Ben Greenfield In The Hotseat: An Exclusive Sneak-Peek Into Ben's Life Journey, The Launch Of Kion & Much More.

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield coming to you with probably one of the most narcissistic podcasts I've ever, ever released. Because it's an interview with me. Yeah, it's with me. No, seriously, this is a big moment for me. I've been on a podcast before, rarely on my own, but the reason that I'm doing this is actually pretty big, pretty profound as I've dropped hints about. For the past couple of years, behind the scenes, I've been slowly a brand new company. I've surrounded myself with this ragtag team of health enthusiasts and hardworking writers and operations managers and medical experts and consultants and raw ingredient formulators. And we've been pouring blood, sweat and tears and brain power, baby, into this, this new company, this new brand. And it launched two days ago. Two days ago. What is it? It's not only edutainment, like tons of extremely high, well researched, non run of the mill content you've never seen before. Really good articles, videos, a whole bunch of new stuff from me. But it's also products that I've developed along with some of the brightest minds on the face of the planet, along with my own superfood hunting around the globe, including things like ketogenic blends and superfood meals and anti aging nutrients, health bars, safe fat loss compounds, complete gut support concoctions, essential oils. We'll be adding health enhancing and biohacking items that you'll find around my house and my gym bag, but in very high quality, very rigorously tested forms like infrared and EMF blocking clothing, including tin foil aluminum hats. No, I'm just kidding. A unique travel fitness gear, stuff I travel with that I wanted to make available to you. Beautiful things like essential oil diffusers and woo woo energetic pendants and journals. Tons of stuff. So this podcast, it kind of delves into the journey of how we've created all that. And if you're just itching to get your fingers on some of this stuff right away, the website is getkeown.com name of the company is Keon as in Ki. And the website is getkeown.com just like it sounds. Get G E T Keon K-I O N.com I don't want to go on for too long, just visit the website. It's all self explanatory and honestly, it's really, really cool. It's the next big step for little old me in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show. And it was during that time that I had to make some decisions about, like, where I wanted to go with my life and what I wanted to really do as a career. I wasn't gonna be, like, a pro athlete, and obviously, at this point wasn't gonna be, like, a freaking computer programmer. I was already making video games in my house. Like, I was digging it. Plus, it was a perfect marriage of, like, my love for fantasy and also, like, the technology that I Of an early adopter in terms of, like, computers. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, what's up? Welcome to Keon. I'm Anthony. Hi, I'm angelo Keeley, the CEO of Keon, and I'm here today with Mr. Ben Greenfield, the visionary and CEO behind Keon.

What's up? But I'm actually, if I could interrupt you. Far inferior to you, Angelo, at the fine art of beatboxing. The beatbox, I guess I've discovered. Dude, before we even talk, before we even dive into this thing, dude, give me a flavor of your talent. All right.

Key on, key on.

I love it. There you go. You know, you are gonna have to teach me that someday.

I will teach you. I will teach you.

I know we were chatting the other day, and you told me you start with. You start with boots and cats.

Yes.

So you just say, like, boots and cats fast over and over again.

Yes, I do. Like a box breathing. Boots and cats. Boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and.

Got it. Yeah, like that.

Yeah, it's good.

All the way. Driving home today, I'm just gonna be.

Saying, you should do it, man, on the airplane. Like, the people that sit next to you really love that.

Normally, it's pro. Less annoying than my electrostimulation devices and gravity compression boots.

I would love to sit next to you on a plane, man.

It's fun. It's an adventure. That and my green gooey powders.

Yeah. So, dude, it's awesome to be able to have, I think, this unique interview today where we're going to do really a deep dive into who has been. Greenfield. Where'd you come from? How'd you end up here? And hopefully allow everyone here to walk away with some really awesome tips about how to optimize their body, mind, and spirit.

Dude, that's. That's what I freaking love to do, is just talk about myself. Yeah, no, no, I, like, I do a lot of stuff that I'm hoping can help people out. Like, like, as far as, like, daily routines and. I don't know, I mean, like, if we talk about my. My. My kids or my. My eating habits or whatever, you know, my goal is for. For people to get mad value for their lives to get better no matter what we talk about. So. Yeah, man, what do you want to know?

Well, I think it's unique too, because you're normally the guy interviewing other people in these long formats, and I feel excited to get to offer to everyone else, you know, a more deep dive into you. So let's just start from there.

But nobody's gonna be as good an interviewer as me, other than that guy on funnierdie.com who does the between two ferns thing. Zach Galifianakis. You'll be no Zach. That's even hard to say. You'll never be a Zach Galifianakis. Angelo.

Wow. I appreciate the confidence that you gave me right at the beginning of the interview. I feel like, no problem. Just psyched to ask questions and not to be such a beatbox. Yeah, at least I got to beatbox, dude.

So.

Okay, let's jump in, man.

All right.

Where did you come from?

I was. I was gonna make a joke about my mother's birth canal, but there's really not many jokes to be made without seriously offending my mother. So I was actually born in Lewiston, Idaho, in North Idaho, where my parents at the time lived with just one kid, my older brother. And I was born at a St. Joseph's Hospital. No fancy water birth. My parents were like naturopaths or hippies or anything like that. You know, my. My mom was from Detroit and my dad from Miami. And yeah, they just wanted to start a family way up in Idaho.

Well, that sounds kind of. I mean, a little unique that they moved from Detroit and Miami to Idaho. What brought them to Idaho?

Yeah, we were kind of a weird fit in Idaho initially. So my dad grew up in Miami, the son of relatively well to do parents. And he got in trouble at, like, an early age. You know, he was. He was into drugs. He was kind of like, you know, mixing up with gangs and things that. Things that you do when you're a big city kid with Money and too much time on your hands, I guess. And not only did he reach a point in his life where he was looking for a lot of meaning in his life, and admittedly, it's awkward for me to be telling my dad's story and know that he might see this and want to jump in and correct me on so many points, but ultimately, long story short, is like, he was searching for meaning in his life. And he also had a really traumatic incident where he and his brother were basically involved with cocaine dealings in Miami. His brother got stabbed and he died. And that was kind of like the final domino for my dad to just, like, pick up and get out of the city. And he literally, like, put his finger on a map, and it landed on Idaho. So he went to Idaho, and he moved all the way up to this tiny little town of Moscow, Idaho, where, strangely enough, I wound up, you know, we can talk about this later. Getting married, you know, myself later on in my life. But he wound up in Moscow, Idaho, working as a firefighter. Working as a volunteer firefighter in Moscow, Idaho. And at about the same time, my mom, who also had a lot of. Lot of kind of trauma of her own and also grew up not so much a big city kid. She grew up in Alpena, Michigan, but then moved to Detroit, Michigan. And she was very much like a drugs and rock and roll girl, too. I mean, you know, she was definitely not like a clean, natural hippie, you know, the way that I think some people have envisioned that. My parents actually were based on some of my own interests. But no, she got in trouble herself. She had, like, some pretty serious scares as far as, like, assaults and stuff like that in Detroit. And she also wound up moving to Moscow, Idaho, from Detroit. So Detroit and Miami met up in Moscow, and that's not too far from Lewiston, Idaho, where my dad wound up actually getting a real job as a firefighter instead of working at the volunteer firefighting department in Moscow. And they started a family right there in Lustin. Dad is a firefighter, mom is a homemaker, slash hairstylist. She had a hairstyling salon right in our house for most of my childhood. So watched mom cut hair and dad would go to the firefighting station, and he wound up being a paramedic eventually as well. So that's how I wound up being birthed in Idaho.

And you said earlier that there was a big brother before you, but how many siblings do you have?

So I've got one older brother and I've got one younger brother, and then I Have a younger sister, and then I have an even younger sister who we adopted when we were all teenagers, so. Wow.

Cool. So big family. How do you. Do you feel like big family affected you in terms of how you see the world?

You know, I think that oddly enough, probably because of my education, which we can get into more. Despite me growing up with a big family, I'm still very introverted. Like, I'm still kind of a. Kind of a lone wolf. I appreciate family. I love family. The fact that I only have two kids, to me, it seems like a kind of Like a small family, But I guess I grew up thinking that, you know, four kids was kind of kind of the norm. So I don't really know that having, you know, what I think many people in this day and age would consider to be a big family really changed my life that much. I mean, but maybe it did, you know, like, I had to change diapers growing up and, you know, know how to take care of babies. And, you know, I guess I have and had for a long time growing up, like, a real appreciation for babies and kids. And, you know, through college, which we can talk about later, you know, I taught sports camps and even high school was teaching kids how to play tennis. And, you know, one of my main jobs growing up was freaking, you know, babysitting all the neighbors, kids. So I have always liked kids and hanging out with kids. Maybe part of that comes from being in a big family. But I do. I do love children and babies. I just don't have that many of my own.

So growing up in Idaho, what was school like? There's.

For me, it was weird. So I was homeschooled. I was homeschooled K through 12. My siblings, for the most part, aside from dipping into a little bit of private school and some tutors here and there, were also homeschooled. And I have bittersweet feelings about being homeschooled. For me, I've always been an independent learner. I think just coming out of the womb. My mom's womb got two mentions so far on this show.

Congratulations.

Racking up the points.

What's her name?

Congratulations, Mom. Pat.

Pat.

Congratulations. Seriously, Mom, I love you anyways, though, so I've always been an independent learner. And so for me, being homeschooled for the most part, involved my parents, like, having curriculum and books around that they would kind of, like, encourage me to delve into. And there were certainly times, like, traditional homeschool, like at the kitchen table with my math book open, where mom would be Showing me how to solve an equation or dad would be helping me get through a story problem. Those type of things certainly did occur. But for the most part, I would take books and self educate myself. For much of my homeschooling career, if you will, that was just the way that I was wired. Like, I love to read, I love to just get books and I would go to the library. Like I would finish school and I would go to the library after finishing school, get a bunch of books from the library and stay up until like 2am just reading books, reading and reading and reading. And you know, I still read every single night, every single day, every morning. Like I love to read. So that really helped me out being homeschooled. But I think there are some, there's some failures, I think when it comes to that type of educational approach. For example, even though it made me a really good independent learner, able to solve problems on my own, able to think outside the box, almost have this mentality that rules are. How's the saying go? Rules are meant to be suggestions or something like that. Just kind of thinking outside the box when it comes to everything from following rules to learning to solving problems. But at the same time, kind of having that lone wolf mentality I think held me back from being like a good team player, a good little factory worker, someone who works well with others. You look at the sports I wound up playing later on, like tennis and triathlon and stuff like that. Like very kind of like independent sports. Even what I do now, like obstacle racing and hunting and adventure racing, those kind of things, you know, like I love to be by myself and solve my own problems. And when I got to college, that kind of bit me a little bit. Like I had to learn to play well with others and still have to learn how to play well with others. I mean, honestly, my educational philosophy is that you give a kid the best of both worlds. Like this is what I'm trying to do with my kids, right? So they go to school. So I homeschool them the first couple of years, then realize with as much as I travel and the fact that mom just like she's not a teacher, that's not what she loves do to, to do that. I'd be shorting my kids if we tried to homeschool them their whole lives. So now they go to school and at school they learn all the things that I'd have a very hard time teaching them at home, like how to play well with others, how to solve problems as a group, how to start businesses. As a group, how to speak foreign languages that I don't know right now and that I can't teach them or don't have time to learn how to program Lego robots, how to play instruments from all over the world. The other. The other day, my son said goodnight to me in nine different languages, right? Like, these are things that I would not be able to teach my children unless I were literally like a full time stay at home dad. But at the same time, when they get home from school and when anybody's children get home from school, I think that the parent's job starts right then in terms of unschooling, homeschooling that child. So when my kids get home from school, I teach them the things they're not learning in school, right? Like how to start a fire out in the woods and how to shoot a bow and hiking and foraging skills and how to rent out their room on Airbnb and basically the sky's the limit, really. But ultimately, I think that the best of both worlds is for your child to get that education in terms of being an entrepreneur, being a lone wolf, solving problems, having independent resilience after school, and then they learn all those, those teamwork and group cooperation skills, and also the things that you might not be able to teach a child that you need to outsource at school. And in my opinion, that's kind of the best of both worlds. So my own education was far different, though. It was pretty much just like, here's some books. Read them, figure them out, and keep the fingers crossed that I actually did the homework.

