Ben Greenfield - Biohacks That Will Upgrade Your Life

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Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have Ben Greenfield here with us. And before we get into the show, I'm going to be giving you some insight into who this individual is.

So here we go.

In 2013 and 2014, Ben was named one of the world's top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. And by 2015, Ben was coaching the world's top CEOs, chefs, biohackers, poker players, tennis, motocross and endurance competitors, and professional athletes from the ufc, the NHL, the NBA, the NFL, and beyond. All while advising, investing in companies in the health, fitness and nutrition industry. In 2016, he joined the Spartan SGX as one of its certified coaches. Today's episode was absolutely amazing. I picked up Ben Greenfield's book Boundless recently and that inspired me to reach out to him to have him on the podcast. And we made it happen. So enjoy the show. Let me know what you think. And before we get started, make sure you subscribe to the Rise of the Young podcast. Leave a rating and review on itunes. Share it with a friend, screenshot it, put it on your Instagram story. And last but not least, enjoy the show.

What's going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have somebody that I am very excited about. We have the one and only Mr. Ben Greenfield. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Yo, what's up? I'm stoked to stoked to be here. I ducked out on a little walk to catch some sunshine and some fresh air. I'm trying not to get too much cabin fever with this coronavirus quarantine, so.

Totally, man. Well, I mean, first things first, I definitely appreciate you coming on today. I found out who you were through your book Boundless, which I absolutely love, which we'll get into. But you're someone that, you know, after watching your interview with Joe Rogan and seeing the way you think and after looking through everything you've done, what I want to start this off with is who you are. For the people that don't know, I'd love to have you give a brief introduction into what you've done this last decade of your life.

Do you want the answer I give when people are sitting next to me on the airplane and I just want to shut them up and not have a long conversation? Or do you want the whole okay, because people ask me on an airplane, I just tell them I'm an author because everybody kind of understands that. But I, you know, I grew up in North Idaho. I was actually home schooled and so kind of had an outside the box education which I'm actually doing with my own. I have twin 12 year old boys and we're kind of doing the same thing with them. They don't really homeschool, they kind of more unschool meaning, you know, they learn primarily through life based education. So, so their math curriculum might be building a tree fort or for example Spanish might be a family trip to Mexico. So everything just based around learning through life as much as possible. Now that being said, I was homeschooled in a little bit more of a formal sense, being sitting around with books at the kitchen table with mom and playing outside a lot and just grew up with a real love for physical culture, the outdoors. And I was also a real bookworm, a real nerd. You know, I love to read. Very, very kind of self educated and self driven when it came to discovering this idea of learning and being a learner for life. And I've kind of carried that with me through life, but got really interested in sports as a teenager and wound up actually going to college and studying exercise physiology and biomechanics with an idea that I kind of wanted to go into sports medicine or orthopedic surgery and wound up instead of going to medical school, I opened a bunch of gyms and personal training studios and partnered up with a lot of physicians in the, in the Idaho and Washington area and did a lot of almost like exercises medicine. So I partnered with docs and, and they connected with their patients and we'd use a lot more, what would be considered more advanced metrics back in those days, things like metabolic rate testing and blood analysis for nutrition and high speed video cameras for gait analysis and just a lot of kind of Geeked out stuff like the early days of biohacking fitness. And in 2008, I was voted as America's top personal trainer. And that kind of thrust me more into the limelight of being like a speaker, traveling to a lot of fitness conferences, teaching a lot more. And so I kind of wound up pivoting into doing a lot more of what I do now, which is a lot of online media like podcasts, videos, blog articles, a lot of investing in the health and fitness and nutrition space. I still speak around the world and have a small suite of clients, primarily executives who I train for sleep, for health, et cetera, mostly via, you know, Skype and phone calls, and then sit at home, work on books like that one you alluded to earlier. Just finished writing that one. And then like I mentioned, you know, we unschool our twin boys out here in the, you know, we're kind of out in the forest in Washington state on a little kind of self sustainable area with solar panels and a well and goats and chickens and a garden and, you know, I do a lot of, lot of, lot of bow hunting, a lot of outdoor adventuring and. Yeah, so. So that's me.

Love that, man. I appreciate it. And I know I want to touch on just, I know you're an Ironman triathlete and Spartan racer and someone like you said that.

