Ben Accidentally Gets A Bit High On Ketamine & Talks About His Journey Of Biohacking, Ancestral Health, Spirituality, Fitness & Much More With Light Expert Matt Maruca.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, we feel this deep knowing inside that there must be more to life than this. There's so much information and it's a blessing and a curse. And I think that it can tend to get into a little bit more of that curse territory. Wake up in the morning and do the very, very best job that we can with whatever is put on our plate. We with supreme excellence, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, everybody, welcome to the podcast. I got a chance to sit down with my friend Matt Maruca from the Blue Light Blocking Raw Optics. He actually came to my house and he interviewed me while I was high. I'm not kidding. You're gonna need to listen to today's episode to learn about why out in my guest house. So this one got a little funky. Anyways, the shownotes for everything you're about to hear you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Maruca because that's Matt's last name. N M A R U C A BenGreenfieldFitness.com Maruca is where you can listen to or access the show notes for the entire podcast for today. Do you want to know something interesting?

There's no going back.

There's no going back. And this, this will be. So this is reminiscent of a podcast I recorded way back in the good old days of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show where I was beginning to experiment with decarboxylation of marijuana. And I, prior to recording with my sidekick at the time whose name was Brock Jason Skywalker Armstrong, you go back and listen to these old Ben Greenfield fitness episodes. That was, that was my sidekick on the show. And that morning I had just gotten, the day prior something called a magical butter machine, which is this, this countertop home version of a commercial blender that allows you to make your own edible edibles and oils and tinctures. And so I was experimenting with this thing in the kitchen prior to ducking down into the. Into the studio to record the podcast with Brock and was making myself edible. And I was very young and kind of a gumshoe when it came to anything decarboxylation and marijuana related. And long story short is that I had the math incorrect and I tasted one of my edibles prior to going down and doing the podcast with Brock and wound up consuming the equivalent of 100 milligrams of cannabis of THC prior to the episode. And it hit me about 10 minutes in and the entire show went to pot. And I actually got like a half hour into the show, and then there was this long pause and Brock says, ben, are you there? And I go, brock, we gotta reschedule this man. And I went and laid in bed for the next eight hours. Now, why is this relevant? Well, I'll tell you. So this morning, glorious morning, woke after. After a wonderful time last night, eating these. These steaks that we smoked from Bel Campo on the Traeger with a little bit of avocado oil and citrus salt. And, yeah, we had a little bit of coconut ice cream and we played a little concert for the boys and rocked a wonderful night of sleep last night. And then got up this morning, did a. Did a workout on the Vasper. So it kind of. Kind of biohacked with a little bit of hyperoxy and hypoxia, and I did a cold soak afterwards. And then as I do nearly every morning, made my superfood smoothie, and I made a little extra for you. It's always bone broth and kefir and colostrum. And I put a little C60 in there, some stevia, some salt, a little bit of the organifi organic protein powder blend. That's like a vegan protein powder blend with enzymes and probiotics in it and all manner of superfoods known to man. Then we top that with baruca nuts. And I put a little bit of frozen cherry and coconut flake unsweetened coconut flavor.

That was delicious.

Oh, so, so delicious. That's. That's just how I love to greet the morning. And so anyways, everything's rocking and rol. And we're prepared to go out and record this amazing podcast together. And so last night, we. We also did breath work in the sauna. And during that breath work in the sauna, I introduced you. Matt, I realized you're supposed to be interviewing me, and this is a really long introduction, but take your time.

This is the purpose.

So prior to that breath work, which I've been bringing my boys through for five weeks during this coronavirus shelter in place, I have found breath work and. And cold to be a wonderful way to end the day. Not only for the. For the flush of nitric oxide and the carbon dioxide retention, the metabolic alkalosis, just. Just all of these. All of these wonderful properties that. That you derive from heat, cold, and breath work. And so we went in and we did breath work last night before we had our steaks and our coconut ice cream and that wonderful dinner, and I introduced you to this nasal spray called Zen. Now, Zen is formulated by a friend of mine who's a physician down in Florida, Dr. John Laurence. And it is an extract of an Amazonian tobacco like plant that's often used in plant ceremonies to clear the head. So this will often be something that is administered prior to combo, prior to ayahuasca, prior to any type of plant medicine kind of journey. It just kind of clears the head. But I've also found it to be really fantastic for breath work. It's called hape, also known as a rape. And most often it is administered intranasally. You snort it up into the sinus passages. I gave you some last night prior to our breathwork because I found that it just clears your head, makes it clean as a slate and it's almost like pouring a cup of coffee up your, up your nostrils. And how did you feel when you did that?

Well, I didn't know what to expect. I thought it would maybe be some pleasantly warming aroma. And then Taryn and River said, I think it burns. And I said, does it? You said, oh, it's fine. And then I did it. And sure enough, two snort or two sprays, one in each nose. I proceeded to experience the burn, but then I just pushed the last three really fast and just got over with it. Yeah, but it definitely cleared things for sure.

It gets a little bit barbaric, masochistic. For the first 15 seconds or so, you feel like someone has put a flamethrower up your nostril. But the after effects are extremely pleasant and you're able to tap into that third eye and you feel as though your sinus passages are opened up and it really has this really nice head clearing effect. And again, it's called hape. And that is the reason that is used in a lot of these plant medicine ceremonies. And sometimes I'll even do a few sprays of that in the morning, just kind of charge myself up, get going in the morning, clear the head. And. And so, long story short. Long story long, I suppose in this case we were getting ready this morning to go out and podcast and I grabbed that Zen spray from the refrigerator and I, I thought, well, I'm just going to clear my head and then head out to the Greenfield Guest House here and podcast with Matt out in the forest. Well, it turns out that what I actually grabbed this. This was about 20 minutes ago, so I'm still on it. And for those of you listening in, yes, I'm high as a kite right now. I snorted ketamine. Now Ketamine is an anesthetic with mild to moderate psychedelic and hallucinogenic properties. Meaning that if I were to close my eyes right now and put on a sleep mask and noise blocking headphones, I would be on another planet. But instead, my eyes are open and I am lucid sitting here talking with you, Matt. Podcast for what is bound to be a relatively historically notable podcast, because I am on a psychedelic hallucinogenic anxiolytic drug called ketamine, which I snorted intranasally prior to our episode. Now, the bright side of this, the bright side of this for those of you listening in or watching, because we're doing this on Instagram Live, is that ketamine is relatively short lived. It's in and out of your system 30, 45 minutes or so. So this, this podcast that folks are listening to should progress from me being a blithering idiot full of ketamine, which was compounded with oxytocin, by the way, which is kind of like a trust lovey dovey woo woo kind of hormone. It could progress to me actually becoming witty and edgy towards the middle of the podcast.

But.

But right now I am on.

You're just gonna fall asleep.

I am on a full on psychedelic hal. Hallucinogenic.

All right, how long do I have to.

Intranasal drugs? You got a half hour right now to just toy with me, if you will.

Phenomenal. Well, Ben, thanks again for such a great evening yesterday, for hosting me in this beautiful. I love this bed, I have to say.

Yes, that is the. Let me think. I think that that's an essentia mattress out here in the guest house. A fully organic. No animals died in the production of this mattress. Vegan, everything known to man worked into it from an organic standpoint. But yeah, that's the essentia mattress out here in the guest house. Fully EMF blocked.

Yeah. So this is the Light Diet podcast, which I haven't told you much about other than the name, but the focus is to analyze in more depth the relevance of environmental mitochondrial factors in health. You know, there's enough podcasts on diet and supplements and so on which serve their purpose, but there are none essentially focused on light and mitochondria. You happen to be, among many other things, an expert in these fields, I would say, or at least extremely knowledgeable and well read and experienced in many types of experiments.

