20 seconds are as fast as I can mechanically make myself move. So it'll be just like watts through the roof. Like I'll use a power meter and I'll be like 500 watts just blasting watts. And then the 40 seconds I'll just try to maintain that I'm running confidently, that I'm still mechanically open and looking good, not shuffling. And that's then the hard part. But yeah, I mean the hard stuff is hard or very, very intentional. Where it's like right now I want the trial standard in the marathon, so 5:10 to 5:15ish pace. And I'll hit that if it kills me, I'll hit that. If I'm feeling great, I'll hit that. Whatever, whatever it takes, I'll hit those splits.

For someone who want to mess around with power training for running because obviously it's pretty simple on the bike you get attachment to the crank of the bike for the bike power. But for running, is it like a shoe based power meter attachment?

It is. I'm using Stryd. They're Boulder based.

That's the name of the company.

Stryd with a Y.

Okay.

They're pretty cool. And I can't speak to the accuracy. Right. I would have no way of knowing. I don't really care to even find out how accurate it is. But it's precise. Right. So it's definitely iterable. Like I can go in there and know exactly what kind of shape I'm in. And it's cool then because I can look at like form tweaks, you know, with different form activation and I can look at form power versus versus output and I can compare different shoes to see which one's more efficient for like watts per beats a lot. You can really get in there if you want to.

Wow.

And I kind of try to play around with all that stuff when I'm two months out, three months out from race day. By the time that I get to the last month, I just, I really like it because I can just say, okay, I need 315 watts. That's what I'm capable of. And not only that, but coming at it with the angle that I do, it's like because it's so precise and so controllable, I can know that, okay, if I hit 310 watts for this many hours, that I'm going to meet God, right?

Yeah.

It's like that's really what I'm after with my endurance. The PRs are what they are, but the, the having something that is so hard that you have to have some crazy transcendental experience to even get it done, that's really, really kind of where science meets.

Talk more about the esoteric parts of fitness and finding God during a run. A little bit later on, you're known as. Also, I've heard some people describe you as like one of the biohackers of Ultra. And I want to hear about perhaps some of the technology that you use in addition to a power meter. But back to the nutrition real quick. What about some of these things like ketone esters, ketone infused. What's that? The keto brick. I think I gave you one at the party last night. That like the thousand calorie keto brick. Do you use any of those type of weird engineered fuels?

I do when I'm training heavy. I mean, I love a keto Brick, as a nice blanket.

Thousand calories.

Thousand calories. You know, 30 some grams of protein.

Don't eat it on an airplane. I had diarrhea at the end of the flight. All thousand calories. Yeah. It didn't work out too well on an airplane.

I think I did half of one before I took off running here, so. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, then I've been doing two different protocols, one of which I call the EPO protocol, which is like erythropoietin, like cycling drugs as everybody knows it.

You're about to share your illegal performance, drug utilization on a podcast. Nobody's juicing except you and me and your mom.

We're going to make it juicier.

Yeah. So.

So the idea was that they had big bumps in EPO with sauna use right after exercising. And so I've just been hopping in the. I use sauna space. Near infrared. Yeah.

Post exercise. By the way, that's important to note that the study. The only study that showed increased EPO was when you went in, already heated up, and a little bit fatigued and dehydrated. Yeah.

I think the dehydration. I think we're. If I were betting, I would say we're in the era where people are gonna realize that dehydration is a fricking superpower. I mean, it's a stressor. Right.

Just like carbohydrate depletion can be.

Yeah. I mean, you want to get the flexibility in your body, and so you have to kind of stretch these systems by getting them as low and as high as they can. So there's a role for pre cooling and a roll for heating, but I'll get in there with a little sip of KE4 into the sauna. Yeah. Some ketone aids. So I'll take some straight ketone esters or maybe an R13, just because, like, I don't know, like the pina colada ones, if you have. Those are so good.

Yeah, Those are the ketone ester drinks that have the R13 butane dial less expensive, arguably less potent than the KE1 that you were talking about, right?

Yeah, the 4.

Yeah. Or the KE4, rather. KE4 is the fancier one. Right? Yeah.

It's a little more dense, so a little more. It's a gram of ketone ester for every two milliliters.

Yeah. First time I got it, I shot a whole bottle. It was like 16 servings a bottle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the same. Same man all the time. Really? That's kind of the thing if you. If you don't have to worry about low blood sugar for your physiology, if you've stretched it to where that's not a concern, it seems like the more the better. Right. In, like, Tour de France protocols. So I'll take 10 mils or maybe 15.15mils milliliters and hop in the sauna post exercise. And then I'll wait until. Until I'm real, real woozy and dizzy in there. And my thought is I'm stressing the system as much as I can, giving it the ketones and probably putting EPO through the roof. I'd love to do a little bit of blood work for that, but it seems promising since both of those things separately seem to be.

I mean, if you were to test hematocrit, hemoglobin, mean corpuscular volume, and just a basic blood panel, like a complete blood count, and all those values were. Or the ones related to increased red blood cell production were elevated, it's a pretty decent sign. I don't know if there's a direct measure of erythropoietin that's readily available.

I don't have to have one because otherwise I would worry I had a good workout or a bad workout or something like that. Especially undulating altitude, because I live at pretty serious altitude. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I've been doing. I've been doing that. That EPO protocol in the. In the peaking phase, which I think has paid off.

So your EPO protocol is finish workout ketones, get in the sauna until you're just. Eyes are bugging out your head.

Yeah. It usually only takes about 20 minutes.

Yeah.

So it's nothing crazy.

Yeah.

Okay.

But was that dry sauna or infrared?

That's near infrared.

Okay. All right. Yeah. So you preheat it before you go out and you run. Then probably I'll.

I'll throw it on while I'm getting whatever together or taking the ketones or, you know, what have you.

Ye.

But, yeah, that seems like a really good use of ketones. And then the other one I've been doing, I kind of call it the Tour de France protocol, which is just to kind of trickle them in for recovery purposes. So it's not that I'm using them before a workout, I'm using them afterwards. So I'll sip a hard ketone seltzer drink with my protein at 1pm right when I break the fast.

Yeah.

And that seems to have really paid off. I mean, I'm having a really, really breakout block right now. And that's one of the things that I haven't really incorporated as liberally as I have been this time. So I'll have, I'll have semesters with my lunch. I'll regularly have semesters with my dinner. Some, some sort of, some sort of ketone exogenous supplement with my dinner dinner again being that bit that is most likely to have some carbohydrate content into it.

So just pretty crazy how good you can feel. I mean even if you know somebody's listening they're not like an elite endurance athlete. And I should note I'll put all the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com Kunkel K U N K E L if you guys want to go visit the show notes and and dig into Anthony's stuff a little bit more. But it's pretty crazy how by slow bleeding ketones in all day long which I've been doing ever since the HVMN guys came to my house because we were there and they're just like hey take a shot. Hey it's lunch. Take a shot. Hey it's two take a shot. 5pm Take a shot. So when I did that I felt great all day. Since then I'll just like put a little bit of ketones into everything. It's amazing.

Yeah, it's impressive and I think the recovery, the recovery literature on it's interesting.

And anti inflammatory DNA repair, longevity benefits. Yeah, they're pretty incredible. I mean the only damage is your pocketbook.

They're not cheap, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah. It seems like that's the only thing that matters is recovery is recovery. In the end of the day scientific literature doesn't make you faster but when you see that it's working in the real world like this, very, very encouraging.

Yeah. What about your pre race routine? I mean a guy like you thinks as much about this stuff as you do. He's got to have some kind of an elaborate pre race routine.

Yeah, it kind of starts a week out. I'll have my last somewhat long run a week out and I like to have a race mixed into there. So a 5k, maybe a 10k but typically a 5k in there a week out from pretty much anything. A marathon or certainly before an ultra I'll have a 20 mile morning.

Yeah, that's funny. By the way, I used to like when I raced Ironman I tried to find a sprint triathlon seven to 10 days out because it kind of just puts you in that competition mindset. Practice your transitions, you get to practice the nervous. And if you're peaking, it doesn't take.

Anything out of you.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So that, that usually feels good. And since I don't regularly train those all out paces, I can't really hurt myself with a 5k anyway. I'm not, you know, I might be 5:15amile marathon shape the next weekend and I might do 5:05 for a 5K.

Yeah.

Maybe even at altitude.

But yeah.

Yeah. So it's, it's nothing too crazy just because I'm not specifically trained for it. But having, having that one week out, that last long run, I think people over taper. I'll do a two week taper and that's plenty. And really you'll do a two week.

Taper for what distance?

Anything.

Anything.