Well. It's cool, man. And it says a lot about you that you've taken what was really impactful for you in your childhood in terms of the homeschooling, and you're still finding a way to integrate that with your kids, but you're seeing where it was maybe lacking and other things you want to get, you know, offer your children. I wonder on the same level in describing that, like, I'm wondering about health and fitness. When did that become a big part of your life? Like, was that a big part of your family life as a kid or is that something you did on your own?

So there, there were occasions when I was growing up where my parents would try to put me into soccer or basketball or baseball or T ball or kind of like the traditional American sports. And I was never that great at sports. Like, my skill mostly when they put me in those sports was like, I was the person who could just like run laps for days around the other Kids. But I really wasn't much of an athlete growing up. And it was because, like, I'd be in soccer practice wondering what happened to the Prince on page 332 of the fantasy fiction book that I was halfway through, right? Like, I just, I lived for. I was a geek, right? Like I played chess. I spent many, many hours with like online World of Warcraft and was one of the first adopters of these multiplayer online role playing games. I would sit and program my own computer games. Like, I would make my own version of first player shooting or first person shooting games like Doom. I had, like, there were occasions when my parents would like, hire a tutor to teach me stuff. And one of the ones that I liked the most was I actually had a guy who came and taught me computer programming. And I would just like program computers and take apart hard drives and figure out how to work computers and how to use the old dial up modems and access the Internet, which was kind of a new thing. As I was growing up, I wrote my first 400 page fantasy fiction novel. By the time I was 13, I was winning magazine essay contests. I was president of the chess club. I'm not saying this stuff to. I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but instead I'm pointing out the fact, like, you didn't start. I was not a jock. I was not that kid. I was a total intellectual geek growing up.

So where did it come from?

So When I was 12 or 13, my parents moved out into the country, right? They packed up from our tiny little home in Lewiston, Idaho and moved like six miles out of town up on this big hillside overlooking the, the Snake river and the Clearwater River. My dad was still working as a firefighter and paramedic. My mom was still cutting hair. Like, she built a little haircutting studio right there in our house. And they put up like one of those old school blacktop tennis courts. And I remember, like, I helped my dad lay down all the lines in the tennis courts. I'd never played tennis in my life, right? Like, first thing I learned about tennis was like how to draw the squares and the dimensions of the court and how big it should be. But they actually hired a local girl to come up and teach my brothers and I tennis. And I fell in love with tennis. I think part of it was because I had a crush on the tennis instructor. It always helps. Yeah, I know her name was Michelle and I really liked her. And so that was extra motivation to show up every day and to practice and to go out there and you know, figure out how to serve harder and how to hit. But I also, as I really got immersed in the sport and I started like playing these USTA tournaments and I started like, I really liked it. Like I would go and check the rankings like in the little magazines that would come out each month and see what my ranking was in each of like the, you know, I was a teenager by this time, but that was pretty cool for me to like see my ranking rising in the usta, the US Tennis association, and to go out and begin to like play in matches and tournaments and have it be really serious. Like I was like in charge of my own success. Like, I loved that I didn't like, like basketball and soccer, like these, these sports where like my success hinged upon like all my teammates and everything. Like, I love to just go out there and figure out a way that I could beat the other person. Completely self sufficient, right? Like, and part of that was just like that whole homeschooled lone wolf mentality too, I think. But anyways, I also really got into like, hey, I'm doing hill sprints up this hill back behind our house. Actually gives me way more gas for these tennis matches, like a much bigger gas tank. And I started messing around with like plyometrics. And I convinced my dad to like take me down to gart sports like down the hill from our house and get like these little 10 pound dumbbells. And I remember like the first ever weight training exercise that I learned slash made up was I would lay on the bed on my stomach and I would do dumbbell curls just like until my arms felt like they were going to fall off with these little 10 pound dumbbells. And then eventually I convinced my dad to go get the 15s and the 20s. And the second thing that I bought was I was watching on TV and they had like one of those made for TV AB devices where you kind of like pull in and you contract your abs like isometric contraction and then release and then pull out. So I bought that and I would just do that for day. I started to get like six pack abs and you know, I was still eating like I would eat Big Macs and iceberg salads and with, you know, drenched with ranch dressing and freaking, you know, pizza. You know, I would eat like two large pizzas easily. My brother and I would have like pizza eating contests. So complete crap food. But I was getting into exercising and there were two people that were kind of like family friends who really inspired me. There's this One guy named Rafael Escamilla. He was like one of the state's best powerlifters, really, one of the country's best powerlifters. And he showed me like how to lift the barbell and like how to do a squat and how to deadlift. So, you know, I'm a 14 year old kid and you know, at that point, you know, I bought my own little bench, right, and put it out in the garage. And I remember it was just like cold steel and benches out in the garage. And I would go out there and I would put on like the old school belt, you know, around the waist, like the leather belt. And I just do these exercises that this guy Raphael taught me. And he was like a biomechanist, he was a good instructor. And so I learned how to weightlift. And then there was this other guy named Bruce. And Bruce's kid Andrew was one of my friend or one of my little brother Zach's good friends. And Bruce was a bodybuilder, like a good bodybuilder, like a professional bodybuilder. And he would come over with his rippling muscles and big biceps. And for me, like as, as a teenage boy seeing that kind of physique, this was back when Rocky was big and bodybuilding was still kind of cool and not completely freaky. This guy was teaching me how to do bicep curls and how to increase vascularity. And he even introduced me to the concept of getting massages and deep tissue work after I'd work out. And so I started pick up tips from all these guys. And don't get me wrong, at the same time I was still like full on, like computer programming and Warcraft and reading books like they're going out of style, like every fantasy fiction book that came out. Because I still pictured myself as just like this complete intellectual. You know, when I test for homeschool, I had like some of the top scores in the nation. And like I was a real, real intellectual. But I started to develop this love for almost like, you know, I guess like an early form of biohacking, right? Like, how can I get a better pump, how can I be faster on the tennis court? How can I serve the ball harder? And really like from the time I was, I was 13 until I was 16, like that was my life was like being homeschooled and reading and playing on the computer. And then when I wasn't doing that, I was pretty much like playing tennis and crushing it on the weights out in the garage and running the hills back behind the house.

One of the things that just stands out about you to me is like, how you are such an amazing balance of both competitive athlete and intellectual. So. And I think of you as, like, nerd jock, basically. When did that.

It's like. It's like, what, Clark Kent?

Yeah, seriously, Superman.

That's the glasses, not the cool glasses.

Well, you do have the glasses. You have the. The rose colored glasses.

That's true. I do have my biohacking glasses. All right. Those are my Clark Kent glasses.

Yeah, there you go, man. So when did that intellectualism get turned onto more of the biology and science aspect of this? I understand where it came up in terms of the actual training, but you've got an amazing interest and have done tons of research and interviews. I mean, hundreds of thousands of interviews now in this area. When did that get ignited in you and how.

Well, like I said, I was still pretty intellectual, like, while I was playing tennis. And the local tennis coach, Kai Fong for Lewis Clark State College, he was a pretty cool cat. He was like this, like, Buddhist monk from Malaysia who was also a tennis coach who was, like, really Zen, you know, he kind of got this whole concept of, like, you know, mind and spirit optimization and translating down to the tennis court for calmness and focus while you're playing tennis. So it was. It was kind of an interesting early introduction for me into the whole, like, kind of, like spiritual side of athleticism. And he was also a really good coach, and he would come and watch some of my high school matches because I was playing competitively. Idaho had state laws that allowed homeschooled kids to play high school sports. So I actually played for the high school tennis team during this time, you know, between the time I was 13 and I actually graduated from high school when I was 15. And so it was around when I was 16 and playing at my final year of high school tennis that Kai came and asked me to play tennis for the team. At that point, I had to make a decision because my dad, who kind of had this whole unschooling, homeschooling kind of philosophy, he lined up an internship for me. Because that's big in the whole unschooling world is you don't go to college, you get an internship, you go and you work on a farm, or in this case, you go and you move into the house with this. In this case, this computer programmer. And he's gonna teach me, like, this ex Microsoft employee who owned his own software company. And I was just gonna go full on into computer programming and software design and I wanted to make video games, right? Like that, because I was already making video games in my house. Like, I was digging it. Plus, it was a perfect marriage of, like, my love for fantasy and, like, you know, creating weapons and monsters and stuff like that. And also, like, the technology that I was kind of an early adopter of in terms of, like, computers, you know, online role playing games, things like that. And so when I got offered the opportunity to go play tennis, that was pretty attractive to me. I will admit that part of it was because playing tennis and going to college sounded to me a lot sexier and a lot more likely to get me hooked up with some hot women than going and doing a computer programming internship in some guy's basement.

I think that was an accurate prediction.

Right? Right. In retrospect, who knows? Maybe I turned out an upper opportunity to be like, I don't know, Bill Gates too, or something. But ultimately, I chose to go to college. And not only did I choose to go to college, but I chose to do what this guy Bruce, that bodybuilder guy, actually really encouraged me to do, which was to study kinesiology, which is basically just like a fancy. It's like glorified physical education. It's like exercise science and biomechanics and biochemistry and physiology. And so I declared myself as a kinesiology major.

And this is at, like, age 16.

It was 16 years old. I started college, and I was 16. Big mistake, by the way, to go from homeschooling just to get thrust straight into the. Into college, you know, and parties. And I didn't join a fraternity, but I lived with a whole bunch of other guys in college, and it was just. It was wild for a little while as I caught up on all the worldly things that I had not really experience in homeschool. I don't think that's a good way to go about, like, life. Learning about life. I'm like, with my own kids, I'm a big fan of. We talk very freely in our household about sex and alcohol and drugs and all these things that I think should not be forbidden fruit to a kid when they get into high school, into college, but they should be well familiar with the ins and outs of the risks and how this stuff works, all that jazz. But I was not. So I started college when I was 16, and my life was pretty much eating copious amounts of food, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, working out for many, many hours a day, including three hours of tennis practice a day. And studying. Right? And not studying very well. Like, first year, pretty much like pretty poor scores because I was more interested in working out and partying in girls than I was in what I was studying, so.