In this specific field, we've established that the experimentation piece.

Yes, exactly. That was my sort of reference here. And additionally, the light diet kind of invokes the concepts of Spirituality, and if you will, a diet of light. Not just physical light that we're familiar with in the universe, but the light of God, the light of consciousness. And that is really, you know, in an old time, there were, they would say, like the diet of worms was like a meeting. So the alter ego of this podcast is like the Light Diet, which is my sort of creation of a set of steps to realign oneself with nature. Sort of what Dr. Cruz has taught me a lot of, most of which I've learned from him in that area. Conversely, this could be the Light Diet, where we sit and have a conversation and discuss about spirituality, which is for me often more interesting and I think for many people as well. So that's the purpose here. And with that in mind, I'd like to start by asking you, who is Ben Greenfield?

Oh, geez. Who is Ben Greenfield? In terms of just my logistical history of how I came to be here.

I would say something along those lines. You can brevity or not brevity.

That's also one of those questions to which the gut response is, how long you got?

Yeah. So I'd say, you know, basic introduction so that as we move into the more sort of higher level concepts people can understand. You know, you've been in these Men's Health magazines and outside, and you've done all the Spartan races and the Ironmans. You have a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and a nice mountain cabin, essentially. So, you know, who. The reason I don't ask who are you? Is because that's a more spiritual level question. But who has been Greenfield? So people can have a bit of an idea of where we're starting from.

I.

As you see him.

Yes, I. My background is that I was born in North Idaho and was born into a family comprised of a. A mother from Detroit and a father from Miami. Both kind of like big city slicker type of parents who had moved to Idaho. Both of them on their own volition to escape this, you know, very fast paced, often drug infused, unfulfilling, hectic, stressful lifestyle that they were living in their respective big cities. And they moved to North Idaho. They met in Moscow, Idaho. They got married and began to raise us kids in North Idaho in kind of a relatively unconventional way. We were homeschooled. We lived out in the countryside on this acreage and property out in Lewiston, Idaho. Grew up very, very much encouraged to think outside the box, be independent, resilient, creative, and really was raised from the get go with this idea that it's more important to be your true authentic self than to try to mold yourself into who the world might expect you to be. And that certainly served me well, I think in my career and in all of my dealings. The upbringing in Idaho eventually led to me getting really, really interested in this whole concept of physical culture, right? Like I've always loved reading, writing, learning, teaching, singing, music, but a big part of it also was, was a real infatuation with the human body, with the human brain, with spending time outdoors and increasingly, especially as I, as I got older and began to enter college. Science, right? Physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology. How does the human body actually tick? How does the human brain actually work? And so as a teenager I was very much interested in just wanting to go on and be a professional tennis player. I loved to play tennis and I was very good in high school tennis and was a top ranked USTA tennis player and played tennis for the men's collegiate team for my first couple of years of college. And you know, as often happens, A became burnt out on tennis and B realized that the idea of a professional tennis career was probably not that realistic for, for me as a, as a, you know, kid who started swinging a tennis rack when I was like, you know, 12, 13 years old and you know, was, was in no way positioned to be a true professional tennis player. I realized pretty early on in college that that wasn't going to happen. But fortunately, at the same time I was, I was pretty immersed.

Ac know, you kind of look like Roger Federer actually.

A little bit.

A little bit.

I was playing tennis with my little boy the other day. We play as a family two or three times a week and the boy's hair was getting their eyes. So mom put the, the, what do you, what do you call it, the hair scrunchie on him and gave him both a man bun and they look like little Raphael and the dolls running around out there. So anyways, in college I, I was very academically rigorous because being homeschooled, I never really, I, I never really became accustomed to the idea that you take X number of credits or you know, you finish school at three or you finish school four, whatever. For me just life was learning, right? So I just, I grew up with a voracious curiosity and just love to learn. And there, there was no, there was no real differentiation between like school and play, between work and play. Like I, I grew up luckily as a pretty self actualized little boy. Meaning that for me a perfect day was just reading and learning from 7am Till 2am that's just what I love to do, still do love to do that. And so in college, I was taking like 30 credits a semester and everything. Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, organic chemistry. Chemistry. I took all the pre med courses because I wanted to take the MCAT and potentially even become a physician. So I, I took all of that to allow that door to be open as well. And once I came out the other end of University of Idaho, in this case, I had a master's degree. I got a master's degree in biomechanics and physiology and was accepted to six medical schools and decided to take kind of like a gap year, a work year, before committing to any of those schools and going on and becoming a physician. I took a job in knee and hip surgical sales, which for me was great because I was making a lot of money. For me at the time, what was a lot of money just working in medicine and knee in hip surgical sales. And at the same time became really disillusioned with the modern medical system. Just no doctor who I was working with told me that I would be anything but crazy to go to medical school. They had these boats and homes that they had no time to even enjoy because they were just so overloaded with paperwork and these long working hours and a broken medical system and, you know, $40,000 hip implants going into morbidly obese patients who should have been advised to exercise and change their diet. Anyways, the whole thing was just flying at me like bullets out of the matrix. When I finally got into the private sector and began working in medicine and I realized, dude, I don't know if I want to be a doctor. And so at that time, the only other thing that I really knew, aside from, you know, medicine and physiology and chemistry and health, was exercise. Because during college, I attained every degree or certification known to man when it comes to exercise. Personal training certification, strength conditioning certification, nutrition certification. And so I was a nutritionist, I was a personal trainer, I was a strength conditioning coach. And so I remember I walked across the street from the apartment that I was living in in Post Falls, Idaho, doing knee and hip surgical sales, walked into the gym that was across the street from that apartment, comple slapped my resume on the counter and asked for a job in the same week that I. That I quit the knee and hip surgical sales. And I, you know, I had a great resume for fitness. And so they gave me a job as a fitness manager. And I just, just leapt full into training people, teaching classes, you know, spin instructor, triathlon courses, you know, nutrition classes, community classes, you Name it. And so for the next eight years, that's what I did was I managed gyms. I wound up partnering with a couple of local physicians and opening my own gyms and personal training studios and partnerships with them. In 2008, I was voted as America's top personal trainer. And that was mostly based on just my continued focus on the utilization of cutting edge science as much as possible. So I was using high speed video cameras and indirect calorimetry and blood analyses and all these crazy things that no trainers are doing back in the day. So I was kind of like, you know, early on, you know, biohacking, so to speak, with my personal training businesses. And when I, when I received that award as America's top trainer, I was then kind of thrust into the limelight of speaking at a lot of these fitness business conferences and given a stage presence. I started writing more. My website kind of took off. I started a podcast, I started a YouTube channel and kind of started to do a lot more media type of stuff. More than just say, like, you know, whatever, counting dumbbell curls for a soccer moment once, it was getting a bikini. And so I eventually realized that I really couldn't run a bunch of gyms and also be traveling around the, around the country, you know, giving talks. And, and you know, I, I could, you know, I, I could have definitely just, you know, hired a bunch of employees and, and started a gym franchise and gone that route. But I instead dec being more of a writer and an author and a speaker and a podcaster, and sold all of my gym equipment, stopped all my, all my leases, moved my clients onto other personal trainers in the community. And this was right around the time that my twin boys were born as well, which was perfect for me because we wanted to homeschool them, moved into the house, started a home office, began doing largely a variant of what I do now, which is writing, podcasting, speaking, advising, consulting. And now I also do some investing and have started a few other businesses like a supplements company on the side. But ultimately it started with being homeschooled in Idaho, going on and getting a degree in college in science, kind of bypassing medicine and going into fitness. And then fitness took me into more of kind of like a speaking, authoring, podcasting role. And that's so a lot of what I do now. And obviously I probably left open a ton of gaps there, but that's long story short, kind of my background and.

