Why The World Needs Heroes, "The Humility Of The Hero" & A Call To Action: Ben Greenfield's Speech From PaleoFx 2022.

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

But look around you and tell me that right now we do not need a hero. A collective uprising of people who are willing to speak up for what we believe in. You can't be a hero and so tied down to all your biohacks and gear and fitness that you're just weighed down and unable to proceed forward. Yeah, it is scary. It's scary crossing out of your ordinary world and stepping over that threshold. But the feeling deep down inside that you get when you speak up for what you believe in, nothing in the world can replace that.

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

Hey, what's up?

It's Ben Greenfield. The podcast you're about to hear is actually the keynote speech that I gave at Paleo FX in 2022. I'm going to put all the show notes for you@BenGreenfieldLife.com HeroPodcast that's H E R O podcast. BenGreenfieldLife.com HeroPodcer now, why hero? Well, the reason for that is because this entire talk is about why the world needs heroes right now. It's a call to action. The theme of this year's PaleoFX was Primal Uprising. And I really wanted to kind of go outside the box of supplementation, health and biohacking and inst delve into, I think, something a little bit more important when it comes to living out whatever hero's journey that you've been called to. So I hope you find this inspirational and that you can leave your comments, your questions, your thoughts, your feedback over at BenGreenfieldLife.com HeroPodcast.

Welcome Paleo fx. Is it a good day for everyone so far? Yes. Learning new things, trying new hacks, messing yourselves up with all sorts of crazy pills and capsules and electrical machines out there. You know, I talk about that stuff a lot when I come up here and I speak. I'm not going to talk about any of that stuff today. Laser lights up your nose or the. Those special pills and capsules and magnetic electrical units. Those are all cool. But I wanted to talk to you about something different today. This idea of being a hero, this whole concept of a primal uprising. What's a hero? Well, you might be familiar with the hero's journey. We're going to learn a little bit more about that.

This afternoon. The ordinary world that you may have found yourself living in so peacefully the past few years.

The call to adventure, the Refusal of the call, the meeting with the mentor, the crossing of the threshold tests, allies, enemies, the approach to the inmost cave, the ordeal, the reward, the road back.

The resurrection, the return with the elixir. It's all the classic heroes journey. And I think that we are living in a time right now where more than ever we actually do need heroes. We need heroes. I realize that that might sound hubristic, right? Every generation has thought that they were living through the difficult time, they were living through the tough time. I'm fully self aware that this could come across as a little bit cliche. But look around you and tell me that right now we do not need a hero. A collective uprising of people who are willing to speak up for what we believe in, who are willing to put our foot down and finally quit accepting all of the nonsense that's streaming at us 247 via media in our and our friends and our social life. And we don't need a scorched earth hero. We don't need an Arnold Schwarzenegger hero. But we do need heroes. We need heroes who understand what it means to surrender and what it means to sacrifice. We need humble heroes. Humble heroes. Which is why I called this talk the humility of the hero who could admit when we're wrong and change our mind, but not do so in a way that scapegoats others. We need heroes.

Who, like my personal hero, Jesus Christ. And I will tell you more about that hero and many other heroes during this talk, can rise up and have the meekness and humility of a gentle lamb, but the ferocity and the courage of a lion. That's the type of hero that we need now. I recently wrote on my website that aging men and women who fear death will do great evil. Do not underestimate.

The power and the temptation and the evil that's capable of any of our fellow human beings, especially as we approach death. You will find this, especially if you're in this anti aging and longevity sector. The more that you approach that phase that's halfway through your life, the more that you approach that phase where the aches and the creeks and the pains start to emanate from your joints.

The more you realize your impending mortality and death. Man, if you're not wired up the right way, if your priorities are not right, the things that you will do to clutch at life, the things that you will do to leave a legacy that goes on far after you've left. The things that you will do for more power, for more wealth, for more money, for more Fame for just even more dopamine that you can bleed into your system before you die. It's unsettling. It's shocking. And we right now are facing an uphill battle against people who actually fear death and will do great evil and great injustice because they fear death. Now, the idea of whether or not we should fear death might be a topic for another day. I think that death should be honorable. It should be something that we hold up on as a pedestal, as a crossing of a threshold into a better place. But many, many people fear death. And we're fighting people who fear death and who will do great evil because of that. So we need to surrender. We need to sacrifice, we need to serve. We need to gird up our spirits in such a way that we can be that hero that the world needs right now. But we must be a hero in an entirely different sense of the word. Now, to be a hero, you have to understand the hero's journey. Has anyone in here ever studied up on or heard of the hero's journey? It is the classical plotline that some of the greatest Hollywood hits and greatest Disney princess movies and greatest novels of all time have followed. I first discovered it when I was reading an excellent book by Christopher Vogler called the Writer's Journey. The writer's journey spells out this idea of something that resonates deep within our human DNA when we see the that hero who's living in an ordinary world go through these precise 12 steps of the hero's journey. And I've actually mapped it out for you. Basically, human beings across the eons of time have been living out this hero's journey. And you can see here different Hollywood movies. Lord of the Rings, Lion King, Spider man, the Matrix, Star wars, and Harry Potter.

Can all give us a glimpse into what this hero's journey looks like. For illustrative purposes, I can walk you through this journey. I need to know which movie you guys like, which one's your favorite? Somebody says Matrix, Star Wars. Ooh, I've heard a few star. I've heard a few Star Wars.