And it worked like with girls being 16 in college. Yeah, you're like this young guy, dude.

I like, I was bigger like than I am right now when I started. Like, I was, I was a hunk because I like, I'd been lifting hardcore for like 3 years and following this bodybuilders advice and this powerlifter's advice and I was playing tennis. Like I didn't go near endurance sports. You know, aside from running those hills back behind my house, I was not a skinny endurance athlete like I am now. I had, you know, that, you know, I kind of realized later on in my life, once I started to tap into like triathlon and obstacle course racing, that my ability to like run lots and lots of laps around the basketball court when I was a kid or like outrun all the other kids in soccer was actually just like built in lactic acid tolerance. Right. Like massive stamina and endurance. And granted, based on my genetic testing, this might be a little bit of a rabbit hole. It turns out that despite me being good at endurance, my body responds really well to power training. My genes are all fast twitch muscles and so even for endurance, the best way for me to train is with explosive effort, short sprints, powerlifting, things like that. So my body responds really well to that kind of training. But ultimately in college, my first year of college, that was pretty much it was just like eat, train, play tennis, do a little bit of studying on the side. And that's what I did for that first year. The other thing that I was doing at the time in both high school and in that first year of college was I started teaching tennis lessons. That's how I made money to help pay for college was I would like, this is kind of like my first foray into entrepreneurship, like to kids or I put out flyers. I contacted the parents of all the kids who my family knew and I would bring in kids like four to eight at a time and, and do like group tennis lessons at a discounted rate. And then I'd do individual one on one tennis lessons at a slightly higher rate and just taught tennis, which was perfect because we had a tennis court at our house. Right. So I just go out there and teach lessons. So that was kind of like my side gig at the time, aside from just like playing tennis and working out.

So as college went on, did you do any other types of jobs or what did you do with the rest of your time.

I, I got to a point where after that first year of tennis I realized I kind of sucked compared to like the actual, like I wanted to be a pro tennis player, right? Like that. That's where I saw myself going with this was, yeah, study for a couple of years and go off and join the circuit and you know, start making, start making big time dough as a tennis player. And I just, you know, I got my butt kicked by all these, these international players who'd been like swinging a tennis racket since they were five, right? Like I'd been playing like three or four years and it was a wake up call for me. And I, after a year decided that dream of being a pro tennis player probably wasn't going to happen. And so I transferred colleges and I moved out of Lewiston and up to Moscow, Idaho and started attending University of Idaho. And it was during that time that I had to make some decisions about like, where I wanted to go with my life and what I wanted to really do as a career if I wasn't going to be like a pro athlete. And obviously at this point wasn't going to be like a freaking computer programmer. And so I kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole there, but how did I get down? What was your question?

My question was like, did you do any other type of jobs when you were in school? Or like, what did school turn into? You gave a picture kind of like.

The beginning, it got kind of crazy, like, so I took all that energy that I was putting into, like lifting weights and playing tennis and like making my body better and trying to be, you know, a pro athlete. And I instead developed during college a really keen interest in science and health, even though I was a horrible, horrible, like science and math students, even like in homeschool, I got good scores, but I hated it, right? Like, I didn't like science and math. And even like my first year of college, I just like, I didn't get good grades really, you know, I was partying and most of my focus was on working out. And frankly, I didn't think it was important to get good grades. But it was in the second year when, and I think it was the perfect storm of really good professors in exercise physiology, in biomechanics, my previous history with weightlifting and sports and kind of understanding the transfer between exercise science and human potential, like optimization of the human body, that I realized that I could take all of this science, math, physics, biochemistry, exercise physiology, microbiology, organic chemistry, all these things that I was studying as I went through these exercise science courses. And I could actually use that to mold a more perfect human right to actually begin to get results, not just for myself and all the other sports that I began to delve and foray into. After I realized tennis wasn't the only thing on the face of the planet. And I also realized I could get freaking big and strong myself. I began to transform myself into a superhuman using a lot of these techniques. So for example, I started bodybuilding. You know, I went from pretty big at about 190 pounds to 250 pounds of solid muscle and 3% body fat. Like I was frickin huge.

And you feel like you did that through being turned on to science.

I used a lot of science and a lot of physiology. I was doing like back in the day, like freaking like occlusion training and complex sets and carbohydrate cycling and protein loading and salt manipulation and all these tactics not only to put on muscle really fast, but also to be able to step onto stage. And granted I was a poor college student, so I couldn't afford steroids or anything like that or fancy foods. I was drinking four of those nasty chemical filled ABB bodybuilding shakes every day. I was actually sponsored by ABB, so they'd send me 30 shakes a week and I just pound those things. Usually it was a few cans of tuna fish for dinner with a little bit of ketchup and relish and stuff like that to actually make them taste okay. Other staples were like hot dogs dipped in peanut butter. I maintained my habit that I had my first year of college of like eating a super sized Big Mac meal every day. But I started to eat fewer of the fries and kind of like ditch the bun and focus more on the protein and the meat. And I kind of switched to like this high protein, low carb, bodybuilding esque type of diet. And at the same time like I started teaching spin classes and I got my personal training certification and started personal training and I got my nutrition certification and started really geeking out on nutrition and like taking nutrition classes on the side. And I really, really took like a deep dive into both exercise and nutrition for like those next three years at University of Idaho. And in addition to that I kind of, I kind of got it like I've always been into, into like starting businesses and like saving money. Like there was, there was a tennis coaching business that I had. But even before that, you know, I would like Halloween, I would freaking like take out two pillowcases, go to every one of the biggest houses in town, Fill them up, grab two more pillowcases, and just keep going for hours every night. And then I would save all that till the summer and sell it because that was when candy was scarce. Right?

That's like so.

Right. And I would set up like neighborhood table, spread out all the candy, and it would just be under my bed until that.

You, like sell individual pieces or you'd like package them together?

Oh, I'd sell it individually. I'd sell it as like the boxes. I like collect like 12 of the king size snicker bars and you could buy all those at one once. So, you know, I had like this passion for a slight amount of entrepreneurship and I think that was influenced by my dad. Because my dad. I'll bring this full circle back into what my back into what I also was doing during college. But my dad eventually quit being a firefighter and a paramedic. Now during the time that he was a paramedic, he would actually drag me around to all these like, what do they call them? They're like medical conferences. Right. And so at a very young age, even before I got to college and started working the anatomy and physiology lab and dissecting cadavers and tearing apart cow hearts and doing all the things that I did in college, you know, I was. This is gross. But like, I go to these medical conferences and all it was was like dudes who had been like skewered by forklifts and warehouses and people who had accidentally stuck their arms and meat grinders and like people who put their seatbelts on wrong and got their like heads chopped off by their seatbelt while they were driving. Like all these things that you see. You know, I remember like a guy like tried to kill himself by shooting himself with a shotgun, but managed to just like blast his face off so he was still alive just like walking around with his face off. Like, these were the kind of conferences I'd go. It didn't turn me into like a freak of nature, like violence obsessed child as much as like kind of made me really comfortable around like blood and the human body and physiology. And you know, my dad had me at an early age get my CPR and my first aid certification. And so there was, there was some health exposure in addition to like the workout exposure early on. But he quit that job and decided he wanted to strike out on his own. And he started a non emergency medical transport service, like started his own ambulance business. And he kind of branched out from there and went into a whole bunch of Stuff. Now, his dad was also, like an entrepreneur salesman. His dad was one of Zig Ziglar's good friends. And Zig Ziglar's like this icon in sales and business. And so my grandpa, Grandpa Bill, he used to sell cookware all over back east, like this old school. Like, I think it was called, like stainless steel cookless cookware, something like that. And so I think he got a little bit of that from his dad, who was just like a complete workaholic and never home. And my dad wasn't a total workaholic, but he was into a lot of different businesses. So he went from the ambulance business into like a pager and cell phone communication business. Like one of the first people ever to be, like, selling cell phones and like, giving people cell phone packages and pager packages. And I remember, like, all of us kids growing up, like, everybody thought we were drug dealers because we all had pagers, right? And really it was just like mom telling us to pick up milk from the grocery store on our way home.

From, I'm sure in Idaho too.

Practice or whatever.

Pretty cutting edge.

Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. I remember at one point my brother got so fed up with his pager. We were driving down the road and mom, pager. He just like picked up his pager and just like threw it out the window. And that was the end of his pager. But basically, my dad started that communication service and then he branched out into restaurants. He bought like a bagel franchise. And then after that he got into coffee and he built outside our house a giant, like, building, like a nice building with like an Italian, like those espresso machines that have like the four different heads on them and like this $20,000 gourmet diedrich coffee roaster made in Sandpoint, Idaho. Like this work of art. And I would wake up in the morning and there would be giant trucks delivering burlap bags full of coffee from, like Guatemala and Costa Rica and Tanzania to our house. And my dad would be out there in the morning with this, like, smell emanating out into the countryside of, like, green coffee beans roasting. And I'd go out there, you know, as like a 14 year old kid, and I'd be knocking back espresso shots. And my dad would be like, hey, try this, try that. So, you know, from a very early age, I was sucking down coffee and tasting coffee and watching my dad grow this business. So I did get to see, growing up a little bit of entrepreneurship and also a little bit of cereal entrepreneurship, and grew up kind of Comfortable with this idea that it's okay to kind of like not necessarily fit the mold of like the 9 to 5 banker kind of job. So coming back to you asking me about what jobs I had in college, in addition to doing the personal training and nutrition coaching, which I did at two different gyms in town, so, you know, 4 or 5am Before I'd head to classes, I'd personally train clients until my first class. And then once I got out of school, around 8 or 9pm, I'd go and and train as many people as I could in the evenings. And then on the days when I wasn't personal training, I worked at a local French bakery, which worked out well because I'd like sell chocolate croissants to people in the morning and then personal train them in the evenings. It was very, very good cyclic business model, positive feedback loop. And then I also worked at a pub coffee house that my dad actually started right there in Moscow, Idaho. Still exists to this day. It's called Bootser's Coffee House. It's extremely popular. It's like Guinness beer and like people playing like Irish music and stuff like that at night. And then like coffee house by day.

Is it still your dad's old wooden.

Smoky, you know, there's like a cigar room and a humidor and like, you know, all these fancy espresso machines and you know, they still roast the coffee, but he moved the coffee roaster there. And so I worked there as well. So I was basically working as a barista. I was working at a French bakery. I'd work at the pub in the evenings. I'd work as a personal trainer both on the weekends as well as early mornings and in the evenings when I wasn't at the coffee shop. And then I also held odd jobs as like a ta. So I was a TA for the anatomy and physiology lab. I worked in the microbiology lab. Basically just watching liquid chromatography and HPLC and doing centrifuge and learning chemistry. I was kind of a workaholic in college. I don't know what the name for it is in college. Not a workaholic, but basically I was taking 24 to 28 credits a semester and working three to four jobs. And that's what I did for four years in college while I was also dabbling in a ton of different sports and kind of figuring out what it was that I wanted to do with my life.

