Biohacked Superfood Smoothies, Healing Wounds Faster, Advanced Hypoxic Training Tactics, Hormesis & More With Kyle Kingsbury.

Hey, folks, this is Ben Greenfield, and my guest on today's show is a beast, Kyle Kingsbury. He's a former football player at Arizona State University, a mixed martial artist who fought professionally for eight years, six years of that being in the ufc. And he came up to my house. We spent some time in my backyard recording this a few weeks ago. Actually, Kyle's a pretty entertaining guy. And in the show notes, I'm gonna put a pretty entertaining video. Do you like how I said that? Pretty entertaining. I'm gonna put a very entertaining of Kyle up to a whole bunch of biohacking goodness, along with the healthy morning smoothie that Kyle and I made together. A big ass smoothie. So the show notes are full of goodness and you can access them over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle so you're gonna hear this one from my backyard in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

If you don't have an off switch, if you don't even just five, 10 minutes, if you don't turn your brain off, you're just going to be running that system into the ground. It'd be the equivalent of trying to work out all day long. You're never really going to get a lot out of your workout. You can't hit a maximal effort if you're just constantly moving. And it's the same thing with the brain. There are foods on this planet that are so good for you that you really shouldn't be looking at the macros with. And if it means going over 50 grams of carbs, who cares, you know? So one of those being sprouted seeds, sprouted pumpkin, sprouted sunflower seeds.

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On the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. So, Kyle, you're picking little cacao nibs out of your teeth there. How is it?

I'm still working them out. Quite delicious.

Did you like my morning smoothie?

I like how I can taste all the different flavors. It's truly a symphony in my mouth.

That's complex. You should be a MasterChef judge. You know, a lot of folks who I have over to my home, who I feed my morning smoothie to, they tend to. Tend to kind of make a frowny face and then one edge of their mouth goes up a little bit, and then they ask me if I have any scrambled eggs or bacon. And apparently they don't like the medicinal taste of my morning smoothie. But I absolutely love it when you shove it.

I'm not sure they understand how good cinnamon is, how good turmeric is, how good cacao is.

Yeah, we shot a whole video of. Well, this morning's smoothie was ice and lemon at the bottom because the coolness from the ice and the ascorbic acid from the lemon helps to prevent oxidation of all the other relatively expensive things that we proceeded to place into the. Into the smoothie, we added a whole box of Kettle and Fire organic bone broth. We added some organic wild arugula, Ceylon cinnamon to lower that postprandial blood glucose response, even though there really aren't a lot of carbohydrates in my morning smoothie, we added a little bit of hemp pea rice, vanilla flavored protein powder and some butterscotch organic stevia, and then a whole bunch of organic cacao powder. And then we blended that all up over the ice and we. Then we broke up a nature bite bar and we put one of the Greenfield fitness Systems nature bite bars in there and we put a nootropic energy bar that the folks at Trubrain sent to me. We crumbled that up and put that in there. A whole bunch of organic unsweetened coconut flakes. And by the way, all these other things are after we blend, right, Kyle?

That's right.

We can get the chewableness, get a little chewable and clustered sea salts, a little Aztec sea salts. And what else do we do? I said cacao nibs. Yeah, cacao nibs. And that was it. And each of us got our own blender bowl because it's so big. You get your. It's one of those smoothies where you get your giant cup, my Teddy Roosevelt man in the arena cup, and then you get whatever's left over in the blender bowl with the spatula. It's a man's man drink.

Well, it's nice, too. It's like when you go to Johnny Rockets or one of these places as a kid and they always give you the little extra ice cream from the milkshake. You want to have that feeling whenever.

I go anywhere and I have them make me a smoothie. I always lean over the counter and I wash them. And I see just as they're about to throw that wonderful blended smoothie into the trash, which is what they do, you know, they just rinse it out and toss it. I tell them, hey, why don't you grab an extra cup and pop some of that goodness in there. I'll take that off your hands for you.

Let me get both.

Yeah. So I've had Kyle, for those of you listening in, who I'll introduce here in a moment over at my house, the past couple of days, we've also been throwing out some workouts. How'd you like this morning's workout, Kyle?

Well, it started a little rough, but you scaled it down for me, thankfully. And it was phenomenal. It was good. It was a good pace of jack, the heart rate up, get the body moving and then kind of tone it down, control the breath. You know, when we're doing some of the other exercises towards the end of the rounds, like the, the glute ham activation.

Yeah, that's, that's something I've been doing a lot like morning. So I'll work out hard one day, but then the next day I'll do something that's a little bit more morning mobility. It's like yesterday we tackled the obstacle course, right. So both of our legs are bleeding. We were climbing the. Climbing the vertical ropes, the 30 foot.

Vertical ropes, some nice rope burn from.

The horizontal climbs and the log crawl and the bucket carry and the keg carry and the tire flip and the.

Rig, the barbed wire crawl.

Yeah. But then this morning, you know, it's basically like some, some easier, lighter kettlebell get ups, some rollouts with like an ab wheel, goblet squats, but not like incredibly heavy, more, more like range of motion goblet squats. We did. What else were we doing?

We just did that little plank exercise you did where you supersetted with the ab rollout was phenomenal.

Yeah, that's a really good morning mobility exercise. What you do for those of you listening in. Oh, and by the way, justjust so I don't leave this too far in the background for you, that smoothie that we talked about, we video recorded the whole thing. And you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle, that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com kyle as in Kyle Kingsbury, K Y L E. If you want to watch the smoothie, goodness ensue as well as any of these exercises or anything else we talk about. But this plank exercise, I really like it for your pelvic joint and your pelvic mobility. You just get into a plank position and you take your asis, that hard bone on either side of your hips, and you rotate your asis until you and then drop it down to the ground until you get it to touch the ground, and then you rotate back the other direction and you do it in the other direction.

I could feel that opening up the psoas. Yeah, it felt really good.

Yeah, exactly. So our soasses are nice and open for this morning's show. Who is Kyle Kingsbury? Who are you, Kyle? Former football player, Arizona State, right? Yep. What position?

Defensive end. A defensive tackle. I was too small to be a good D tackle and too slow to be a good defensive end.

Nice. I like it. But you were good enough to be an MMA artist. You fought professionally for. For a while after that.

Yeah. Eight years professional, six years in the ufc.

And I only know this because we went down to the rope swing at the Spokane river, and we were getting ready to jump off the rope swing, and someone's like, Kyle Kingsburg, UFC fighter, all the bandits.

Kyle Kingsbury.

Yeah. All the kids are coming over wanting to pose for shots with Kyle while the rest of us slunk into the backgrounds and played on the rope swings as Kyle.

Well, they recognized you because the way you were talking into the camera, they were like, oh, I think he's a YouTuber. I've seen them YouTubers before. Yeah, so that was nice.

See, I was a random YouTuber, but they actually recognized you. Anyways, though, for those of you listening in, Kyle knows a lot. Actually, we've had a chance to touch on a lot, from longevity to plant based medicine, to a lot of these workouts, to, you know, family and kids and beyond. And so there's plenty that we could talk about today and plenty that I've heard you talk about as well. So rough to actually know where to start. But you told me about a few things that you were interested in discussing, and so I've got a whole list in front of me. One of the first things that you told me, and this might sound completely random, is that you've been into. Really? I asked you how you were working out these days, and you talk about how you're trying to utilize the hormetic effects of certain activities to enhance your fitness rather than just like crushing it with hard workouts. Really, really focusing more on hormetic stressors. So tell me a little bit about that and how you're utilizing hormetic stressors.

Well, I started, I mean, I guess the concept would be I had to bust my ass for so many years in fighting. It was kind of like, how can I. What are the cheat codes I can enter into? Create some type of systemic response where my body's going to respond and really think of things ancestrally like, all right, if we don't have air conditioning in our cars, air conditioning in our homes and things like that, like, how would we live? What are the, what are the types of stress that we'd, our body would encounter? And I live in Las Vegas now, so it gets pretty hot. And so I was, I was telling you about the poor man's sauna, the poor man's heat shock protein guide that I'm doing where I get a sauna suit like you would cut weight in before, before a fight or something like that. And I'll throw this guy on with some sweats underneath, get the headphones going and I just go for a nose breathing walk. So I try to time that in the middle of the day after a heavy powerlifting session.