I'm old school. So we'll go with Star wars, the ordinary world, right? Luke Skywalker on a moisture farm, whatever the heck that is, at his aunt and uncle's house in Tatooine, right? Living his ordinary, peaceful life. And then there's a call to adventure. There's a call to adventure. Now, as you can see here on this slide, it's when R2D2 comes and gives a message to Luke that threatens to rock his world. Take him out of his peaceful, comfortable existence. And then we have the refusal of the call. The hero, in this case, typically digs their heels in. They don't want to go. Life is comfortable. Life is peaceful. Life is not scary. Even though scary is a lot of times where you need to be to make maximum impact and to be able to live out your calling and your purpose for your life. The ordinary world is very comfortable. So there's often a refusal of the call. I don't want to do this. I don't want to crush the threshold. I don't want to be that person. I want to sit and behave on the airplanes and the Ubers, and I want to keep my mouth shut and put into my body what people are telling me to put into my body.

And I want to live my life watching Netflix and making money and giving my kids money and then dying. It's the ordinary world. It's comfortable, it's peaceful. It's safe. It's not impactful. It's ordinary. It's a very safe place to be. Many of us are there right now, and then we have a meeting with the mentor. In this case, you know, Luke meets Obi Wan. Obi Wan Kenobi, his mentor. Typically, the mentor is that person who pushes the hero outside their comfort zone who says, yo, it's time. It's time to cross that threshold, to get out of your ordinary world and to go and seek out something greater for yourself, Right? Something greater for yourself. It's like the classic Disney princess again, right? There must be something more to life than this. Has anybody ever sat with that existential crisis? Like, there must be something more to life than this. If you're at that phase, then you're hearing the call to adventure, and you're nervous, and you're about to cross the threshold, and it gets pretty exciting and pretty scary after that. And a lot of times, you need mentors. You need people who can help you along the way, who can teach you what it takes to cross that threshold. And when you cross the threshold, that's when the adventure actually begins, right? That's when Luke leaves his planet and goes to join the rebel forces. And some Star wars aficionados in here are probably going to read me the riot act for not getting everything correct about Luke's journey. But Luke crosses the threshold. Luke crosses the threshold. Then there's Tess. There's allies, there's enemies. There's everything from Yoda to the garbage monster and the base of the spaceship. But typically, we have people we meet along the way. The Fellowship of the Ring, a perfect example. We have elves and dwarves and Hobbits and other Hobbits, and we have mon and we have dragons, and there's all these characters that occur leading up to the next step of the hero's journey, which is the approach, the innermost cave. The approach to the innermost cave. And that's where the evil lies. Sometimes it's not an actual literal cave, but it's the place where you have to go to do battle. It's the place where the hero is about to take what they've learned from the mentors, from the test, from the allies, from the enemies, and go in and see what they're actually made of. And then there's the ordeal, right? Like, this is. This is the fight. There's many of them in Star wars, many of them in Star Wars. But you can see here, in this case, it's when they rescue Leia and Darth Vader kills Obi Wan Kenobi. And that's the ordeal. But is the movie over at that point? Is the movie over after the ordeal? You're right. No, it's not. It keeps going. We have the reward, right? The hero has clutched the reward. They hold the reward. And now it's time to go back. And this is the part in the movie or the storybook where everything seemed like it was. Was going to be hunky dory and okay. And then the enemy is not quite dead yet, right? Or they come rushing out of the cave after the hero who's clutching the reward under their arm, bringing it back to the people. And the enemy comes and they say, no, no, this is not going to happen. Not this time. Not this time. And then we have the road back. And the road back is the point at which the hero has that reward clutched under their arm. They're hurrying home, they're hurrying back to bring this elixir back to the people. And there's one final battle. And typically in this final battle, the hero gives it everything that they've got, every last shred of their energy, their courage, their bravery, their emotion.

And then they're resurrected. They're resurrected, they're brought back to life.

At that point, they return with the elixir. We see it in Rocky, we see it in Frozen, we see it in Star wars, we see it in. Gosh, there's so many, many flicks and stories where this pattern repeats itself over and over again. Now, I have a hypothesis. I think that one of the reasons that we resonate so deeply with this story is.

It's part of the epicness of human history. At the very, very beginning of time, we were in our ordinary world and we had a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of things that happened. We had a lot of sin, we had a lot of fallouts with God. And then eventually we got to a point where we needed this salvation, we needed this elixir so bad. And the greatest hero who has ever walked the face of this planet, Jesus Christ, basically gave that to us, lived out that hero's journey for us in a very inspirational way. And there are other examples. There's the.

Person who finally decides to step out from being overweight or sedentary or obese and they sign up for their first Ironman triathlon, right? They cross that threshold from their ordinary world. We have the parent who decides that they're going to take their kid out of school and unschool or homeschool. I've been through that. It's very nerve wracking, very harrowing to make that decision to step out and do something uncomfortable. Especially when your child's life and psyche and emotions and education is on the line. There's the business person who pivots, who decides to take their business in an entirely different direction, to do something new, to do something scary, to defy the status quo. And there are many of you in here, I know, who have done that, who have quit your day job and stepped out of your ordinary world and started something new, started something that really resonated with your soul. And I respect that. There are so many instances where we see this hero's journey being lived out over and over again. And I think the ultimate, again, most inspirational example of the hero's journey is that of Jesus Christ. This is so inspirational to me, this deity sitting at the right hand of a God in heaven.