I mean, I could totally see the threads and how they've evolved to who you are now just in terms of the focus on entrepreneurship, the physical, I love it.

Like, I, you know, I've taken the personality test and you know, I test out. I mean, you're the freaking COO of my company, you know, that's. I test out as an achiever, right? Like, I'm just like constantly wanting to make things happen for myself or for the people who I'm working with. And I'm very, very driven. It's hard for me to stay in bed in the morning. It's hard for me to go to bed at night. Granted, with everything I've studied up on sleep and circadian rhythm, I think I've gotten lucky that I'm not one of those guys who created completely destroys my body and my brain in the process of achieving. But at the same time, yeah, I mean, I don't know if part of it was not fulfilling my dream, like early on of being kind of like a pro tennis player, because even before that I was really doing a lot of things. I just like to always be learning and doing right. I don't know if part of it was the other thing that happened, and that was the fact that I decided three years into college that based on everything I learned at that point in exercise and science and anatomy and physiology and chemistry, that I wanted to be a doctor. And I wanted to specifically be in sports medicine or orthopedic surgery. And so what I did was I started to take all the pre med courses. So I took all the pre med courses. When I graduated with my bachelor's degree at the same time, I took the MCATs and I applied to like 20 different medical schools. I got accepted to four different medical schools. None of the ones that I actually like. I wanted to get accepted to like an Ivy League school, you know. And so even though I got accepted to these other medical schools, I decided to try again. I decided to get my master's degree in what was, what was basically at that point a self directed master's, meaning that I choose all the 400 and 500 level classes that I want to take and I go to my advisor and I present them and basically they approve what I've decided to study. And it was a blend of nutrition, pharmaceuticals, biomechanics, physiology, microbiology, organic chemistry. I pretty much identified every single thing that would make me a real like standout for getting into medical school and just like custom created exactly who I wanted to be a year from then. Right. So I basically, and that's exactly what I did for a year, was I continued to work in those Jobs that I was working in, but I fed through the fire hose as far as science is concerned.

And did you like the classes? Did you like what you were studying?

Sucked this stuff up. I loved it because not only had I at that point, just fallen in love with science and physiology and math and physics, and I'd realized I was actually good at it, and I like to do it. Sadly, I completely forsook any amount of, like, you know, like, I grew up, like, watercolor painting and writing fiction, and I played violin for 13 years, and I kind of just like, neglected all that for the most part during college. You know, for a little while, I had a rock band and, you know, I'd sing and play guitar, but that was about it. And I was just like, hardcore freaking, like, science and sports. All through college. I got that master's degree, and my plan was to just, like, go on and reapply to some of these medical schools that I really wanted to get into, right? Like Yale, Duke, Harvard. I was really interested in, like, the MD PhD program at UPenn. I was pretty hardcore sold on getting to the top of the academic ladder and practicing medicine. And I got offered a job from, like, a surgical sales company, a good job. Like, I saw dollar signs, like, as a poor student, and I just gotten married at that point, you know, as I had started my master's de degree, my wife Jess, and I got married.

How old are you at this point.

Right, In Moscow, Idaho. I was 21.

21?

Yeah. I just turned 21, so.

21. You finished a master's degree and you're married, right? And you're wanting to get go to MD PhD at an Ivy League school, right?

Exactly.

Not a traditional kid.

No, no, not. Not. Not traditional. No, not traditional. Kind of messed up. But I. I got offered this job, and it was, like, good money. And, dude, I saw dollar signs. Like, I was like, wow, I could not get this job, and I can go make money and maybe my wife and I could go on, like, some freaking cool vacations. Because when I met my wife, she was like, a world traveler, you know, she was like. She'd been to Italy and Africa and Spain and all these cool places that, like, I had always wanted to go. But at that point, like, I'd never really, like, done a lot of travel. I'd never really experienced culture, you know, homeschool school kid, grew up in Idaho. And so my thought pattern was, well, hell, I could, like, I could make some money. I can get a ton of experience in of all things orthopedics. And sports medicine, which is obviously going to make me more attractive to medical schools. That I'm saying, you know, I'm telling you, this is what I want to get into.

So you're still holding out the vision.

That you're going to do, make money, travel the world? Oh, totally.

This wasn't now.

Totally. Yeah. And I worked for five months, starting at the beginning of the. Well, it was more at the beginning of the spring, but through the summer. And my job consisted of going to hospitals or medical clinics and speaking with doctors about the biomechanics of knee and hip implants, or overseeing the implant of those knees and hips, those artificial knees and hips into patients during surgery. So I'd stand with a laser pointer, and they'd have the saw, and I'd have blood getting sprayed over my goggles and. And on my booties. And, you know, this is all salesmen. They had you in there doing that. That's how surgical sales work. Like, you sell the equipment, then you teach the doctor how to use it. Like, granted, like, I'm not downplaying, like, the education of the surgeon or anything like that, but when a new, like, you know, a new method of a patellar tendon replacement comes out, and there's different. There's different biomechanics, there's different pieces of equipment, there's different styles of screws that need to be installed. You're standing there, insert, basically teaching that surgeon how to utilize the equipment that your company has sold them to install. You know, whatever that $40,000 Tesla price to knee that somebody's getting put into their body that's going to last 10 years. You know, it's an interesting system. And while that certainly has some utility, I think, you know, I think the ability to replace a joint is kind of cool. Everything I experience in the modern medical system completely left a horrible taste in my mouth for modern medicine. I was interacting with, like, orthopedics docs and sports medicine physicians who hated their jobs, who were drenched in paperwork at the end of the day, who had good money and cool boats and nice homes, but seemed miserable and unable to spend a lot of time with their families. And the hospitals were just, like, horrible. Like, I was. I was pretty far down, like, the healthy nutrition road at that point. I hadn't really delved into, like, the ancestral nutrition approach. It was my wife, like, a rancher girl, who kind of turned me on to, you know, like, raw milk and, like, only eating the meat that, you know where it came from and, like, baking your own Sourdough bread, like, all that stuff. But at that point, I was into eating. I was a freaking bodybuilder, dude. Like, I was just like, you know, broccoli and chicken, right? And. And top sirloin steak with stir fry five nights a week. And, like, so I wasn't eating that much crap by that point. And I also saw, like, what these people were eating and the cafeteria food and the unhappy nurses, just, like, it wasn't a hap. Like, I wasn't happy. Like, every time I went to a hospital, I was like, when can I get the freak out of here and, like, go make an amazing meal and go work out at the gym? And, like, you know, at that point, I was getting into triathlon and go ride my bike outside and feel the wind in my hair and. And the sun in my face. And I did not like modern medicine. I didn't like where I was. I didn't like that western approach where, hey, you know, here's your implant. Here's your pills, you know, and despite the money, I really decided, like, I could not see myself in, like, five years doing that. I didn't see it sustainable at all. So at that point, not only the.

Sales, but even being a doctor, I have a whole medicine.

I moved to Post Falls, Idaho, like, an hour and a half away from Moscow. Left my wife in Moscow to go work this job. So we'd see each other on the weekends, and, you know, I should backpedal a little bit because we had, you know, what? Actually, I think maybe later on we could talk about, like, my wife and I or how we met, because there's.

Some interesting things I wanted to ask about that.

I think it's actually, I'll close the loop on this, and then we can get back to it. But basically, I quit that job. And I walked into the gym across the street from this apartment that I was renting in Liberty Lake, Washington, the Liberty Lake Athletic Club. And I slapped my resume down and asked for a job. At that point, I had a killer resume. I'd been personal training for four years. I had, like, classes, like, up the wazoo in terms of knowing every single tiny little nook and crevice of the human body. I was a certified nutritionist. I was a certified strength conditioning coach. I was a certified personal trainer. I had a ton of experience not only working with people, but at that point, I had been teaching sports classes to kids at University of Idaho for three years. I was teaching the volleyball courses at University of Idaho. I played volleyball. I played middle for the men's water polo team. I was a spinning instructor. I was a bodybuilder. I taught weightlifting classes. I did an internship at D. Duke University with Raphael, this guy who had been, like, the powerlifter who I met. He went on and got this killer job at Duke University, like the head of sports performance at Duke University. So I worked at Coach K's lab at Duke University, because when it was time for me to do my undergraduate internship when I was at University of Idaho, I called Raphael. I was like, dude, I want to come work with you. And so I trained NFL athletes and did hardcore biomechanics at Duke University during my entire internship. And at the same time, shadowed orthopedic surgeons and sports medicine docs the whole time I was down there because I was still hardcore sold on medicine. So ultimately, what I'm saying is, when I walked in that gym, it was a shoe in for me to get a job. And they actually offered me a job managing the facility, like, being the fitness manager of the whole facility, which was great for me to be able to transition into a little bit of job security from this other really cool job that was going to be my dream job that I was quitting. And I knew I didn't want to be a doctor. I knew I loved fitness. I knew I loved helping people get healthy. I knew I loved nutrition. And so I just walked into the gym and asked for a job.

Wow. And so what came of that? Like, how long did you do that? What did it turn into?

Well, you know, I was. I was married at that point. Yeah.

And actually, let's go back. I'd love to hear about how you met Jessa and how that came about.

Jessa. You know, I was not only a homeschool kid in Idaho, but I was a Christian conservative homeschool kid. And we went to, like, this reformed Baptist church in Moscow, Idaho, and there was this family that also went to that same church, and this little blonde girl with ponytails sat in front of me in second grade in Sunday school, and she had a big crush on me, and. And she just tried to talk to me, and every time, I would ignore her. I had my fantasy fiction book, and I had my computer programming stuff. I didn't care about girls that much at all in second grade. I was into what I was into. And so she wound up realizing that I was just kind of a loser when it came to the love department. Even though we kind of, like, were in the same Sunday school for a little while, my parents moved on, and they went to a different church. And we kind of like knew of each other. Like occasionally we'd be at the same watching the same basketball game across the court from each other in the bleachers, things like that. But ultimately I never really ran into her again until lifeguarding class in college. And I had to save her life as the, like, you know, like she was the drowning girl and I had to go in and save her life. And it wasn't like love at first sight. It wasn't like, oh, who's this hot girl that I get to save? She was running track for University of Idaho. And it turned out that we just, we just hung out a lot in that lifeguarding class and we started swimming together, you know, training for the 500 meter course. They got a pass in lifeguarding class. And she invited me out to a triathlon that she was going to do with her brother in law. And she came, convinced me to be like the runner on the team, which was the first time I'd ever really like been introduced to the sport of triathlon. And I was still pretty big at that point. I remember, it's like all I remember from that race was the Coeur d' Alene Triathlon. It was a 10k, the first 10k I'd ever run. And all I remember is as I was transitioning out of bodybuilding, my boobs bouncing up and down during the whole run. I'm like, this hurts. That's the one thing that was the sorest after the race was my boobs because my chest was just huge. There's pictures of me crossing the finish line. Just this big ripped dude crossing the finish line of the Coeur d' Alene Triathlon with like big pecs. And so anyways, I did the, I did the triathlon and you know, I wound up like hiking with her and I go out in runs with her where she'd just like kick my butt. And we'd go on bike rides and we'd hang out at that coffee shop that I'd work at. And her and her girlfriends would come sit at the counter at night while I was working and we'd joke and hang out and we'd go to movies together. And you know, she'd come chill at the house that I lived at with a bunch of my friends. And she was just, she was a tomboy, she was a rancher girl. You know, she grew up in a big family and you know, she wasn't really academic, she was just into sports and like some healthy, you know, hometown Holistic cooking out in the farm. And her dad ran the sheep farm out at University of Idaho. He had moved there from working out in Montana. Had a ranch out there. And, yeah, we were just like best friends for a year and a half. Just chilling together, hanging out. And I remember one specific week where I started to get attracted to her. It was really weird. It was so totally not love at first sight. I was just like, you know what? Jess is actually pretty hot. It was kind of like that kind of thing.

