Blue Zones, Physical, Emotional, & Mental Presence, Bodily & Spiritual Fitness, Light Discipline, Changing Habits & More With Jay Shetty.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, none of this is fulfilling. I can literally be like, pose on the COVID of a magazine, whatever, with girls draped off of each arm, eating $100 steaks for dinner every night and experiencing what many people would covet as an amazing life. But I got news for you. I'm not happy. I, after 20 years, realized my own mistake of just like beating up the body, expecting it to bounce back, and thinking that was true fitness, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, well, well. Today's fun episode is with my friend, Jay Shetty. J. Jay Shetty, for those of you not familiar with him, is a pretty influential content producer. One of the top podcasts in the world, actually. And I was down in la, had a chance to swing by his place and we just had a fantastic chat. We talked about physical, emotional and mental presence. We talked about fitness. We talked about sleep, we talked about water. We talked about the inability to disentangle the body's fitness and the spiritual fitness. We talked, talked about stimulating your body safely with technology. We talked about siestas, a ton of stuff. So this was a great show, wonderful chat. All the shownotes you can find@bengreenfieldfitness.com Shetty S H E T T Y that's bengreenfieldfitness.com shetty and I hope you enjoy today's show.

I am so deeply grateful for our trusted, committed community that shows up every week. And today's GU is someone that I met a few years ago. Now we've been going back and forth trying to make this happen with both of our schedules, with the pandemic, with COVID with everything else that's been going on. And I have to say that I'm pumped and I'm so excited that we're finally in the same room together. I'm talking about none other than human performance consultant, New York Times bestselling author, self experimenter, and one of the most wild, crazy, interesting, curious people that I know, Ben Greenfield. Ben, thank you for being here. Thank you for showing up. And even just the few moments we spent together, I'm already looking forward to.

It's kind of bittersweet though, because like last time we hung out, we were eating wonderful Italian buffet style, five star resort Sardinian food, surrounded by amazing people and music. That whole. Was it Mind Valley? Was it Mind Valley University? It was. Yeah, it was. It was awesomeness. Fest. A fest. I don't think they even call it awesomeness fest anymore because that word's dated. But yeah, they, they had like, it was almost like a Disneyland in Sardinia, some giant resort. All I remember the food was amazing, great parties. And then I met you. We were sitting at a table at dinner and you and I had never met before and Vishen Lakhani was there and he introduced us and then we thought about doing a podcast. And that was like two years ago, literally three I think finally the other side of the world, we finally hook up. But yeah, Sardinia. You know what was interesting about that? Like Sardinia is well known as being a longevity hotspot. Or like Nicoya and Loma Linda and Okinawa, you know, one of these so called blue zones. Even though there's some controversy about the whole blue zones and whether or not the, the demographic data was accurate or whatever. But either way, like people live a long time there. Like we know that. But when you look at the populations that they studied in Sardinia, it was a lot of the old people up in the Dolomites, right, who were, you know, hiking up hills with their goat's milk and their wine and eating, you know, small col water fish and herbs and spices and teas and living this outdoor lifestyle combined with social relationships and love and all these things that we know now feed a good, not just health span, but lifespan. And then we got to Sardinia. So that was like the picture I had painted in my mind. But then when we got to Sardinia, we weren't like up in the craggy hills with like old Italian people drinking table wine over small fish and tea up in the mountain somewhere. This was like a full on like 5 star resort with like golf carts and, and like man made beaches inside giant walls. And so it was interesting for me. I kept wanting to slip away like up into the Dolomites and be like, okay, well this is interesting, but what's kind of like the non touristy side? Like, yeah, regardless though, the, the food I think was amazing and probably, probably something the, the longevity enthusiasts up in the mountains would have killed to get.

Yeah, absolutely. We were, I think we were, I hope we were eating seasonally.

I think we kind of sort of, I think it was seasonally slash what the locals there thought would kind of impress, impress people from. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

But, but I mean like, you know, I've eaten in Italy before, I guess more like the locals.

Yeah.