Who basically comes down to earth and becomes a baby and.

Poops and burps and has to eat baby food and get cut and bruised and scarred, live their whole life down here in this crazy different world that's anything but the ordinary world of heaven, and eventually undergoes an ordeal, one of the most unfair, brutal, horrifying murders that has ever existed in this planet. And then eventually, after going to battle against evil forces for three days, rises again and the hand comes up.

With the elixir and suddenly there we are, there we are with that hero who's gone to battle for us and we're able to just lay it all down at the foot of the cross. Our burden at the foot of the cross. Because that hero had returned for us with the elixir. I think it's the ultimate example. The ultimate example. And I think that for me personally, that's the hero that I want to be. I'm not a God, I'm not a deity. I'm not a. I'm not Jesus. But I think it's a pretty good example. And today I want to give you four ways. Four ways that you can cross the threshold out of your ordinary world and you can be a hero. These are practical examples. I don't just want to talk to you about the hero's journey. I want to tell you what to do. And I've had to walk through each of these steps myself. And I can tell you right now, it's been transformative. So the first is to surrender. Surrender all attachments.

You got to be willing to give up everything. So Frodo left the Shire. Neo left the Matrix, Simba left, left Primal Rock. Luke Skywalker left Tatooine. Jesus left Heaven. You can't be a hero. And so tied down to all your supplements and biohacks and gear and fitness and tools and diet and belongings and social media accounts.

That you're just weighed down and unable to proceed forward. You have to free yourself from attachments. You must surrender. And there's a lot of really good books out there about surrender. You know, I like Michael Saylor and David Hawkins, and there's many ways to do it. But, you know, there's a book that I would recommend to you by Napoleon Hill. It's called Outwitting the Devil.

That book is not as popular as Napoleon's book, Think and Grow Rich. But has anyone here read it? Anybody read Outwitting the Devil? Yeah. It's a great book. Scotty, how you doing, man? So the idea is that the devil would prefer for us not to be impactful as human beings. And one of the best ways to get that done is to put us into what Napoleon calls a hypnotic trance. Right. Wake up.

Use my day as an example.

Right.

Oil pulling and tongue scraping and jumping up and down on a trampoline and taking your supplements and making your coffee and going to work and taking a lunch break and having some superfoods and taking a nap and getting some more work done. Coming home and having dinner and going to bed. Very comfortable, Very comfortable. That's the hypnotic trance, though, that many of us have been in. We're creatures of scheduling, of calendaring, and that's all good. That allows you to be very impactful, but at some point, you must be willing to get uncomfortable. You must be willing to surrender attachments. And a lot of times that means sacrificing yourself for other people. And I'll get to that momentarily. But the idea of surrender is very powerful. You have to be willing to surrender your body, your biohacks, money, drugs, supplements, plant medicines, your social media feed, your calendar, your schedule. You have to be able to look at anything in life and say, as Anthony DeMello says in his book Awareness, I really do not need you to be happy. I'm only deluding myself that without you I will not be happy. But I really don't need you for my happiness. I can be happy without you. You're not my happiness. You're not my joy. Can you say that to your coffee? Can you say that to your smart drug? Can you say that to.

Your gym and your fitness routine? Can you say that to your diet? Can you say that to your books? Can you say that to your Instagram account, Facebook, Twitter, I don't care what it is. You must be able to step back.

And surrender attachments to anything in life, with one exception, that would be God. God is the one thing I know in my life, even above family, friends, fitness, everything. God is the only thing I will not surrender on. But you must be willing to surrender every attachment in life. If you want to be a hero, you cannot go camping out in hero land with a giant backpack full of all the things that you need in order to survive based on the hypnotic trance that you've been living. So you gotta be willing to surrender. There's another author named Arthur Brooks. He wrote a fantastic book called Strength to Strength. Strength to Strength is about how we progress from our early phases in life where we're doing, doing, doing, achieving, achieving, achieving, inventing, and how we can gracefully transition into a mentorship role, into a teaching role. Any of you who are becoming old fogies like me, I just turned 40. I read that book. It's called From Strength to Strength. It's excellent. It's an excellent outlook on how your latter half of life compares to your former half of life. And he has a similar saying. Arthur does. He says, this is not evil, but will not bring me the happiness and peace I seek, and I simply don't have the time to make it my goal. I choose to detach myself from this desire. That's another perfect example of surrender. And you should be able to just pick anything in your life and say that. And if you can't, if there. There's some type of cognitive resistance or Spiritual resistance or unsettling in your gut, then you have work to do. But when you combine surrendering with the other tips that I'm gonna give you, it makes all this very, very easy, especially if you care for your spirit, which I'll get to as we go along here. So, first, to be a hero, you must surrender. Second, you must sacrifice. Okay? So the modern stereotype of a hero is this Adonis like figure with cannonball shoulders and multiple swords and weapons on a giant stallion riding out to save all of humankind.

And I think that to a certain extent, from an ancestral or primal or paleo standpoint, that kind of makes sense, right? The people who appear to be harder to kill would be the people who we look up to as leaders, as potential heroes, as kings. We've been stereotyped, We've been conditioned to want that stereotype in a hero. But if you look at Peter Parker, Peter Parker was scrawny. Frodo was a very small man with hairy feet. So was Bilbo. Luke Skywalker didn't have the most impressive spaceship. Harry Potter lived in a frigging cupboard underneath the staircase, okay? These were not the kind of massive, impressive heroes that we like to think of.