Well, I used to be until I figured out that kind of stuff actually isn't that healthy. But I. But I did live much of my, much of my life as a masochist.

Yes, got it. Well, I did want to touch on just with the current situation of, you know, coronavirus and this quarantine about what's happening. You're someone I have so much respect for, of, you know, the science about what's going on. So when it comes to this current pandemic, how are you thinking about it and what do you believe people can do to remain healthy and, you know, put more precautionary measures in their life throughout this time?

Oh, okay. Well, you know, I'm definitely anything but a virologist or an immunologist, so don't take anything that I give you as medical advice. I can tell you what I'm doing though.

Totally.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing here. Just based on what I've learned. I've got a pretty extensive suite of primarily functional medicine docs who I converse with on a daily basis about kind of the state of where things are and talks to a lot of frontline providers. And so in addition to just what folks are already hearing about like social distancing, hand washing, attention paid to just basic immunity protocols, like eating a diet rich in whole foods and including vitamins like vitamin C and vitamin A and D and E, and just being smart about general immune supportive protocols, which I think is prudent. Anyways, a few things that are kind of like non negotiables for me every day now. Number one is because we know that everybody probably has a little bit elevated levels of stress and anxiety during these times and for other reasons. I can kind of outline to you I'm doing a lot of breathwork. I've replaced a lot of my like a lot of times I'll do a hard workout in the afternoon or the early evening and I've replaced those hard like, kind of like kettlebell high intensity interval training sessions, weight training with just some really short body weight style workouts. And then instead I'm doing a lot of like nasal breathing, carbon dioxide retention, WIM HOF style breathwork. What would be called like intermittent hypoxia or carbon dioxide retention breath work. And it's interesting because when you look at nitric oxide, for example, which is something that's increased when you're breathing in and out through your nose, or when you are for example doing like sauna or cold thermogenesis or cryotherapy, or even just like I am right now, like walking in the sunlight, that's fantastic. It's almost like Viagra for your whole body. But it also has some really good health and antiviral effects. And so that's one reason I'm doing a lot more of the breath work. In addition to its ability to be able to control stress, anxiety and help me to sleep better. But then also when I'm doing that breath work through the nose, I'm exhaling for longer than I inhale, which allows my body to hold on to a lot of carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide can also have a really good effect at helping more oxygen get into tissues. And it's also a little bit antiviral and antimicrobial too. So I've really stepped up my breathwork routine. I would recommend if folks haven't maybe dug into while they're at home or stuck at home right now, into things like, you know, like a WIM HOF course or there's another really good one that I, that I took my boys through called the SOMA Breathwork course S O M A And any of these forms of breath work, they're just really great, not only for your Physiology, but for your psychology. And I'm doing those in the sauna. Like all my. I have a little sauna in my basement, like an infrared sauna. And so I'm getting all of the nitric oxide effect of the heat from the sauna while I'm doing the breath work. And I have my boys in there with me too. So it's a little bit of father son bonding time when we're ducking in there at the end of the day every day to do breath work and heat together. The other cool thing about the sauna is it helps you to produce heat shock proteins, and those are really protective for your cells and they help your immune system become stronger. And so the sauna is another thing that I'm kind of combining with the breath work. And then every single time we do this in the evening, because we're in there for like 30 to 45 minutes, so, you know, we're pretty hot. We finish up with like a really good cold bath or a cold soak. And the reason for that is not only so we aren't all sweating when we sit down to dinner with mom, but also because the cold increases nitric oxide. And the cold, we know that brief bouts of cold, not like long 20 minute cold baths, but brief bouts of cold. And I've taken a cold shower at the beginning and the end of the day for years and years because of this. It's fantastic for the immune system. It really steps up your white blood cell production. So every single day.

Cold therapy.