Where I came from, that's pretty cool. I don't know if I've actually heard that story really told. I didn't know that you were working on being a pro tennis player, so.

Oh yeah, that was, that was the dream at one time.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean it's, it definitely was a huge, I can imagine being a huge part of your life, especially knowing how in gear you are when you get into something. Yeah, it's got to be probably a pretty good forehand back.

And you know, when I, when I decided that I probably wasn't going to make it as a pro tennis player and was just getting my ass waxed by all these guys from Sweden and Portugal and Spain, you know, these folks are just light years ahead of me on the of circuit. I, I still love to compete, I love sports. So I, I, you know, in college I continued to play whole set for the water polo team, I played middle for the men's volleyball team and we went all the way to nationals. I got into amateur bodybuilding after that and then competed professionally and on an amateur level in triathlon and ironman triathlon for 10 years. You know, during the whole time that I was running all these personal training studios and gyms and you know, even beginning to speak and write more, I was, I was hardcore in the triathlon and endurance sports community and really kind of made my a name for myself as an endurance expert or endurance coach, which a lot of people still associate me with. And then from triathlon, you know, five years ago, kind of pivoted into obstacle course racing and raced professionally for Reebok for about three years. And then last year kind of started to hang up the hat and realized that competing on that level of intensity and masochism was not something that was going to kind of keep me put together and healthy for life. And so I've moved on to greener pastures like swinging kettlebells and taking ice baths. But yeah, I certainly have woven physical activity into the mix quite a bit along that journey.

Nice. So you said that when you began to pursue the more media focused, writing, speaking type of path, what you were doing then was essentially a variant of what you're doing now. So could you explain? Because obviously I'm here, I'm seeing you and first of all, it's amazing, it's inspiring to see you because you're so passionate about what you're doing and you do it with so much enthusiasm. You're in the zone and you have all these devices on you in the morning and the joov, and you're totally naked in front of the joov, the whole thing. So how did that working from home podcasting routine look, you know, 12 years ago or 10 years ago, when you were first getting into it to now, like what have been, if I were here following you around then, what are the biggest changes that you've implemented now since then?

Well, first of all, The fitness community that I operated in for so long is of course based around this idea that if you eat healthy and you move right, then you will be healthy. And for the longest time I relied upon proper dieting and exercise to keep myself at a level of what I thought was supreme health. And I began to realize as I became more and more steeped in not only kind of an ancestral approach to human optimization, but also learned to begin to identify a lot of these so called evolutionary mismatches. We're surrounded by, you know, emf, specifically non native emf. Lighting, air, poor quality water, even stress and emotions and relationships that affect us biologically, that there's a lot, lot more that goes into health and longevity than just eating right and moving right. And so along the way, I began to change up my own personal protocol in terms of everything from my exposure to natural light, to the type of water I drink, to the type of air filtration mechanisms and I'd use in my home, to the amount to which I'd mitigate emf, to self quantifying things like HRV and sleep cycles. And so for me, part of it was just becoming more aware and more educated on what really, truly makes one healthy. Combined with, as a so called immersive journalist and someone who's out there writing about and podcasting about and speaking about a lot of these things, you know, I'm constantly exposed to all these companies and products and technologies and even questions from listeners and from readers and from fans about, you know, have you tried this? Can you, can you test this out? Can you see if this works? Can you give this one a go and write about it? Or, you know, people, you know, go from asking, you know, 12 years on a podcast, how can I bench press more to, you know, now, you know, how can I whatever, combine methylene blue and Chaga extract and Shisha Elite with photobiomodulation for mitochondrial optimization. So it's like as my audience's questions get more and more, more and more fringe, I'm, I'm diving into these deeper, darker rabbit holes. So it's, it's all just been a journey, but the journey has been a, a realization that there's a lot more that goes into being healthy than just exercising and eating and be A constant, constant, daily influx of new things to learn, driven by questions my audience is asking me and businesses that reach out to me just to show me cool new shit they're working on. And so every day it seems like something new is getting implemented into my life just based on new things that I've learned. So it's not as though I one day snapped my fingers and said, I'm going to move out here in the forest and 10 acres and put a bunch of biohacks in a house and, you know, wake up in the morning and do my. My red light, my trampolining, and my biocharger on my sauna. It's just. These are just things that have just kind of developed along the way.

You know, I was, I think, 14 years old and a freshman in high school. Well, that's when I started really looking into health because I was really struggling with allergies, gut issues, headaches, among other things. Acne was sort of vanity, was what triggered me to start reading about diet and exercise. And so that was when I first learned about you. I think I first read somewhere on some forum in the, you know, the depths, the catacombs of the Internet. I found out about the whole 30. And then it was like, well, I don't have any money to pay for that, so let me just figure out what that is, you know. And then so I learned about the Rob Wolf, Mark Sisson and your blog, and it was really interesting. I know I could. I wouldn't have imagined that we'd be sitting here recording a podcast six years later.

Yeah, it's all kind of a small world. This whole, you know, this whole network of, of, you know, the, the, I guess the, the ancestral fitness movement or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it's. It's kind of.

It's still really small. Pretty small crowd when, when, you know, working with blue blocking glasses and seeing that that is our market for the most part right now, and realizing that, man, that's like not even a million out of 330 million in the states, maybe a million plus, but you know the numbers better than I do.

It's.

It's very small, but it's growing, which I think is really cool. You know, there's more organic food, at least I think, than there was before. At least the awareness, maybe the food is.

It's still dwarfed by the, by the old school fitness industry. I mean, you go to any, you know, like, like, you know, idea Fitness or the, or, you know, bodybuilding convention or whatever down in Vegas, you know, compared to something like whatever Paleo FX or the Ancestral Health Symposium or some of these, these forums or conferences where I think people really, truly are pursuing a more ancestral approach to, to living healthy and optimizing the human body. You know, the, the fitness movement as a whole is, is massive compared to this tiny little ancestral health footprint that we're living in. I mean, it's, you know, right now it's largely still, you know, whey protein shakes and energy drinks and, and, and you know, I guess they're probably going to go out of business now, but you know, Gold's Gym or Lifetime Fitness, like that's still what being healthy and fit is in America at least is gyms, whey protein, you know, tanning beds like that, that's still the majority of, of what fitness is.

So, so when I started to learn about the diet stuff, it was one really interesting angle that made sense. Just like I guess my path and your path and many others kind of run in parallel, seeing that there's the diet, the supplements, the movement, then there's the light, sunlight, circadian rhythm, sleep, air, all these different environmental factors that impact our ability to utilize our food properly and our ability to detox from all those chemicals we're exposed to. So that's evolving. I'm kind of, I'm curious, do you see that reaching mainstream anytime soon? You know, I'm going to be with this podcast and the things I do working on pushing the knowledge about blue light. And it seems that companies are starting to have awareness around blue light. You know, the big warby parkers of the world. And IBUY directs all these online companies. They're offering blue block encodings. Granted, there are reflective coating like you mentioned in Boundless, that doesn't actually block anything beyond 420 nanometers. So it's essential. They're essentially ineffective.

Right.

But nonetheless that's reaching the mainstream. The blue light glasses, you need to block the screen, so that's something beneficial. Sunlight has more obstacles to cross over, obviously because of the whole skin cancer concern. People don't know about what, what you mentioned on the podcast, but it is.

Getting me, I mean, Outside Magazine magazine, arguably a mainstream magazine, had an article in, in last year's issue about how I think they said sunscreen is the new margarine is the way that they said it. And, and they highlighted some of these studies about folks who have regular.

I didn't know about that article. Amazing.