Yeah, I think I feel off my game if I taper any longer than that. And even with that, the second week out, the week before race week might still be 100 miles. So if I'm coming off 160 or 140 miles a week, then 100 miles, that's part of the taper.

Part of that's obviously genetic in terms of the high volume responder and even the faster tendon and ligament repair that you see.

Yeah, my body loves training.

Yeah, if you do that DNA fit, it'll tell you, hey, you should train consistency every single day because you recover extremely quickly. But don't do like super big, big hard workouts all at once versus consistent. Daily is better for you if you're that fast recoverer.

Yeah, yeah, that definitely seems to be the case.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean that's kind of where it starts. And then I'll have something short and spicy during the week, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, have something that's confidently over speed. So kind of like that uphill session I was describing. Maybe 20 seconds real fast, like as fast as I can mechanically move. And then 40 seconds moderate and do that 10 times or 15 times or 20 times. I might have that within the last seven days. And then the final session before race day will be something at race pace just to build confidence. It might be five miles, a hundred k pace or three miles at marathon pace or something like that.

Yeah.

And so then I'm, you know, then we're seeing 72ish hours out and at that point I'll just crush fiber. So this is something that has fiber. Fiber.

This is something that's gone wrong for seems like counterintuitive.

Yeah, but like 72ish hours out, I can just start crushing like coconut flour pancakes or Something. And then somewhere around that 60ish hour, maybe 48 hours out, I'll completely take fiber out of my diet. So then I'm just like.

So does the high fiber kind of like just like clean you out and then you move to a low fiber diet because you've already been cleaned out enough to where you're not gonna have a bunch of bowel movement urges during the race.

Yeah, I've got it right. I don't know, three dozen times or something now. So I have a lot of confidence. It involves some timers on my phone. Since I'm not type A to begin with, I'm kind of okay with just being laissez faire about whatever. But when I get it just right, man, I'll. I'll have one little nervous poop before the race and then I won't poop during, I won't poop after. I won't poop until the entire next day.

Wow, so you really get cleaned out.

It's not bubble guts when I do. It's just like one quick little thing and then get right back at it. And so I'll do that for a prep race. And yeah.

It'S done me a lot of good because my whole GI tract feels lighter. I mean, I feel better about eating calories while I'm running hard from that. And I've wondered now about like butyrate production, things like that. I'm thinking maybe because I'm crushing real food, I'm getting all this fiber in here. I wonder if I'm not just getting some Celsius.

If you look at the bacteria profile of the elite athletes, and these are studies that they've done with the high levels of Akkermansia, which is a probiotic that has a side effect of increasing short chain fatty acids and things like butyrate in the gut. Arguably, you're probably enhancing your Akkermansia production and your short chain fatty acid production to the extent to where you might be getting the gut metabolism effect that you see either naturally present or induced via diet in a lot of these high performing individuals.

Yeah, I'd be shocked if there wasn't something good in there. And I've also considered that would be a perfect time to like sell my poop, you know?

Yep. Thinking like an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur.

We've done a few of them in the house. Yeah, people, friends that are sick, that tell their friends, hey, I could really use somebody. I don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars. It's like, come on over, we'll bust out the food processor that we don't use.

Come on over. Where?

To the house. Like.

Oh, you mean like your house in Colorado?

Someone straight up has turkey bastered multiple, multiple folks a few times. Right, right in the house and just. Yeah, like sieved it all out. And what's the house like?

One big frat party full of ultra endurance athletes sharing their poop or what?

Basically, yeah. I mean, the ultra house Durango.

It's a ultra house Durango.

Yeah. It's a 1300 square foot, three bed, two bath, just trailer mobile home in Durango that I own. And since I've made ends meet without having to rent out rooms, I've just offered it up to anybody that wants to come there for peanuts or free or whatever it needs to be there.

No kidding. Just athletes?

Yeah. I've had nature photographers and, you know, I had one guy that just came out to just to lose some weight, ended up running his fastest 10 miler ever afterward. But the reality was he just came out, went to the grocery store with me, bought everything that I bought and then ate like I did for whatever it was, 45 days and lost 30.

Do you guys have like sponsors filling the place up with like recovery boots and gravity chairs and stuff like that?

Yeah, that's definitely the idea.

Kind of rough around the edges still.

Yeah, it's. It's definitely shoestring still. And I'm not sure where it's going to go from here, but yeah, I mean, it's. It's kind of. I think if we had the sponsors, we'd have an easier time assembling a proper elite team to live there all the time. And then we have more appeal for camps. But right now it's really just me offering my own personal space.

Take some notes while you're at my house. Put a Zen den up there and a tub.

Yeah, yeah.

You've seen the setup at my place.

Yeah, I've been enjoying it. So.

Yeah, it's kind of funny, like sometimes I'm at my house, I'm like, gosh, I wish I were still like competing heavily in sports because now I've got all this stuff I didn't have when I was competing, a whole bunch of stuff.

I was walking over to the little guest house in the back today and I was thinking, I wonder if I envy him more or if he envies me because, like, I'm broke as it gets and I have basically nothing, but I'm like on that up and up of rising this man. If I could just get an extra 1500 bucks, then I can go race.

Comrade, trust me, there are some times I think, gosh, if I go back and do bodybuilding or I go back and do triathlon or go back and do obstacle of course racing with the knowledge or the, I guess the means I have now. But I mean, obviously by not racing I've put more time into the business. By putting more time into the business, I have higher income. And of course if you're pouring your heart into racing, it's pretty hard to like be a full time CEO too, so.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, you can't really have the best of both worlds unless you have some very generous benefactors.

Yeah, I have a million good ideas and I'm kind of, you know, we both know Mark Bell fairly well.

It's like, yeah, Mark's great.

I have a million good ideas and I think I'm just on the Mark Bell trajectory. Yeah, it's just like I'll just keep living a life where I don't actually need money and then when I need it, I'll just, I'll manifest more of it because I'm such a freak.

Great book for you. Probably heard me and my sons talking about it in the car last night on our way to that dinner party. The book called Early Retirement Extreme. I'll recommend that to you and anybody else on the show who wants to live within your means. I'm taking my sons through right now because we're very, very careful about not giving them silver spoon mentality.

I love hearing the conversation.

We have all Greenfield Family foundation where, you know, they have got to totally take care of themselves. Once they turn 16, they're in charge of their car, their cell bill, contribute to the household income, everything. But as a part of that, I'm taking them to this Early Retirement Extreme book that goes into things as, you know, as little as don't buy a whisk, you know, use a rubber band and two forks. So it's a good, good book. But anyways, back to the pre race routine. Is that it? That's just like the fiber and the poop and boom, you're done.

Well, so then that, that whole week will be maybe trickling in carbs, maybe not. That's a little more race dependent. If it's like a marathon or a half, I'll probably leave it at 125 grams net a day or so. And after so many years of defaulting to most of my foods being functionally zero carbohydrate, it's really easy to just inject that, you know, I'll just, Instead of doing 90% dark chocolate, I can do 50% with a friend or whatever it is, I can have a sweet potato with dinner instead of not. And so it's pretty easy and feels very, it feels decadent to have, you know, 125 grams of net carb after having 20 for a few weeks.

Yeah.

And so I might, I might leave it there if it's before a real, real long event. I might have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, real low carb. But then somewhere around that Thursday, certainly, certainly Friday before a Saturday race, I will crush. I mean I'll have my normal like can of sardines, you know, since I'm avoiding the fiber, I won't supremify them with all the nuts and seeds and everything that I add nutritional yeast. But I'll have what I would say, what I categorize as gluten free junk food. I'll get something hyper palatable with no fiber.

The night before you're carb loading with clean burning carbs.

Yes. And so I'll usually aim at about half starch, half sugar. That's easy to find, that's any number of cereals or gluten free donuts in the freezer aisle or whatever it is and stuff that I know won't leave me pooping on the side of the road. And then I like that nice rush of insulin coma to just knock me out.

That's true. You sleep like a baby. If you've been restricting carbs, the only way to get that is you gotta inject insulin like growth factor. You go low carbs, you want that same type of sleep, you get the peptide like epamorelin or whatever. But the interesting thing is I used to do the same. I'd carb load at the night before my races. But then, and I learned this from the nutritionist, Steve, I forget his last name over Hammer nutrition. He said, well in the morning then eat a higher fat breakfast or like a bulletproof style coffee or whatever. So by the time I would get to the swim for Ironman and out of the water, that's when I would take my first gel or dose of carbohydrate. So you're essentially keeping your body from going hypoglycemic leading up to the race, shifting your body into high fat burning mode because you've had a high fat breakfast, you still have all the liver and the muscle glycogen because you loaded with carbs the night before. And it's actually a really really cool way to not be standing at the start line of the race and feel like you're going hypoglycemic because you had a bunch of carbs for breakfast.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I've just been skipping breakfast. Or I'll do some, I'll leverage some ketones. Just take a whatever quarter or a half of a E4. Just take some ketones.