Yeah, I've been doing breathwork, heat and cold. Not that I haven't done those in the past because I think those are really just great general health practices for longevity and health span. But they're also really great for the immune system and they're really great for stress and they don't involve a bunch of, you know, fancy supplements and, you know, crazy, you know, injections and stuff like that. So the. The other two things I'm doing that might actually fall into the category of being more like advanced or weird or fringe, but that I really think are smart. Just based off of, again, a lot of the discussions that I've had with doctors who are at the front lines or kind of on the cutting edge of things you can do to enhance your immune system or kill viruses. One is ozone therapy. And so as soon as this thing started to hit the U.S. i bought an ozone generator. And ozone is just basically it's O3 instead of O2, right? Oxygen is O2, ozone is O3. And what happens is when you create O3 using an ozone generator, one of those oxygen molecules, it gets kicked off really readily and it's super unstable. When it winds up in your body, it just knocks out microbes, bacteria, viruses, and it's very, very damaging to any of these infectious agents. And so what I do with the ozone generator is a few things. I can make ozone water with it and drink ozone water. You can take the ozone and fill this little bag that comes with the ozone generator and do. I know a lot of people might find this cringeworthy, but it's basically like a rectal insufflation of ozone where you put a little bit of it in your butt, basically. Yeah. And that's a really, really fast way to deliver ozone straight into your bloodstream. And then also, and this is also really great for like sinus issues, colds, flus, etc. You can also use this earpiece and do what's called ear insufflation of ozone. So I'm doing ozone on a regular basis now that. That's definitely not something I would have done much in the past, but I think for me that's near the top of the totem pole for what somebody could do at home to just have some of the biggest guns you can get for viruses. And then the final thing I would say that might fly under the radar, but that I'm doing on a daily basis is based around this idea that the lungs really don't have their own built in antioxidant system like a lot of tissues do. And so because of that, they're a little bit more susceptible to, in particular this virus, upper respiratory tract infections. And so I'm trying to get antioxidants into my nasal passages and into my lungs. And one of the best ways to do that is to buy, like you can buy this from Amazon, a nebulizing mask. And what a nebulizer does is you put a little liquid in it, and any liquid that you breathe in it just kind of vaporizes it and you breathe it in. It's basically like a vaporizer for healthy things. And then what I did was there's a doctor in Florida, Dr. John Laurence, and he makes this stuff called Glutastat, which is a blend of glutathione and N acetylcysteine, which are two super powerful antioxidants. And while I'm working at my computer during the day, just for like 20 minutes, I put on that mask nebulizer and I basically just breathe in pure glutathione and N acetylcysteine. So if I was ever exposed to the virus from, let's say, opening pieces of mail that got delivered or whatever, it's just crushing anything that got into my respiratory passages or my nasal cavities or anything like that. And for those two things, I just talked about ozone and then nebulizing. I did a Q and A on that recently. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com VirusQA I just created a shared Google Doc with some of my thoughts about the use of those protocols. And actually on there I include a few other things that I recommend or have found helpful. But I would say the top five when you asked me that question would be breathwork, heat, cold, ozone, and nebulizing.

Very good. I appreciate the insight and I did want to pivot the conversation because I know you talk a lot about gut health and I want you to spend some time on this A so that I can learn more about it. But for the people that may not be too familiar with how to improve their gut health, I'd love for you to touch on that because I know it's an important topic that you cover a lot.