Yeah, actually having lower rates of skin cancer compared to those who get large boluses. Of sunlight on the weekend, you know, during a trip to the beach, for example. And they questioned the ingredient profile of a lot of these sunscreens, the potential carcinogens or xenoestrogens etc. And so yeah, I mean I think that people are becoming more aware of living in a way that more closely parallels something that does not present ourselves with as many evolutionary mismatches. You know, we, we've also seen this before, we've seen cycles before. I think it was back in the, I think it was like the 50s or the 60s. There was a big physical movement culture and a lot of people kind of shifting towards like a paleo esque diet and lifting sandbags and kettlebells outside and you know, going barefoot and swimming in rivers and moving like, you know, like animals, like an erwin la core type of, type of movement protocol. But that was like back in the, the, in the 60s and then that all got replaced by the marathoning of the 80s and the gym culture of the 90s. And what we were just talking about, you know, whey protein shakes and tanning beds and Gold's Gym and lifetime fitness and the entire gym and fitness industry just kind of swallowed up that whole natural movement, natural health industry. And I see us kind of, kind of go getting back slightly into a cycle of people moving a little bit more naturally or living a little bit more naturally and would hope that it's here to stay. But yeah, I mean it seems like it's, it's, it seems like it's, it's catching on and it makes sense.

So of all the things that you have learned about in that, in this sort of newer or I guess you could say older model of natural living in line with the circadian rhythm, ice baths, you know, things that really impact the mitochondria. What has been the most interesting to you? Like you know, something maybe you learned about and thought, oh, this is fascinating.

You know, I think related specifically to your question and probably your audience also the concept of human photosynthesis I've found lately to be pretty interesting this idea that we can, in response to photons of light actually shuttle electrons into the electron transport chain and activate or increase the activity of cytochrome oxidase. If we have certain factors present and essentially there are certain protein structures or compounds that can harness those photons of light, so to speak, and use them to split water and produce electrons. And one example of that would be melanin, which we have naturally in our skin anyways, but that can be consumed orally via something, something like Chaga mushroom extract. We know that a couple other compounds that act similarly would be anything with appreciable amounts of chlorophyllin, you know, like cilantro or chlorophyll, for example, or chlorella, rather the, the algyl extract, chlorella. Another one would be methylene blue, which is, you know, now becoming pretty popular as a, as a nootropic. You know, it's also sold as a fish tank cleaner online. So you want to make sure if you use it that you get like good, pure pharmaceutical grade methylene blue.

But pairing fish tank cleaner, no, not.

Fish tank cleaner, but pairing things like, like chaga, like methylene blue or, or, or Shilajit is another example. Or chlorella or cilantro with photobiomodulation and sun exposure or infrared, near infrared, far infrared light exposure. I've actually been experimenting with that quite a bit myself lately and I, I feel an uptick in energy levels when I kind of, kind of stack those two modalities. So that's one thing that, that I've kind of been pretty interested in recently. And you know, there's that book, the Human Photosynthesis, I think I shared with you.

I have a copy of it.

Sire G does a better job in his new book, Regenerate, I think, explaining human photosynthesis. But, but it's. Yeah, I think that's one area that's super interesting.

This is to me fascinating, all of it. But I had a bit of a light bulb moment last night when on our little Instagram live, you were mentioning how sunglasses also reduce the production of alpha MSH or that melanocyte stimulating hormone just via the eye. You didn't say alpha MSH at that moment. But then these three things that other two experiences I had, I was in Mexico over the winter looking at these, you know, retirees sitting in the pool where at this one place I was staying and they would be just baking in the sun. I'm thinking, how are they staying in the sun so long? And I realized, oh, they have sunglasses on. So these, you know, these natural mechanisms that we have to say, okay, I've gotten enough, I believe it's pretty clear. Sunglasses kind of undo that. And additionally they also undo the production of the protective mechanism as well. Which is just fascinating that with the work of Alexander Wunsch, who I imagine you're quite familiar with, he has described how light via the eye contributes to the production of serotonin, melatonin, dopamine and alpha msh. So that clicked when you said that last night. Oh, that's, that's how it works.

Yeah.

So if people wear sunglasses it's really, really increasing our risk of having a problem because we can't protect ourselves.

Rarely wear sunglasses unless something. I'm at risk of snow blindness. You know, when skiing or snowboarding. You know, in, in on a bright sunny day you do need to eliminate some of that glare because you can cause some retinal damage with, with really, really concentrated bright bursts of light like that. Or you know, for example, for eye protection if you're out boating or you know, out in the beach and sand is blowing or whatever. There are some use cases for sunglasses, but I view them more as, as eye protection and, and for me to wear sunglasses as a fashion statement is something I eschewed many years ago as I realized that I really just wasn't biologically interacting with the sun via my built in lens the way that I should be. And so yeah, I rarely, rarely wear sunglasses. And considering that I used to lose sunglasses all the time anyways, it's been quite nice for my budget just not to have to buy sunglasses and lose them.

Yeah, now it's the blue blocker budget. But it's okay, we got you covered.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I told you I'm, I'm a bane of your existence because I'm also, I'm notorious for losing watches and glasses so I always wear just like a cheap ass 10 to 15 timex cuz I know it might last 2 months before I lose it anyways. And then the blue light blockers, I, I misplace those things like gangbusters. There's got to be so many hotel maids or hotel security agents with a fine, fine pair of raw blue light blockers of random blue light blocking glasses. I've left on hotel bedsides. Hotel good for the world.

We're spreading all the love. So this is really fascinating. I love the discussion about light because again it's so kind of under discussed now to transition a little bit. I love to, like I said, watch you do your routine here because I want to get myself more and more to a place where I'm focused and creating on the high leverage things that I love, which for me is I think pretty similar to what you do. The reading, the writing, the researching and maybe less on the daily operational management of growing a business. So you know, it's not that that's not fun, it very much can be, but it's not what I think could be the highest use of what I'd love to do so. And obviously you're doing that now. So with so much we discussed briefly last night, information overwhelm in the world today, you know, there's so many different, different health strategies and this and that and the other thing, you know, there's not just health strategies, but just things to read and learn about. How do you kind of discern, you know, how have you become okay with just saying, I'm gonna just focus on these most important things and then not maybe read every great article that's coming out because it's too much? What does that process been like for you? And how have you kind of gotten to that point where you're. Where you're more than anything focusing on what is the highest expression of your passion and your use of time?