Are you talking about like one of these sauna seats you can just like buy off Amazon?

Yeah, 30 bucks.

Like a giant, giant wrap of aluminum foil around?

Yeah, pretty much. So I'll throw on, you know, some sweats, a few layers underneath. That way I have something to sweat into. And then I'll throw that on over the top top and it'll be, you know, 105 to 115 depending on when I'm going out in the day. And I'll really focus on nose breathing the entire time. And you know, I was doing this in April when we first moved out there and it was pretty nice weather, you know, high 70s, low 80s, so nothing too, too, too hard on the body. But I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get through this, this hundred degrees that was coming over the summer. And it's amazing how fast the body adapts and responds when you put it through things like this because just in a matter of weeks it jumped into the hundreds and I'm able to continue to do this.

So really I used to do this when I trained for Ironman Hawaii. What I would do is in the summer I just wouldn't use my AC at all. I'd drive around with my windows up and purposefully get the car as hot as possible and just choose the middle of the afternoon to go run errands. And I would get home just drenched in store sweat. Poor man's sauna. But it worked. You don't have to actually go buy a spa membership or buy some fancy infrared sauna for your basement, which is nice.

I will be getting that.

We have been spending a lot of time in my infrared sauna, by the way. For those of you listening in. What was that first session that we did? We slept like babies the first night. We just put on the sauna, put a bunch of blue spruce essential oil in there. We played Michael Tyrell's Love Life and Lullabies Tracks, which are like these beats that are specifically designed. I've had this guy on my podcast specifically designed to produce certain frequencies of relaxation. And then we went from there to a quick dip in the cold pool to finish up in the hot tub. Anything like that in the evening. Dude, it just. Just knocks you out. But I like this idea of a sauna suit in the afternoon. And then you do like deep nasal breathing or some. Some kind of hypoxia as you're doing that.

Yeah, I'll do. I'll do the deep nasal breathing. I've been combining my altitude work with strength training to where I'll either wear, you know, I have a Hypoxico altitude simulator. So I'll wear that while doing strength training, or if I'm really gonna push myself and I need maximum effort, I know I'm not gonna get that at 12,500ft elevation. So I'll lift at regular oxygen. And then in between sets or after my lifting session, I'll do six minutes on, four minutes off with just breathing, you know, nasal breathing into the oxygen or low oxygen machine.

So this hypoxia is. Or hypoxia. Hypoxico. It's not like, for those of you listening in, like a training mask, which is just something that creates a breath resistance to strengthen, for example, your inspiratory and your expiratory muscles. The Hypoxico actually strips oxygen out of the air and causes you to need to be or simulates 18,000, 20,000ft, whatever you put it at, and you're not exercising with that, you're just sitting there, like reading a magazine or whatever.

Yeah, I'll do both. So sometimes I know if I'm doing a higher rep range, I can get away with it. So if I have lower weight, like, and this is, you know, everything's relative. So lower weight for me on squat will be back. Squat would be like 315 or 365. If I'm hitting anything in the 5 to 8 rep range, I know I can get away with that at altitude. Whereas if I want to get into some, you know, really heavy, you know, triples and doubles and singles and things like that, I'll want to do that without the mask. And then go ahead and use the mask afterwards to go ahead and get into that.

The Hypoxico mask, correct?

Yeah. Okay, so I'll turn the machine off.

Is it attached to, like, a long tube? So you're walking around, like, with the tube attached to the unit?

And I have. I have a home box set up from Rogue, so I can get that going in my house. It's kind of a pain in the ass to lug that thing around. I used to take that.

What do you mean, a home box setup?

Well, you know, you just go on a website, you order a squat rack, you get your weights, your kettlebells, that kind of stuff. I've got £320 in bumper plates and other two and a quarter in iron, so I can go up to 560 pounds, you know, which would be pretty much a PR deadlift for me. There's. I'm not really gonna tap. Tap myself out like that with an altitude machine going at the same time, but that's where I'm kind of playing with the differences. You know, when I need to go really hard, I'll do that without the mask and just use the altitude simulator afterwards so I can still get that response.

And you find you're still able to lift pretty well with a mask attached to your face and then a tube.

On the higher reps. It's not a problem. And these are things. It's not dynamic. You know, powerlifting is squat bench and deadlift. So it's really not getting.

Yeah, I guess you're not really doing, like, burpees or something like that.

Yeah, I couldn't do barbell snatch with that thing in the way or anything like that.

And this is a little bit different than the unit that you and I worked out on yesterday. We hit the paddle board in the Spokane river, and then we came back, and we were going to a party last night, and we actually wanted to kind of wake our brains up. And this is actually a tactic you can use as, like, a cup of coffee for the brain with no actual stimulants, and it's hyperoxia. This isso the hypoxico that you were just talking about, Kyle, that will simulate altitude. I actually have one of those in the treadmill. So I have an incline treadmill in my garage. When I'm getting ready for the last couple of months before I'm getting ready for the Tahoe World Championships for Spartan this year, I'll walk on that treadmill at about a 40% incline with a hypoxical mask set on a relatively high altitude. So you're walking with the mask on. But last night what we're using was this different unit, and this is a relatively new kind of addition to my home protocol. It's called a live O2. And you got to experience this, Kyle. But what it does is it allows you to restrict oxygen. Right. So, for example, what we did yesterday was you warm up for about six to eight minutes with restricted oxygen and then you flip it from hypoxia into hyperoxia and you'll do like a 15 second sprint with hypoxia and then a 15 second sprint with hyperoxia. It feels pretty cool when that full blast of oxygen hits your face, though.

I wasn't sure. I saw this thing at Paleo FX with you and having it here, I was like, I'll definitely give it a try now. And I thought you were going to put me through a torture. Another torture technique like when we were doing your Spartan obstacle course. Yeah. I thought I was going to get waxed before we went out drinking and having wine and things like that. So I really wanted to take it easy, but I thought I'd at least give it a shot. And that first breath of hyperoxia goes in through the nose and you feel it through your entire body immediately. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, 15 seconds, sprint as hard as you can in hypoxia and you feel like you can't go another second, flip the switch and then you can go that last 15 as hard as you can.

It's amazing. It's like lifeblood hits your face. Yeah. So for any of you who haven't tried this before, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But it's called a live O2 machine. It's not cheap. It's like a five, six thousand dollars thing that you saw. It's right there in the office next to us. Because by the way, if you guys haven't guessed yet, we're outdoors. If you haven't heard the birds singing out in my patio podcasting right now. But this live O2 is in my office and it's this giant bag. Right. So we flipped it on like an hour before we got in. So the whole bag sucks all the oxygen out of the atmosphere in the room, concentrates the oxygen, then you just breathe pure oxygen Whenever you hit the plus button on the little remote that you hold while you're doing the workout.

I want to comment on that. The cost. So when I was, I read Beyond Training. It's a phenomenal book. One of my favorites. Yeah, when I. You wrote that book. So I was reading the Amazon reviews, there were some one star reviews. And you know why? It was the recommendation of very expensive tools like, like a Hypoxico or a LiveO2 machine. And the thing is I like, I look at you as like my consumer report for, for body enhancing electronics. Right, right. And there are tools that you can do without any of this stuff. Like you reviewed the Oxygen Advantage phenomenal book. They talk about breath holds, things like that, that'll improve CO2 retention and things like that. So you're still going to train some of the same responses without having to spend a penny. And it's important to have all these different avenues that you can trickle in. So if you don't have these machines, you can still get these effects for the body.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, part of it too is, and you've been out here, it's not about just having fancy electronic equipment that you hook yourself up to and exercise with to cheat yourself out of ever having to put in the hard work. Right. Like I'm a big fan of putting the hard work into the body and then using a lot of this stuff as icing on the cake or as a way to engage in better living through science, to feel better or to enhance oxygen delivery or to improve longevity. But I mean, you, you see it, you see how it is out here. Like we work hard too. You know, we climb ropes, we jump over walls and we carry sandbags. So I think, I think a little bit of both. And you know, sandbags aren't quite as expensive as oxygen.