That's what I would have done. If I would had ketones back then. That's what I would have done. But in my case I was literally just like filling a blender with coffee and some butter and MCT oil and you know, doing the high fat coffee thing.

Yeah, I don't typically do calories of really any significance until that 1pm Mark. Yeah, that goes for 100% of my training. I mean, but I would say I don't count ketones in that. I will let ketones go outside of that both later and earlier if I want. Yeah, I'll have ketones of pretty much any variety as long as they don't have significant calories from something else in that window.

Anything else crazy as part of the pre race routine, you do any funky hokey pokey dances, stretches, breath work, anything like that?

I've been doing a little bit of CO2 tolerance stuff.

Okay.

Where I'll have like a maybe a 3 second or a 4 second inhale totally through the nose and then I'll have a maybe a 30 second exhale as gentle as I can. And really the last three seconds, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, brace. And then I'll have a, I think I'm up to a 12 second hold on a negative breath hold there.

So you're doing like a self alkalizing type of protocol.

Yep. Maybe.

Yeah.

I just know I've been, I've been referring to it as CO2 tolerance because I think growing up without a wind instrument or something, it's kind of murder doing that. Because I'll do that seven times or eight times.

Yeah.

One after the next. So then you have that long slow exhale and then I'm pressing out the last three seconds and then the last three seconds in the negative hold, I'll try to squeeze out any more that I possibly can.

Yeah, technically that's, that's a little bit more like oxygen tolerance because CO2 tolerance, you'd want to build up levels of CO2 in the body. And the way that you do that is almost like breathe in, letting go. Breathe in, letting go, breathe in, letting go. With like nice easy exhales. So you're not blowing off a lot of CO2. And by the time you get to the end of that protocol and you breathe in a whole bunch, suck it all in, and then do one final blowout, you're sitting there with high levels of CO2 in the body and you just gotta sit there on that exhale with massive levels of CO2. What's interesting is then you get an increase in the acid buffering enzymes responsible for getting rid of the CO2. And that's why some people like to do something like that prior to ice or prior to a workout. But the easier hack if you don't have time for breath work is just arm and hammer. Baking soda, 0.3 grams per kilogram in little tiny teaspoons leading up to the race. And you have that same alkalizing effect I've been using. Really careful with how much sodium citrate for the same. Yeah, yep. Sodium citrate can do it too. Yep, exactly. Exactly. And you get less of the bowel issues. Yeah. Less of the bowel issues from the sodium citrate.

Yeah, none in my case.

Yeah.

I think I'm going to do half and half, do some potassium citrate just to get the citrate in there for the ph balancing, but then have. Why not a little more potassium? So. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of breath work. Something to kind of calm me down. I don't really do pre race music or anything like that, but I take one hell of a nootropic stack and then because that's basically caffeine.

A nootropic stack.

Yeah, yeah, we can get into it. Okay. And then because that's basically caffeine free, I can stack that with a solids, full scoop of pre workout and have another 250.

Because a pre workout usually has like caffeine and blood flow precursors and stuff in it. And you're mixing that traditional ergogenic aid with like a nootropic stack.

Yeah, something that's straight, you know, Limitless pill is.

Now everybody wants to know what your limitless pill is, so go ahead.

Yeah, I mean I've been using. For training I'll use Apex by Wukio.

Wookie. Yo Cichl. Six letters, three syllables, phonetic.

You spelled this for me last night. I forget.

W u k I Y O. W.

U k I Y O. And it's so weird because this Wukio stuff showed up at my house like a week ago. I didn't know that you had told them to send me some. And I tried it first of all I was surprised because it had like one of their brands had like psilocybin extract in it and I didn't even know how they could like legally do that. But it was an amazing blend, crushed the day. And then I took this other stuff you told me about Apex and again like my traditional afternoon siesta didn't happen. Cause I just basically like worked all the way up until dinner. And then this morning at like 5:30am I took their other one called Ease and they have all these proprietary chemicals in them I'd never seen before. But you described it to me like the closest you could get to something like LSD stacked with psilocybin or something like that without actually taking those two.

It's like pre workout without the oxygen starved, feeling short of breath and your heart's racing added to like an almost uncontrollable LSD dose of just flow and selflessness. And I'll be out there on the roads and I'll actually, I mean I put a lot more into it than just a supplement. You know, I put a lot of mindful work in. But I will regularly forget what it is that I'm doing. Like I'll be running five 15s or something and I'll just look at my watch and see, yeah, it was a 512 and just have this visceral response that it was good and I'm doing the thing and just totally forget that it's a finite amount of miles or that I'm doing this for some external goal. I just totally boom. Flow state on control.

How'd you find that wukia stuff? Because I thought it was like out of Japan or something.

Yeah, they're, they're not, they're not super popular still.

I've never heard of them. Yeah, I'm kind of like in this sector.

Yeah, you definitely are. I'm surprised you haven't because I, I just came across them. I'm not even sure. I mean I, I think I saw some if somebody on their crew and just, just dumb luck. But I try to keep my finger on the pulse here of anything. I've been waiting on a smarter caffeine or a proper limitless pill sort of nootropic stack that would benefit me without.

Making me feel this stuff like again. Like I've only taken it three times but those sexy little stainless steel bottles and you put the capsule in it and you can combine it with caffeine and other stimulants if you wanted to. Like you said for a pre workout. But you know, I'm curious because I interviewed and oh, by the way, I'll get a link from you or hunt down a link, I'll put it in the show notes for that stuff. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Kunkel K U N K E L. You'll have Anthony's name memorized by the end of this thing. I interviewed the guy who wrote the book Runner's High. He talked about how a lot of ultra endurance athletes where I think the combination of the focus, the bliss and the painkilling will take small doses of THC, like 2 and a half to 7 and a half milligrams THC pre training or pre race. And then when I interviewed Andy Triana of Superbrain, another friend of Mark Bell's, fantastic, fantastic interview, he delved into not only the fact that for ultra endurance athletes, microdose of LSD, like 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD resulted in not only the improved focus and kind of like that bliss state that you were also talking about, but in addition, LSD is apparently one of the most powerful inductors of beta oxidation or fat burning for the generation of ATP of any molecule yet discovered.

Interesting. I'd love to get data on myself. I don't think that would be very complicated to do a.

No, it wouldn't be complicated like drop acid and do indirect calorimetry.

Yeah, I mean 2ish times a week right now as I'm getting into really peak training and it's quicker and sexier and I'm hammering, I'll take about that dose. It's probably somewhere around 15 to 25 mics.

Yeah, yeah, but you can't use that stuff when you're racing, can you? Or what's the testing like in ultra indoor?

As far as I know, it's not on a watch list even right now.

LSD or thc?

Lsd? THC is, but with the new standards, if you're not a pretty serious stoner, you could get away with 5mg or so first thing in the morning and be fairly intoxicated on your competition. Now I don't, that's not ideal for me. I don't really care. I'll use THC maybe 2 times a week as well and you know, minimum effective dose, maybe just for a, for an enjoyable evening or, you know, but that'll be 2 to 5 milligrams, maybe, maybe 7 milligrams and then hop on the red mill and, and hammer out a, an infrared treadmill. Session. I call it the Red Mill.

I used. I used to take a hit on a joint instead of like a glass of wine in the evenings. I quit doing that after seeing a lot of the data on brain gray matter, on memory, and particularly a really compelling study that came out like eight months ago on rampant free radical leakage into the mitochondria with a dose of THC high enough to induce any type of altered state.

Was it just.

So now the only time. This is like once a month I will use THC is for like after my wife and I have gone on a really hot day. It's one of the best things for orgasms and sex, particularly for women. And so if I give her the pen to take a hit, I'm not just gonna stand her there and watch her. So I take a hit too. And I'll use it for sex about once a month. Like for a big bliss. Yeah. Long sexual, marathon type of experience, but that's about it.

Interesting. I think you could just go with like lube as well. Probably I've even used.

There's a local one like a THC lube.

Yeah. Even Colorado mushroom company, they make a. Yeah. This love salve and it has Amanita muscaria has like the world most famous. And she processes it all. She's the mamonita, as it were. My local mycologist.

Yeah. Not that I want to turn this into drug podcast, but Amanita mascara is also fantastic for pre sleep, for lucid dreaming. Yeah.