I gotta say, it's pretty funny. Cause she's not like. She's a noticeably beautiful woman. Yeah, she's not like.

Right, right. But it was just one of those deals where I just always thought her as my friend. Right. And so we. I remember, like, there was one week where it was kind of like a bam, bam. It was like a Friday night and Saturday night. Like, we went to a play on Friday night, and she was like, wearing this amazing skirt and blouse. It just looked really hot. And it was like, that night, I was like, wow. I could actually. I could actually, like, see this woman, like, being my partner, maybe, like, getting married or something. You know, I didn't. I didn't tell her that. But at that point, I'm like, boy, at least, you know, I should. I should maybe just, like, you know, get a little bit more romantic with her. Like, like, actually, like, I guess, like, test the waters and see if she likes me. So the next time we went to a movie and I grabbed her hand at the movie, and just, like, right away, you know, she grabs my hand and we, you know, we start, you know, you know, like the pinky lock thing, you know, just, you know, the whole, like, oh, she actually likes me type of thing. And we started making out in the movie theater. It helped that it was a horrible movie that we weren't interested in. And it was evolution, this movie, like, aliens take over the planet, but it's a horrible, horrible alien planet take over.

So is she waiting. She was just waiting for you to make the planet?

I think we were both kind of, like, waiting for each other to make the move. It was kind of like a mutual attraction that grew over time. And so, yeah, I mean, from that point on, I mean, I remember we went back to my place and we, like, made out for a couple hours. And then, like, we were just, like. We were lovers after that. And. Yeah, I mean, like. And I'll put this right out there. Like, I'll be totally honest. I, like, our relationship was really special. Like, for example, you know, Knowing that, you know, like, my kids might see this. They know my values and my beliefs. Like, we waited till after we got married to have sex. Like, we were actually really. We went about things in like a really kind of like serious, grown up way. It wasn't like a casual college, like, fling. Like, we really truly realized we wanted to marry each other. And so it was after that that I went to Duke University. I did that internship. The whole time I was doing that internship, I was saving up money. I designed a ring, like a heart shaped bezel rock ring, and had like this designer up in New York create the whole thing and like the most expensive thing I'd ever bought in my life. But I came home and again, very conservative, Christian, north Idaho upbringing. You know, I went and I went to her dad first and asked her dad if I could ask for his daughter's hand in marriage. And he was out like shooting barns, shooting birds in his barn. So he's like holding his gun as I'm sitting there asking him if I can marry his daughter. And he said, you know, he said, yeah, go for it. And so asked her to marry me. And we got married like a year later in Moscow, Idaho. And then I moved to Post Falls and started working in surgical sales.

Man, it's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing that.

Thanks.

So you guys are married. Jumping back to kind of career stuff. You guys are married, you're at the gym and what, you know, what comes of that.

So I'm the, I'm the fitness manager at the gym. And things are going really well because, like, at that point, you know, I'd kind of had like, I'd worked a lot of jobs. I knew entrepreneurship, I knew how to freaking, like, you know, sell personal training, meaning, like, I knew how to like package group personal training classes and courses. And I taught the triathlon class because I was really getting into triathlon at that point, really getting into this idea that, wow, I could take all this physiology and nutrition knowledge and use it to hack a sport where there's a high rate of attrition, meaning, like, you need to eat right and you need to move efficiently. This isn't a sport like baseball where you just gotta, like, not like, all respect to baseball, but in triathlon, like, you gotta be out there for like 10 hours, you know, 12 hours, 17 hours, moving and moving and moving. And so I really found that to be like a perfect platform to kind of like experiment with the science of the human body and physiology and nutrition. So I'm teaching triathlon classes and I'm teaching group training classes and I'm doing individual classes and because you've given up.

Bodybuilding at this point?

Yeah, I moved into triathlon at this point. Like I totally pivoted from like power sports and strength sports sports into endurance sports.

You're 21, 22.

I was about 22 at this point, end of 21, 22. And so like things went really well. Like I had, I had a lot of clients and like I was, I was working hard, right? Like the life of a personal trainer up at 4am Your first client is at 4:30 before they all go to work. You work until about 9am Things kind of settle down between 10 and noon. You're kind of like working on programs for clients. People come in about lunchtime to train during their lunch hour. You train people during their lunch hour. You have a little bit of time to work on people's programs again or to do your own workout between about two and four and then everybody finishes work and starts coming in and you do more personal training between about 4 and 9pm and then you go home and you collapse and maybe have time for a movie or something and get up the next morning at 4 and rinse, wash and repeat. So that was my life for a couple years and I absolutely loved it. Like I got to live at the gym, train, hang out with cool people, work out. And my wife was working as a, as she got her degree in interior design and graphic design and so she was working for a local magazine doing design and layout. I was working as a personal trainer. I worked my butt off and then on the weekends we'd do a little bit more partying and hanging out. And it was not a life conducive to like raising a family. But I was like, I was doing really well as a personal trainer and I was using all this knowledge and all this education that I had planned on using to be one of the best doctors in the world and was instead just like a frickin personal trainer. This tiny little town in Washington that just happened to be the town where all the rich people lived. So I developed this mentality that if somebody really wants to get a good body and brain, I'm gonna pull out all the stops, figure every single way to do that. And the people I was working with didn't care. They would do anything to get the best. Well really in this case, the best body. I wasn't too far into like the brain hacking and cognitive hacking components at that point, but I really had this mentality that hey, if Like, I'm the guy to come see if, like, you just want to optimize everything you can optimize, and you've got the money to do it, and you basically just want to. Want to, like, look good and feel good. And that was what I specialized in.

And so then how did that transition into, like, books and.

Yeah.

And online and all that? Like, what. What drew you into that? And, like, what year are we talking.

About once that I rediscovered my passion? So I graduated. It was 2005, you know, started this job. 2006, you know, working at the. At the gym, and was there for two, two and a half years, like, doing this gig. And during that time, I rediscovered my passion for writing. I began to write, like, a weekly newsletter at the gym that would go up on the wall. And it turned into more like a weekly, like. What's the word? Like, a tome where it's, like 30 pages. It's, like, supposed to be the one page on the bulletin board. And all of a sudden, I'm writing, like, these extensive newsletters at the gym. And email was kind of, like, getting to be a pretty good way of communication then. So I developed an email list and was now emailing these newsletters to people at the gym and had this whole email list saved in my own. I forget what I was using, like, Hotmail or whatever it was at the time. So I kind of had my own little list, and I just CC or BCC all these people and send out the weekly newsletter and also post it on the bulletin board. And then I wrote a book, and Jessa helped me lay out this book. It was called Shape 21. And it was, like, 21 days of how to, like, eat clean and how to exercise. And each day just told you exactly what to eat, exactly how to exercise. It was all body weight exercises and dumbbells. You could do it anytime, any place. And it was all my own special recipes. And basically, I created this book, and I created a DVD to go along with it. My mom and I went to the park, and my mom shot me doing for, like, hours and hours all these different exercises. And so we made a DVD out of that, and we packaged that inside of a book. And I had this local company in coeur d', Alene, Idaho, print off, like, 500 copies. And I got in my car and I drove them to all the local gyms and the local GNCs, and I had them stock this book. I just told them, hey, I'm going to sell this book to you for. I think it was like seven or eight bucks. And the MSRP is $17. And I forget what our split was, but basically they made a little money off of selling it. I made a little money off of them selling it. And it was horrible loss leader for me. But that was like I had made a book and I was super duper proud of that. And I remember like when I got my first check from GNC for like 30 bucks, I was like, holy cow. I just made money while I was sleeping. That was really cool. And I wrote a book myself, published it myself, printed it myself, made the DVD and it sold like, that's pretty cool. I was really proud of that. So I had this interest in writing and producing and publishing and kind of got a little bit of a flavor for that when I was still working at this Liberty Lake Athletic Club. And at the same time, one of my clients, because I had a lot of local clients there. One of my clients, Husbands, was a local sports medicine physician. He was actually the lead physician for Ironman Triathlon. So he knew of me, I knew of him, and he approached me and said, hey, I have this idea, like you're obviously doing all this personal training and you're really intentional nutrition. You obviously know biomechanics and physiology. He was aware of my training background because his wife had had me over for dinner to their house and he and I had talked quite a bit. His name was PZ Pierce. And Dr. Pierce laid out to me the idea of what if there's this one stop shop where somebody could walk in. And there are physical therapists, chiropractic docs, sports medicine physicians, personal trainer, exercise physiology lab, biomechanics lab, sports performance training facility, everything somebody would need to optimize, let's say an Ironman triathlon or a marathon or that a team would use to stay perfectly healthy during their season. And if somebody got injured, they could go in, they could meet with the doctor, they can meet with a chiropractor, they can meet with a physical therapist. Like a really kind of cool idea, like, just like this one single place that people could go to for everything they needed. And his proposal for to me was that I partner up with him and I run the entire lab component, the exercise physiology lab, with all the blood testing equipment and the masks that you wear that measure like carbohydrates and fat oxidation, the high speed video cameras that you can use for biomechanical evaluation, along with computer software to where you can digitize it and slow down someone's running gait or slow down someone's bike speed or watch someone do a barbell squat and see how their hips are moving along with, like, a training facility where you can then take them out and do very, very functional training. Like, I was very much into, like, functional movement screens. I was very much into, like, bodywork, fascia work, kind of like a really holistic approach to the human body. Because at that point, I took pride in considering myself to be a guy who you came to when you just wanted that complete body that looked good and that moved the right way. And at that point, you also wanted some of the nutrition advice, you wanted the blood tested, you wanted the physiology measured, you wanted the movement measured. So his idea was that I actually run that lab, right? Like that component, like a hybrid model of a personal training facility, like a personal training studio, with a whole bunch of really expensive laboratory equipment thrown in. So I launched that facility with him, and for the next couple of years, that's what I did was I took a lot of my clients from the athletic club, came over there and started training with me, and we partnered up with a whole bunch of local physicians and started to practice almost this exercises medicine approach where they'd send all their patients down to the facility. I'd train them, I'd work with them. They knew that we were the best of the best. We were the people to go to when nothing else was working, because we had the most expensive equipment we could test. We had me there as the knowledgeable personal trainer, slash nutritionist with all these different certifications who could, like, measure your physiology and your biomechanics. And we had PZ there who could do all your medical evaluations. And we had the chiropractic doc and the physical therapist and the massage therapist, pretty much everything these patients or these athletes needed. And so that's what I did for a couple of years. And it was extremely successful. Like, it was a really, really cool package that we put together for people, and they paid for it. And I began to kind of, kind of, I guess when you look at things from a career standpoint, just kill it in personal training, right? Like, I was, you know, I was making six plus figures a year. And at that time, like, that was a lot for a personal trainer. And I was beginning to get recognized on a national level for the work that I was doing in terms of the athletes I was working with and the results that I was getting and.