Yeah, not at all. But you can, it's. It's something that I've kind of gravitated towards since retiring is what is the minimum effective dose and you can get so much out of, you know, hold breath retention while you're working out, things.

Like that, sauna suit and breath walk.

Sauna suit, things like that. Yeah. There's a lot that can be gained from, from things like that. My resting heart rate has dropped 10 beats per minute. You know, I have one of these aura rings that you turn me on to and I'm in a. Obviously that's, that's not a cheap purchase either when you're comparing it to a Fitbit or a Jawbone and things like that. But I've owned Those products and they don't work nearly as well. They're not going to tell you REM sleep, deep sleep and things like that. They tell you when you move in the night.

Exactly.

Or if your wife moved.

They also, they'll tell you if your wife moved. They also emit a Bluetooth signal. You know, every one to three seconds you get a Class 1 Bluetooth signal blasted out by those devices and search for a device like an iPhone to talk to. So you're just constantly irradiating your body. That's why I like this ring too, is you can put it in airplane mode and it doesn't. Doesn't transmit a signal.

It's an easy way to fine tune and kind of know it for, you know, coming from fighting and especially training at American Kickboxing Academy, there is a culture of push harder. You know, like, you get hurt, it's throw some dirt on it, pussy, that kind of thing. And you don't. You're not really taught to listen and pay attention to your body. So having something like this.

You mean like yesterday on the obstacle course when you were walking up the hill and you were fried and done. I told you to keep going and you listen to your body and quit.

Like, no, dude, I'm done, I'm done. No mas, no mas.

That was it.

I had to tap out after one round.

Yeah. The thing is that you've got a lot more muscle than I do to carry and cool with your training regimen.

I felt that on the rope climb because on the, on the descent of the rope climb, I went to failure. So about halfway down, going nice and slow and controlled, I ended up getting a nice, nice little rope burn there. Trying to really slow myself down and the group failing. But it was awesome.

Yeah. And by the way, for those of you listening in that, we put a Manuka essential oil on it. For those of you who haven't tapped into Manuka honey or Manuka essential oil, any topical wound or scar like that, dude, I have that stuff out on the counter right now for the barbed wire wound on my back from that spartan race last weekend. But that heals stuff up like Wolverine. It's crazy. Like, so Manuka honey works well. But if you can get the actual oil like we were using that, that's like pounds and pounds of Manuka oil. Just steam distilled in one tiny little bottle.

Yeah. And that's not gonna break the wallet or break the bank.

Nah, nah. That's only like $7,000. Easy, easy, easy buy. So when you're Doing these hormetic stressors, like restricting oxygen, for example, with this hypoxic approach that you have while you're weightlifting or you are wearing a sauna suit, have you found that that works well when you're combining it with other strategies like combining a hormetic stressor with fasting or using some kind of supplement or you're doing hot cold immersion or like, what kind of other things are you doing to go along with some of these unconventional hormetic stressors you're using?

Well, here's something I wanted to talk to, I wanted to pick your brain about because when I went to XPT and I know that you've been a part of that, I went down in Malibu, they do their cold first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.

To clarify that that's the performance breath work. What's XPT stand for again? I Forget. It's Brian MacKenzie, Brian McKenzie.

It's Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reese.

Yeah. You do like underwater breathing. Dr.

Golf. Yeah. They're doing, they're combining basically everything you could think of in terms of boosting the body in unconventional ways.

Yeah. And by the way, I'm actually going to be doing a clinic with them in Kauai this December. I'll put a link in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Kyle if any of you want to go to that and you yourself can freeze and almost pass out in water. But yeah, that's, that's one of the.

Things I learned from them was because I was doing the WIM HOF method and I would jump, you have to create space. You know, if you think of these things like an altitude training, that's a workout. Even if I'm sitting on my ass watching TV or reading a book, that is a workout and it's taxing in the body. So if I'm going to do cold therapy and it's only a five minute session, I need to give that space prior to my next workout. I can't just jump in the car and go to Jiu jitsu. And I learned that the hard way. I showed up to Jiu Jitsu class and it felt like I had been training for three hours just from that five minute ice bath. Once I got on the mat, like everything was tapped out. ATP stores were all gone. And so when I was at xpt, I noticed that they would do this.

They weren't, I should clarify, they weren't all gone. You just had so much vasoconstriction going on that you couldn't Access them.

There we go.

Blood flow.

Yeah. Lack of blood flow. Body, Body was taxed. So when I, when I go to xpt, I see they do this first thing in the morning.

Morning.

Or they'll do it right after some of their underwater training with the breath holds and things like that. And then there's maybe a two hour gap with some smoothies, some really high profile, you know, turmeric tea, things like that. They're going to help the body and some breath work so you're able to recharge the system and then give it space and then you can go into a hard workout a couple hours later. So learning that was a big deal for me. But then also this idea that we had talked about where there are certain things that you take that are good for you, like high dose vitamin C, things like that, but if you were to take them prior to a workout, they would minimize the training effect. And so I've also.

Or after workout. Really?

Or after workout. Right. So giving it that space because these things are good for you, your body does want them and they help you with recovery. But timing of things like that, right. So also timing of your cold bath, because if you were to jump into an ice bath right after really heavy strength training, you might minimize some of the, the inflammatory response that's gonna be helping you to gain more muscle and more strength.

And I think it depends too. And the reason that I say that is this morning, for example, you and I did a workout. We followed up that workout with cold water and hypoxia in my cold pool back there. And then we came inside and we had a smoothie and a lot of the ingredients of that smoothie, like I just mentioned when we were talking, there was ascorbic acid and antioxidant from the lemon. And we had turmeric, another antioxidant. And people would say, oh, you're blunting the hormetic effects of that training session. The way that I view things is if I do a training session that has a ton of breath work, which is going to create a lot of potential for oxidation or the need for your body to learn how to bounce back without having exogenous antioxidants or things that are going to blunt that hormetic response into the body, I won't do something like that afterwards. But for me, what that would mean is 45 minutes of hypoxic underwater swimming. Right. Like a real true breathwork session. Or like this morning, what we did, I classify that as primarily a mobility session. There wasn't A lot of eccentric muscle tissue damage. There wasn't a huge metabolic load like there was when we were doing the optical course yesterday. And so the type of meal that I'll choose after that is the type of cold water immersion or something like that is far different than a very hard workout where sometimes just to get the body core temperature down, I'll jump in and out of the cold pool very quickly. I won't do a longer 5 to 10 minute soak like we did this morning. And then afterwards I'll make a smoothie, but it won't have the vitamin C and the turmeric and the extra antioxidants in it. So you kind of step back and you look at your training session. How much eccentric muscle tissue damage occurred, how much hypoxia it was there, how long was it? And if it really is one of those brutal sessions that beats you up, that's where you can actually wait a little while to shove all the antioxidants and the cold baths and all these other things into your system, which sounds counterintuitive, but in fact, you're giving your body its own chance to heal. And then a few hours later, that's when you start to pull out the stops after your body has had a chance to upregulate its own stress response.

Yeah. And even if you look at, you know, the cold we did was what, 60, 70 degrees?

Yeah. This morning it wasn't freezing temperature.

The vitamin C content in a lemon is still highly bioavailable and very good for you. But it's not like taking a gram of vitamin C, that kind of thing, Right?

Exactly. We weren't doing like a bunch of liposomal.

It's not overkill.

Yep, exactly. So you, you've got stressors like that. Now, how about from a dietary standpoint? I know that, that you have certain things that you do in terms of like fasting and ketosis. And obviously I don't want to insert, consult people's intelligence by explaining what intermittent fasting or ketosis is. But at the same time, like any, like for example, you mentioned the microbiome to me and how you've discovered some things when it comes to ketosis. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, the microbiome. Have youhave you found certain things that happened to your body?