Yeah. I've done a little bit of tincturing too, but I think topically I've, you know, I mean, I don't get to absorb all that much through my man parts, but I've witnessed some incredible things.

Yeah, I'll have to note that I kind of forgot about the THC absorbability.

Yeah.

So back to the nootropics. So during the race, you know, we're finishing up with like the pre race routine. You said you'll go in typically fasted, have loaded with carbs the night before you've done the fiber dump, and then you're just like nootropics. But for a race that long, are you eating as you go through the race or doing ketones or anything like that?

Yeah, I would like a small blanket of ketones just to avoid big glucose spikes. But I don't know that I've ever really eaten enough to fuel a race. Not even good races. So I tend to not really like to eat. And so with marathon performances, I'm not totally sure if I Even have anything to gain by sneaking some hydrogels into there. Chasing the Olympic trials, it looks like that's something that'll, that'll be worth some time.

Hydrogel's being the fructose maltodextrin to increase the glute. Four transporters.

Yeah.

Basically a mix of carbohydrates.

Yeah. So I could, I'm open to the idea. That'll help me a little bit. But I tend to just do nothing for a marathon. I mean my, my fastest times are on. On nothing still.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think all that heat training helps you though, with that?

Yeah, big time. I mean, I think, I think fat adapt to fat adapting real, real deep and then adding that to heat training and having like I'll, we'll get into morning routine, I guess. But yeah, I mean I'll have some good heat stimulus basically every day of my life, if not twice a day.

Yeah.

And I think years and years and years of doing that. We know you don't get less of a response. You get more of a response on some of the heat shock protein measures and things like that.

Like measure your temperature, like use a rectal probe or anything like that.

I was totally using a rectal thermometer and you were having a good laugh about it for, for quite a few years. And then I just, I just got clicked in with core. Have you seen those guys? They use some type of magic. I'm gonna butcher this probably, but I think it's like a wattage measurement of some kind. And they have a two stacked system in there and they kind of project what the temperature difference is and look into your core that way. And so they can give you a.

Temperature, but it's not like up your butt. It's like subcutaneous.

It's like a heart rate monitor.

Oh.

And so they, they can project, or at least they think they can. I haven't validated it myself, but I would imagine it's pretty good. That's interesting. You can see that your skin temperature rise, these big waves as you sweat and as you cool off and as you get into cold water or as you get into the sauna. But then your core temp is much more stable and you can see how the two kind of interplay and dance. Really, really cool technology.

I'll often hunt it down. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'll hunt it down and find some more information on it. Or you can send it to me. Is it core with an E or just like K O R C O R E C O R E. Okay, cool. Now you hinted that you have a morning routine so it sounds like that's different. Like your average morning is different than your pre race routine.

Yeah, pre race. I'm not, I'm not going to do cold, I'm not going to do heat, I'm not going to do anything that would compromise me. I'm just going to kind of sit quietly and let all the steps course through my system. So with, with training I delay caffeine. I always have and I'm really happy to see that's getting kind of trendy now. Yeah, but I'll delay caffeine.

Thanks to huberman, the idea of delaying caffeine so you're not shifting your circadian clock backwards too much and just because.

It hits you harder, I mean it's really is nice.

Since your cortisol awakening response occurs, you get the cortisol surge. No use putting caffeine in your body when you already have cortisol. So you wait until the cortisol surge subsides, then you do the caffeine dose.

Yeah, and I'll add that too. You know, I'm outside getting into Junction Creek, so freezing, freezing mountain runoff. Getting my natural light in my face and getting nice and cold and then I'll scamper in for the sauna and that's.

You do the cold every morning?

Yeah.

Wow. Just like wake up and get cold. Yeah, I've done that a few times. I get nervous though because like you see that the, the only situation in which you tend to see, especially men get arrhythmias or some type of heart electrical abnormality is with extreme cold when they first woken up. So I always think, gosh, nobody else in my family is awake yet. Should I get into the Marozco. I've done it a few times and it's fine. But that's always at the back of my mind. I'm like I'm going to be caught, I'm going to be found dead with a heart attack in my cold tub.

At 6:00am Yeah, I mean anymore I was doing a minute up to my neck which was very, very cold because it was 32, 33 degrees rushing down. It was savagely cold. And now it seasons a little more, a little more long in the teeth. Now I'm just doing up to the waist and I'll do four minutes and that's enough to get me kind of numbed out and vasoconstricted and then I'll scamper right into the sauna I'm not trying to shiver. I'm not looking for brown adipose. I'm not looking to increase my metabolism, nothing like that. I'm just looking really for a little bit of inflammation regulation and then some mitochondrial biogenesis. And it's, it's just, it's a rush. I mean it's, it's like that first cup of coffee while I'm waiting to actually stimulate. And so that's, that's a real good way to start the morning. And then, yeah, adding, adding not just the heat but the near infrared. Get everything turning over and at that point I'll get right up and have a liter of water with any sups I'm going to have before and then after the sauna I'll have, that's where I'll get stimulated or take whatever the, the bespoke supplement of the day is basically.

Do you like alter your nootropics or move through them so that you're not getting some type of a tolerance to a certain dose of something like whether it's these wukios or anything else?

Yeah, 100%. I'll have a day that I'll have a microdose LSD day and I'll even plan for the afterglow the next day. And so I might stack it with just something like a cup of coffee or maybe sobriety, God forbid, forbid. And just had nothing the next day but just enjoy, enjoy that afterglow.

I think just based on the fact you've already done an ice bath, you've kissed sobriety out the window, you've already got pretty good amounts of epinephrine and adrenaline.

Endogenous version. Yeah, yeah. So I cycle everything and I try to aim at minimum effective dose. But then as the season goes by, as I'm just periodizing it, I will be getting a little more rowdy and a little more aggressive as it goes. I like to cycle everything and use minimum effect doses so that I don't carry around tolerance or don't need anything at all.

I'm the same way. One day I'll do mushroom coffee, the next day I'll do something like the nootopia supplements. The next day I'll do a microdose of psilocybin. The next day I'll do green tea. Like I think I was telling you last night. Like sometimes two weeks will go by and I haven't taken the same like memory boosting or cognitive boosting or energy enhancing aid for two weeks. And I'm the same with sleep. Like sometimes I'll take kion sleep. Sometimes I'll take some cbd, sometimes I'll do extra magnesium. But my working theory is that if I'm just constantly cycling through the body, is always getting this novel stimuli, and slips into the desired stage just a little bit more easily.

Yeah. I think that's 100% the truth. And then if you randomize them a little bit, you get a feel for what the next day feels like.

Yeah.

So, you know, you might. And some of them, you know, if I'm getting so stimulated first thing in the morning, there's no way I'm gonna score a nap. Whereas something like a Kratom, If I do 2 to 3 grams of plain, not an extract or anything like that, just some plain kratom, I can have an awesome flowy morning workout where I'm curious and not in pain and get everything moving and then I can go home and take a nap. So the same supplement that helps me.

My problem with that stuff is you won't poop the next morning. You don't think so Kratom's pretty constipating for a lot of people.

Interesting.

Can be.

Maybe the dose is small enough.

Yeah, yeah.

Two grams is very, very.

Yeah, that's not that much. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll, I'll cycle everything and kind of plan for the, the after effects of, of each one of them.

Right.

I'm not shy about using 2 to 4 grams of nicotine. I think that's a great thing for lifting. In my case, for whatever reason, it just motivates me to do all the little things. It gives me more satisfaction probably out of completing all those little things that you say you're going to do, like core work and you don't actually do.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, having, having the, the heat, the cold and some different supplement, it's really bespoke for the day.

Yeah. And then knowing how to stack them. Right. If you take nicotine, take that pre workout or a nitric oxide booster, because nicotine is vasoconstrictive. Right. So you get some of the acetylcholine esterase benefits of nicotine, you get more acetylcholine hanging around, but then you're also able to vasodilate. So once you start to mess around with this stuff, Mix and match. Or like I told you this morning, if I ever take too much of something, I'll just, just pop like 200 grams of L theanine and it kind of just like calms you out. Yeah. And brings you down. Yeah. Yeah. So your morning routine, anything else kind of. Kind of interesting about it?

I mean, I will say right now as one more taking a guess at why I'm breaking out so hard right now and having such a. Such an awesome, effortless block and just having more fun than ever. I mean, I'm 31. I've been at this as seriously as I could for a decade, and I'm still kind of finding what I would consider beginner gains. And one of the things that I'm doing right now is I brought it back after trying it with a previous cycle. So a lot of time people will question, how do you know what's working and what isn't if you're trying half a dozen things at a time? And part of it is I'll add different things at different periods and kind of log the effects. But it usually takes two, if not three or four training blocks of cycling in and out of these things to really know what does what for me. And one of the things that I thought did good for me before was taurine and citrulline malate.