And you're drawing in a lot of national people.

Yeah, yeah. And I got nominated by a few docs to the National Strength Conditioning Association. The world's only internationally recognized certifying body for personal trainers to be. And this was in 2008, America's top personal trainer. And I got the vote and basically they nominated me as, as America's top personal trainer. And that's the award that I received. And at that point, things got a little bit crazy because I started to get all these offers to write for all these magazines and to speak at all these different fitness business conferences and to basically kind of delve into this whole business building and business advice and business consulting side of fitness that I really hadn't been involved in before. While at the same time I was running my own facility and competing as at that time, like one of the nation's top ranked Ironman triathletes. Like, I was competing as like an elite amateur Ironman triathlete. And so things got pretty busy. Things got really busy. Like, there was a series of months where it was pretty much like airplanes, get home, personal train, and I would sleep like, you know, two, four hours a night max, and just like work and work and work. So at the same time that I was doing all of that, I realized that it wasn't necessarily sustainable. And really the light bulb went on for me when I was at a fitness business conference where I was speaking. And my role there was to teach people how to do well running a brick and mortar personal training facility, how to use these advanced tactics like exercise physiology and biomechanics, what kind of physiology equipment to purchase, how to use dart fish software, how to analyze clients, how to get the most out of the people that you're training. And this guy got up after me and they called him like Mr. X or something, like mysterious Mr. X. And he was a total online personal trainer and ebook author. That's all he did, was just new media stuff. So instead of running brick and mortar gyms, like, what he did was he wrote books and he taught people using online courses how to actually get the results that they wanted. He specialized in actually helping skinny guys gain muscle. They called him the skinny Guy Savior. His name was Vince Del Monte. Since then, I've actually had him on my podcast a few times, him and his wife, and they're really cool people. But at the time, I was just blown away watching him up on stage and realizing that, wow, there are different ways to actually help people than necessarily clocking in at 4:00am and, you know, clocking out at 11:00pm and at the time, my wife was at that conference with me and she was pregnant with our boys, with our twins And I knew that at that time I was searching for some, like, I knew what I was doing wasn't sustainable. And I tried to like take on local college interns and other employees and kind of teach them to run my facility, but it never really seemed to like, it never seemed to work for me. It never seemed to kind of click and it just, it was unsustainable for me. And as this guy's up there talking, I realized, wow, I can actually create a lot of the value that I'm creating for my clients here locally, but scale it and actually take a lot of these ideas that I have and just put them online for people to use there. I could take a, a plan that I might walk a client through who's paying me a bunch of money every month to do, and I could write this thing out and just put it online for a whole bunch of people to use. As I was there at that conference, not only did I meet him, but a lot of other people who were doing things like creating videos and putting training videos online with the actual exercises rather than working one on one with clients, actually creating an online exercise video library and doing things like not podcasting, but recording audios and uploading them along with the training plans. I'm starting to realize, wow, how could I have such a savvy knowledge, I guess, of computer programming and the Internet technology and not have realized I can actually use, I can take a lot of what I'm doing and actually put it out there for the world to access. That was when the light bulb went on for me that I could actually take a lot of what I was doing and systematize it and scale it and get it out there for a lot more people than just like my tiny little training crowd in Spokane, Washington.

And so like your move into doing that full time, was it pretty fast, like as soon as you got nominated for the 2008 Personal Trainer of the Year or.

As I sat there in the conference on a little yellow legal notepad, I sketched out my first idea for a training program that was very similar to what I was already giving to some of the pro athletes I was working with and, and the high end CEOs who were out there racing. And I instead spent the next six months, I'd get home from work at 9 or 10pm and I'd sit in front of the computer until 2 or 3am and I'd program my website. I built a website to actually feature this program. I built PDFs, I developed videos, I developed audios, obviously I had a little bit of knowledge of what I was doing from having done that little shape 21 program. But I laid all this out and basically six months later put it out there as an actual program that people could go online and they could buy to learn how to. It was called the Triathlon Dominator. People could learn how to train for a triathlon in minimal time without neglecting their friends or their family or their career or their social life. And to be honest, it sold like hotcakes. People loved it. And I realized that, wow, this is sustainable. If I do this, this would allow me to stay at home with my kids, do what I love to do, which is write and help people get more fit and at the same time be there for my family, not have the exhaustion I've experienced over the past decade of just working my fingers to the bone in this brick and mortar setting and actually still create value for people. At that point, not only did I start that program, but I started one of the first ever health and fitness podcasts in itunes, which for the first couple episodes was just me with the National Journal of Strength Conditioning Research open. Basically reading that to people, telling them about the research for that day. And it was just like me, messed up hair, my old T shirt. My business at that time was called Pacific Elite Fitness. And I would just like basically make these videos for people, put them out on itunes. And it was like my first ever, like it was called an RSS feed, so I'd make this. And itunes was really finicky back then. This was like, what year is this? This is towards the end of 2008. And so, you know, it was one of the first, like, kind of like itunes podcasts in health and fitness. But I started putting that out. I started putting out like YouTube videos and was kind of figuring out ways to actually kind of like use new media to spread the word about how to, like how to optimize your body, how to train. And so that, that kind of developed for me into most of what I was doing in addition to training people online, doing consulting online. Because after my national exposure, I started to get approached by people in Florida and Australia and the uk. So I realized I can help a lot of these people out via Skype and via phone. So I just kind of transitioned my whole business. I sold all my personal training equipment at that point. I had a sister facility in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho and also facility in Spokane, Washington, like both exercise physiology, biomechanics, health based studios. And I sold all that stuff, moved all my clients onto other local personal trainers and moved in and started doing podcasting and video and audio creation and book writing and training people online pretty much full time. And doing that, along with, for the first couple years of their life, homeschool. Homeschooling My kids.

And why did you choose to homeschool your kids? Just from, like, it's what you knew, because that's what you're a big part of it.

I mean, you know, I kind of laid out my educational philosophy a little bit earlier and the. And that's something that's developed over the years, but initially I just thought that, man, if I'm going to create little like, like, honestly, like, free thinking, badass, resilient, libertarian little boys, you know, running around the forest, freaking, like, killing it, you know, what's that movie Captain America, I think is, you know, that came out, you know, where there's this guy just like, you know, taking the children's education into his own hands. Like, that was like my relatively flawed vision of how one could raise a child. And then I realized, like, I ran into a lot of other kids and, like, the whole unschooling community, and they, like, had really bad social skills and they were really good at, say, like, shoeing horses and digging ditches and like, starting fires in the woods. But there were some serious, like, interpersonal and communication skills that I saw that my kids weren't getting. And I also, because my career had developed into a career that really, like, had me and still does have me, you know, on the road 10, 20 days of the month sometimes. That's kind of unfair. If I'm trying to homeschool my kids and I'm not even there for many of the days that I'm supposed to be there, like, hunched over the kitchen table teaching them math. So that's where I decided to kind of like, do that hybrid model of outsourcing their education to some other people, you know, doing like, private schooling plus homeschooling.

So you just mentioned having to travel, like, 20 days out of the year. You know, you left the running the gym situation so you could be home more and have more flexible schedule, and then you end up traveling a lot. What's all the travel about?

Well, I speak like, that's a big part of what I do. So when I was at university or. I'm sorry, when I was at Lewis Clark State College playing tennis, I was on the speech and debate team. So I was. They're like what's called the after dinner speaker, where you get up and you Give like, this entertaining talk after these dinners, right? And also their impromptu speaker, where you walk into a room and a guy pulls out of a hat a topic, and you walk out. Usually it's like a current event, and you got five minutes to prepare, then you come back in and you give, like, this presentation on the topic. So I was doing that in college, competing on the speech and debate team, and I continued to dabble. We didn't even get into this too much, but I dabbled in summer theater and acting, and I was very, very comfortable on stage. In both high school and college, I did some of that. And so in addition to when I was traveling around teaching at these fitness business conferences, I began to start to speak on stage. Not just at those conferences, but, like, health and fitness conferences. I'd get up and talk about nutrition or fitness, et cetera. And it was really. When I published a lot of books, from the time I published shape 21, I never really stopped writing. I did the triathlon dominator plan. Sometimes I'd work with publishers and publish books. I was lucky enough in 2013 to publish a book that became a New York Times bestseller. Well, you want to all of a sudden get a whole bunch of demands for you to be all over the place speaking. You publish a book that's a New York Times bestseller. And it was at that point. Point that really, like, demands for speaking went through the roof. And so I'm traveling around all these conferences, you know, the Ancestral Health Symposium and Paleo fx, and, you know, just every health conference that's out there, you know, is wanting to bring me in and speak. And it's a. You know, I enjoy speaking, and it's a very good way to kind of, like, help to get the word out there to people about, you know, what I do and to teach them about health and fitness and nutrition concepts on a pretty big scale. And it's a way to get out of being in my underwear in front of a podcasting microphone to instead. And I am in my underwear right now, by the way, just so you know, I'm wearing them. I just have clothes on top.

I appreciate you clarifying that.

I am comfortable in my underwear. Yeah. But anyways, I started doing a lot more speaking, especially after my book was published. And that's really. I love to speak. Like, I love getting on stage and speaking, but it is tough. At the same time, I feel like, you know, it also satisfies my love for traveling the world and seeing new things and meeting new people and going out and kind of like, doing that old school equivalent of like, you know, a man or a woman going out and, like, slaying dragons and providing for the family, then coming back home and, you know, and so, you know, going off on a travel adventure to go speak is to me, like, kind of similar for me, going off for a week in the Colorado mountains and, you know, hunting elk and coming back, you know, it's just kind of. I kind of dig the experience.

So anyone that follows you knows that you're not just focused on the body, right? You really care about the mind and the spirit as well. How did that develop out of, you know, being the guy that ran the gym and being this guy super focused on the body and maybe being focused on in the technical, intellectual way. But you've really, I mean, you're super known for biohacking in a much broader sense, as well as other components of mind optimization and spirit optimization. How did that come about?