I've been working with Dr. Grace Liu, who started the Gut Institute in Dublin, California.

Grace Liu? Yeah, Liu. She's actually very good.

Yeah, she's, she's a speaker at PaleoFX. Phenomenal lady. She's been helping my wife and I. But one of the things we noticed from staying strict low carb, like you know, 40 to 50 grams a day for an extended period of time. And I saw this in, you know, getting poop tests done, looking at, you know, the balance of microflora and it shifted over time. I would notice that if I stayed in ketosis, strict ketosis, that is not low carb, but actually in ketosis for low longer than four months, that I would see a dramatic change in the amount of fat burning bacteria versus the fiber eating good guys that we tend to know and love. So if we take a probiotic, a lot of those guys are gonna really thrive on a high fiber, high plant based diet. And those are the things they wanna chew and break down and create butyrate and these good short chain fatty acids. Right. They're also our protectors. They help balance the microbiome, they make sure that candida's under wraps, things like that. So by staying in this long term ketogenic state, in preparation for my first and possibly only 50k ultra that I did, I had like 90% fat burners. And I didn't realize this, but I had Candida and parasites already possibly picked up on a tour for the troops, you know, way back in the day. Never really noticed it. Obviously when you're low carb, you're not feeding those guys so they stay dormant, they go into hibernation. And then after the race, being extremely broken down and quite dehydrated over the course of 10 hours, we saw just everything exacerbated. You know, all these problems came up. I went from training two or three times a day to only being able to train twice a week. Kept getting a common cold, no matter how little I was training. And she was, she just said, hey man, I think you got parasites now.

She did like a stool test.

Yeah, we did a comprehensive stool analysis from Great Plains labs.

Yeah.

And I.

Was that the one where you poop into the hot dog tray for like three days in a row?

Yeah, yeah, three days in a row, hot dog tray. You gotta scoop your own poop. It was probably the nastiest thing ever. Andbut all in the name of science.

And understanding, you don't wanna eat breakfast like an hour afterwards, still wafting in your nostrils and you're still checking your hands in a very paranoia like fashion.

Even when you wear the plastic gloves, you got plastic gloves on. But it's, it's a big difference between having, if you've ever pooped and you Leave. They have a name for it. It's called the iceberg. When. When the top of your poop still comes out of the water.

Oh, that's me, like, every morning.

Yeah. So you smell that and you're like, oh, man. You know, sometimes it's not that bad. Sometimes it's bad.

That's the best dump is when it. When it. When it's big enough to where there's. It's not. It's. It's no longer submerged.

But when you. In a tray, all of that's out in the open. It doesn't matter if you have the fan on. Doesn't matter if you have incense burning.

Yeah. Your brain. It's a different.

Yeah, it's a different deal. But, yeah, the test showed that I had the highest level of parasites on the test possible and the highest level of Candida possible.

Congratulations.

Yeah, I was pretty proud of myself, especially considering how much. How we eat organic and how much I've. I've really trying to take a dive into organics. I was like, man, how did this happen? And, you know, one of the things that. That letter that was asking me about all the countries I've been in, and I've been. I've been in quite a few suspect countries doing goodwill tours for the troops. Ironically, it probably happened in Djibouti, Africa. So I got parasites in Djibouti is pretty much where I. Where I nailed it down, because that was the only place where we got off base and had tap water. Yeah, I got parasites in Djibouti. So it's taken about a year to work through that.

Now, returning back to what you're talking about, though, before I hear. Because I'm curious. Even though some parasites can actually be venom, beneficial for the body in many cases, like an opportunistic parasite like that you want to get rid of. I've come back from Thailand with those things, and it's nasty. You're up like clockwork every two weeks as they lay their eggs, and your stomach feels horrible. For anybody who hasn't had a parasite, it's not fun. But you were talking about your bacterial ratio. Now, are you referring to the firmasuit bacterioid ratio?

Yup.

Like what? You can get tested with the American Gut project, that type of thing.

Yeah, yeah. And you Biome as a company out of San Francisco, I think you just did one with Biome out of Seattle. I think that might be a little bit more comprehensive.

Yeah, Viome is a newer one, and there's some other companies popping up that are doing. So the way I like to think about it is you can test, let's say, how much fruit versus how many vegetables that you have in your digestive tract via something like you biome or the, the American gut project and look at your pharmacy bacteriode ratio. Or you could look at the amount of apples, oranges, pears, bananas, blueberries, cherries, et cetera, and the amount of parsnips, kale, arugula, cucumber, carrots, green beans. And so it's breaking down these bacteria into extremely precise ratios and identifying every single one as, as far as far as what that's worth from a diagnostic standpoint or what it's going to tell you about your body. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Like, I have all my biome results and I'm waiting for their scientists to go over them with me because to have that comprehensive of a look at my biome, I almost don't know what to do with it. There's so much data.

Yeah, it's. And a lot of this is new too. Right? So we're figuring this out on the fly. One of the things that we, we kind of came to the conclusion of was I needed more fiber. I needed to not think of things like. And talking with the guy that you just went down and recorded with Darren Olian, the superfood hunter. There are foods on this planet that are so good for you that you really shouldn't be looking at the macros with. And if it means going over 50 grams of carbs, who cares? You know, soso one of those being sprouted seeds, sprouted pumpkin, sprouted sunflower seeds. They have a micronutrient profile that' sthat's unheard of. They're also high in fiber, high in protein, and high in really good fat. But if I'm trying to minimize and really lock in that under 50 grams so I get into this ketogenic state, I might miss out on that.

Well, it's kind of like the nutrient density you're missing on the prebiotics. You can turn your gut into a veritable wasteland if you're not careful. That's even related to an article I wrote recently that I've been having to revisit a lot lately on coconut oil because of the recent controversy over coconut oil. My article on coconut oil had nothing to do with the heart disease disease factor, but instead the fact that coconut oil is inflammatory to the gut and saturated fat in general is inflammatory to the gut when consumed in the absence of adequate amounts of fiber. And that's why a lot of people who do like the high fat diet coconut oil.

So waking up throwing a half a stick of kerrygold butter and a mountain of MCT or coconut oil probably isn't ancestral. That's probably not how our predecessors not.

Such a great idea. Now granted, when we made the smoothie this morning, and those of you who watch the video will see me say this, I used to go out to that garden that's back behind us right now, Kyle, in the morning before I did exactly what you just saw me do in the kitchen and I'd be out there tooling around the garden for a good five minutes, picking some kale, some lettuce, some bok choy, some parsnip, cilantro. I'd go out and harvest some wild mint, I'd do a nettle and I'd find all these various places plant based superfoods. But the problem is that when you add all of those to a morning smoothie, I will drink my smoothie and then I'll work like a dog until like 2 or 3pm and just not stop, you know, doing emails and consults and podcasts, etc. But the problem is you got to take a huge dump at about noon when you put that many plants in your morning smoothie. And so I've kind of, I do a lot more plants with dinner now and even with lunch than I do with breakfast. You saw me, you know, it was just like a handful of arugula in the smoothie that we had this morning. Because yeah, I mean there can be a lot of diminishing return with the bulk. But at the same time, yeah, you definitely want to. And we of course had fiber from the cacao nibs and the tons of.

Fiber in the coconut flavor.

It felt like it was a fiber deficient smoothie. But yeah, that, that is a huge error that you see a lot of people make is they'll switch to a ketotic based diet. But it's a low fiber ketotic based diet diet and probably, I would say, I don't know if you're aware of these resources. Two of the best resources that I'm aware of out there for a fiber rich ketogenic diet, or at least a fiber rich diet that controls blood sugar levels by not introducing high amounts of carbohydrates. Because I'm not necessarily sold on ketosis as the solution as much as controlling blood sugar fluctuations and controlling long term blood sugar elevation. That appears to be a better predictor of longevity and health than whether or not you're producing a lot of ketones. The two resources are the Wahls Protocol by Dr. Terry Wahls and the book the Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven Gundry and specifically the ketogenic portion of that book, the Plant Paradox. Both of those, in my opinion, are perfect examples. If you're listening and you wanted to see what a fiber rich, low carbohydrate diet actually looks like, those are really good examples of how to do it and how to do it right.