So my wife and I, early on in our marriage, we flew into Rome, didn't have a lot of money. It was either senior year of college or right after we both Graduated. And. And so this was back in the day when I had to, like, fax all my reservations in and my credit card number to the, to the different places that we wanted to stay and stuff. But our, our harebrained idea was we wanted to rent bikes in Rome and just like zigzag ride them all the way up to Florence. And that's what we did. We rented bikes, but I planned ahead and mapped out the whole route. And so I would fax my reservations into these agricolas, you know, which are like farm stays where you stay with these Italian families out of their farm, or like little hostels or beds and breakfasts. That's basically what we had the money to afford. And so we, we got into Rome, we start riding. And basically, because I'd already prepaid for all these reservations by faxing them in, it was, come hell or high water, we had to get to where we were going that day. And most days were like 35 to 50 miles of riding, which isn't a whole lot. But these are like heavy touring bikes with, with panniers on either side, these bags where you keep all of your belongings, your clothing, your toiletries, whatever. And inevitably, as the trip goes on, and we'd like, buy wine and buy cheese and buy souvenirs. These bikes would get heavier and heavier as we'd go. Every city there is built on top of a hill, you know, like an old medieval village with walls, and you got to climb a hill. So every day at the end of the day, the very last thing we'd do when our legs were already toast was just climb, climb, climb to the top of these hills and then hunt down, you know, wherever we'd actually put in a reservation to stay at. But I remember the most special thing was it was every single day you'd finish, you were swe, you were tired, your legs were aching, and you knew that there was a homemade Italian meal with some table wine that rivals a $50 glass of wine you'll buy here in the US and wonderful people and smiles and a bed to stay in. And I just remember every single day riding up those hills thinking gelato, homemade ravioli, red wine. You got this, Ben. You can do this. And it was a cool trip. We got all the way up to Florence, we put our bikes on a train and just took the train back down to Rome and flew home. So now I have, you know, years and years later, I have twin 13 year old sons. And when they're 15, so year and a half or two from now, we're going to replicate that trip, we're going to take them back. So now I've got them kind of starting to train and learn how to be comfortable on the roads. You know, like the Italian roads have no shoulders.

Right.

So you got to know to handle your bike on roads and know how to ride a big fat touring bike instead of a road bike. And so that's going to be really, I'm super looking forward to that is like the next trip to Italy with my boys riding through the, through the Italian fields and, and hunting down Florence again.

That's a beautiful plan. I love hearing them and they're lucky boys. And I remember that as a young man my parents would drive us to Italy. That was their favorite place in Europe. So we would drive from London, we'd get the ferry into France and then from France we would drive again to Italy. So we drive to Venice, we drive to Naples, we drive to Rome, we just Dr. To a different place and we drive across Italy because we didn't have the money to fly there and my parents preferred doing a road trip and we, we didn't get on any bikes or anything like that. But even what you were saying, I.

Was going to say weak family. If you guys were real, you would have taken bicycles.

Yeah, yeah. You would have taken a bike from London.

Bike from London to Italy.

Yeah. No, we were like eight years old. But I have good memories of visiting Italy with my parents as well. So I can only imagine how your boys are going to feel when they go.

I think they'll do. My only concern is the girls because I got like 213 year old and be 15 by then. Like blond haired, blue eyed American boys and just having taken my wife there and seeing the reaction to, you know, my wife's blonde haired, blue eyed, you know, the men there are very, very forward and cat calling as she walks down the street. Then when I took my sons to Thailand a couple of years ago, same thing. Like all the Thai people just flock around them and then the women are practically swooning as these little blonde haired bo walk through the street. So we may have to bring, bring some fly swatters to keep the, keep the women off of them.

I love it man, I love it. I, I, my first memory of you actually was in Sardinia. I knew you were going to be there. We were, we were both speaking at the conference. You know, I was learning about you and learning about your world. I was, I'm, you know, I'm not a biohacker. That's not my background. In. In the same sense as you are. And so I was intrigued and I. I loved your sessions that you did, but my first experience of you was we had an evening party and it was like this. We were on this bridge, if you remember, at the hotel, and you literally jumped in to, like, the hotel lake, slash, pool. It was. And the reason why I say lake is because it wasn't like a swimming pool. We have to. I've got to give Ben credit. It was. And it was evening, so it was. It was cooler. And you dived in and you swam and you got out and you. You made your. And we were just. We were all like, wow, that is. That is the way to enter. So I always remember this. You remember it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that. That was early on in the trip. Honestly, dude, I love water.

I know you do.

I'm at home in water. You know, I competed for years in open water swimming and Ironman triathlon and the biking and the running was okay, but I did and I still do. Just love.

You could see that.

I love the water of the ocean. I love spearfishing. I'm not a big water man in terms of, like, surfing and kiteboarding and things like that, because I don't really have that up in Washington state, so I can't practice it. And I tend not to really be passionate about the things I suck at because I can't practice them. But, yeah, I think water is almost woven into my DNA somehow, because my dad, all of his side, comes from Australia. And I'm a big believer in the fact that we do carry a lot of things epigenetically in our DNA. Not only trauma, but also the things that our ancestors are good at or love to do. My son, river dreams a lot about snow and ice and Finland and trekking up snowy mountains in the cold. And it's interesting because my wife Jessa's whole side is like Northern European, you know, up in the area around Finland and Estonia and Switzerland and some of these more like snowy white places. And it's funny that that's like a repeating dream that he has, and I suspect that it's just. It's woven into his DNA in the same way that a love for water is woven into my DNA. And I'm actually super excited because right before I left to come down here to la, I received a package in the mail. This company called Finis sent me these headphones that you can attach to your goggles, and they're bone conducting headphones, meaning that you can listen to stuff while you're swimming or while you're under the water or while you're spearfishing or whatever. So they conduct the sound through the bones on either side of your head rather than your ears. Right. So you don't have to worry about like the wires and everything. And then they sent me these goggles that have like an in screen display as you're swimming that show you how many strokes you've taken and how far you've gone. So, you know, perhaps it'll just suck all the enjoyment of swimming out of me because sometimes excess technology can do that. But you know, just water toys like that. Absolutely love. And we live, we don't live near water where I live. We live on about 10 acres of isolated forest land up in Washington state, which is great. You know, we have, we have goats and these cute little Nigerian dwarf goats and Icelandic chickens and a bunch of garden beds and all sorts of old growth forest where there's all sorts of wild plant edibles like mint and plantain and nettle and white tailed deer and turkey and coyote. And it's a great place, but there's no water right there. So now I'm building this natural pond and then just to scratch my swimming itch, I got one of those swim pools that it's like 20ft long, but it has a super hard jets.