You know, I think that, again, another example of this would be Jesus Christ.

The Jews, if you study Jewish history, were expecting this messiah who would come bearing a sword, you know, maybe with a giant army who's going to save them from the Romans and finally free the people. And what did they get? They got a tiny little carpenter baby, you know, born to a poor mom and dad, you know, grew up in a little town called Bethlehem and was really, you know, nothing. And yet he told us that the meek shall inherit the earth. He told us that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And so this idea of a hero not quite being.

That hero that we've been conditioned by Hollywood to believe is the ultimate hero is something to think about. It's humility, it's surrender, it's sacrifice, right? It's not the braggadocio of Gaston and Beauty and the Beast or the muscles of the Predator or the Terminator.

It's a humble approach. You know, Rocky Balboa is a poor Italian American.

Frodo and Bilbo again, little tiny hobbits, right? You don't have to be big. You don't have to be powerful. You don't have to be rich to be a hero. As a matter of fact, I think that a hero who arises in a time like this needs to be a Pattern interrupt. Because it is the rich, it is the powerful, it is the influential. It is the people with all the social media followers who we expect to be the hero. And all of us are waiting for that person to be the hero. How many of you have been waiting for the past two or three years for somebody to step up and say something? But it's something that you know deep down inside, you wanted to say and you still want to say, but you don't. Cause it has to be somebody cool and somebody impressive and somebody who's rich, who, if the world tries to shut them down, you know they're going to be okay. So we sit here and we wait for.

Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and, you know, all these influential figures to save us. And that's not necessarily the way that we should be thinking, right? It's humble people, ordinary people, people who band together, people who stand up for what they believe in, people who are their true, authentic selves, who are the hero. Every single one of you in here has the great potential to be a hero or scarily enough to be a monster. But you can choose who it is that you want to be. You have to sacrifice in terms of humility, meaning you have to sacrifice your ego to be a hero. But you also have to be willing to sacrifice yourself, your money, your job, your career. I mean, you gotta be willing to be weird, to be cast out, to be vilified, to be a martyr. Look, I don't want to sound narcissistic, but, like, fitness was a pretty successful game for me. Fitness and health and biohacking, okay? I made a lot of money doing that stuff. I was successful doing that stuff.

And then I stepped out and I decided I wanted to help people find greater meaning and purpose and fulfillment. I wanted to help people find the same hope and joy that I wake up with every single morning as I greet God and I talk to Jesus and I care for my spirit.

And that's something that required me to sacrifice. Meaning that I had to be willing to be laughed at, to be vilified, to be weird, to be like some Jesus freak on Instagram instead of the cool fitness guy. I can tell you right now, when you make that step to be authentic, when you take that first step, yeah, it is scary. It's scary crossing out of your ordinary world and stepping over that threshold. But, man, like, the feeling deep down inside that you get when you speak up for what you believe in, like, nothing in the world can replace that. But you gotta sacrifice your ego, and you have to be willing to be sacrificed in order to do that. Look at Jesus Christ. You know, it was a horrific, horrific death that he experienced hanging on a cross, beaten, crown of thorns on his head. You know, six hours of suffering and tormenting and three more days of fighting evil forces in hell. And.

Talk about sacrifice. Going from being the most powerful entity in the universe to being the most lowly. Like, that's inspiration right there. If any of you have not yet read that story, you know, read Matthew, read Mark, read Luke, or read John in the Bible, go home and read it when you come back from the event. It's so inspiring what this individual did in living out the ultimate hero's journey. So, yeah, you gotta surrender. You gotta sacrifice. Sacrifice your ego, Sacrifice yourself. The meek shall inherit the earth. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. That's the way that you need to start thinking. And after surrendering and after sacrificing, the next step is service. So service. This does not mean you gotta go build a school. Does not mean you gotta, like, get on a plane and go construct churches in Africa or deliver water to people in need across the world. Service can begin very, very simple. Like, for me personally, it began with my family. I did not realize how much I needed to serve my family, serve my wife, serve my sons, be there. And a family foundation, frankly, until Covid hit and I was stuck with my freaking family for a long time and I realized, oh, my gosh, this is the foundation in addition to faith that I probably haven't been pouring enough energy into. Just imagine if every single one of you in here returned home and just delved in hardcore, going out of the way to serve your family, whether those are your own children and your. Your spouse, or whether it's your mother, your father, your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, your nieces, your nephews. Next, serve community. Okay? I began to throw dinner parties and have people over and go out into the community and serve and volunteer and find people to help, right? A hero must have the heart of a servant. A hero must have the heart of a servant. It really, like I said, wasn't until the COVID pandemic that I really realized how much of a difference you can make when you volunteer in your local community, when you throw dinner parties, right? We began throwing dinner parties once or twice a month, just inviting people of all shapes and sizes and colors and religions and backgrounds over to our house to just break bread together and have a meal. We went out in the local community. We found men, women to help. There Like I said, I changed my entire purpose statement to be able to serve my family. My purpose statement in life right now is to love God through prayer and worship and to love my family by preparing for them and by providing for them. And it's so odd because when you set up that foundation of faith and family at home, everything, everything becomes better out in the business world, in the sporting world and the recreational world, in the real world, in the adult world, it all starts at home. And I think that sometimes a lot of us think with this kind of grass is always greener type of syndrome, that all the cool stuff that we can do, all the impactful stuff that we can do is outside the home. But I can tell you right now, some of my most impactful moments right now are when I'm meditating and praying and journaling with my sons in the morning and at night and when my wife and our heads hit the pillow every night. We're praying together, we're spending time together. I'm serving them, I'm preparing them, I'm providing for them. That is the mentality that you need to have as a hero. It doesn't have to start big, it can start small.