Yeah, and I'm by no means saying, I mean, when I was on Rogan's, I pretty much put the ketogenic diet on a pedestal. I think there is very specific uses for it as a tool. You know, obviously it was created for kids with epilepsy and things like that. If you are obese and you really need to drop pounds quickly to save your life, there's a lot of efficacy there for that. But unless you're an Inuit or an Eskimo, chances are you're not eating 80% fat in your diet year round or, or 10 months out of the year at least. You have to think about where your ancestors come from. Looking at Weston A. Price and his work, traveling the globe and understanding different indigenous tribes and people that lived in different parts, whether you were closer to the equator, you had access to more fruits and vegetables, smaller game, fish and fowl, that kind of thing, you get up towards the poles, you're going to eat bigger game. Probably do better with red meat and lower carb diets. Most of my ancestors are from northern England, northern Europe, so odds are that I can do better with less fruit. Doesn't mean I'm going to go off the wagon and have a ton of carbs now, but I don't necessarily need to be under 50 grams a day to be a healthy person.

Yeah, and granted, playing devil's advocate because I'm not quite sure of this. While the Inuit and the Eskimos do show absence of large amounts of obesity while consuming an extremely high blubber rich diet, I'm actually not sure what their microbiome looks like. I'm not sure what their rates of colon cancer are like. I'm not really sure what their rates of gut issues are like. So I don't know if they actually do have some fiber deficient type of gut issues based on their diet. I actually don't know. Maybe if you pipe in on the comments section, let us know you could clarify on what their guts look like. I Wanted to close the loop on that parasite thing, though. What did you wind up doing as far as the parasites are concerned?

I've been working with Grace for about a year now, and we've been having a different rotation of dietary stuff. We went through GAPS diet for a little bit. Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride out of the UK wrote that one. It's a fantastic book. A lot of healing with that. Tons of bone, broth, collagen, hydrosylate, things like that to heal the intestinal wall, make sure that there's no leaky gut syndrome going on. Reintroduction of different probiotics, systemically building the microbiome back while taking a lot of things that would wipe out things. So, you know, things and things. If I can break that down a little bit. Wormwood, black walnut and. What's the other one? Wormwood, black walnut.

And there was like, allicin, like a garlic extract.

Yeah, allicin. But then even things like oil of oregano, which is fantastic if your immune system's down. But if you were to take that for a long period of time, that actually kills everything. That'll kill the good guys and the bad guys.

Oregano.

Yeah. So understanding, like if we take some.

Of these harder things.

Yeah, yeah. High doses for an extended period of time, you have to understand why you use it and when you use it and then really regulate, like a rotation of things. Like, okay, I'm going to wipe these guys out for a couple of weeks, but then give my body a break, rebuild the microbiome. So I'm making sure that I balance back the good microflora, making sure that I'm feeding those guys, and then kind of rotate things back and forth, rotation is incredibly important.

Rotation from a seasonal standpoint. Right. And if you look at Ayurvedic medicine or the different doshas or body types or even a lot of Native American diets, there is a lot of dietary rotation based on seasonal availability. And of course, that's important due to the fact a variety of factors, you are more sensitive to carbohydrate and insulin fluctuations in the absence of sunlight versus the presence of sunlight. And so higher amounts of fruit and carbohydrates in the summer can actually be okay. Or another example would be that your gut responds very good to warm, kind of rich, spicier foods in the winter, like hot foods, whereas hot foods in the summer can actually aggravate and create too much, I think it would be called in Ayurvedic typing, too much pitta. I believe there's probably somebody who just wanted to jump through the podcast and throttle me right now, it's gonna jump out of line. My doctor, now, my local physician here in Spokane is an Eastern medicine practitioner. And that guy's level, his body of knowledge is just, it's through the roof. And I know we've got some listeners who are very into this as well, but bear with me here. In addition to that, what you're talking about is the importance of kind of like both, both herbal variety and then also I would even say nutrient and caloric variety. Right. So having your body go through phases or periods that you see a lot of religions implement fasting. You know, I see my dad, he follows Eastern Orthodoxy in a very religious way. And you'll see him and there's certain times there he's like, yeah, I'm just not, you know, I haven't had meat in like two weeks. I won't be eating meat for another, you know, week and a half or so. Well, that might seem strange if you look at things from a longevity standpoint, like the Mediterranean diet and longevity. One of the things that we fail to take into account is that they fast a lot. They have certain periods of time where they engage in meat restriction. There are certain periods of time where there are 24 hour fasts like Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner. While those are not things that people are necessarily doing every day, it seems like in America we're like, oh, I'm going to go pure vegan or I'm going to be pure omnic or I'm going to do a 16 hour fast every day no matter what. Damn it, 365 days a year versus I'm going to have these two weeks where I'm working two 24 hour fasts and a 16 hour fast every day. So rotation and variety versus just pure dogmatism in diet I think is really important. And especially as you went through with your parasite and with your gut issues, you can fix things and then go back to perhaps not using as high an herbal protocol. You don't have to be on your, on your wormwood for life to have a protocol.

Right, Correct. And then going back to what you're saying about rotation and kind of not being dogmatic. I mean, if you, if you decide I want to try intermittent fasting, you don't have to decide that. The way I decided to go into ketosis, you can say, let me work this in. So one of the things I've been playing with is if I do two really hard lower body lifts a week, odds are I'm going to wake up very hungry the next day, the day after that lift because my body is demanding of calories, protein and nutrients to recover from that. So I will eat breakfast the day after one of you know, if I say I have a really heavy squat session Monday with some altitude training and possibly even a nose, breathing, heat shock, protein, walk in the sun, when I wake up, I'm going to need to eat and that's fine. Listen to my body, have breakfast, lunch and dinner that day and then as I feel fine going to bed that night, maybe the next day I'll do a 16 hour fast and the day after that I'll crunch that to a 20 hour fast, water only, maybe some black coffee, a cup or two in the morning and be fine. But really working that in so that it is something cyclical, but it's also something that I can still pay attention to my body and have some leeway when I need more calories. I follow my body and do that.

Yeah, when you're talking about quantifying like that, well, not quantifying but more like listening to your body, are you using technology much like you mentioned, the Oura ring, I'm curious for a guy like you who played football and then competed at a high level in the MMA, who's very dialed into biohacking and fitness now and who studies a lot of these things, and you yourself, I know, are launching a podcast as well where you're interviewing a lot of folks in this sector and I'll link to that in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle, for those of you listening in, what are you doing as far as technology is concerned? I mean, aside from walking around with a mask on your face while you're powerlifting, especially when it comes to like either self quantification or other ways that you are either enhancing recovery or learning more about your body.

Well, the Oura ring really has been the best piece of equipment, equipment that I've, that I've purchased. And it, you know, it's not, it's not cheap, it's not going to break the bank, but it's, it's definitely not cheap. It's $300. But if you talk about some of these other things, like I had a Withings watch, a jawbone, all these other things, they're not going to break down information the same way that the Oura ring does and they are constantly improving things. So one of the complaints that I had when I was talking to their, one of the guys that works for them was that if I had a heavy powerlifting session and I mentioned this to my strength coach, Jesse Burdick, because he was like, man, should I get it? And I was like, well, I don't know. Let's, let's hold off for a second. If I did a max effort deadlift day because my heart rate's not jumping through the roof and I have a lot of time in between sets, it would look like I was going for a walk in the park. So literally a slow jog would show more work output. Now they've added, added in this ability to put an activity in which will change pressure.

Little plus button and add in. Describe what you've done.