Well, like I was telling you last night, we do indeed live in an era where we have access to libraries of information that kings of old would have killed for. And we literally have a wealth of resources at our hands. It's something as simple as the smartphone in our pockets that literally give us, you know, something similar to the equivalent of the wisdom of Solomon, you know, literally in our back pocket, which is a crazy amount of power to possess. It's like, you know, in Jarrow Tolkien. You know, having the ring is one thing, but having the control to be able to wield that ring with the right kind of power and responsibility is a completely different thing. And when. When you have access to this amount of information, it is something that can create some serious, serious overwhelm, FOMO and constant feeling of needing to catch up, needing to digest, needing to listen to yet another new podcast that has come out or yet another series of books or YouTube video or interview or Twitter thread or blog post or blog feed or blog aggregate. I mean, there's so much information, and it's a blessing and a curse. And I think that it can tend to get into a little bit more of that curse territory towards people who are voraciously curious like you and I, just. Because we could literally wake up in the morning and spend our entire day reading books, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks, books, visiting websites, and learning, learning, learning and filling our heads with information because there's so much information out there. There's a couple ways to come at this. A, we definitely want to position ourselves to be able to use the unique skill set and the unique purpose that we were born with to make the most impact on this planet. And by delving into activities that distract us from that purpose or that don't serve our Best purpose. We really aren't doing that. And this is why, for example, Tim Ferriss four Hour Workweek was a huge influence on me as I was building my business. Because from pretty early on there were a couple of years there where I was coding all my own websites and designing all my own PHP scripts for newsletters and emails and writing programs that would allow different companies to drop ship things when. When folks would fill out an order form on my website and I was doing all my own copy and all my own, all my own videos and all my own audio editing and I was pretty much wearing every single hat in my business. My wife can tell you I'd come home from the gym training clients at 8pm and I'd work till around 2am or so. Just, you know, go from the gym onto the online business that I was creating. And I did eight it all the blessing of that is that I now kind of sort of know what's going on when someone from my team is asking me a question about a website or an email or a form or whatever. But of course the curse of that is that, you know, you do tend to, because you know a little bit about what's going on, a little bit about everything. You tend to want to micromanage everything. And so one of the best things for me was that four hour Workweek esque approach where I realized I just need to start outsourcing as much as possible to the people who really crush what they're good at to free me up to be able to do what I'm actually good at or what I'm passionate about or what puts me in the zone or it feels like play to me or what reflects what I like to do when I was a kid. Because when something satisfies all that criteria, it's indicative that you're actually doing and living your true purpose in life versus just putting out a bunch of fires and micromanaging things that really aren't your responsibility or your true calling. Gary Keller has a great book about this that I think is free right now on Amazon called the One Thing that's amazing. Crush that one thing that you're good at. And so for me, part of it comes down to freeing up the time to be able to interact with all this content. We're surrounded by all this information where we're constantly, you know, and sometimes overwhelmed by. Well, I certainly free up hours in my day by outsourcing and by paying other people to do things like the web programming or the email funnels or the research or the shopping or even the, you know, the mowing of the lawn or the cleaning of the house. Like, I. I'm a huge, huge fan of outsourcing. And I think too many entrepreneurs don't begin to outsource and hire early enough because they are concerned about Maslow's hierarchy and being able to pay the bills and. And how can I afford to hire another employee or outsource to another assistant this month? And in my opinion, taking on debt to hire an assistant or to outsource or to build out a company is actually prudent because that debt is something that will be paid off based on the amount of time that it frees you up to be excellent at what you do. So that's part of it now. The other part of it is, of course, once you have freed up that time, once you have outsourced, once you have learned not to micromanage, and once you have identified the things, things that you're really good at and focus on just crushing those things, then what's going to happen is that you're still going to have more information than you know what to do with, more books than you, you'll ever have the time to read, more podcasts than you'll ever have the time to listen to, and, you know, more opportunities than you'll ever be able to take on all at once. So learning to say no and having a no filter is really important. And I say no with increasing frequency now. I say no a lot and say yes to only those things that are the hell yeses. And how do you know what's your hell yes? Well, you have to have a single, succinct, very clearly defined purpose statement through which you filter everything. Like, you know, my, my purpose statements right now is to. And purpose statements could change, by the way, want to be the same throughout your entire life. But mine is to read and write, learn and teach, sing and speak, compete and create in full presence and selfless love to the glory of God. That's my purpose statement. And so if I can take anything that's beautiful, by the way. Yeah, because it weaves in. It weaves in everything I think should be woven into a purpose statement, which is when I say to read and write, learn and teach, sing and speak, create and compete. Those are all things that I love to do when I was a kid. Those are all things that put me in the zone. Now those are all things that, that spark deep and impactful joy when I'm doing them. And I could have put programming in there. I could have put painting in there, I could have put woodworking in there, I could have put travel in there. But. But none of those things actually satisfy the key core criteria of things that really give me joy, put me into the zone and reflect what I really liked to do when I was a kid. But I can tell you right now, reading, writing, learning, teaching, singing, speaking, competing and creating are all things that light me up and that I love to do. And so if an opportunity comes across my plate that doesn't fit into one of those categories that I can filter through my purpose statement, then it's not really going to be a hell yes. And then furthermore, with that purpose statement, if it's all about me fulfilling my Maslow's hierarchy, making more money, getting a nicer car, having a bigger home, you know, wearing more fashionable clothes, et cetera, all of that is also going to be pretty unfulfilling at the end of the day, if that's what the purpose statement is motivated by and geared towards, right? Taking care of oneself. But if you can develop your purpose statement and then go forth into the world and with that purpose statement, love others, you know, follow the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and live out your purpose statement in selfless love towards others, you don't have to worry about Maslow's hierarchy, right? The rewards will come back to you. You give, give, give, give, give, and the world will take care of you. People are reciprocal. And you'll find that the more you can love others with your purpose, the more success will come back to you. And then finally, for me, as a Christian, when I finish my purpose statement to read and write, learn and teach, sing and speak, create and compete in full presence and selfless love to the glory of God. What I mean by that is that I believe that we were created, and we were created with this stamp, with this image that reflects God. And that's a pretty big responsibility. When you consider that you were made to be like a God, like literally. And when you consider the magic of the world that we live in and the bodies in which we operate, and you consider the deep, deep, unfathomable complexity of this universe and how great a creator must exist to have put that in place, then one of the best things you can do to love and to glorify and to magnify that creator, which I think we really are called to do, is almost like. Like a gift that we give back to the being that put us on this planet in the first place, is to wake up in the morning and do the very, very best job that we can with whatever is put on our plate with supreme excellence. And by simply taking your purpose statement and say, I'm going to love God or glorify God with that purpose statement, what does that mean? It means I'm going to do a really good job. I'm going to do a really good job and I'm going to be excellent at whatever I do. So if you have your purpose statement and you say, I'm going to love as many people as possible, and then I'm going to be really, really excellent at that, and I'm just going to pride myself on supreme craftsmanship in any of these things that I do well that reflects back and glorifies God. And so long, you know, coming full circle to your question with the information overwhelm and all these opportunities that we have put before us, A, outsource to free up time so that you're really able to crush out what you do and learn those things that you're really deeply, deeply, passionately care about, want to learn, and then B, really hone your purpose statement. So even when you're in that situation where you have more free time to learn more, you're really only choosing those things that allow you to live out your purpose statement more fully. So I'll give you an example to drive this home. Let's say that you wake up in the morning and you, Matt Maruca, have the opportunity to listen to an audiobook or a podcast interview with, let's say, Alexander Woonch or some other amazing person who's talking about light. And your purpose statement might be to bring the knowledge of biological and spiritual light to this universe. Something like that. And then you also get a call from a friend who just got a Groupon ticket for golf lessons, and you've got the opportunity to go out and learn how to play golf and play 18 holes of golf and you ask yourself, well, I don't know, what's my purpose statement? Does golfing fit into my purpose statement? Is that something that really lights me up? Is it something I love to do when I was a kid that puts me in the zone now? Or is this a shiny penny or a distraction compared to me going for a hike in the forest and listening to this two hour long interview with this dude about light? Because that's what I really feel called towards. That's what my purpose is. And so that's a simple and maybe stupid example, but I just pass everything through that filter of does this better equip me or enable me to live out my purpose in life. And I say no to a lot of coffee shop meetups and investment opportunities and books people want to send me, etc. Just because they. They don't fit into that purpose statement.