Dinner parties, taking care of your family, helping out, volunteering in the local community. Those are the type of things that don't seem sexy. They don't seem like the type of epic thing that a hero could or should be doing. But these are the things that make a big difference. You know, one thing that we do that I'll tell you about here momentarily is we even write down one person who we're going to pray for or help or serve each day. Every single morning. My family and I do that. And it's impactful because that's 365 people a year that you can help, that you can send an encouraging note to, that you can pray for, that you can be there for that you can go out of your way to help. So surrender, sacrifice.

Service.

And then the last thing that you need to do to really equip yourself to be the type of hero that the world needs right now is you must gird yourself up spiritually. You must put on your spiritual armor. I've written books about this recently. I wrote a book called Fit Soul. I wrote a book called Endure. And that's what these books are about. They're about spiritual fitness. Because, look, it's almost embarrassing that this one part of our bodies that's going to go on and live for eternity forever and ever, the one part from which our Energy and our emotions and our character emanate. It's often the most shriveled up, shrunken, neglected part of our entire existence. We train our brain, we use all the fancy electronic tools we take the smart drugs and nootropics. We train, we do fitness, we do hacks. All that's going to disappear. What does it gain a man or a woman if you have the whole world, but you lose your own soul, right? So your spiritual fitness is so, so important. It's something that I go out of my way to tend to every single day. And I'll tell you a couple of things that we do, but, you know, this is a verse that I like, and I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you, but it's this idea that every day when I wake up, I think, all right, I'm putting on my helmet of salvation, my shield of faith, my belt of truth, my shoes fitted with the gospel of peace, the sword of the spirit, the power of prayer, the breastplate of righteousness, and I'll pray that over myself. I'll put on my spiritual fitness in the same way that I go for a run or I lift weights, or I do yoga or I drink a cup of coffee. You gotta take care of your spirit if you want to have the resilience and the fortitude necessary to be able to fight the uphill battle that a hero has to fight. So how can you tend to your own spiritual fitness? I'll tell you what I do. This isn't necessarily the perfect way to do things, but this is what I do. Actually, for those of you who want to experience this, I didn't really realize this until a couple hours ago when I was about to come up and I was talking with the folks at Braintap, and they actually have programmed into their braintap that's out there on the expo floor the exact routine that I do in the morning and in the evening that I lead my family through. It's very simple. We use something called a spiritual disciplines journal. And in the morning, we sit, we start a timer, we close our eyes, we meditate. Typically, we'll meditate on a Bible verse for two or three minutes, sometimes memorize it, and then we all write down one thing that we're grateful for and spend a couple minutes meditating on that, visualizing that, bringing it to life, thanking God for it. And then we move on to service, which I was talking to you about. We write down that one person we can pray for or help or serve each day, and then we end with a simple Lord's Prayer and then we move on to the evening, in the evening, later on. We love our evenings as a family. We have these wonderful family dinners and we sing and we read stories and we play games and I tell corny dad jokes. And in the evening, after we've had that dinner, we again return to our journals and we write down three things as we replay our entire day like a movie in our mind. We write down, what good did I do today? What could I have done better this day? Meaning where did I learn from my failures? And where was I most purpose filled today? Right? Where was I scratching the itch of my ikigai, my plan de vita? If you don't have a purpose statement in life, you must have one. It's very interesting. As you go through this practice of gratitude and service and self examination and purpose, you find those things that you might be doing repeatedly that you could have done better, that you failed, that you don't want to repeat. It's revealed to you those things that occurred that made you feel most purpose filled with your life. You realize those things that happen to you each day that you might not intentionally be grateful for, that you should be being grateful for. And this practice is just amazing. It's service.

Gratitude in the morning, its purpose and self examination in the evening. And then if you want a little extra.

You know, another thing that I do and please notice this is all calendar, this is all scheduled. This is all intentional. This stuff doesn't just happen. You have to do it. You have to carve out the time. You have to set your alarm clock earlier, right? In the same way that you set it to go to the gym. And it's hard. I've been on a spiritual journey for the past, I mean my whole life, but really more intensively for the past six or seven years. And every single day I wake up and every single day there's resistance. Every single day before I do my journaling and my praying and my meditating, I want to go check emails and I want to go work out and I want to have the cough. I want to do all this stuff. But you got to prioritize. I think within the first hour after you get up, you need to take care of your spiritual fitness if you really want to be equipped to be the resilient hero that the world needs. And so the other thing that I do is I wake up before the entire rest of the family's awake and I put on this wonderful, like this Spotify channel. It's Called soaking worship. It's just great, great music. And I'm kind of a biohacking geek. So I do about 30, 40 breathe ups, right? I literally will sit there on the floor on my cheesy little hippie meditation cushion and I do my 30 to 40 breath ups and I end with an exhale and a final inhale. Suck all the air in.

Breathe it out. I have candle lit in front of me. Soy and paraben and fragrance free for anybody who's wondering if it's a paleo candle. And.