Yeah, and the whole reason why I kept with it through that was because sleep, sleep was the number one thing when it comes down to recovery and how, how I'm breaking down things. And it didn't matter what it showed for my activity level that day, because how I slept that night was telling me how hard I had worked that day. So a max effort deadlift day is obviously going to take its toll on the body and the central nervous system. Heart rate variability is going to drop. I might get my lowest resting heart rate much later in the night as I'm recovering and things like that. Body temperature might be elevated throughout the night. All these things are mapped and broken down.

I've actually, I've found the complete opposite to be the case. I actually, just this morning, I don't know if you've seen it yet, I released a video on my website where I used the new dashboard that these, these folks at Aura. And by, by the way, I don't, I don't. You know, this podcast is sponsored by Aura. I'm not sponsored by Aura. I don't think you have a financial.

Tactic tied to financial tasks.

I like to use it, but the idea, although if you buy it using my discount code, I get like a referral, kickback or whatever as an affiliate. But other than that, the thing that I released this morning was their new cloud dashboard that lets you pull up anything, let's say your body temperature, your heart rate variability, your level of activity, and the level of, let's say, deep sleep that you acquired during the night. You can compare and contrast all these variables. And what I found quite interestingly was a direct correlation between the amount of high intensity physical activity that I accomplished each day, the drop in heart rate variability that occurred because of that, and an actual significant increase in my level of deep sleep, meaning on any day where I Was beat myself up really hard. My sleep doesn't suffer. It actually gets better and deeper. Which I guess makes sense to a certain extent. And I suppose there'd be a law of diminishing returns because I remember when I'd raced Ironman triathlons. Maybe part of this was due to all the sugar and caffeine I'd consume before I got into doing them in ketosis. But I would have to take Valium to go to bed at night after racing for 12 hours. You'd think I'd just pass out. But you're so amped up you can't even.

Yeah. You can't turn it off.

Yeah. At all. So yeah, it's interesting but I've actually found a correlation between how hard I've worked and how good my sleep is. So you use this sleep self quantification. Any other pieces of technology that you use to enhance life. I mean I know yesterday you had the. At my breakfast table you had photobiomodulation. You had in ear light therapy.

I wanted to test that. Like I said, you're my Consumer Electronics Reports for anything buying.

I can put a photo in the show notes of you guys. But Kyle is literally. I think you had three different pieces of high end technology attached to your head all at once before breakfast yesterday.

The only thing I didn't get was the ball zapper.

Right. We still have to try the ball zapper. Actually, I don't own one of those. You mean the Gainswave device? Yeah. That's like a $40,000 ball zapper anyways though. So any other pieces of technology that you use or that you're into from a biohacking standpoint?

Yeah. I mean the hypoxical machine was a big investment. Obviously it's in the thousands but my wife and I both use that. We get a lot from it. As I've said, I retired three years ago from fighting and I really didn't want to push myself the way that I used to.

And you're not going to fight again. That's not.

Yeah, I don't want to fight again. I don't want to want to get hit in the head anymore. It's something where I really do like this idea of minimum effective dose because I've spent so many years training that hard and I don't enjoy that. I enjoy picking up something heavy off the ground. I enjoy going for a smooth nose breathing run. I enjoy walking in extreme heat or meditating in a really freezing temperature cold bath because I've adjusted to those things. But they're low impact, they're not hard on the body, and I'm not wiped out. So I can still play with my 2 year old boy and be a dad. You know, I don't want to beat myself up to the point where I can't have sex with my wife for two days because I'm that run down and my body feels destroyed.

Right, right. And your pharmaceutic bacteriode ratio is so messed up that nobody would want to have sex with you anyways.

Yeah, they could smell it.

My pheromones coming off me would be all bad. I don't think we have that discussion last night. Complete segue about pheromones and about how women on the pill tend to choose partners who are incompatible with them. And it was a fascinating discussion we were having. I don't think you were part of it, but that's a chat for another day, I think. A few of the things I wanted to talk to you about, though, you're mentioning sleep. And something you talked to me very briefly about was how you're doing caffeine rotation for your adrenals. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so one of the issues we had by doing this bulletproof style copy coffee for so long and really that was breakfast every day for years. Whether I was in ketosis or not, that was still my breakfast. And just understanding, you know, this worked up, so. So mentioning that I have a two year old son, when my wife went off coffee, being pregnant, I still made a full pot every day and I would drink the entire pot. This was a light roast, so much higher in caffeine. And that's what I got adjusted to. So we would split, you know, once she was able to have coffee again, we would split that pot, which is.

Still the lighter roasts are the ones that are higher in the caffeine.

Exactly.

And so we would split lower in the antioxidants.

Lower in antioxidants. So yeah, it was a real issue just in terms of necessity, you know, when it starts to be something where, oh God, I have to have my coffee, you're no longer using it to go up, you're using it to get normal. And really understanding that about myself made me want to kind of dial that down so I could feel coffee again and really understand, like what I'm using it for. Like, I'll use that on a day where we have a podcast. I'll use it on a day when I have a road trip. I'll use it on a day where I Have a really heavy lift or I want to be sharp as attack, that kind of thing. But if I know I'm going to have a relaxing day and I don't have to do a whole lot, I'll use a tea or something with less caffeine in it. And it's funny because I went for a month without coffee. I switched to Yerba Mate, thinking I was going to drop my caffeine level about three weeks in. I decided to read some more on Yerba Mate and I realized the caffeine levels are quite similar to coffee. So I was like, oh, no wonder I didn't get a headache or have any withdrawal symptoms. I just substituted one for another.

The research on this idea behind lower caffeine coffee is actually really compact, compelling. And I recently talked about this on a podcast. How the caffeine content of a beverage, or just your caffeine intake in general is correlated to your telomere length and high amounts of caffeine decrease, or I'm sorry, increase aging, increase the rate at which telomeres lengthen. Whereas coffee and some of these caffeine containing beverages, ironically enough, decrease the rate at which your telomeres shorten and have an anti aging effect. So you're actually best served by choosing very tannic, rich beverages that only have trace amounts of caffeine in them. And that's why I'm actually a fan. You talked about caffeine rotation in that sense. This idea that you have X amount of adenosine receptors in neural tissue and caffeine will adhere to those receptors. And as more and more caffeine builds up and you need more and more receptors over time for the caffeine to attach to. You also need more, more and more adenosine in order to feel sleepy. And the best way to decrease the number of adenosine receptors that you're building is to stop caffeine for anywhere from seven to 12 days. So what I do is I have one bag of and it's up in the freezer right now. I didn't even tell you this, but that was decaf you drank this morning, by the way. Yeah, so right now I'm on a decaf cycle, right. So all the coffee is decaf, but you get all the antioxidant benefits, you get all the taste benefits, you all get all the, you know, the bowel movement enhancing benefits of coffee without the caffeine when you do that rotational type of setup with your caffeine intake. So that's all I do is for one week out of every month or so. I just switch to decaf. And you get a lot of the antioxidants there as well.

That's awesome. And still, it's kind of a brain trick because you still have that flavor of your coffee. It doesn't feel like I gotta suck this tea down now.

And the mushrooms, we always have the mushrooms in the. So anytime you have coffee at the Greenfield house, there's always a box of the four Sigmatic Chaga. Or today we have the Turkey tail Maitake five mushroom blend from four Sigmatic. But I'm a fan of putting the mushrooms in the coffee and then typically just a touch of stevia for a little bit of flavor. You could argue I have a morning sweet tooth, perhaps.

It was delicious. Yeah. No issues there.

Yeah, no issues with the deliciousness. You are also proponent of meditation.

Big time.

Big time. I'm curious what it is that you do with meditation. I know you use like the Brain FM headphone app.