Okay.

So I was. I'm using like a gram, maybe a gram and a half of taurine first thing in the morning, and I'll stack that with 9ish grams of citrulline malate. And I don't know if it's even the citrulline at this point. I'm kind of wondering if it's not just the malate, because the malate has its own kind of nootropic effect.

Yeah, Malic acid.

And then the. The chronic of having it every single day, having kind of. Of chronically elevated nitric oxide. I had noticed the same thing using something like betelite back in the day, of it just having chronically elevated levels or bumping it every single day. I think there's got to be some kind of benefit to that.

So you're saying that you actually like that mixing the taurine with the citrulline malate?

Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been doing that and a little bit of pink salt.

What's the reason that you started doing that? Blood flow.

Yeah, blood flow, I think, was the original draw with citrulline. But at this point, I'm not. I'm not totally even sure how this is. How this is all working, but it's one of those things that I've cycled on and cycled off so many times at so many different doses. And I've settled on this now, and it seems to really be paying dividends.

Yeah. Mechanism of action most likely would be the blood flow enhancement from the citrulline combined with ATP production from the taurine. I wonder about hormones too. Increasing energy, currency and blood delivery of at the same time. I don't know about hormones. I don't know.

Yeah. Because even with like carnitine and things that I've played with in the past, I wonder if I'm not. Just because I think I'm a particularly androgen sensitive sort of runner type. I mean, that's why I can pack on muscle.

Is that because you're a ginger?

Maybe, yeah. I'm so vitamin D sensitive. I'm just like X man over here making vitamin D. Yeah. Half ginger.

Half ginger, half ginger. So what about. I mean, like, similar to that. Like, are you doing any kind of elaborate sleeping protocols?

Yeah, I use a chili sleep and I fricking love that thing, man. That's been so game changer.

Can't win our business though. Yeah, Yeah, I went out of business. They got bought out or something.

Sleep me, right? I think they're still around. It's.

It's still around, but they're like hard to get. I actually right now I'm running a bed jet up on my bed, which uses. It's like a bedside air conditioning unit. And the problem with that one is my wife will like. I had to adjust it a ton so go down to 65. And I thought, well, I keep my sleep me at 55 because I got rid of my sleep me because it broke and they weren't able to do repairs anymore. So I got this bedjet thing and I put it at 65, as low as it'll go. And my wife was freezing all night and I was like snuggled up against her and pretty cold myself. And like I'm a cold beast. And so then I put it all the way up at 72, like 7 degrees higher than its lowest temperature, turn the intensity of it down to 50% and I'm hella cold all night long, like in a good way. So I'm using. It's almost like a bedside air conditioning unit now. But you're right, I mean, the cold for anybody who's exercising a lot or just for anybody really, that's a game changer.

When I think a topper. A topper seems ideal or even a weighted blanket or whatever seems ideal because then you can do it and your partner you're with doesn't have to freeze.

Exactly. They could wear a weighted blanket.

I have mindset to go that like 1 degree up per minute for 30 minutes.

To wake you up.

To wake me up. And it's so nice.

I never tried the alarm function on the bedjet has one of those too. Like hot air from cold air.

Oh, you got to do it. You gotta do it. Because I find that while I'm training really heavy, I pretty much wake up feeling like death every morning.

Yeah.

More mornings than not. And I find that's all it takes to make me physically warm up. It feels so. I feel like an emperor though, because I'll wake up with that thing all hot and then I go outside and get in the cold water and then I come back inside. I'm like, man, I am the king right now. Yeah.

The only thing I use right now is the, the Apollo, the haptic wristband that vibrates. And I've got that set. If I'm not up and out of bed by 5:30, I've got that thing. At 5:30 it'll start vibrating in energy mode. And then at night it shifts into sleep mode. But that's about the only like alarm clock ish thing that I have.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's great. And then I get up at exactly the same time every day, which for me is 8:30.

With or without the hot water. It's just hot water. Makes it feel better.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Interesting. What about in the evening? Are you taking anything to help you sleep or doing any type of pre sleep protocols?

I'll take a little bump of have some sort of exogenous ketones way more often than not. And then I've been using a mushroom blend. I don't think they're using it. I don't think they're making anymore fresh cap. They had this unwind blend that was, that was a bunch of herbals all put together.

Rishi and turkey tail and stuff like that. Yeah.

And then the rishi and the chaga and everything. But yeah, I've been, I've been on that plus an extra gram of chaga.

Yeah.

Since the realization that most of your melanin is not in your skin but is in your mitochondria.

Yeah.

Instantly it like totally changed my relationship to things like chaga, where they're talking about melanin and all this stuff that kind of seemed too abstract or too woo woo. Too much of a stretch for me.

And the dark blues of the plant kingdom tend to increase melanin production. Chaga is one of them. Shilajit, methylene blue and chlorella or spirulina Any of those massively increase mitochondrial activity of cytochrome C oxidase. Especially if you're in the infrared sauna or under sunlight.

Yeah. Stacking it with loads of sunlight where I live.

Yeah.

And then. And then the infrared for. I mean, there's a bulb, there's an ear. Infrared bulb pointed at me for probably 10 hours a week. Yeah. I love it. Wow. So, yeah, stacking it with air. That's something I've been doing is chaga every night. And that's again, like, I'm having such a breakout. All I'm doing is just logging everything. Like a proper nerd.

Yeah. Breakout meaning getting better and better.

Yeah.

You're doing a lot of these things, but do it. Did you ever get, like, pushback from sponsors who are like, oh, he's the weird guy. He was talking about LSD in a podcast. I heard him, you know, no money for Anthony, or, you know, he was. I noticed you were on, like, a recent, like, sexual marathon as orgasms type of podcast. And obviously sometimes, I mean, I've gotten pushed back from sponsors for talking about, you know, doing stem cells into my dick or whatever. So I'm curious, you get. Do you kind of feel like you get pushed out a little bit of sponsorships by doing weird stuff?

Oh, big time. And part of it. Part of it was that I'm able to get weirder and weirder now that I've stopped holding sponsors that may or may not regulate me. But it means I don't have a. You know, I'm running professionally to the extent that that's a thing. And I'm doing it without a shoe contract, which is basically unheard of. Right. Like, that's not really viable because usually your shoe company, that's your health insurance.

You go through a lot of shoes and those things are expensive.

That's your living wage. Well, yeah. And it's your, you know, it's your first $30,000 a year or whatever. It's your travel fund. It's. It's everything that makes it kind of viable. So it's made it really interesting to kind of. I don't know. It's not that I'm reinventing the wheel, but I'm definitely carving my own path here and insisting upon doing it the way that I want to do it. And that's. That's absolutely had a financial impact on my ability to do what I'm doing. But I just think it's. So right now I'm wondering, how do climbers do it? You know, climbers will just have some project and will disappear for six months and the company will just pay to make media if they need it. It's like that's, that doesn't.

I don't think climbers do do it, dude. They sleep in.

Well, there's that too. There's broke as runners. There's broke as runners, so there's something to that. But I still think that the, the model of someone who's sponsored to do some crazy transcendental things kind of has some merit. You just have to figure out how to, how to swing that and how to, how to merge the two of them and how to share these crazy transcendental experiences so that people that are, you know, sitting in an office and doing all their runs on, on the treadmill.

Yeah.

Can then see what you're up to and get all amped and get through their own stuff.

Like for me, at like we have a supplements company. Like I look for like edgy, controversial athletes who are head turners who are doing unique things because I don't want the Kool Aid, you know, the old plain Jane, you know, just like safe but arguably boring athlete. Like, I like a lot of the head turning athletes like in the MMA. Like, I like, like Sugar Sean O' Malley and Conor McGregor and you know, and pattern interrupts like, you know, Danica Patrick, which was race car driving and, and I guess no Anthony Kunkel for ultra running.

Yeah. Except. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's the idea is I would rather stand for myself even if I also have to stand for being a total starving artist monk of an athlete. Because I do think longer term, I think even financially longer term that'll be better. But it's certainly, it helps me sleep easy at night knowing that I'm actually contributing whatever it is. And I have not just the freedom to do what I want to do, but I have the freedom to be wrong.

Yeah.

And I think that makes, even if I haven't found a way to make it as financially viable as it needs to be to scoop up some land like I'm after right now and that sort of thing, the ability to properly speak your mind lets everybody trust that I'm using the supplements or the companies or I'm endorsing the things that I want because I think they're the best.

Right. You're authentic. You're being you. So I mean, you, you mentioned starving artists, but I'm curious, do you like, think of your craft as an art? Like, do you think of exercises as an art?