For me, that's really where I am right now with business and starting to outsource more and more things slowly but surely. You know, I feel like when we, when we finally die and move on, it's kind of a cliche, but the things that not a lot of things are necessarily going to have mattered or matter, I think, much at that point on our deathbed. And I'm very confident that how many podcasts I consume and articles and blogs and books I wrote, read, or maybe wrote one day won't have the biggest impact as much as those few really, you know, meaningful things like the things that you've aligned in your purpose statement as being really important. So to me, it's. It's like I've just gotten. I feel like I've gotten a lot clearer, although I'm still kind of trying to get it all together, but. But just having a goal and having a clarity of purpose, like you said, and then going from there. Otherwise it's always going to be more, more, more, more, more, and it's never gonna be enough. But we're already. Even if I never read another health book or any book for the rest of my life, like, I'm still me, a being, you know, it's. It's something that I think is great to do if either it aligns with my business goals and I want to be more educated first on something for a business reason, or if it aligns with my personal passion, but if it falls outside of those categories, it's like, what's the purpose? What's the point of even engaging with anything at that point, you know, maybe helping others. So I appreciate you giving that answer.

And you learn and you digest information, not necessarily to become a library, because let's face it, in an era of Google and massive digital libraries in the cloud, you're never going to even come close to approximating the knowledge base one could get anywhere else. So just learning for learning sake is relatively unfulfilling at the end of the day. And nothing you will be necessarily proud about on your deathbed other than that it was an interesting way to pass away time, right? Like having your nose in a book. But if you're learning to teach, if you are learning to love, not mean learning how to love, but learning so that you can Love, right? And you are learning to be able to pass on information to friends, to family, to children, to the world, to your audience, to your fans to make their lives better. Then the goal of that learning suddenly becomes honorable and quite fulfilling.

Right?

I would much rather on my deathbed have said about me, you know, Ben read 3,000 books in his life and turned the information that he learned from those books into helpful, actionable tips that made people's lives actually better versus, you know, Ben knew a lot of shit because he read a lot of books. But you know, what, what's that exactly?

What's it mean in the end?

You have to be able to turn around and translate the information you've gathered into something that actually helps people and specifically helps people in a way that fulfills your purpose statement. And so really, I think again, that's how you handle the information overload. And I think I was telling you this last night. I've even had to kind of change my approach a little bit. Like I used to say for the longest time that I read a book a day, which I did for many, many years, all the way up until about five months ago, I read a book a day, and that was just my rule. Read a book a day, and this.

Is skimming, or actually, you read every word.

You open the book, you crack open the COVID you read the table of contents, you flip to the back to see how the back is laid out, you flip through the book to see how the book is laid out, and then you take a pen. And there are really good books on speed reading. Jim Quick has a good resource on this. His new book Limitless is really good about this. But you basically just trace each page, trace down each page, trace the next page. You gradually learn how to digest information in chunks rather than word by word. And you never regress as you read. Meaning I always have this rule where I never turn the page backwards, backwards, which means that I'm reading with the conscious realization that I must be grasping what I'm reading and not just looking at words or looking at chunks of information, because I've told my brain, you're not going to see this again. You're not allowed to turn the page back. So I'm always reading consciously and by reviewing the contents, reviewing the book, seeing the layout of the books, book, going through it with a pen, scrolling the pen down through the page as you go. So you're using your peripheral vision to gather information, and you're engaged with chunks of information as you go through the book. It's Almost like you get to the point. The best way I can describe it, because I've been doing this since I was 6 years old, is you're essentially taking a photograph of a page, photograph of the next page, turn, photograph of a page, photograph of the next page, turn. And I can get through a pretty decent sized book in an hour and a half or two.

So, like Boundless, if you were speed reading and it wasn't your book, how long do you think it would take you to consume the 600?

Boundless is an atypical book. I'm not just saying that narcissistically, but that book is a little bit bigger than the type of book I would take on to read in a day. But Boundless would probably be like three days to do something like that.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty amazing.

However, I have now committed to quality over quantity. And what I mean by that is I am reading my books more slowly. I'm not drinking them like a smoothie, I'm eating them like a wonderful complex salad, chewing every bite 40 times, and.

A rib eye coated with apple, a.

Ribeye coated with pesto. And I am creating a shelf in my library full of the, as Ryan Holiday would say, the so called perennial bestsellers, the books that I want to come back to over and over again. And I'm taking my time and savoring books and even choosing the books that I do read more wisely and just slowing that pace of consumption and going for quality over quantity. And I'm finding that to be quite satisfactory because of two reasons. A, the books that I really, really want to read, I can spend a lot more time in and get a lot more out of, but I still have in my back pocket that speed reading skill to where if I'm going to interview somebody for a podcast and I just need to get through their shit quick so I know what I want to ask them for the show, I can do that. And so, yeah, I'll still pull out some books and just like read them in an hour, but I've given myself permission to slow down the pace and not form my identity around being that guy who reads a book a day. And I'm instead trying to read books more slowly, digest the information more slowly, be more aware, be more present when I read, and hopefully harness even better information out of those books that I can help people with.

Yeah, I'm. I resonate with that highly because I first heard about the book a day from a Tai Lopez YouTube advertisement. You know, in his garage with his lamborghinis that some people said aren't his. But whatever. That was like something. I still feel fomo if I think about it. Oh, I should be able to read a book a day. I should be able to get all this content. Once I have the business more outsourced, maybe I'll be able to focus more. But like you said, even at that point, there's so much more information than I could ever hope to assimilate, even if I had every day, all day, where my business is running itself, you know. So I think that idea of focusing and filtering and doing it for a higher purpose, which is what I kind of would like to get into personally. For me, things have evolved from, you know, well, I grew up sort of of from a spiritual side of things. At least I grew up, you know, in a normal life and I was kind of like an atheist and so on. And then I got into my health quest, I guess you could say. And as I learned about the light and all this stuff that I was learning from Dr. Cruise and the books that he recommended, Light Shaping Life, about biophotons in the body and the Body Electric, all these books were implying that there's this. Not only did the Paleo diet make me sort of of think, what else have I been taught that isn't true? Because it was such a 180 from what I thought I knew about health and whatnot. So I was open. And then these books just kind of opened my mind further to that, the possibility of what people now say, you know, God and all of these things. But when it comes to this, you know, trying to achieve, I just, I get this feeling like, you know, what if it's sort of like a competition in some sense or it's for some people it's like a competition, right? And I've. I feel like when. When I or anyone buys into that competition, it becomes a struggle because it's, you know, you're never really going to win and no one's really going to win if it's just all about reading more and becoming the guy who reads the book a day and whoever makes the most money in their drop shipping store or whatever per day. You know, it's like there's these competitions that they're kind of bottomless pits. And my understanding has come to the point where it's. That's basically the monk philosophy in some sense. Like you can just sit and basically do nothing and connect with God and become a really powerful soul, and that will lead to much more fulfillment than the person who achieves all of these things in the material world. You know, this too is almost like a cliche, this concept of not achieving that you won't get satisfaction necessarily from material things. But it's only a cliche in the sense that people speak about it all the time and don't really read into it, really. It's a eternal truth, you might say it's in the Bible and that sort of thing. So with all that being said, I really want to ask you about your faith and your experience. How did you become, you know, a Christian or were you raised a Christian? And how does you know having God in your life affect the way you do things and drive your every day and kind of give that sense of general calmness and centeredness to the things you do and allow you to be such a high achiever and still maintaining such a, you know, strong family presence and sense of, you know, you seem very grounded. Just running into you, it's like I'm amazed at how grounded you are for how much you're all over the place, it seems.

Here's the perspective on that. First of all, to directly answer your question, yeah, my parents were first generation Christians. What I mean by that is both of them did not grow up in Christian households per se, but became Christians when they were in midlife, prior to when I was born, around the time they, they got married, they were both so called new Christians. And I was raised in a house where we read the Bible in the mornings and we sang hymns and we went to church and we prayed over breakfast, lunch and dinner and just a basic evangelical Christian family. I think that for me, this concept of, of Christianity comes down to the hero's journey. I truly believe that the hero's journey is embedded into our DNA on a really deep level. There's a reason that the most successful pop culture productions on the planet all tell this story of a person in the ordinary world having a call to adventure, crossing a threshold, connecting with, with mentors and allies, eventually going on and going to battle against the final enemy, nearly being defeated, nearly being destroyed, and at the very last moment, somehow making it out alive and then returning back to the village or the city or the people or the civilization with the magical elixir and, you know, saving humankind.