Yeah, that was, that was a big one for me and I think that's a big one that I. The reason I talk about that a lot is because I really have come to understand this importance of quieting the mind, especially in the world that we live in. Whether you're. You have a high profile job or you're in sales. And I saw this firsthand with my father in his stress levels growing up, trying to be the provider for the home. And, you know, everything's commission based. There's no salary, 100% commission. So it's all on the sales and just seeing how stressed out people can be. If you don't have an off switch, if you don't even just five to 10 minutes, if you don't turn your brain off, you're just going to be running that system into the ground. It'd be the equivalent of trying to work out all day long. You're never really going to get a lot out of your workout. You can't hit a maximal effort if you're just constantly moving. And it's the same thing with the brain. If we, from a performance standpoint can push pause and give it some space to not think and to rest and relax, it doesn't even have to be a nap. And I'm big on naps too. But that will give so much more power to the brain when we do need to use it for creativity or critical thinking. And it is a booster for the brain, especially for the second half of the day. But circling back to meditation from a peace standpoint, it's really been Something that has improved my quality of life more than many other things. And it's something when you talk about hitting the lowest common denominator, something that everyone can be and should be using. There's so many different forms of meditation. When I first started in, it was very hard for me to quiet my mind and understand, like, what the hell am I doing here? Why am I. I can't stop thinking, what is this quiet space that I'm trying to get to? And it didn't really work for me. But two things made a big difference. One was using something like brainwave entrainment through Brain fm. I could throw in the headphones. And even I noticed, even if I thought during that.

Kyle, what is brainwave entrainment?

Basically, you're using some type of music to train the brain into a certain wave state, whether it's alpha, theta, those kind of things. We want to take that down from a high thinking beta wave state where we're really just go, go, go, and we slow that down just a notch. So, you know, Steven Kotler has pioneered and talked a lot about flow states. I think Stealing Fire is an excellent book that I just finished. But how we get into that, I mean, there's. There's many paths to the same truth, right? And one of the ways that we do this and has been done for thousands of years is through meditation. So if you find it really hard to sit quietly in a room or if it's hard to find a quiet room because you have kids or different things going on, or you're in the office and even with your office doors closed, it's still pretty loud outside. You can throw on the headphones and close your eyes, throw an eye mask on and enter into your own little quiet time. And 15 minutes later, you feel the difference. I mean, it really. It really is a game changer. And that's why I promote these guys. I am affiliated with them. So full disclosure there. These guys I work closely with, they sponsor my podcast. But it's a phenomenal tool and for $7 a month, I think it's well worth the price of the ticket.

I interviewed them and for those of you listening, I'll put a link to that interview in the show notes. But one of the things that I've noticed with it. Well, a couple of things, the first we did discussed this morning and I'll get to in a moment, but the one is that yes, you can take a nap without actually sleeping. You put it on for like 20 minutes or even five minutes, and you feel as Though you've just kind of disconnected from the world for a little while. It's very hypnotic. The other thing that you mentioned is it's almost so hypnotic that if you put it on, let's say an eight hour sleep cycle, and this might sound ridiculous, but some people like to sleep longer than eight hours. And the longest you can program that thing for right now is eight hours hours. You wake up when it stops. So the little hack I've found for that, whether or in addition to that, I think the longest you can nap on the app, 45 minutes. Right now, let's say you actually want to nap like an hour, which is real. Like a lot of times I will nap up for an hour. What you do is you put on your Brain FM app and then there's another app called Sleep Stream, which is like a DJ for sleep, for deep sleep, for power naps, for focus, for creativity, for anything. And I'll play that in the background of Brain fm. So I've discovered that my phone can play both sounds at the same time. You can activate both apps simultaneously. So you play the Sleep Stream at the same time that you're playing the Brain fm. And then when the Brain FM turns off, the Sleep Stream's still going and it doesn't wake you up.

You don't get woken up abruptly.

Stay in that state of sleep. So there's your little app tip for. For those of you who want to know how to hack your FM and hack it. Another thing that I wanted to touch on was you're also very much into. I know, for example, you've been on the Joe Rogan podcast, and I believe that you talked quite a bit about Ayahuasca on that podcast. And when we were paddleboarding yesterday, you were discussing various successes and failures that you've had with that plant as well as other psychedelics. When it comes to psychedelics, what are some of the biggest things that you've learned as far as efficacy for certain situations or dosages or sourcing or any practical tips for people who would want to utilize psychedelics for any of the things that you found them to be efficacious for?

Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a deep rabbit hole to go down and certainly a loaded question. I think really a great place to start. Start for people trying to get into this would be the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by Dr. Jim Fadiman. He'll talk about everything from microdosing for creativity and just changing perspective all the way till going deep. So what would be considered a Heroic dose, as Terence McKenna calls it. Five grams of mushrooms or more, things like that. What you need in terms of a sitter, a babysitter, basically somebody that'll sit with you and make sure that everything's okay. So if you hear an odd noise or if the door knocks or there's some interruption, you have somebody to handle those situations for you and make sure things are fine all the way up to a guide or a shaman. And obviously a shaman is going to have a different level of understanding of what the plants are doing and where you're at in that space and be able to guide you through some of the tougher moments. But you know, really there, this is something that anybody who talks about psychedelics will talk about. This is set and setting. So your mindset going into to it are you, you don't take these things when you're having a mental breakdown. You take these things when you're well prepared, you've meditated or prayed.

Don't a lot of people use like microdosing with LSD or microdosing with psilocybin if they're for example, like low on sleep?

Yeah, and that's a whole different ballgame. I want, I want to separate that real quick. They're. These things are dose dependent and what you get from them are completely different experiences, even among the same thing. So if we're just talking psilocybin, if you were to have a half a gram microdose, that's going to be a world different than having a 5 gram, 10 times the amount heroic dose, which will really shift. You know, you're talking about things like dissolving the ego, an out of body experience, possibly having a visionary state where you can go through a dream world and experience things as other people. Or, I mean, I, we really don't need to get into the things that you see, but in terms of the impact that you have, I mean, these are some of the. When I talk about. You joked about this with JP Sears, the micro level versus the macro, more is better. And that was tongue in cheek. But if I can quote Terence McKenna, he was giving a lecture on Lorenzo Haggerty's podcast, the Psychedelic Salon. And while he's giving the lecture, one of the questions he opened up to the, to the public to ask questions and one of the guys said, is there a wrong way to take psychedelics? And he laughed and he said, yes, if you don't take enough. And the reason for that is during the 60s when it was all about flower power and partying and you're listening to Jimi Hendrix and you're out at golden gate Park with 30,000 people. It's very easy to just say, oh, I'm going to try some of this, I'm going to try some of that. And I'm drinking beers and this kind of thing. And you don't go in to your own meditative state where you're alone, you're quiet, you're in a dark space, and you can really dive deep. And the beauty of a macro or heavy dose of these things is to really understand yourself differently and to think of the world differently, to see the world with new eyes, to shift your perspective and to understand things about yourself. Maybe you couldn't understand, but you don't get that when you're surrounded by a large group of people. If you're out at a house party or a bar, it has to be a situation and a setting. The second part of this, the setting where you can give yourself space to really dive deeper and understand things and maybe face some things that you. You didn't know were there, or face some things that you don't want to face. You know, that's a big one. When you talk about things like ayahuasca, and they. They talk about that as being the apex of teacher plants. So the pinnacle, one of the. The teacher plants, the deepest experience you could have among these things. And, you know, iboga is right up there with it. But out of all psychedelics, ayahuasca has been one of the most transformative and one of the hardest things that I've ever done. And it usually is that way every time. It's different every time, but it's a much harder situation to go through.

Because it's uncomfortable physically or because it's uncomfortable mentally? Because both.

Both.

You're fighter, you played football. I mean, it seems like throwing up and having some mild physical discomfort wouldn't be that big of a deal for you.

Yeah, there is the physical discomfort. They call it la purga. You're going to purge of some sort. And purging could be laughter, it could be crying. It could be physical purge, like vomiting uncontrollably or pooping your brains out, which has happened to me more than more often than not, especially with the parasites and Candida. But there's some mental stuff. I mean, if you think about things that we go through life and something happens to us and we try to forget it, therapists will say, you're blocking this memory out. Let it come up. And these kind of things. And the truth is everyone's got baggage, everyone goes through stuff. And even the super rich kid that grew up having everything, whose dad was never around, never went to one of his games, was out of town all the time, went on trips and left him at home with a, with a live in nanny, that kind of shit, that kid's got problems too, right? And so when you take a substance like this, you basically throw the curtains back and whatever's underneath is going to rise to the top. So the things that you're bothering. If you had a really traumatic experience like a rape, or if you're a soldier and you watch one of your friends and fellow veterans die right in front of your eyes, you. You might go through that entire experience all over again. But seeing it for the second time allows you to see it from a new angle and allows you to heal from that and move on. And you might think you're over that, but it's really about getting through that another time to understand it differently and truly heal from it. That allows you to move on and experience life differently.