100% I think part of what rubs me so wrong about athletes being sponsored at, let's say, the Olympic trials level on the track, I have a half dozen people because I've talked about plant medicine and psychedelics and all this stuff. I've had people reach out to me and say, man, this is totally off record, you'll understand why. But I've had, I would not have been, you know, the athlete, the hockey player is a good example, or the 5k on the track. It's like I would not have made it to the, to the trials, the Olympic trials or to the NHL or I wouldn't have had the comeback that I had if it wasn't for psychedelics. If it wasn't for. Right, yeah, I mean, whatever. And some of them, some of them are 20 year old punks, right. Like, I wouldn't have run so well. And D1 College, it wasn't for mushrooms. And then some of them are, are, you know, I have one buddy that's in his 40s and has recently stopped running for a major shoe company after years and years and years. And now he's free to speak his mind for the first time ever. And it's because he doesn't have to worry about the financials. But it also means he's, he's working a job instead of a job he doesn't love. That is instead of just kind of telling the world what it took to run so freaking fast. And I think there has to be some way to set up a proper energy exchange for all this because I think.

What do you mean by that?

I think athletes have something to offer the world and it's not just fast performances. And the second you get sponsored by some big box company, it's more important that you be anodyne and agreeable and safe. And if you can do that and also win races, then they don't care. They'll slap shoes on you and they'll sell a bunch of whatever their super shoe is or what have you. But it sets up this world where these people that are doing freakish things that in theory should see the world in a way that no one else is capable of seeing it. Right. If you're running 140 miles a week, what does that take? What are you doing? What do you think about out there? And so I'm convinced that most of those people, myself included, would have something to offer the world. And you don't have to be right for everybody. I mean, I think if you have something of value, plenty of people are going to look at that, and rightfully so. Even say that's dumb, that has no value for me at all. But I think by shackling these athletes, you're not able to speak your truth and you're not able to be wrong. You're not able to stir the pot and say controversial things. And so then you end up with this.

I don't know, maybe you are. Maybe you'd be surprised. Maybe if you continue down the road of free expression and being your authentic self and doing the weird stuff and biohacking, five years from now you're gonna be getting the fat sponsorships and turning heads and, you know, people who played it safe won't be. I mean, you never know if people see the light here.

Yeah, I'm okay making my own route. I think that what I'm doing will be viable enough for myself and for a cross country team or so worth of athletes. You know, call it five to seven athletes that I would like to be able to support in the three to five year mission. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think, I think.

We do it the team of the island of misfit toys. So what do you think about when you're out there? Like, are you allowed to listen to stuff like headphones in? Because in Ironman we weren't allowed to have headphones. But obviously you do in training. But for runs or races or whatever, do you think about or listen to.

Much in a good race? I don't think about or listen to anything.

Nothing? You don't like even like count to 100 over and over again?

No, I think the fewer thoughts the better. And I do a lot of things in my life to make that happen.

Like what?

I think like, you know, you get into an ice bath. That's all you can think about. You do that every single day and you're building a little bit of plasticity. You add that to like lion's mane and, you know, occasional nicotine and eating a high choline diet. Boom. You know, you have a perfect recipe to then kind of, you're practicing not just being in the cold, but being perfectly mindful on one thing at a time. You add that to the heat where you have the. Whatever that molecule is. It's the same molecule you get with alcohol withdrawals that tells you, okay, get the hell out of this box.

Yeah.

And you, you add all these things together and, and you make that the intent of training. I think if you're. If your intent of training is to be gritty and look for something challenging and, and fight yourself, then you'll find it. But on the same token, I think if you're. If your whole point of training is that I'm gonna go get weird. Right. I'm gonna take my clothes off and prance through the wilderness. I think you'll find that too. I think you'll find some sort of peace. And anymore I'm looking for. I'm looking for that. I'm flow. Flow hunting and I'm chasing that kind of peaceful, effortless bliss. And I think that does me right at least 50% of the time.

I don't want to tell you how many audiobooks I listen to while Ironman training and looked at my bike as like, like a traveling university. But you're talking about races, then racing. Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, like, because I. That's like, honestly, like how I learned a ton about business and starting my companies and everything was literally just like during Ironman. I'd listen to the business books and Tony Robbins and. Yeah, obviously not during races, but yeah.

My training, runs, workout days, Nothing.

Yeah.

Or really, really exploratory days. I'll just. I'll bring the dog out. I'll put an ice bandana on him so I don't have to worry about him. And he's just a little reservation dog. Res dog. Like, he's bulletproof, so I can just let him free range. He's so well trained. And we'll just go out there and we'll. We'll just flow together and I'll just kind of, you know, smell what he smells and get weird out there. And that would be a day. That or pace work are definitely days where I don't. I don't bring anything.

Yeah.

But the other days out of the week, you know, there's plenty of room. 8 runs, 10 runs a week where. Oh, yeah, have whatever it is. I usually use it to keep up with things that people are gonna ask me about. Yeah, the Huberman stuff.

Exactly. That's.

That's through becoming or finding Ultra going through rich right now.

Yeah.

Just because, you know, we have a lot of similarities and I think there's something brilliant about having access to. To somebody's audiobook, assuming that they really like it.

Yeah.

Because I think you can get somebody's best essence, you know, all of their wisdom. It's such a. It's chocolate cake for my brain. You know, it's just such a decadent experience.

Audiobooks are chocolate cake for your brain.

Now even stand up man. An hour special. Somebody's just best killing it. It's like I can get this distilled version.

I never thought about stand up.

This stand up. And it's. It took them 20 years to make this hour. And I can just listen to it and laugh and it's. I don't have to. I don't have to understand it. I can just engage with it. And that's the kind of. That's artistry, right? I would like to be able to do that with whatever it is that I think I'm doing out here on the roads. I would like to be able to kind of bottle that and distribute that to anybody that wants it. And if 50% of the population or 99% of the population says this has no value, it's dumb. You're a crazy person. Eats mushrooms and runs in the woods. I don't care. Because the 1% I believe, I believe that they, they will get something so deep out of it.

Eats mushroom poops, coconut wraps and runs in the woods. I used to. I used to load up sometimes for my interval training. I'd like grab a bunch of like 84 to 5 minute slow songs and 84 to 5 minute fast songs. Because I used to be a spin instructor, so I'd always put together tracks. I was usually doing this for my spin classes anyways. And I'd load that up for, like, music to push me during an interval training workout because I'd have to look at the watch at all. I was like, yeah, just listen to this entire silent track. Like, go easy when it's easy, go hard when it's hard. And that's my workout. So I did use music sometimes, but nowadays it's almost always audiobooks and podcasts. What about if you get injured? Do you, do you get injured much? And do you have, like, some strategies for that mentally or physically?

Historically, I, I don't get injured. Historically, I. I hurt regularly, but I. I never have to miss training. Wow. Over the last, like year and a half, maybe even year, I've had more. I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess over the last two years I've had more missed days, so, like proper injuries than I've had in the entire preceding decade. Wow. And I think part of it is I've gotten a little greedy and trying to run a little bit faster. And some of it's just freak stuff that happens. Right. Or compounds. I think a lot of it was just related to the previous thing of just getting back at it before I was ready. But it's been, it's been awful. Awesome, really, because it's made me dive down other avenues that I wouldn't have explored otherwise. But I do think all the heat training, primarily because I've done that since I was 17, 18 years old.

Yeah.

Jogging in place in a sauna.

Yeah. You get a big increase in tendon quality with that. It's almost like you get free young muscle. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

And I go in there to the death. I mean, my, my red mill, my infrared treadmill, that's all decked out with a tungsten, a 4.4b bulb panel in the back to one bulb panel in the front. And it's on an incline trainer with a drop cloth around it. Basically.

I'll take you on, bro. I'll take you through one of my like 90 minute breathwork sessions in the heat tomorrow morning and see if you can hang. I mean, I'm not like Laird Hamilton taking the air, dying and the, and the, you know, the kitchen gloves in there. But I used to drag my bike in the sauna for like hour to two hour long marathon sessions on the bike.

Nice.

And then even before that, my wife and I in this condo we lived in, I'd go to the top floor of the condo in the middle of the summer, pull on a garbage bag with like cut out holes for the legs and the arms, pull on two layers of clothing and winter coats on top of that.

Yep.

And ride and watch like the first three of the Rocky series or Star Wars. Literally just like ride for six hours.

Yeah.

Sweating buckets.

But I think the heat, the heat's a huge secret.

You're also lighter than me. I don't know. You might be able to take me. Well, we'll have to have a heat off. A sauna off, as they call them in Finland where people die.