Yeah, I would say that, you know, although there, there are a host of things that can go wrong in the gut, right? You could, you could get like giardia or, you know, candida or yeast or fungus. You could get, for example, some kind of gluten intolerance that you develop as a response to stress, et cetera. 95% of people who, when I look at their tests for GI function and there's like a really useful stool test you can order from a company like Direct Labs, for example. It's like a three day stool analysis that'll show you yeast, fungus, parasites, inflammation, bacterial balance, all this stuff, you just order it to your home and you collect your stool for three days in a row from your morning dial movement. And you thrill whoever you live with because you keep these FedEx prepaid poop packages in the fridge until they're ready to mail off. But then two weeks later you get this really helpful PDF that just walks you through everything that's going on with your gut. And the number one thing I see with people is what would be kind of roughly defined as leaky gut, right? Like a permeable gut blood barrier typically brought on by inflammation, antibiotic use, hefty exposure to like glyphosate, herbicides, pesticides, et cetera. And when you consider that the barrier between your bloodstream and your entire External environment is like one cell layer thickness, right? Your gut's basically a giant garden hose that goes from your mouth to your anus. And anything that you eat, anything that you consume, there's about a one cell thick layer that protects your bloodstream from what's passing through your gut, which is great if you want to absorb nutrients and things along those lines. But if that gut barrier becomes permeable, then large proteins that should not normally be in your bloodstream wind up crossing from the gut into the bloodstream. So that might be the wheat germ agglutinin proteins or lectins from beans and grains. It might be albumin from egg consumption, whatever. But whereas those foods would not normally be an issue, I'm not against having good bread or eggs or beans or things like that. It could create a pretty significant autoimmune reaction and inflammation if you have a leaky gut. And so that's the number one thing that I see, is leaky gut. And the best way to get rid of a leaky gut or to make sure that you don't get one in the first place, first of all, you just want to make sure that you're not eating in a stressed state, right? Like at our house, before family dinner, we always, like, we say a prayer. We all talk about what we're grateful for. We take a few deep breaths in through our nose and out through our mouths. There's not a lot of work being done at the table. Nobody's working on emails and checking phones. So we just really appreciate food. And by not eating in a stressed state, you actually really decrease your propensity to develop this inflammatory response to food, which sounds simple and stupid, but that's something that's important that shouldn't be underemphasized. And then being really careful with, you know, choosing especially produce that's not been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides or, you know, wine from grapes that have been sprayed. You know, just trying to choose a lot of organic food that doesn't have a lot of glyphosate on it. That's important. Being careful with hefty use of antibiotics or other things that might cause a lot of damage to the gut. We even know that, like, hard exercise in hot water and hot weather can cause a little bit of a leaky gut issue. So you want to be careful with eating too quickly after a hard workout session, especially one in the heat. There's a lot of tactics I go into in the book, but the fact is most people have a leaky gut. Most People might hear that and know what to do to keep them from getting one. But if they already have one, the best thing that I found to heal the lining of the gut one would be bone broth. I drink a lot of bone broth. I drink like two to three cups of bone broth per day. It's so nourishing to the gut. And if you're vegan or if you're plant based and you don't want to do bone broth, kind of like an alternative to that would be chia seed slurry, where you just take some chia seeds and you put them in a glass mason jar in your fridge and you just cover them with a bunch of water and it makes almost like this gel that's super nourishing to the gut, really helps to heal the gut. And then the other ones would be colostrum, which is the first part of the breast milk that comes out of a mammal. Because most baby mammals are already born with a leaky gut. Like their gut's permeable because they're trying to absorb a ton of stuff while they are in the womb. But once they're born, that needs to be healed up so that they're protected from the external environment. And colostrum is fantastic for that. So you can buy colostrum supplements like goats colostrum or bovine colostrum. And that's fantastic for the gut, it's just fantastic in general for the immune system. It's a good strategy at this time anyways. And then glutamine is another one. You can just buy l glutamine powder and take about a gram or two of glutamine per day. That really helps to heal the gut. And then in addition to bone broth or chia seed slurry, colostrum and glutamine, all of which will just help your gut to feel amazing. I would say the last one, this is a little bit more fringe, but there's a really good researcher in the US named Dr. Zach Bush and he's super smart. He's one of the smartest guys for the microbiome and for the gut bacteria that I know. And he actually does a lot of research on soil based bacteria. You may have heard of probiotics before and some of them are derived from the soil. This is one reason why kids who play outside a lot or live on a farm get sick less because they're getting exposed to a lot of these soil based probiotics. So their guts are more stable and 95% of your immune system is in your gut. And so that's one of the reasons why. But he's actually. He's harvested specific probiotics from the soil that help to heal the gut, specifically from the ravages of liposate, herbicides, pesticides, etc. And he has a company called Ion Biome. I O N B I O M E and I'm not commercially affiliated with him in any way, but I like his product as far as something that you could take as kind of like a daily tonic. It's usually a liquid that you just keep in your fridge. You can take a shot of that on a daily basis. And I like to throw that into the mix too.

Got it. I know there's a lot of information that we can cover today, but I did want to touch on just your book, Boundless. You published it in January. There's an immense amount of value inside of it. You know, you talk about upgrading your brain, optimizing your body, and defying aging. What inspired you to put this book together? For those that have may not have picked it up yet, because I know it's something that you spent a lot of time developing. I picked it up myself. I actually bought two copies. But what inspired you to create this book and put those three main headings on the COVID You know, upgrading your brain, body aging. Because there's so much context inside the book.