One thing that I'm extremely curious about was that yesterday when we were on the paddle board, you said something like, I asked my a question to get the answer. And is that something that is typical in a ceremony like this, where you would actually say something to yourself? Are you cognizant enough to say, because I haven't done ayahuasca before, for example, to say, hey, I want to know this about whatever. Let's say, let me think of a good example here. Should I be spending more time with my children in the morning while they're having breakfast, that type of thing. Should you ask the universe that question about yourself? And can you?

Yeah, you can. So you set an intention before you go into this and you can pray on it, meditate on it. You can just write it down if you're not into those sort of things. But really understanding and outlining what you want to get from the situation, what are the things that you want to work on and improve in your life? And you take that weeks ahead of time going into this ceremony. So once you're there, you have something to focus and return to when you are going through some of these physical discomforts.

So you actually prepare.

Yeah, definitely prepare. There's a pre and post. Yeah, a lot of people bring notepads. They'll write things down during the ceremony, but it's text your friends. Yeah, I've seen some people pull open the iPhone to take notes and it's, it's a little disturbing. So Try to, try to not use electronics if possible. Yeah, exactly. Keep it in airplane mode. But you know, I'll give an example. I just thought of my wife and this was before we were married. I thought of her in my first ceremony and my very first vision. This was after a really hard purge and I thought of her and I became her. And I relived every single argument we've ever had in our relationship up to that point, as her looking up at me, yelling at me. But the things that were coming out of Natasha's mouth, it was all stated in a way, in a way that Kyle understood it. And when I pulled out of that, I mean, it was just pure waterworks. I cried and let go. And I understood that in all those situations we weren't coming eye to eye because of our own filters, of our own background, of our own prejudices and saying things or thinking things like, yeah, you just, just don't want me to have fun or, you know, I used to drink like an asshole, so why are you on me about drinking? I just want to have a good time not being honest with myself and understanding that I was really destroying myself. It was not in a productive way. It was not to have a good time. It was, hey, let's go balls to the walls because there was some shit inside that I hadn't dealt with. Right. So these things can really bring positive change to the way you live. And nothing I can give credit to. Nothing more than really wanting to do that work first. It's not something you just show up to and say, hey, let's see what happens. You have to have a reason of being there and understanding that about yourself and wanting growth and wanting to improve your quality of life and you'll get more from it than you expect.

Yeah, interesting. I'm a little bit scared because my brother and I are going down to do a seven day Iboga in Costa Rica in October. And so I'll definitely be going in equipped with the notepad and plenty of self reflection beforehand.

Quite deep.

Yeah. You also of course have the things that are a little less deep than that that you play around with. I noticed you're preparing to drive home after we podcast. You've got the Kratom out, the little capsules of Kratom. And that's an interesting pick me up. You like to use that stuff when you're on a road trip. For example.

Mark Bell Hook. Look me up with them.

Don't worry, the sheriffs won't listen in. I'm not sure if it's illegal to be assuming that when you're driving.

I think it's a legal gray area. But no, I would, I wouldn't. You know, Kratom is an opiate and in a high dose of six to eight capsules, or if you're a bigger guy like myself, maybe 10 capsules. It's a, it's a big sedative. So I don't want to be drowsy behind the wheel, but I'll take one capsule.

It can be a euphoric uplifter too, for sure, but I find. Very similar to caffeine.

Yeah, for sure. And, and that's really why I take that on a road trip, is that I don't feel a ton of discomfort sitting in a tiny Prius for 17 hours. And it does sharpen my mind and wake me up a bit. So while I'm driving home, I'll listen to a ton of podcasts, I'll finish another book on Audible, but I'm tuned in. I can pay attention to these things. I can still have my eyes on the road and understand what's going on around me. It doesn't shut me down in the way. And same thing would go for something like LSD. You know, if you do 4 or 500 micrograms, you're going to be out of your body. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, up to 50 micrograms, based on experience and size, you're not going to experience that at all. You're going to be highly tuned in. And that's a big reason why a lot of these Silicon Valley tech guys are getting into it and really work on it for creativity and innovation.

I'll do other. Typically for a big writing session about once a week, I have a little volumetric doser up in my bathroom and just do about. About 10. Exactly. And it's very good for that, for lateral thinking patterns and for almost like merging your right and left brain interaction. It kind of keeps you out of being in a super overly analytical mode and more open to creative ideas seeping into anything that might otherwise be analytical.

Yeah, it really is interesting. It's fascinating because science is catching up to things that people were saying a long time ago. And this goes with everything from yoga and meditation onto psychedelics and a lot of the work that's being done by Roland Griffiths at John Hopkins University and things like that, where they're doing FMRI and brain scanning, while people are under the influence of LSD and psilocybin, they're seeing this globalization of the brain and new neural networks being created where the body and the mind can think about things from different angles. And it's pretty fascinating to see science really catch up to what hippies have been saying since the.

The 60s. Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of hippies, I'll lay out the tea that I made for Kyle so that he could get a good night of sleep. Last night, before we did this podcast, it was kind of funny because I made each of us a giant mug of this tea. And then my son came into the room wanting us to blast dubstep and have a nerf gun fight at about 10pm and we were just. We had our tongues hanging out the corners.

We were halfway through that giant horse.

Racing, paddle boarding, and playing around with this hyperoxic unit in my office and sauna and cold pool. But we were drinking my little nighttime blend Into a little pot of water. I put about a tablespoon of Kratom, another squeeze of vitamin C to enhance the absorption. Any ascorbic acid increases the absorption of alkaloids from things like Kratom or marijuana or anything like that. We took some the of. Of my company's nature CBD capsules with the ashwagandha and the lemon balm, broke open eight of those. And so we put about 80 milligrams of CBD, no THC in there, A couple of packets of the four Sigmatic Reishi, which is like a relaxing mushroom extract. A little bit of stevia for flavor, a little bit of cacao for flavor, and a little bit of what's called Copaiba oil. Copaiba oil, which is. It's kind of like this agent that increases the absorptability and deliverability of just about anything that you mix it with. And so we put a few drops of that in there and it was a nice little. Nice little nightcap.

Yeah, it was phenomenal. I slept like a rock until 7:30, just out cold.

Yeah. Well, I know you gotta drive to Vegas after this, but I'm glad you got a good night's sleep and that we got a good podcast in this morning, bro.

Hell yeah, brother. Thanks so much for having me up here. This has been a blast.

Absolute word anytime. And for those of you listening in, I've got plenty of photos, I've got videos if you guys don't follow me on Snapchat. I actually Snapchatted much of the podcast today, so you can kind of see the environment in which we were at. And that's something I do a lot of. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness, dot com Snapchat you can check that out. And all the show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle Best website for you, Kyle, for people to go to would be what?

Well, you can see me on Twitter, Twitter and Instagram. Ingsboo. I'll be starting a website a little bit later. And then the podcast that's launching this month is Current Space with Kyle Kingsbury.

Current Space with Kyle Kingsbury. I'll make sure that I tweet that out myself. And if this podcast that you are listening to right now comes out close to the time that Kyle releases his podcast, just head over to the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Kyle and I will link to that. And a lot of show notes today. But everything from Kyle's sauna suit and hypoxico setup to some of those books that we mentioned like Wahl's Protocol and Plant Paradox to resources for making your own sleepy time tea to the psychedelic explorer's guide and oh, so much more goodness. So check it all out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kyle in the meantime, Kyle, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Thank you, brother.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Kyle Kingsbury signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice. Sam.