I've got incense sticks, right? So my goal is to make my little meditation room almost like a temple, right? So I got my incense, I got my candle, I got my music, and then I just start praying, I start pouring my heart out. You know, I have a little list on my phone of all those things that I want to pray for and I'll read, I like to read something encouraging like a devotional. Usually the devotional that I read has a little Bible verse on it. So I'll read the Bible section, read the devotional. And I always open with the prayer and the breathing and the candle and the incense and then I always finish with a, with a prayer. You know, sometimes I'm done with that by 5:30 in the morning, right? And so yeah, it's, you are a little bit, you are a little bit tired when you wake up early, do that. But you know what? I don't know a lot of impactful people, I don't know a lot of leaders who don't live life just a little bit tired. The way I think about things is I believe in eternal life. I believe I'm going to live forever. And so I don't mind a few decades of being a little more tired than usual because I was putting on my spiritual armor when I get up in the morning. But that's been super impactful for me. Not only this meditation of service and gratitude in the morning and purpose and self examination in the evening, but also this idea of just going to God hardcore every single morning and being a little bit woo woo about it, right? Candle, incense, breathwork music. Like if you're speaking to a deity, you might as well make it a sacred experience. It's not as though you can't talk to God when you're sitting in the drive through at McDonald's waiting to order your.

Think about where I'm speaking, order your salad with your chicken breast on top of it. But this idea of starting off each day intentionally like that, it's so powerful. You Guys, it's so powerful. You know, after hearing this about how the world needs heroes and there's this whole mapped out journey that a hero can follow, and there's a need to surrender, to sacrifice, to serve your fellow human being and to gird yourself up spiritually. Maybe you're feeling the call, you're realizing that you might have a little bit of a pull, a little bit of a nudge, a little bit of a desire to step outside your comfort zone. Maybe you imagine, like the Disney princess, that there must be something more to life than this, that you have some attachments, that you can surrender, that you can release, that there are certain elements of your life that you need to sacrifice. You know, you're seeing, you're tasting, you're sensing, you're hearing, you're smelling this call to adventure. And maybe you don't want to be a hero. Maybe it sounds scary. Like I was telling you, scary is where impact happens, right? Comfortable, ordinary existence is not scary. It's happy, it's comfortable, it feels good. That's what 99% of the human beings walking the surface of this earth are experiencing right now. But man, scary. Waking up and not knowing if you're gonna get censored, not knowing if you're gonna get shut down, not knowing if someone's gonna laugh at you. Cause you decide you're actually going to acknowledge the sacred spirituality that exists inside each of us as human beings. It's scary, but it's impactful. It's scary, but at the end of the day, it actually is more fulfilling. I'm more happy living a scary life than I was living a safe and ordinary life. And I really, really think that in order for us to experience this primal uprising that we're all here to contribute to, we have to have that same mentality. You gotta step across the threshold out of our ordinary world and be willing to be a hero. You have more power and influence than you think you really do. If you have a $500 laptop and a $30 a month Internet service plan and a YouTube account, you've got a greater potential audience than like a 1990s television studio with millions of viewers and cameras and a staff and transmitting antennas and receivers. Like, really, there's so much that you can do just with the little supercomputer you probably have in your pockets right now. Just start speaking up for yourself. Start speaking up for what you know to be right.

Go to God every day to check yourself and make sure what you're saying is actually something that is derived from the ultimate source of wisdom and discernment. Study the life of Jesus Christ, the ultimate hero. Yeah, watch Star wars and Frozen and Rocky too. But, man, even just the Gospels, it's a perfect place to start. Every single hotel room I've ever been in has it right there in the bedside drawer. You open it up, you read that story. It's so, so inspirational.

So you gotta surrender, you gotta sacrifice, you gotta serve, Gotta gird up your spirit. That's how you change the world. That's how you make impact. And I'm sure. I'm sure that there's something you're doing right now that you could be doing differently.

Some step that you could take in your family or in your community or in your own life that you've just been waiting for and putting on hold because you thought it would be weird, you thought it would be scary. You thought it would take you outside of your ordinary world.

Does that sound familiar to any of you?

What are you gonna do? I'm serious. What are you gonna do? Are any of you doing something right now that you could do differently? Is there some step that you could take right now in your community, with your family, with yourself, that will equip you to be the hero that the world needs? Because you do have more influence than you could ever imagine? This is now participatory. Somebody speak up and tell me, what's one thing that you're gonna do? Well, you're going to surrender or sacrifice or serve or gird yourself up spiritually. What's something different? Who's brave enough? Who's the first person to step outside your ordinary world of being an audience member? What's your name? Mariah. What are you going to do? Having a baby, that's a big step. That's a big step. I can get behind that, though. It's one of the most important and beautiful things you can do in life. One of the most important, beautiful things you can do in life is to have another human being. Another human being that can go on to change this world, make it a better place. Now, you set the bar pretty high by having a baby. It's possible that there's 50% of this audience that might not be able to have a baby unless they identify with that particular skill. But anything else, Anything else come to mind.

That you want to step out of your ordinary world and do something you've been wanting to say, something you've been wanting to participate in, something you've been wanting to speak up for? Yes.

I am a mom. I have two young adult boys. They're 22 and 24. This is something I already did, and I challenge every parent in the room to do this.