There's two things. Number one, I realized during my Ironman triathlon career. This was. This was about 2011 or so, you know, and it really was my impetus to start on that book, Beyond Training, which. Which redefine how you should actually train, taking all these elements or taking into account all these elements like nutrition and digestion and brain and hormones and all these things that a lot of hard charging exercise enthusiasts fail to pay attention to. It was my own experience with the fact that I looked really good in spandex and I was really fast on a bike and running a marathon and swimming in my wetsuit, but I wasn't healthy. I started to dabble into this world of blood and biomarkers and self quantification. And part of that was because I was speaking at all these health and fitness conferences. So I'm constantly exposed to the most cutting edge kind of like tactics for quantifying the body or biohacking. The podcast does that too. I'm constantly approached by people who are like, hey, we have this piece of technology. We're planning on releasing it in like a year. We only use you as the guinea pig to test and trial this thing out. So I was really familiar with this concept of just beginning to test and see what's going on inside my body, not just outside. You know, I was having, like, sleep issues and skin issues and, like, my cortisol was really high. And I started to realize that there's a lot more to things than just the body. And a big, big part of this also came down to the fact that many of, like, the focus issues and the distractibility issues and the sleep issues and the hormonal issues that I was experiencing were not just due to body dysfunction, but also due to a lot of the inflammation that can build up in neural tissue in the brain from improper training and from lack of sleep and from eating the wrong type of foods, right? Not doing the high protein, low carb bodybuilding diet or the high carb, low fat triathlon diet. But I began to realize that there are other things that are important for neural health, like, like healthy fats, like avocados and olive oils and sardines and walnuts and these kind of things. And so I really started to geek out on healthy, holistic, ancestral nutrition. And my wife was a huge help in that because she was a rancher girl, right? She was already into making your own fermented sourdough bread and milking goats and raising chickens for eggs and doing all these things that we do now at our home in Spokane. But ultimately part of it, the mind part of it was really making that connection between not just a holistic approach to the body, but realizing that this skull that's sitting on top of the rest of our body is kind of like the master controller. And if this is falling apart, in many cases, it's because something's going wrong up here. This is just kind of the canary in the coal mine for issues that are occurring in the control center. And so I realized that you have to do more than just take care of the body. You need to optimize the mind. And it's more than just like eating fat or getting enough sleep. You have to actually build new neurons and you have to learn new things and you have to engage in novelty and variety and challenge. I started to realize that being a complete human, a big, big part of it is challenging your brain and caring for your brain and challenging your mind and optimizing things like focus and creativity. I really started to tap more into that side of things. And in addition to that, I kind of started down the anti aging and longevity route because a large portion of the people I was working with, these are like 40 to 60 year old men and women who not just want to like, these are like hard charging high achievers who want to live a limitless life, who want to go out and do triathlons and marathons and Spartan races and CrossFit wads, and they want to figure out how to do it and still live a long time. So I started to really get into like anti aging and longevity. What makes the body actually go for a long period of Time. What's the secret to all these long living people? And sure, a big part of it really was a lot of the stuff that I already knew, right? Like you eat a lot of antioxidants from wild plants and you move and you lift and you sprint and you consume like healthy fats and you get enough sleep and you get lots of sunshine and fresh air. But I also started to delve into this concept that family and love and relationships and the belief in some kind of like a higher power, like a spiritual aspect to life were really the defining characteristics of what made a human not only live a long time, but be happy doing it. And sure, I grew up as a Christian, well, familiar with spirituality, granted. I kind of like went off the deep end for many years in college and even after college, kind of like forsaking that whole idea and kind of scoffing. Humans are pretty powerful. We train our bodies, we train our brains. Screw the whole spiritual woo woo aspect of things. But I've realized that there's actually a lot to that. Everything from positive emotions to gratitude to love to relationships to family. So it's been, well, you and I are talking right now. It's been about three years that I've really started to take a deep dive into everything from like prayer and meditation and yoga and gratitude journaling and a lot of the things that I would have kind of like laughed at and scoffed at as like whatever the ironman triathlete riding my bike down the highway or the bodybuilder as things that are things that old people do or people who aren't cool do or people who are kind of weird and edgy and like hippies living in the forest do. And I've realized that's the stuff that not only puts the icing on the cake, but it kind of is the cake, right? Like having a six pack abs or increasing your iq. That's the icing, right? The cake is the spirit, the cake is the soul. And so really like that's a big, big part of my goal now is I don't want to just help people have. Like what I started off doing was helping soccer moms look good in bikinis, right? Like that was what I was doing in college was just like personal training in a very, very traditional way, you know. And then I got into biohacking and optimizing cognitive performance and neurofeedback and all these things that can help to optimize the brain. For me, it started with sports performance, it kind of turned into, wow, this makes me like A more productive CEO. It makes me into a more productive author. It helps me to get rid of jet lag. But really, I mean, the key to everything is strong spiritual health. Because, I mean, like, all of that is for naught if your soul sucks, right? Like, if your spirit isn't fostered or cared for, if your love and your relationships and your family quality are dwindling. And so really, that's how that all kind of evolved was it started with a keen interest in health and the body. And then I realized, like, you got to take care of the control center. And then I realized that, really, it's the invisible that counts even more. And it's what science has shown us ultimately results in lasting happiness and longevity. So, I mean, like, you know, and now I'm, like, beginning to learn about, like, tai chi and qi gong and how people have known this stuff for thousands of years. But I had no clue how powerful all these invisible energies are, how powerful the spiritual side of things is when it comes to making all this work that people do on their bodies and their brains actually mean something. And now that I'm starting to realize complete optimization of the body and the mind and the spirit, things are just clicking. All of a sudden. I'm like, holy cow. I'm. I'm 35 years old right now. And it's right now that I'm realizing, wow, this is what it feels like to be a completely optimized human. Like, this is what it feels like when your body is working right and your mind is working right and your spirit is optimized, and you wake up happy and fulfilled. You put all these pieces together, and it's just like. It's magical. It's almost unfair how good you can feel when you optimize to body, mind, and spirit. And that's where I'm at. From playing the tennis in my backyard outside the hills in Idaho, to decide not to be a computer programmer and going on and doing the personal training and playing tennis in college, to deciding not to be a doctor and going on and doing that brief stint in surgical sales and getting into being a fitness manager, to moving on launching my own gyms and personal training studios, to then getting into new media and speaking and writing and online consulting. All the stuff that I kind of do now, I've realized that ultimately the message I want to bring to the world is that, hey, you can optimize your body, your mind, and your spirit. You can do it all. And so that's Kion, man. That's what I've created is that this whole concept of Ki, like getting your Ki on, like optimizing your Ki, like feeling that life force, that energy, that chakra, that prana, the chi, the Ki, whatever you want to call it, like, you know, when you've optimized your mind and your body and your spirit, it's a really cool feeling. And now my sole purpose in life, my calling in life is to bring that to the world. That's what I want to do.

So talk more about that. What's the vision for Kiyan moving forward?

Forward to. Okay, so this is my job now is pretty fun. I want to hunt down the best experts on the face of the planet and get into their brains and basically take everything that they know and bring that to the world in kind of like an edutainment sort of way, in an entertaining and educational way. And I also want to hunt down the best products, the best solutions, the best superfoods, the best nutrients, the best herbs on the face of the the planet and bring those to people as ways to take what those experts have proven to actually work and make those accessible to everybody. Basically be like that one stop shop for optimizing mind, body and spirit. I mean that's what I want to do with my life, is make all this happen for as many people as possible. Help other people to experience what I've experienced and what I'm seeing people who have actually discovered that the key actually get into. So that's the goal. And granted I've gotten back into writing fiction. Right now I'm just putting the finishing touches on my very first ever work of fiction that's actually done done that isn't like the 12 year old Ben unrefined work of fiction, but it's actually a full on fantasy fiction novel. And I'm getting back into singing and songwriting and ukulele and guitar. And a big part of this has come from my realization that hey, you can optimize body and mind and spirit all at once. Like I don't have to wait till I'm 70 years old to be like whatever doing watercolor paintings or making music or traveling the world or writing books that maybe aren't about physiology. But you know, my ultimate dream, man, is I want to foster what it is that I love to do when I was 6 and 7 and 8 years old, which is to read and to write and to teach and to make art and to play music and you know, to tap into that love for like fiction and fanishing and storytelling and at the same time I Want to find the coolest stuff on the face of the planet that optimizes body, mind and spirit and bring it to people right here and basically make getkion.com the place that people go to when they want to feel like a complete human being.

Can you share more about how coaching and the coaching program fits into all this?

I can't do that all myself. I really can't. I've realized that I made this mistake early on. Like I mentioned, I was running some really cool personal training studios and gyms, but I never really kind of built that army of personal trainers who could do what I was doing so I could help more people. And so part of Kion is I am mentoring personal trainers, coaches, physicians, chiropractic docs, physical therapists, people who want to learn these same concepts of optimizing mind, body and spirit and teach them how to interview experts and how to get inside their minds, how to find cool products and develop cool products, how to create amazing content that helps people, how to work with their individual clients to optimize not just their body, not just their mind, not just their spirit, but all three. And so a big, big part of Kion is actually creating that platform of education. So I'm working really hard every day on creating curriculums for coaches to be able to basically allow people to be mentored by me and to learn what I'm learning, what I have learned over the past couple of decades, so that they can basically also help people to achieve key. Achieve that total optimization of mind, body, and spirit. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound like full hubris or narcissistic, but I kind of want to create almost this army of mini mes who are kind of like, who are doing what I am doing and hopefully doing it even better than I'm doing it.

So I can personally attest to having worked with you closely, your intention to be fully optimized and to bring this to other people. And I don't mean to go on a superficial point, but a way that it shows is how productive you are. It's insane, man. I've never met anyone like.

Like you.

How do you, like, I've asked you, what are the little tactics? But I gotta ask you, for everyone else that's watching, like, how does it work, man?