Well, a. If you bought two copies, you've got your own weight training set. Indeed, for a little extra weight set at home, while you're stuck at home on this quarantine, if you can't get to the gym, you got two extra dumbbells. I said, because the book's like 650 pages long. And so it kind of wound up taking a life on its own. But three years ago, when I decided I wanted to write this book, I originally wanted to write a book on anti aging and longevity because I was kind of like slowly pivoting out of the, like, the extreme sports scene, like the ironman triathlons and the Spartan races and all these things are really focused on performance and kind of realizing that extreme performance often flies in the face of health and longevity. And I really wanted to focus more on, for example, a lot of the tactics that these blue zones, right, these areas where people are living a disproportionately long period of time are incorporating, you know, things like, you know, the different bitters and herbs and spices that they use to the amount of alcohol that they may or may not consume. Some of their spiritual Tactics like fasting and meditation and gratitude. But I wanted to weave that together with a lot of these more advanced things. Like, you know, a lot of the research coming out of Russia, for example, on, on peptide therapy for increasing lifespan significantly via these, these, you know, injectable or oral based peptides, or, you know, what a lot of anti aging and hormone clinics in the US are doing to slow aging or even a lot of, you know, more like, like beauty tactics. You know, a lot of the things you can do for your face, your skin, your hair, your nails. And I just wanted like a kind of like a tome on longevity and anti aging. And I realized while writing the book, there's just so many things that feed into it, from immune system enhancement to, you know, keeping yourself from getting too much visceral or adipose tissue, to, you know, maintaining lean muscle mass and grip strength and walking speed and you know, all these different biohacks that can I get the minimal effective dose of exercise and then the whole cognitive component, right, not just learning new things, but also, you know, your. There's a blood brain barrier, just like there is a gut blood barrier, you know, and so I talk about that in the book and how that can become leaky too, and ways that you can heal that and, you know, how to balance your neurotransmitters and how to use things like smart drugs and nootropics and even microdosing with psychedelics. And so, you know, it just. There were so many rabbit holes I wound up diving into. I realized it should really be a book that's more just like a blueprint to a human being than a book just focused on anti aging and longevity. And in writing the book, I realized, you know, every single chapter, really, if you were to incorporate all of this, it gives you energy. It just comes down to energy. You want all the energy that you want at your beck and call whenever you want it every day. Every human being deserves that. And so I decided to conceptualize that as boundless, boundless energy. So that's kind of the backstory of the book. And yeah, published it a couple of months ago. And when I turned it into the publisher, it was like 1200 pages. And we wind up cutting about 600 pages, but I put them all online. So when you get the book, every single chapter, there's a link to a webpage. When you go to that webpage, it has like all the extra content, all the extra resources, podcasts, articles, books, science, ways that you can take a deeper dive into the chapters. And I just kind of split it into body optimization, brain and mind optimization, and spiritual optimization.

Very cool. And I wanted to ask as well, when it comes to, you know, someone that may be listening today, I'm 19 years old myself, and a lot of young people that maybe haven't spent time optimizing their health or their brain, what would you say are like three things that they could start implementing today to, you know, start creating that boundless energy in their life? You know, maybe this is the first time they heard of who you are and, you know, the first time hearing things like this. What could you say to, you know, someone 18 to 25, what should they start implementing in their life to. To start, like I said, attracting that boundless energy.

For the brain specifically, you think?

Yeah, for the brain specifically.