Yeah. They got rid of the world champs on that. Otherwise that would still be on my short list of things.

Actually, now you just got to do the wife carrying competition. That's the other one over there.

I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to get under 130. I'll be the wife.

Your wife will carry you. Yeah. So now the other thing I wanted to ask you was, you know, in terms of tracking, do you do much actual blood work, like biomarker blood work? A lot of these athletes are sponsored by like inside track or wellness FX or things like that. Are you tracking much self quantified?

I do a lot of like, biometrics. I don't do a lot of blood work. I have a, I have a really fancy heart rate monitor. I have that core temp.

What's A bi. What do you mean a biometric?

Like, I'll measure hrv, I'll measure respiratory rate, I'll measure temperature. Some, some a little bit less invasive stuff. But I've just had so much work done over the years that I don't, I don't know that I really need to anymore. I'm kind of just trusting what I feel. And yeah, I mean, I tried to. I did one, one little deal with Insidetracker and they just really let me down. I didn't like that it was algorithmic to begin with and then.

Algorithmic meaning it's feeding your data through known reference ranges.

Yeah, they grab, they grab three or four and then projects 20 out of them. And I know that I'm a freak. Right. I have proven, I've quantified that I am not gonna do the average range thing. So I just don't. I have minimal trust in that.

Right. As an endurance athlete, you'd have like red flagged off the charts. HDL crp, probably albumin, likely a low mean corpuscular volume. Like you'd have all this stuff that a doctor would say, oh yeah, you're gonna die, Good luck. You know, dig your, dig your grave. And it's because of the way you train and is actually one of the consequences of being ultra fit, but it's not necessarily a deleterious consequence in many cases.

Yeah. So I just don't really know what to do with a lot of that. But I do like to get some type of blood work done once a year. Just check in. I, I definitely abuse vitamin D and intermittently abuse iron a little bit. So I'd like to make sure that I'm not getting too toxically high on a few things.

Yeah.

So that's, that's enough to justify a full panel. But I'll just do that.

You mean you like, you take a lot of iron as a supplement?

I do. I'll do. What am I on this block? I'm on 30ish milligrams of supplemental iron.

Yeah.

At least every other day. And that's just while I'm in season. I mean, I'm sweating so much, I don't even know if that's, if that's a significant amount. But then I cook in cast iron. I eat a lot of organ meat. I've recently enough realized originally getting down to marathon weight, I ended up giving up meat. Really? Of any kind. I did half pound of raw beef liver a week and that was the only meat that I was consuming because eggs just seemed like A more nutritionally dense way to do it relative to the calories. So I'd have three egg yolks a day, but wouldn't be doing any animal. Like muscle meat.

Yeah.

And recently I realized now that I've replaced that with something else. It's this blend that my local Red Cliff's farm, you know, tiny mom and mom and pop thing. And he just makes this blend that's. That's these. These regenerative churro lambs that live at the bottom of these beautiful red cliffs east of me. And the farms. Amazing.

Or organ meats are just muscle meat.

And it's this blend of. It's fat and tongue. So tongue's basically a muscle. Very, very collagen.

Yeah.

And then was it liver and kidney in there? Maybe there's heart mixed in there.

That's a good blend.

This proper organ meat blend. And I've just been doing that instead of. In lieu of any other kind of muscle meat.

I think that I don't want to overset my boundaries. I know I don't know a lot about your biomarkers. I'm your coach or whatever, but if. If you were taking iron at the amount that you're taking it, and also doing sauna, which is arguably gonna. Gonna help out with iron and iron storage, I would be focusing a lot more on copper because copper is deficient, especially in a lot of heavily sweating athletes. And it. What. It's what helps get iron into the cells so the iron doesn't hang around outside the cells and essentially cause, like, rusting of the body. The cool thing is organ meats are very good done for you. Blend of iron and copper. So you're getting some in the organ meats. Legumes can also be a decent source of the copper. But there's two things that I think are top of the totem pole for an athlete, an endurance athlete, who wants to increase iron storage and copper simultaneously. One would be organ meats, but it's a spleen, like spleen extract you can get from ancestral supplements. You know your spleen, when you see free divers and they dive and they. Their spleen gets compressed, one of the things that occurs as a result of that is increased EPO production. That's why a lot of Olympic athletes now who aren't even free divers, they'll free dive for the spleen compression because it's like illegally supplementing with epo.

I'm intrigued by this idea to make more of it to the same end.

But you can also consume spleen. I know ancestral Supplements has some. That's one company. I don't know if Heart and Soil has them. There's a few other companies and the other one is bee pollen. Bee pollen is massively high in bioavailable copper.

I've used a fair amount of bee pollen.

Yeah. So I would kind of do those and like keep eating the organ meats. But if you did all that, you could probably even back off the iron from a long term health standpoint and get less risk of potential hemochromatosis.

Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready to retest any week now at this point. But I also wonder, just, I think those numbers are still relatively humble. Even If I'm doing 60 milligrams a day, if I'm sweating profusely for an hour a day and just footstroich. Hemolysis, the breaking of those red blood cells while you're out there running, just mechanically stomping your foot and breaking blood cells. Yeah, that's got to be a lot of iron. A lot of iron demand.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's definitely on my radar.

It's a lot of iron demand. And the problem is not replenishing the iron. The problem is replenishing the iron with the nutrients that accompany it that allow it to actually get into the cell versus it hanging around the bloodstream. So it's about bioavailability more than dose.

Yeah, yeah. I should double check copper on something because I've gone out of my way to increase that. First it got on my radar through zinc copper balance and so that's why I was prioritizing it. But yeah, things like liver and kidney seem to be very, very high sources of it. And then I kind of wonder if most of the breakout right now.

Isn'T due to that good fight. We were briefly talking digestive enzymes and that sort of thing. And I'm on this phytase enzyme and I thought for sure it was Good.

Fight is the brand name of the phytase.

Yeah. P H Y T E Good fight.

Okay.

I thought for sure it was just like snake oil, you know, I mean we're in a similar boat where I say yes to everything. I'll trial anything, I'll see what works. But I didn't, I didn't have big. I don't eat a whole lot of phytates. But upping the dose from a double dose already into a five or six doses a day, suddenly I have not had a single single rough run. It's been effortless craziness since then. And I'm not even sure.

If you look at like bromelain, papain, trypsin, chymotrypsin, high dose digestive enzymes, etc. They can be used off label for. Instead of digesting food to break down fibrin in the bloodstream and also be used for biofilm breakdown. So you might be seeing like a thinning of the mucus. You could potentially see an increased recovery and decreased soreness effect from the fibrin breakdown, so. Or maybe the seeds and nuts are messing up your gut and you're digesting them better. Who knows?

Yeah, at this point I'm not even, I'm not even sure. It seems to be doing something beyond what we think it's doing because I'm having, I'm having crazy days after days right now.

But I had to send you a bunch of Kion Flex and see if that works better or worse than the phytase.

Yeah, let's get right there.

It's like a big boatload of enzymes as well.

I do worry about scrubbing my gut though, because I'm big on my gut. I want chia seeds.

My high dose enzymes can do a number on the gut line.

Yeah, that's. That's definitely on my radar. And I, I mean, I'm religious about colostrum.

I don't know.

Played with that. That was one of the.

We have it at Kion. It's one of our supplements. Yeah.

Nice. That was one of the things that when I started doing, I did that pilgrimage route last year that we shot a little documentary on. It's up in my Patreon actually, just to just so that we can still make that run.

250 mile pilgrimage. Yeah, running.

Yeah. Just 11 days of just indulgent running. And there was 160 mile week in there and the first night I just felt like death, obviously. And then your body gets up to speed doing a marathon ish a day. And then I started just crushing. I started craving it. I was just putting these colostrum packets just right into my face. And I was using armor, which is really intentionally. They strip away certain things, they leave certain things and they cold, they cold treat it and yeah, they do it right it seems.

And it's not as good as Keon, but it's good.

Yeah.

And so my body, once I started doing like 8, 10 of these little armor packets a day, I suddenly didn't feel feverish at night and everything was smooth flowing from there.

Wow.

And kind of just having that test, you know, in the foxhole, like that, as it were, seemed to be that convinced me immediately.

Increased gut permeability in the heat during exercise with endurance athletes is not only extremely proven and controlled by things like colostrum and L glutamine, but aggravated and this is concerning by ibuprofen, which, you know, any other nonsteroidal anti inflammatory drug which drives me nuts when I see some ironman or marathoner popping a couple ibuprofen halfway through to shut down the pain because you can introduce basically a sepsis like state.