I called each of my children and I said, I need to have a conversation with you and what I'm about to say. Please don't say, it's okay. Just take it in and accept it. I want to apologize for every time I fucked up as a mom and said or did something to you that made you feel like less of a human, because that was me not being my best self in that moment. It was not a reflection on who you are as a human and as a parent. As parents, that's one way that we can show growth and acts of courage and being a hero.

Yes. Yes. Restitution. It's called restitution. Setting things right. I didn't do that till, gosh, five months ago. I finally wrote my parents a letter. I said, I'm sorry for being a crappy son. I'm sorry for not honoring you. I'm sorry for being embarrassed when you got divorced and throwing you under the bus and, you know, thinking that I could get away with not being nice to you because you were no longer the perfect parents.

You ever read the Five Regrets of the Dying? An article by palliative care practitioner Bonnie Ware? I think her name is. She has a book, too. There's five regrets of the dying, and there's a few of them. You know, I wish I'd been my true, authentic self. I wish I'd displayed my emotions more. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. But one is I wish that I had stayed in touch with or maintained connections with old friends. And that really is the concept of restitution, right? This idea that you don't let the sun go down in your anger, that you can be at peace with all humans as much as is possible and is within your power. Cover every situation with love and peace and joy and forgiveness. It's a very magical way to live. So if there are relationships right now that you can go and fix and repair, you can make the phone call, write the letter, have the conversation, go out to coffee, man. It's powerful. It's powerful. And it can even be with your own family, your own children, or your own parents. Absolutely. Yes, sir.

Hi, Ben. I'm Patrice.

I started listening to your podcast in 2013 or 14. You inspired me. I asked myself the same question. How can I change a world? Came back from Dubai, where I was living for the previous two years. Came back to Montreal, got reconnected.

Very deeply with my kids. I set up, invested all my money into events, sports events. So I'm putting together the world triathlon event in Montreal.

Wow.

And I'm inspiring people to train more, to move with bringing elite athletes to Montreal.

Built a team around that. Created an event company called Podium Production. We now host a world tour of the FIBA 3 on 3 basketball event in Montreal.

We acquired another triathlon event which is more family based.

So thank you for inspiring me to get to that level. Get out of my comfort zone, invest the money. I'm still not making money with those events. That's not the point. The point is I'm having deeper penetration into inspiring other people and bring people to have a better life.

Yeah.

Your talk today now tells me I need to go to the other level.

Yeah.

I need to keep growing on that and spiritually as well.

And it takes trust. Thank you for doing what you're doing, by the way. Thank you for speaking up. It takes trust. It really does. I. I'm not a very trusting guy. I mean, like, you know, I try to micromanage every aspect of my life. I have a really hard time letting go of things. But for me to be able to say things that are important to me, that I'm nervous.

Might scare people away or drive people in my audience away. For me to write an article that is not like promoting a company or something like that, it's just talking about faith and trust and love. That does take trust. It does take trust. It takes me waking up and just saying, all right, God takes care of the foxes and the sparrows and the flowers. So I'm just gonna. I'm gonna do the very best job I can with whatever God has placed on my plate for the day, my true authentic self, and then just hand everything over to God and trust that it's going to be okay. But, yeah, it can be scary. I can tell you what, when you got a higher power on board to help guide you through it, it's. Gosh, it's so much better. It's so much better. Yes, sir. How do you figure out your mission or your purpose?

Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that you can identify your purpose. You know, some of it is thinking back about what it is that you loved to do when you were a child. Right. Like, I love to read and write and spend time in nature. Three things that I still love to do. And fired up by you. Think about the things that make time go by very quickly for you right now. Right. For me, I'll be honest with you. Like, I love to write. I really do. Like, you put me in front of a blank page and you know, I'll sit there for four hours and feel like 20 minutes has gone by writing. You do the same thing with my wife and she'll be a ball of tears and crying because she doesn't like to write. She's got writer's block where you put a canvas and a paintbrush in front of her and she'll literally just paint all day and feel like time is just flying by. So what did you like to do when you were a kid? What makes time go by fast for you right now? Or as my friend Mark Manson says, what makes you forget to eat and poop? It's a pretty, pretty good equation. There's a book though called Ikigai 2.0. I know, it's a funny name. Ikigai is kind of like the Japanese term for life's purpose. Ikigai 2.0 is an ebook that you can get on slow s l o w w co I took my sons through it recently. It's kind of like a formulative way to identify your life's purpose based on your strengths, on your tendencies and what you're naturally hardwired for. And what I like about that particular flywheel that they present in Ikigai 2.0 is.

Look, I was just talking about this on a podcast out there with Mike Bledsoe. You can be the starving artist who is doing what you're doing and very passionate about it and self actualized, but at some point you gotta pay the bills, right? Of course you trust God, but you have to trust God and put on your seatbelt, you gotta trust God and strap on your sword. And so what I like about Ikigai 2.0 is it says, okay, well here's what I'm good at, here's what I'm encoded for, here's what makes time go by quickly, here's what I'm passionate about. But then here's what the world needs. And here's how I can package this up. And here's the commercial and monetizable aspect of it. Because you know, from a very practical standpoint, at some point you have to take your purpose and make it into some type of way that provides for you, provides for your family. But yeah, that Ikiguy 2.0 is very good. As is Masten Kipp's book, Masten K I P P I think it's called Claim youm Power.

Also a really good book. For. For life's purpose. And I have a section in my book Fit Soul, in which I get into life's purpose as well and kind of walk through some stimulatory questions to.

Help you find your life's purpose.