And this would be like Star Wars.

Harry Potter, Star Wars, Frozen, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Rocky, you name it, right? Like it's all the hero's journey. And the reason that I think that we resonate so deeply with the hero's journey is because we As a human race, we are, we're kind of a part of this hero's journey. We feel this deep, deep knowing inside that there must be more to life than this. Right? Which sounds like a Disney princess song, but it really is. At the end of the day, when people take some time to meditate and think and be with themselves and slow down the pace of life and question themselves and question all their belongings and all their fulfillment and all their striving, whether they're rich, whether they're poor, whether they're the mightiest king on the planet, whether they're the, you know, just as, you know, whatever, a warehouse worker barely getting by. We all have this thought, gosh, there must be more. Like, it can't just be, I do all this stuff, then I die, then game over. And I think that the reason that we think a lot of that is because that, that's actually true, that there actually is more to life than just walking around this planet. That there actually is this eternal bliss that we have the opportunity to be blessed with that goes on forever and ever and ever. And I don't know exactly what it looks like, but I do know that it's heavenly. I do know that from descriptions that you hear from people who have, have near death experiences or prophets from the Bible who have seen heaven and seen God, that you're somehow bathed in light and music and deep, deep love and a connection with God unlike anything that we experience in these physical bodies compared to what we might experience and say like a celestial body or a spiritual body that we would be encased in, in, you know, in this, in this afterlife, in the so called afterlife. When we look at the hero's journey, I think that Christianity for me reflects that in a really profound manner. Meaning that, you know, here, here was this son of a God, son of God. Like, you know, there's many gods, but this was, you know, the God and the son of this God, this greatest God, this greatest being, this greatest creator that existence has ever known, living their ordinary, comfortable life as the son of God, eating angels, food in heaven, sitting at the right hand of God on a throne in heaven, all of a sudden has this call to adventure that must have been met with great resistance here. Here is this entire planet teeming with people created in my image and they're messing things up big time, and they have messed things up big time and they've broken all the rules and they are killing each other and they're raping the planet and they are just lost in their own selfishness. And sin. Can you go down there and save them? And not only save them, but. But save them by taking on all their sin and all their shame and all their suffering and taking on the form of a human flesh from being God and going and dying, like, literally, like go down to earth and die. Just. Just fix all this. Experience the most pain and suffering and shame that someone could ever experience and fix all this. Be the hero, right? And so we have this. This story of Jesus Christ, this son of God, who. Who crosses that threshold, all of a sudden appears as a little baby, which must have been horrible for a God to actually, you know, be stuck inside of this tiny, little broken human form of a baby and. And then grow up for 33 years on this planet, 33 really wonderful years teaching philosophies and teachings and insight and wisdom that we can now open up a book like the New Testament and delve into the Sermon on the Mount or any of these other wonderful teachings that Jesus passed along during his time here on this earth. But then, perhaps more profoundly, there comes this time when he's 33 years old, when it is time to actually take that deep, deep dive and go to battle in the way that he is probably the greatest hero mankind has ever known, was called to go to battle for. And he has a crown of thorns placed on his head that dug deep into his skull. Three to four thorns piercing down into the skin of the skull, blood dripping down the face, beaten, carrying a giant, heavy wooden cross through the streets and then getting nailed to a cross. And no human being can have nails driven through their wrists without, I would imagine, just screaming in pure horror. We probably would have been vomiting if we'd have been at the cross, at the crucifixion watching this happen. I mean, this was not. This was not pleasant. Like the idea of a crucifixion, it's a pretty horrible way to die. You know, it's kind of funny because we was not funny. It's interesting that we now wear crosses or people will get cross tattoos or, you know, or cross T shirts. It's kind of like having an electrical chair or, you know, like a. Like a poison injection vial hanging around your neck. Like that's what the cross was, right? Like it was a horrible, horrible way to die and kill human being. And so not only that, not only does he get nailed up on a cross, crown of thorns, you know, spear stuck in his side, dies in a very, very horrible and shameful manner, but then after that, death crosses over into the spirit world, and anybody who has done plant medicine knows that there is a spirit world. And, and I, you know, I've certainly done a lot of plant medicine and have been to places in the spirit world that have left me coming back with an undeniable realization that there's way more going around us than we can just see with our eyes or feel with our hands or touch with our feet or anything like that. And there's this deep spiritual world. And he went into that world and he went straight down to the depths of hell and fought Satan for three days in this epic battle and took on all the shame and all the suffering and probably suffered like, way more horribly in that spirit world than ever could have occurred in, like, on the cross. Like, that was just the beginning. Battled and battled and battled for three days like a, like a freaking bloodied crusader. And at the very end, at the very end, you know, when he was supposed to be dead and rotting in a. In a tomb as human flesh, all of a sudden, you know, I like to think of it as like this, this hand pops up from the ground, you know, and. And it's, it's reaching towards the sky and it's like, oh, wait, I'm still here. I made it out alive. Not only that, but I've come back with the elixir, right? And so the, you know, the giant rock on the tomb is rolled away and this blast of light comes forth. And all of a sudden we have, you know, for the very first time in all of human existence, a human body that died, that was actually a God that went to battle, defeated sin, took on every last bit of shame and suffering that we have ever had or ever will have had or will have, and came out and said, all right, I defeated it. I won. I took on all this. We've ended this cycle of sin and suffering and shame. And the beautiful, simple part of that and the magic of it is what that means. Like that most unselfish thing that anyone could have ever done for anybody else means that for us, whether we were raped or traumatized or abused or beaten as a child, whether we have committed what to us are the most guilt stricken, shameful, embarrassing things that we ever could have done in our lives, every last bit of that, all we have to say is, I believe that story. I believe that that hero's journey actually happened and I cast all my cares on Jesus. I believe that that hero's journey story actually happened and that I am saved. And as the Bible said, it is literally as simple as a little child believing a little Child saying, yes, that happened. I no longer need to carry that burden. Jesus carried it for me. And all of a sudden, it's just like the most enlightening, peaceful, hopeful state you can be in, knowing that every single day you can wake up, up, and no matter how bad things have gotten or no matter how bad you messed up the day before, how much you may have hurt someone, how much you may have made the wrong decisions, that you can just cast that all upon Christ and He carried it all. And when you enter into that state and you realize that everybody's just as much of a an f up as you are, and we can all, we can all cast that on Christ. And nobody needs to carry shame, Nobody needs to carry suffering, Nobody needs to carry embarrassment. Well, to me, that, that kind of Judeo Christian hero's journey is, is about the most fantastic, wonderful, magical tale that one can live. And I think it's really. I think it's built into our DNA. I think it's the story that we crave. And I think so many of us live our lives wanting to be the hero because we resonate so powerfully with that journey. We want to go out and save all the people and we want to go out and start all these businesses and create and impact and all of that is great. That's all of us satisfying that craving. Remember how I said we were made in the image of God, who was a creator? That's one of the coolest things that a human being being can do, is create. But even I carried the burden for so long that I have to be the hero. I have to be the white knight. I have to save all these hurting people. And I would even, you know, judge people or shame people who didn't seem to be rising that same level. And I've grown to realize that it's not our job to be the hero. It's not our job to be the judge. It's not our job to project shame. It's not our job to carry shame. Our job is to wake up in the morning to love God and to love others. And as much as is within our power, tell that hero's journey that I just told to all the hurting people who need that hope. And at the end of the day, I think that's the most fulfilling thing that you can do with your life, is love God and to love other people and to give people that hope so they can realize they don't need to be the hero and they also don't need to feel that shame. So that's that's why I'm a Christian.