Okay, okay. So for the brain specifically, I'll give you a few cool things. So, first of all, we know that the body or the mitochondria, which are your little ATP producing machines in the cells, those reside in neural tissue in the brain just like they do most other areas of your body. And you can kind of turn those on and feed them via this really cool tactic of putting things in your body that feed electrons into the mitochondria and then activating those with either sunlight or any of these kind of newer red light therapy devices that a lot of companies are selling that you have in your office or in your bedroom. Technically it's called photobiomodulation, but there's companies like Juve, for example, to sell red light panels. And then of course, there's sunlight, there's infrared saunas, but three things that if you eat them, actually produce electrons, even if you're not eating food. And they're like a cup of coffee for your brain if you combine them with a walk in the sunlight or exposure to red light therapy. And those three things are chaga mushroom extract, like putting that in a morning cup of coffee or a morning cup of tea, and then going for a walk in the sunshine. Another one is anything that's dark green, like cilantro or like chlorella, which is an algae that you can buy in powder form or tablet form, put in a morning smoothie or whatever. And then something that's very popular kind of in the biohacking world as a nootropic or as a smart drug. It's called methylene blue. And if you consume Chaga, anything with chlorophyll in it, like chlorella or cilantro and or methylene blue, and then get exposure to light, it literally just Turns your brain on fire. It's amazing. And it's also very, very anti inflammatory. It's a neural tissue. So that's one tip that's more of kind of like an advanced biohacking tip, but it's pretty cool and it's really, really healthy for you as well. The next one would be sleeping in as cold an environment as possible, because we know that the brain clears a lot of toxins when you're sleeping deeply. And sleeping in a cold environment enhances that process. And then it also really, really helps with repairing neural tissue if your head is kind of staying cold while you're asleep. And I talk about a lot of ways to stay cool when you sleep in the book. But one very, very simple tactic, aside from just keeping your room cool and maybe even taking a lukewarm or cold shower a little bit before bed, is you put wool socks on before you go to sleep. And the warming effect on your sleep on your feet actually cools the rest of your body. And it's really, really good for healing your brain while you're asleep. Something as simple as wearing like smart wool socks to bed. So that's another one. Try to give you tips that folks may not have heard of before. And then the. Let me think about the last one I would throw out there. I'd say a lot of people who are fans of coffee, the only problem with coffee is that as you constantly flood your body with caffeine, it interacts with these receptors called adenosine receptors in your brain tissue. And your body creates adenosine to help you to feel sleepy at night and to enhance that sleep. I was talking about earlier. And the problem is that if you have a ton of adenosine receptors, because you got to make more and more when you're drinking coffee, even if you're not drinking coffee before bed, if you're to trying just like drinking lots of coffee early in the day, it takes more and more adenosine to make you feel sleepy. So one of the things that you can do to counteract this effect is if you're drinking multiple cups of coffee even earlier in the day, you can put a little bit of this stuff called L theanine in your coffee and kind of like glutamine, which I was talking about earlier for healing the gut. That's a super easy supplement that you can find in powder form or capsule form. And if you take about 100 milligrams of L theanine when you're having coffee in the morning, it can actually help to stabilize your sleep later at night, you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. Meaning that the coffee will not necessarily impact your sleep deleteriously. But the cool thing about L Theanine is it enhances your alpha brainwave production so it makes coffee even more effective. So you can kind of hack your cup of coffee that way. So those are a few little things you can do. I mean, there's a ton more in the book, but yeah, I'm definitely a.

Big coffee drinker myself, so I definitely appreciate sharing that. I'm curious to hear your morning routine on what you do to optimize your day on a daily basis. Like what does your day look like for the people that are listening?