I would love for one or two other people to share if. If you would like, if you feel led. I'll give you one more that's a.

Bit aligned with what you're talking about. A couple years ago, I just been doing what my career, just following the path, the. The easy way, the comfortable way, and drop that. And really poured everything into a lot of things you're talking about.

So dropped it.

Funded one company that does transformational experiences. Another one, a lot based on the work of Joseph Campbell. The Hero's Journey.

Yeah.

And another one based on really helping people find their ikigai.

But.

But what I didn't do then is because my go to is career. So I did that transformation in career. And what I'm going to do is really step back from the career and put it back into the family and now children, grandchildren.

So it's a bit of an inverse.

Of, you know, career first, but for.

The betterment of all, but avoided the.

Focus on the family, which is the closest to me.

Yeah, yeah. And that's wonderful. And it does make me think of one thing that I would probably be remiss, not to mention many of us feel as though to become a hero and to pattern interrupt and to step outside our comfort zone, that there has to be some type of scorched earth event.

You got to go down to Peru and do ayahuasca or have some shaman come over to your loft and serve you iboga or, you know, or kill the ego with some type of plant medicine ceremony. I look around, I hear the. I hear the talk. I've. I've, you know, I've paid attention to the type of things that people turn to when they're trying to become new people. I really haven't met a single person who has changed themselves or altered themselves for good with that type of approach. In the absence of some type of faith practice, belief in God and the saving power of a belief in Jesus Christ. I literally, you know, I won't lie, you guys. I've done freaking every drug known to humankind, right? Like, I've done the boga and the ayahuasca and puking my guts out for three hours. You know, all the, all the things. There is absolutely nothing, nothing that comes close to waking up every morning, putting on my music, lighting my Candle burning my incense and talking to God. No drugs, no plant medicines. I'm not throwing that stuff under the bus. But what I'm saying is you don't have to have some type of crazy experience that occurs in order for you to step outside your comfort zone and start being the hero. Just wake up tomorrow morning. You know, I remember when I, when I first started like that intense morning spiritual practice. The first part of it was just basically repentance, saying, sorry, you know, God, you've been taking care of me for so long. I've barely even been talking to you, you know, and telling Jesus, thank you for dying, for being a hero, for saving me. And every day when I come back, it's just more and more powerful. You know, it's so odd because we hear about this hero's journey and the return with the elixir and Jesus Christ is the perfect example of a deity who came back from hell with that elixir for us, you know, it's called the Holy Spirit, the anointing of the Holy Spirit. And I don't know if any of you ever felt this, but when you have that anointing, it's just energy coming out your fingertips and you're, you radiate joy and peace and love and hope and yeah, you still have crappy days. It's not like you're freaking just, you know, saint with a halo, walking around all the time. But you don't have to have some epic drug infused journey to become a new person. It literally can be something as simple as saying a prayer, saying, Jesus, I believe that you were a deity, that you died for me, that I'm in need of salvation. Please come into my life, come into my heart. It's that simple. It literally is that simple. And it's so, so magical. What happens after that. It's so magical. So that transformation, that first transformation step is so easy. And of course, I mean, you guys all know how to get ahold of me on my blog or my newsletter or my website or whatever this is what I want to help people with for the rest of my life is to find the same peace and hope and joy that I found. So I mean, if you have any questions about any of that kind of stuff, I would love to help you. I also want to thank you for coming. I realize that sometimes I talk about very practical things about the longevity and anti aging and telomeres and blood work and labs and fitness and six packs and all that stuff, but.

I'm just super grateful to be able to stand up here today and share with you what I feel is something that's just far more important, caring for your spirit and being that hero that the world needs. And so if there's anything, anything that you could do in return for me coming up here and talking to you today, it would be to leave here on at some point tonight. At some point, like right now, when you're taking a break in between sessions, write down a step that you're gonna take, something you're gonna do, someone you're gonna call and set right things with some pattern in your life that you're gonna interrupt and change, some devotional you're gonna read, some journaling practice you're gonna start, maybe you're just gonna start off tomorrow morning talking to God, saying, hey, God, it's been a long time. What do you have to say to me? It's powerful. It's powerful when you start your day off that way. Thank you all for coming and I hope to see you tomorrow as well. I'll see you out of the book signing. Thanks.

Hey, I've got a special announcement about an event that's taking place with me and my team at Ben Greenfield Life. So we have our big Ben Greenfield Life team retreat this year in Sandpoint, Idaho. And we're going to do what's called the Walk for Water. During that event, we've partnered up with the fantastic charitable organization World vision. And on June 14th at about 10am, we're going to be doing a 6k, 6k length event, which is the average distance people in the developing world have to walk to get water. Sometimes, sadly enough, not even clean or safe water. But anyways, what we're going to do is we're going to raise money for World Vision to be able to provide clean water for someone in a developing country for life. And World Vision does a fantastic job equipping farmers, equipping people who would normally not be able to get water with the ability to be able to produce water or get clean drinking water. So here's how you can help. There's a $50 donation option that will help to provide clean water. 50 bucks is all it takes to write clean water for one person for life. And there's also a $50 registration fee where you too can join in to do the 6K. So here's where you go. BenGreenfieldLife.com WalkForward that's BenGreenfieldLife.com WalkForWater Check it out and get ready to join us on June 14th at 10am and of course, you can just do this all virtually. You don't have to be in Sandpoint, Idaho for the event.

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. And 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.

Sa.