That's amazing. Truly. I don't know if there can be anything else after that, but I'd really love to just ask you. You know, when I had reached out to you months ago, I was feeling, I had been feeling more and more and more for the last many years that there's gotta be something beyond that rat race that I was sort of trying to put my fingers on verbally just earlier on. There has to be something beyond that. It just can't be this rat race and monkey mind experience on earth. And so we had that, that phone call many, many months ago and you recommended that I read the book Soul Keeping.

So I did John Ortberg.

And that was just amazing because I really started to embody the things that I was implying earlier, you know, that it isn't going to matter what I have when I die. It's going to matter who I am and who I became and who I loved and how I loved and who I touched and how I touched and all of those things. And that's the same, I think, for everyone. So that sort of basic knowledge and wisdom that he shared in that book was so beautiful. And I think that that's something that really everyone could benefit from so much. And I'm just starting to benefit from. You know, I'm reading the Bible, but there's, you know, there's also so many other. And we began to chat about this last night briefly and I mentioned that I'd like to ask you about it. It kind of to. In closing, the question really is how does, how do you, with all of your experience and wisdom in these fields and what you just shared was really beautiful. And what can people do to really begin to embody this love and lifestyle? And to add to the question is, you know, in the world today, you have so many places to start, right? For increasing spiritual strength and our own energy and connection to God. So I'm sort of asking, asking a multifaceted question, not just pursuing the Bible and Christian God, but really the holistic spirituality. For example, things like breath work that we practiced last night, there's from. I guess what I'm really asking is from all the different energy practices, where do you recommend people start to in their journey? You know, breath work. There's Dr. Barry Morgan, who you interviewed, and his energy disciplines, and Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton and. And tons of different Indian and Chinese energy practices. And there's so many others too. Where does someone begin? You know, how does Someone make that choice for themselves rather than getting overwhelmed by feeling like it's another fomo. I have to do breath work and I have to do that and this and that. So. And how does that tie into, in your mind? Not only cultivating our own inner light, because that's one of the key parts of this light, die it, but also connecting with the light of God, you know, God as you see him.

Right, right. A lot of places we could go there. But here's the deal. When you talk about an author like John Ortberg, great author, wonderful books. That book, soul keeping, fantastic. He highlights in that book how many of us are walking around caring for our bodies, caring for our brains, and the one most important part of us, our soul, our spirit, is neglected, shriveled, shrunk up and not tended to because it is so easy to understand and to feel the immediate impact of fleshful activities. You know, I feel really good after that workout. I have such energy after that cup of coffee or after that, that smoothie, that sex was amazing. That we, we sometimes don't care for that part of us that's going to go on living forever and ever and ever, that spark that goes on for eternity after this body has faded, after this brain has degraded.

Right.

And so the question then becomes, well, okay, if I understand that my soul and my spirit is so important to care for, how do I actually care for that? That, like, how do you actually care for your spirit as much as you care for your brain or for your body? And there, there are some resources that I've found to be particularly helpful, because if you look at physical health, you know, I think that eating healthy and moving soundly are important. And I think that when stacked with light, earthing, grounding, heat, cold water and minerals, you're supporting yourself physically on a very profound level from a mitochondrial standpoint. And when we take that same approach to our spiritual lives, there are certain key activities that I think are just non negotiables. Each day there is an author named Richard Foster. And Richard Foster has written a couple of wonderful books on the spiritual disciplines that were some of my favorites and kind of my introduction to this idea that just like the physical disciplines of lifting or cardio or nutrition or stretching or mobility or anything like that, there are spiritual disciplines, and they are things like fasting, gratitude, meditation, prayer, prayer, silence, solitude, worship, celebration, service, and there's a list of them. Richard Follis has, I think, eight or nine in his book. There's another book called the Spiritual Disciplines Workbook that I'M taking my family through right now that literally has, I think, close to 40 different spiritual disciplines. Right. And we're in a new one every single week. You know, like last week's was. Was presence with God. And I think the week before that it was going on a pilgrimage. And so you could delve pretty deeply into these spiritual disciplines. But I think the very, very best place to start and things that move the dial the most for me are very, very simple. And that is a daily breathwork practice, typically combined with meditation and prayer. Okay, so at least once a day, I'm ducking away. I'm doing some form of centering breath work without a lot of distractions. And typically that's starting and ending with prayer. And as part of the breath work, there's meditation woven in. Meditation and breath work are almost synonymous in a way. Way I read my Bible at the beginning and at the end of the day, and that's another big one. That would be the spiritual discipline of study, just filling my mind and my head with those things that I know will feed my soul. So we have meditation, prayer, breath, work, study. And then I would say the last three that are kind of like non negotiables for me are a daily gratitude practice that's writing down one thing that I'm grateful for each day and also sharing gratitude with the family in the evenings. The next would be relationships, meaning prioritizing family dinners, being with others, and just not being a lone wolf. Right. Not. Not using, say, social media and digital devices as the primary means with which to communicate and connect with people. And there's. Then the last one would be worship, meaning songs, hymns, guitar, ukulele, what have you, but this idea of just making a joyful noise. And so those are examples of spiritual disciplines that are woven into my own life. But, yeah, I think that Richard Foster's book is really good as far as, like, a systematized approach to learning each of these disciplines. That'd be a really good place to start. That one's called the. I think it's called the Celebration of Discipline. I have. If you were to. You can always feel free to thumb through my library. You can even take a photo of some of the books if you want. But I have a whole massive library and there's at least 10 books in there just on the spiritual disciplines alone. But, you know, kind of a long winded answer, but those are a few places to start.

That's amazing. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and sharing all these things. I think. Think that, as you mentioned, to me it seems like people get to a certain point and some people ride the physical wave the whole way, but I doubt that people ride the physical pleasures throughout life without a tremendous amount of struggling, suffering, and a general sense of a lack of some sort of purpose. So when you express that to me, that you feel even in the health community, that's sort of a place where many people aren't looking. You know, it's just this routine. And that routine, it really resonated with me and made me think, wow, I, I don't want to be neglecting my soul because it, it ultimately determines my life and who I am. And some would argue how every single cell and atom in the body resonates.

So, yeah, and if I could, if I could bring this full circle, because I know we've talked about a lot, I think the happier and the most fulfilled anybody is ever going to be is when they've honed down their purpose statement into that one single succinct statement that we talked about. You know, what you love to do when you were a kid, what puts you in the zone now, and, you know, what are you naturally good at? You go forth and you love God and you love others, and you're very present with that purpose statement. As you do so, you stay physically fit and physically sound so you can care for this vessel that you're inside, so you can make maximum impact on this planet with good health span and good lifespan. You feed your soul with these spiritual disciplines, gratitude, prayer, meditation, worship, silence, solitude, family, etc. And then finally, and perhaps most importantly, you understand that it is so, so simple to connect with in a very deep and meaningful way, this hero's journey that is built into all of our DNA. And this is probably the, the greatest thing that you can do is you simply close your eyes and you say to God, I believe. I believe that happened. I believe in magic. I believe in something I can't really explain with science, but I believe that you sent your son to die and that all I need to do is cast all my shame and suffering and burdens on Christ and then go forth and do the very best thing that I can with everything that God has put on my plate for that day and knowing that you're saved and that you have no shame and that you go on to eternal bliss afterwards. No matter what happens here, it's just the coolest darn way to live that I can think of. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes the resources pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you you each and every week.