Oh, we could probably do a whole podcast on that. But I would say again, kind of similar like I was telling you about coronavirus, the non negotiables. For me, I always do something kind of easy in the morning. I don't do a hard workout in the morning because you naturally produce a lot of cortisol right when you wake up. And so you don't have to have to really work out hard in the morning to get your body going. And in fact, the best time of day to work out hard is in the later afternoon or the early evening because that's when your body temperature peaks, that's when your grip strength peaks, that's when your post workout protein synthesis, meaning you'll build muscle better. You get a second rise in testosterone in both women and men around that time. So I think you save the hard workout, if you can, for the late afternoon or early evening. And instead I do, you know, I kind of weave in some of those concepts I was talking about earlier. Like I'll get up off coffee and I'll put some chaga and some theanine in there and then go for a walk in the sunshine or go do the infrared sauna. Right. So I'm combining some light therapy, some easy restorative work, and then some compounds to help to turn on the brain. Another thing that I do is I always have a big huge glass mason jar, about 32 ounces of water, but I put things in it. I like to stay in a fasted state. I do a lot of intermittent fasting. So I typically don't eat for a few hours after I get up. So every single day I've got kind of that 12 to 16 hour window where my body's just able to clean itself up because I'm not eating. And so even though I don't put calories into my body. When I wake up, I get this big glass mason jar. And what I put into it are a couple of tablets of hydrogen, which is now getting a ton of research behind it for being a really potent anti inflammatory and antioxidant. I put some sea salt or some minerals in there which are just fantastic for the overall electrical function of your body because those carry a charge throughout your whole body. Every single one of your cells operates on electrical gradient. And so when you get really, really good minerals into your body, it can help with that. So I've got hydrogen in there, I've got minerals in there. And then the other thing that I put in there, the two things I put in there are vitamin C, which is really, really good health tonic. And I use about a 2 to 1 ratio of vitamin C to baking soda. There's actually a really good book called Forbidden Healing that gets into the science behind this and the idea of how it helps to fight inflammation and alkalize the body just very slightly. You aren't going to alkalize your body significantly because your kidneys do a pretty good job maintaining acid alkaline balance. But it shifts your body just a little bit towards an alkaline state, which is actually interesting at the time we're talking because viruses thrive in an acidic environment. And by shifting your body just slightly towards alkalinity, this can be helpful as well for your immune system during these times. But I use a 2 to 1 ratio of baking soda to vitamin C. I'm sorry, vitamin C to baking soda. So I do about 10 grams of vitamin C and about 5 grams of baking soda in that morning glass of water with the minerals and the hydrogen and just suck that down. And the cool thing is that you will have the most glorious poops ever, like 20 minutes later after you do this. So it's wonderful for that too. So yeah, so I do that big glass of water. I typically after that will go have a bowel movement and then I'll go do that walk in the sunshine or the infrared sauna. And if I could throw one other thing in there at some point in the morning, I always do about 10 to 15 minutes of foam rolling or deep tissue work or you know, using like a little lacrosse ball to dig into tissue. And you know, although I don't get a lot of massages with that self inflicted deep tissue work that I do every single morning, by the end of every week I've done like 75 to 90 minutes of just like therapy on my body. And it has like, honestly My, I feel, my joints feel better now than they did when I was 16 years old. And maybe it's because when I was 16, you know, I was playing four hours of tennis and fueling that all with trips to McDonald's. When I was playing college tennis, I would drive to tennis practice, stop off at McDonald's, super sized Big Mac Dr. Pepper fries, go play tennis for four hours. I'm sure that wasn't the greatest thing for my joints or my inflammation, but man, doing that deep tissue work every single morning has just helped my body stay together and kept me, knock on wood, pretty damn injury free despite a pretty active lifestyle. So that's another kind of non negotiable for me in the morning.

Very cool. And I have two more questions, but like you just said, when you were 16, you know, eating McDonald's and eating the non healthy food, what inspired you to dive deep into biohacking? It's something where, you know, you have to put your everything into it and really dive deep to become an expert like you have. So what was the inspiration to dive into this category of research?

Yeah, yeah, I don't have any like crazy, sexy, wounded healer story as much as that. You know, a, you know, I've been podcasting since 2008 and a big part of my podcast has been Q and A episodes that have been really popular. But in the early days, the Q and A episodes were like, well, how do I bench press more? Or how do I, you know, run faster? Or should I have like organic or non organic produce? Like pretty basic questions. And you know, as I would answer those questions, you know, and kind of, you know, shuffle those away, the questions just started to go down deeper and deeper rabbit holes, you know, like, Ben, what's leaky gut and what can I do about it? Or you know, what's the difference between infrared and a dry sauna? Or you know, how can I microdose with LSD or psilocybin? You know, just more crazy questions. And so a big part of it has been audience driven, right? So my audience has just been asking me questions that drive me deeper and deeper into these so called biohacking rabbit holes. And then also a big part of it for me was, you know, when I was competing pretty heavily in Ironman triathlon and Spartan racing and even in bodybuilding early on in the day, just wanting to get the most out of my exercise and the most out of my recovery. And so, you know, when you do that, you know, let's say, you know, recovery and I want to do more than just say, sit around the couch on a recovery day. And you know, and then I start to look into things like, okay, so you could use like compression recovery boost and you could use pulsed electromagnetic field therapy and you know, and stem cell injections, you know, all these different things to, to enhance recovery or to boost your exercise. You know, for me, part of it was just like, how can I, how can I be better and recover faster? And so, you know, a lot of it was just different, different rabbit holes I would dive down for performance and recovery. So it's just, you know, it's just been an evolution, you know. And then from a nutritional standpoint, I would say a big part of that. And my whole approach towards nutrition, which is largely based on. So how did our ancestors prepare food? How did they soak, sprout, ferment? How can we eat according to our genetics? How can we engage in slow food prep? What are the most nutrient dense foods? What are the most digestible foods? How can we take wheat and choose to have sourdough wheat so that it's slow fermented so all the gluten is pre digested? Or how can you prepare quinoa so it's not damaging to the gut? Or how can you take seeds? And this is something I'm doing right now because it's cheap and I'm stuck at home and I want really nutrient dense vegetables. So how can you take seeds and sprout them and soak them and unlock all the nutrients in them? And a big part of that was just when I got married. My wife's a rancher girl, she's from Montana and just grew up making everything from scratch and gardening. And her dad was a farmer and so she had goats and chickens. And so just like chilling with my wife, hanging with her and learning stuff from her as she's kind of tapped into a lot more of the ancestral tactics and then combining that with my own keen interest in the science and the biohacking components have all been pretty big influences for me.