Yeah, I think there's better drugs too. Yeah, that's, that's really. If, if I had a message that was supplements, it was, you know, say maybe to drugs. I just think if you really looked at it and picked what supplements you were using using or what anything that you're putting into your body, any interventions that you're doing and ask yourself if there's a better way to do it. Because I think a lot of people do things just because of convenience.

Right? I mean like get an opioid prescription. Well, I could tell you right now, if you were to stack phenylethylamine and CBD and low dose Kratom and possibly a little bit of a curcumin or turmeric, then you're gonna get an opioid like effect. I mean if you got your wisdom teeth removed or whatever, like do that instead of A, supporting opioid production in general because it's just harming a lot of people and B, having that tempting bottle around for you to abuse for the next month because I always prescribe too much of that stuff.

Yeah, I think that's being an adult about your supp drugs is kind of a really fun place to be then because then it opens the world up to you. So I think that's part of my licentiousness about supplementation or talking about microdosing psychedelics or something comes from that sort of place of. I'm really intrigued at the idea. Who is that guy pushing the doped up Olympics, the enhanced Games he's gonna do?

Oh yeah, I heard about him. His list like the Olympics, but you're allowed to dope with whatever you want.

Yeah. But you have to get health screened. So if your health is in shambles, they won't let you compete. That's so genius. And then he's addressed a lot of the issues in there. But I think one of the issues we're gonna find is it's not gonna work. They're not gonna break the records because the athletes in the Olympic Games are already all doped up.

Yeah.

And my part of my shtick about openly talking about the things that I'm not supposed to talk about is they're an alternative to doing something that's against the rules. I'm okay. Even as someone who's never been drug tested, despite all the stuff that I've done, it's. I'm okay playing within the rules as they're written, or at least the intent of the rules as they're written, even.

Yeah.

And so I think it's. There's so many things that are open to you that if anything, might help your health and wellness and your longevity instead of harming those things that are also totally at your disposal.

You ever race against anybody wearing those, like, doped up shoes? What do you call them? Smart shoes? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Super shoes.

Yeah. I don't have a choice, man. Really. I did a marathon. What was that? Three years ago maybe. And I was ninth or eighth in a field that had money for top five. And I was the only person in the top 10 that wasn't in super shoes. And we're into the era now where, oh, you can compete.

So you were like, you were able to hang with some of the Super Shoe Guys 100%.

But I think what you're finding is that they're worth, they're worth minutes off your time. And so you kind of.

Wow.

Really? You almost have to put an asterisk next to it.

What is it in them that's making them so effective? Is it like the rebound effect?

It's the foam. Yeah. Everybody thinks it's the carbon fiber plates because they're sexy and cool and flashy and you can see them. It's. The original study out of Boulder said it had nothing to do with so.

Just like potential to kinetic energy conversion.

It's like 98% rebounded energy instead of 60 or something.

An EBA adds up over tens of thousands of stuff.

Yes. And then the, the Nike with the, the AirPods and the Alphafly saves your legs even more. I think it's an interesting world because I don't think I can justify those because I don't have the same problems that elite athletes in the marathon have. For example, where they're built for the marathon. You know, their calves. Look at my forearms. And so they get a lot more benefit out of maybe a heavier shoe because it can save their legs the abuse. Whereas my legs.

I still want to put a pair of shots super shoes on you now and see what happens?

Yeah.

All right. If anybody knows anybody who makes super shoes, leave a comment in the podcast. We'll get. We're at Anthony hooked up. Wow.

I'm just wearing the Nikes with everyone else, man. That's the problem is if they're doing the best job, then we all have to kind of really. It's unfortunate for the athletes that aren't.

Socks like Lance Armstrong. You have to be the best doper. Yes, exactly.

You really, if you can try to get ahead or Louis Simmons said, gear can't be neutral. It's either an advantage or it's a disadvantage. And I think that's what we're into now, where these poor athletes that are sponsored by a company that doesn't make a good super shoe, they just can't compete. Or they have to hope that they're smart enough to have it in their contract that they can race in whatever seems to be the fastest. And that's another thing that I really like. I can grab a pair of pulsars by Salomon to have a 6 ounce or just under shoe that I could do 100 miles on the trail in. And it's an advantage, right?

Yeah.

And so even though I'm not running for Salomon and they have no love for me, you just get a hold of a pair of these and then on the roads, I can race in a vapor fly or I can race in the alpha fly. And I don't ever have to say this is the greatest shoe ever. I can just say, well, this was the best shoe for this block with my body based on these metrics.

It was funny right before he stepped out here to do this two hour long walking podcast, you were about to just walk out in bare feet on this gravel. So I know you train your feet too.

Why?

I'm just curious, like a bigger picture question, but why do you do all this? What do you think drives you?

Curiosity. Really? Yeah. I just want to know.

Not just the kind of external, want to know how fast I can run. It's more about the man. What would it feel like to run my high school PR 2 mile 13 times in a row to get an Olympic trial?

I've thought about that before and I've run a fast mile. I've been like, wait, there are people that do this 26 times in a row?

Yeah, I mean, I don't envy those people because I think talent takes them most of the way and they don't really have to think about it at the tippy top end. So I think I think it's. It's fun driving this and kind of getting every little bit of benefit that I can get here and there and harvesting all these otherwise trivial benefits to add it all up in there. But the big driving factor for why I do all that and why repeatedly just build a house of cards just to knock it over, I think it's. It's the curiosity of knowing what that feels like. The, the crazy experiences that I've had were I just have a perfect flow state for five straight hours and have no thoughts. That is worth whatever the price is, right? That's worth any. Anything you'd have to pay to get that state again, you would do it. And so that's really what I'm doing. I'm just out here trying to. Trying to stack these flow states. And as I've found those in things like that pilgrimage, I've had less of a need to race and less of a need to establish myself. And part of, part of that is I think I got the dreams that I wanted as a kid or a young adult, and they were unsatisfying, but I was kind of satisfied with them. Part of me said, well, I did the thing. I don't have to live with regrets about not doing the thing. I got that done. I did more than I thought I could do. And now I'm just gonna be weird and do crazy stunts and kind of talk about it and be about it. And I think the, the cool aspect that's kind of cyclically, kind of a positive feedback loop that drives me harder now is people can benefit from what I'm doing. If I was just a freak and I said, I don't know, I can just run real fast, then that doesn't add any value to anybody. Whereas somebody who's tried three or four times to Boston qualify and they say, what do I do next to make sure this happens? I have, I have a dozen answers. So, yeah, at this point, I've stopped coaching because I don't like the whole hand holding aspect of it. I don't want to white bottom, but I do these consults and it's just half an hour. And you can appreciate some layman or somebody, depending on who they are.

I mean, like 10 to 12 of those a week. I used to coach 47 athletes, most of them in marathoning, swimming, and triathlon, all online. And that was up till about like 10 years ago. And then I switched to doing phone consoles. Now I work with 10 people. Max. That's my max each month that I'll.

Take on, I think a person per day of the week is like all the creative that I would have. Coaching.

Yeah, exactly. Most of those people, we're doing more like boxer. We use this app that's like a walkie talkie, where they'll just walkie talkie me questions and stuff throughout the day. So it's not like I'm managing 10 people's schedules and trying to figure out when I'm gonna call each of those people and how we're gonna sync up. We just talk whenever we want to during the day, and then every Saturday and Sunday, I sit down and lay out their training plan, their nutrition plan, you know, basically look at everything that's going on, and then we just make tweaks and move on to the next week.

Yeah, that's plenty in depth. You can appreciate that, though. 30 minutes of just, hey, accountability.

We're gonna start.

We're gonna start with the basics, and if you knock them all out of the park, we're three minutes into the conversation. We can get deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Your head spin at the end of 30 minutes and you have notes and you have. You have a month or six months of, like, homework items to go figure out and incorporate into your life, and we can come back and do it again if we need to.

Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. That's. That's. It's so cool that you. That you think of it that way. It's just like unlocking curiosity. You know, there's. There's so many things that you alluded to, this pilgrimage run that you did. Some of these things we talked about, like nootropics and that core biometrics device, your Instagram channel. I know you're kind of like this crazy biohacking ultra runner. So if people go to. BenGreenfieldLife.com Kunkel BenGreenfieldLife.com K U N K E L I'll include links, I'll include resources. I'll include everything that you need to access everything that is Anthony. And you can leave your questions, your comments, and your feedback over there as well.

Yeah. And people can just show up at my house. I mean, I'm easy.

Show up at the Durango house.

Yeah. Always offering camps for donation only.

Yeah.

And bring your.

Bring your rectal probes and come for a good time.

Yeah.

All right. Thanks, Anthony.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.

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