It comes down to habits, and it comes down to almost like, this sounds bad, but almost like selfish habits, right? So I get up earlier than I typically want to get up. I do optimize sleep, so I don't watch tv. I Rarely watch movies. And I'm in bed by sometime between 9 and 10pm because I've realized that not a lot of productivity happens after about 9pm After 9pm it starts to get kind of Facebooky, Instagram, y, Snapchatty, what's on Hulu, kind of like that's where I start to go. So I've just realized that, hey, if I play my kids a song on the guitar and read them a book and have some good family time and we go through our gratitude journals and then when the kids go to bed, you know, sometimes like mom and I will make love or hang out or have a chat, but then I'm usually snoring by 10. And so I'll get up at an hour. That allows me to have some me time and to get momentum for the day, but to take care of my body because frankly, if you feel like crap the rest of the day, you're not very productive. You aren't thinking clearly enough to actually create something like compelling content or a podcast or to sit down with an expert and really get into their mind and, and do a good interview, those kind of things. So basically I get up and I have like a breathing routine that I go through. I do gratitude journaling, I do some stretching. I'll like hit any sore spots with a foam roller to kind of keep my body supple. I'll make like some coffee and sometimes put like some medicinal mushrooms or something like that in it. And I have like a good hour where I'm just kind of like optimizing my body and preparing. It sounds like it would be unproductive to like waste that hour for the day, but it gives me such a surge of energy that once I finish that morning routine, once I finish all the morning habits. And I know that, you know, like on our Kion website we've got like, you know, books that delve into what my exact habits are. But I can't emphasize enough the importance of having a habit and a daily routine that travels with me all over the globe, anywhere I go. I mean, like, you know, I've stayed at your house before. You've seen me in my underwear in your living room in the morning, like doing my yoga with my morning motivation on and my coffee's brewing. And I carry that momentum anywhere I go in the world. So if I'm in freaking, whatever, London getting ready for a day at a conference, I have that morning routine and I can rely upon that anywhere I go. And it allows me to be hyper productive just about anywhere. So that's one of my keys, is you start the day by giving yourself massive amounts of momentum with some kind of routine in the morning that doesn't involve emails or Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. Like, it's just taking care of the body. The other thing is that I have for each day, specifically planned out activities for that day that I know I'm going to do. Like, if somebody says, hey, you know you're going to shoot a video, I know that Tuesdays are the day I'm going to shoot a video. I know that Friday instead of Saturday and Sunday are days that I work really hard in the mornings on my fiction book. I know that Wednesday is a big podcasting day for me. I've categorized and chunked a lot of the tasks that I do into buckets. So I don't have a lot of shiny pennies for that day. I don't have a lot of things that say, okay, here's this. The way I used to operate was I would have a long list of tasks that I want to accomplish for the day. Not for the day, but just like, a long list of tasks I want to accomplish, period. I just checked them all off. And when I was exhausted at the very end of the day, whatever I hadn't checked off yet just kind of got moved into the checklist for the next day. And the checklist continued to build. And now I have, like, certain days where there are certain activities, and that kind of helps me to chunk the day and categorize the day. I can look at my schedule for that day, and I just use, like, a Google Calendar to kind of keep track of my schedule and allow others to see my schedule. And basically what that allows me to do is look at the calendar for that day and know exactly what the things are I need to accomplish without anything else distracting me, because anything else has been put into its respective category for the day. So that's another thing that I do is I kind of, like, chunk or put things in almost like buckets. So if someone says, whatever, hey, you need to write an article for Men's Health magazine, I don't drop everything and add that to the checklist and start to skeleton that article. I know, okay, Thursday is the day I do a lot of freelancing. So this goes into Thursday's bucket. So it helps me keep a clear mind. That's a big, big part of things is not having a whole bunch of tasks jumbling around inside your head, but everything goes into an Evernote document for each day. And then Also a Google Calendar for each day. So every single day I know exactly what it is when I wake up, what it is that I need to accomplish for that day. Another thing that I do is like, I do a lot of multitasking, right? Like, I know there's this idea that task switching decreases the quality of that task or your ability to be able to achieve that task quickly, et cetera. Like, you know, every time you switch between tasks, it takes you like 15 seconds to get back to the next task. And I'm not a fan of like, you know, whatever listening to a podcast and writing an article and having a Skype conversation via chat with a client at the same time. But for example, if I've got a bunch of, let's say, high level phone calls, everybody's like, I need to talk to you about this, I need to talk to you about that. I'll just chunk all those for a Sunday morning and then I'll go out and I'll put £50 in a backpack and put my cell phone on and head out on the roads or the trails and start making those phone calls as I'm moving, like as I'm working out. That's the same reason I have a standing treadmill workstation at my desk. So I get the majority of my obstacle course, race training and run training done while I'm just walking five to seven miles a day at a low level pace, just getting work done at my desk. And so I do a lot of that kind of multitasking. I'll do business meetings where I'll invite guys out to a sauna, just sweat and do cold thermogenesis instead of the traditional sit and have lunch. I mean, like, you know, again, like, I've hung out with you and you've seen me, like lunch and breakfast are kind of like afterthoughts for me. It's kind of like, you know, like that for like, don't get me wrong, I'm all about like chewing your food and mindful eating. But I'm not one of those guys who does a lot of like big long lunch meetings or like drawn out breakfast. For me, it's just like, you know, eat, enjoy the food, make sure you chew it enough, you know, don't eat, stressed. But at the same time, I don't spend a lot of time on meals and stuff like that. Usually dinners are more social for me. When I'm traveling, that's when I get a lot of meetings done. Or when I'm at home, that's when I'm spending a lot of time with the family. But that's another one is I really have specific habits set up throughout the day where I'm not spending a lot of time on meals. I know exactly what I'm going to do. I also don't allow myself to get distracted. If you look up my phone, there's no push notifications. Everything where somebody might be able to bug me on my computer while I'm working is off. So when I finish my morning routine and I launch into my day, unless someone has contacted me who I know I need to hear from, like you, like you're my coo, when I see something come through from you, it's like, oh, I should probably look at this just in case there's not a fire that needs to be put out. But other than that there is nothing. Like I'm a horse with blinders on for like, you know, a good four hours at least in the morning after I finish that morning routine where I'm just getting stuff done. And I know that the morning is when I'm most productive. So that's when I. Some people are more productive in the afternoon. Some people are more productive between like you know, one and freaking 5am but for me it's that morning time. So I just, I get down and do it and I try not to let anything distract me. And frankly, a big part of it, like this might sound like a cop out answer, but it's like discipline and habit. It's not getting distracted by pop culture and push notifications and big long drawn out lunches and coffee meetings. It's about just figuring out what's the most important thing to accomplish that's going to achieve the most meaningful change that you want to achieve in the world. And focusing hardcore on that again, like a horse with blinders, like a frickin like rabied bulldog with that thing clutched between your teeth and you just go at it until it's done. That's my method.

So growing up a homeschooled conservative Christian kid in Idaho, how did you end up with a company named Keon?

Well, I know that Key has this like whole Eastern mysticist feel to it, but I mean like Key is, you know, it's the life force in Star Wars. It's like, it's chakra and street fighter, it's prana in a lot of like eastern cultures. It's, it's the chi that moves through your body and acupuncture treatments. But I grew up very familiar with the concept as a Christian of the Holy Spirit, right? Like, this fact that there's like this invisible energy inside us and if we tend it and we care for actually increases our. Increases not just our happiness, but also like our meaning and fulfillment and direction as a human being. Like, the ability to not just be aware of, like, the fact that we are spirits, like we are souls, we, to a great extent, we're invisible beings. Like, you know, I mean, you look at, like, Christianity where I grew up. I mean, you believe that you go to heaven when you die, not that you're just like flesh and blood and sinews that gets buried in the dirt and then your bones degrade and that's just it, you're gone. Or maybe you wind up as a beetle in the afterlife or whatever. Like, I've always been comfortable with the notion that there is an invisible me, right? Like, that I do have a soul and a spirit and this invisible energy and life force flowing through me. But it wasn't until I realized that freaking, like Chinese medicine, a lot of these, I guess, relatively Eastern practices of optimizing that flow, that energy, they to a certain extent have figured out a lot that I think we in Western culture have kind of forsaken for more of a body focus or a brain focus or a more carnal focus. And so, again, paying attention to things like positive emotions, like peace and love and joy and how that made me feel and how that made me perform and how that influenced my happiness and the way that I wake up each morning and paying attention to the way that different sound frequencies of music make me feel, and getting acupuncture treatments and seeing injuries just vanish from needles, hitting points where there's like invisible energy flowing through the body. I've realized as I become more open to these ideas that not only are they incredibly important, but they're game changers. I mean, they really can provide you with kind of like the ultimate meaning in life when it comes to things that go way above and beyond. Just like your own flesh and your sinews and your blood and your cells. There's so much more to life than that. There's so much more meaning than that. And I mean, this whole concept of ki, of life force, of spirit, of energy, of this invisible flow throughout the body, it's life changing. If people are watching this or if they're listening to it and they still kind of scoff at the whole spiritual concept because they think it's woo or whatever. I challenge you. Just go and meditate for 20 minutes or take a Kundalini yoga class. Or go like, you know, like learn to play a musical instrument or just go listen to someone play a musical instrument and close your eyes or be silent. Start to feel that energy flow. There's so many resources that we now have on Keon that help people tap into that. But I mean, for me and for so many people I know, that's what's changed our lives and our happiness and our view of the world and our meaning.

And as succinct as you can be, how does Kion help people optimize?

Their key part of it is education, because I don't define key as just like having a strong spirit, because who cares if. Well, I shouldn't say it because it sounds harsh, but I mean, if you've got an optimized spirit. But let's say you're like, whatever, you're like a really spiritually healthy, like, I don't know, like a youth pastor or a yogi or something like that. But you're like morbidly obese eating Cheetos and your brain fails by about 2pm in the afternoon and you're preparing your body to like die of type 2 diabetes when you're 55 years old. How much are you living up to your calling in life or your true capacity? And how much are you wasting your potential or squandering what you've been blessed with as far as the gift that you can give to the world? Right? So it's not just about like woo woo spirituality. The idea is that when you come to key, I want you to be able to get educated on every single cutting edge strategy that exists, both ancestral and modern, for how to get a good body that performs the way that it's supposed to in terms of performance and digestion and recovery and fat loss and brain and sleep and hormone optimization. I want you to be able to build a mind that really, truly operates like the supercomputer that it is, right? Being able to learn new skills, being able to think laterally, being able to engage in novelty and variety and challenge and actually not get stuck in a rut from a mental standpoint. And of course, as we've already talked about, I want you to learn how to optimize yourself spiritually. And the vision for Kion is to educate people on exactly how they can do that. But then of course, there are plenty of solutions from modern science. Solutions, biohacks like neurofeedback and photobiomodulation and transcranial direct stimulation and electrical muscle stimulation and freaking like portable exercise equipment like suspension Straps and things that help you train isometrically and blood flow restriction devices. All these cool things that you can use as products and solutions that would be considered modern. There are also ancestral things. There's ayurvedic herbs and there are essential oils, and there are minerals, and there are all sorts of things that we can get as natural goodness from the planet Earth that also helped us to optimize both our bodies and our minds. And there are even things for your spirit. Take something as simple as a gratitude journal or a yoga mat that you can meditate on. Let's face it, in many cases, you're going to achieve mind, body and spirit optimization far more fully if you have access to solutions and products. And so my goal is to identify the best ones and to make those available for people right here on Kion. And then the final component, in addition to education, in addition to products and solutions, is sometimes you need an expert to help you or to help a group of your friends or to help a group that you've joined, like the Kion inner circle, actually navigate through the complexities, answer your questions, design programs for you, help you figure out, you know, not only what to eat, but whether or not what you're eating is compatible with your blood and your saliva and your stool and your biomarkers and basically provide that direction for you. You know, I don't know about you, but when it comes to, like accountability, having someone there who can train, who can coach, who can consult with is incredibly important. And so that's kind of like the third piece is not just providing people with the coaching and with the consulting that they can take advantage of to for that optimization of key, but also taking coaches and training them to be the best that they can be to help people actually get that. And so big picture is it's edutainment, it's solutions and products, and it's coaching and consulting. And when you put all that together, I mean, that's Keon.com that's the change that I want to bring to the world. And I'm freaking having the time of my life doing it. Like, I love this stuff. Like, I wake up every morning just super excited to make this happen for as many people as possible and really to become a globally recognized solution for total optimization of mind, body and spirit.

Well, Ben, I can tell you, man, I'm so grateful to get to be part of this with you and the mission to really help people optimize, not just body, not just mind, not just spirit, but all of it together in one community in one place. It's amazing the vision that you've got and what you put together here, and I'm just psyched to be part of it with you, man.

Well, if you're that psyched, will you beatbox us out?

Oh, dude, of course. What should it be? Should it be?

I'm gonna say you make up the theme music, and I'll just play along. Go for it. Here we go. Hit it. There we go, bro.

Yeah.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. Go to bed. Greenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice. Sa.