Very cool, very interesting. And last question, to wrap it up just with everything, you know now, where are you continuing to improve and where are you spending your time when it comes to, you know, what's that next upgrade for you? Where do you spend your time on that next big switch or test when it comes to biohacking yourself? Because, you know, you've tested so many different things. How do you go about your day to day life and what are you continuing to improve on?

Honestly, I'm really focused now on becoming more of a spiritual warrior. Like, I've realized that, you know, because I've been on that journey where I've been one of the fittest people on the planet. Right? Like, I'm not just saying that to be narcissistic. Like, I. I really have done some of the craziest, most masochistic adventure races and death races and trained with the Navy seals for a week and done all the Spartan racing and done six different Ironman world championships and just kind of been there and done that from a fitness standpoint. And I've also been a super learner for a long time. Everything from chess to violin to guitar to ukulele to, you know, speech and debates and, you know, all these things that I've done for brain optimization. I've realized at the end of the day, even though all that stuff is cool and fun and pleasurable, it does bring ultimate happiness and purpose and fulfillment versus caring for the one thing that I think in a lot of people is kind of shriveled up and neglected. The soul, the spirit. And so I'm really focusing a lot more now on meditation, breathwork, gratitude, journaling, silence, solitude, prayer, and all these spiritual disciplines that I think ultimately bring you closer to God and closer to enlightenment and closer to true happiness and fulfillment. So, you know, if I could point your. Your listeners to a good resource on this, Any of the books by Richard Foster, for example, on spiritual disciplines are absolutely fantastic. So that's been one good resource for me. There's another guy named David Hawkins who just talks a lot about how to bring yourself to a higher state of enlightenment in terms of the vibratory frequencies of peace and love and joy versus anger and fear and shame. And so, you know, that's another reason I'm including my boys with me in a lot of this breath work and heat and cold and meditation that I'm doing is because I really want to equip them to learn that while all the body and brain optimization stuff is cool shit, in the end, that's not where true happiness and purpose and fulfillment lies. It lies in a deep connection with your soul and loving others, loving God. And so that's the path that I'm on now is I just. I want to become, you know, a really strong spiritual warrior and have just as strong a spirit and soul as I do a body and brain.

Very cool. I think that's a perfect place to wrap this up. And I mean, last but not least, I just want to say I appreciate you taking the time and for everyone that is, you know, looking to listen to your podcast to learn more about your book. Where's the best place they can go to learn more about everything you have going on in your life.

I'm Ben Grief of Fitness on Instagram. So I post a lot of. A lot of what I'm up to there. The booksoundlessbook.com or wherever you would get a book. And then my articles, my podcast, everything is BenGreenfieldFitness.com perfect.

Well, that being said, Ben, I just want to say again, thank you so much for coming on to the show today. Truly means the world. I know you're busy optimizing your life, so for you to take the time to come on, like I said, I genuinely appreciate it.

Sweet, dude. Well, thanks for hosting me. I'm honored.

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