Yes.

And you attach like a, it's like an elastic band to your waist and you can swim against. What are they called?

There's a name for those pools.

Mine one's called an Aqua Fitness. You know, it's the ones you see Michael Phelps advertising in the back of airplane magazines, that kind of thing. But then I keep mine because I'm a huge fan of like the power of cold thermogenesis and cryotherapy for fat loss and your nervous system health and your cellular resilience. I think most people live in the comfort of temperature too much. And when we look at longevity data, when we look at health data, when we look at nervous system and cellular resilience, constant exposure or regular exposure to stresses of heat and stresses of cold is so good for the human body. So I have a sauna and then I have this pool, but I keep it cold. What I mean by that is I don't heat it. So in the summer, yeah, I'll swim at like 60 degrees or whatever it gets up to. Then the winter I'll go out there and swim and it'll be like almost break through the ice temper. But I get in that thing almost every day and Swim. And that's. And it just puts a big smile on my face.

Yeah, I've been going to this place called Pause in West Hollywood. Yeah. So I've been going there every week with my wife.

They're float tanks there too.

Yeah. So we go there every Saturday and we do the sensory deprivation tanks for about an hour and then we'll both go and do three cycles of the sauna and cold plants together for another hour.

Like a million bucks afterwards, just we.

Do every Saturday morning. It's our, become our morning routine ritual. On Saturday we wake up, up, once we've done our meditation, 10am we head over and then 10am to noon, we're there and it's just been, and you know, I've, I've heard that for a long time. And as monks we took cold showers. We, you know, we're in India, so it was, it was hot plenty of the time. So you always experienced uncomfortable amounts of heat. But doing that since I've been back where my body has acclimatized, acclimatized to wanting a more comfortable temperature. And the temperature at home's always perfect. But also I've started sleeping at like 66, 67 Fahrenheit. And that's even though it was cooler in the beginning, that kind of sleep temperature has really helped. And you wake up sometimes feeling cold. But I can notice that that's doing some good for my body too.

Sleeping in the cold, the, the effects of that on, on the positive effects on sleep architecture have always been surprising to me because it's such simple low hanging fruit. When you look at sleep hygiene, right. We have light as being one component of sleep hygiene. So what I mean by that is your sleep cycle begins in the morning, meaning that the more sunlight, the more of these. Like if you're looking at this from more of a biohacking standpoint, like the infrared light panels that you can use to simulate sunrise in your office that you can shine on your whole body, or an infrared sauna, or these blue light boxes that they sell for desktops that are used for seasonal affective disorders, you know, or of course sunlight being, you know, the top of the totem pole for any of this stuff. Like blasting yourself with light in the morning combined with turning your room into a, just a light cave at night. Like I've replaced all the cans in our bedroom with red incandescent bulbs instead of LED or modern fluorescent lighting.

So that's for the late evening before you turn off.

So my master bedroom, my son's bedroom, and Our master and our master bathroom are all red incandescent bulbs. No, no, regular bulbs.

Like whenever you turn on them.

Yeah, all red, no dimmer, because dimmers. And we're kind of getting into the weeds a little bit here. But dimmer switches on lights, they cause a lot more what is called dirty EMF or a high amount of non native electricity that doesn't jive well with, with human cellular function. And so we don't use dimmers, but we just replaced all the cans with red incandescent. The reason for incandescent being that even though they're, they're slightly bigger power hogs on the electrical supply, it's not that big of a deal. Might be an extra 10, 15 bucks on your electrical bill every month. So it's nothing too big to worry about. But they also simulate the natural red spectrum of sunlight. And the same as our ancestors might have experienced during torchlight or firelight at night. So all of the bedrooms, anywhere where there would be a sleeping place or a place where you might get up to pee at night, it's all red incandescent. And then all the computers, like my son's computer, my wife's computer, my computer, we have a program installed on that called Iris. And Iris just kind of sucks all the high temperature light out of the computer screen at a specific time of day. So it's very eye friendly as the night comes in.

And you can have that on your phone as well?

No, but for the phone, so I do Iris on the computer. And then for the television, even though we don't watch much television, I have a box installed on that called a drift box, that decreases all the blue light from the television. And then for the phone, obviously a lot of phones have built in native night mode, but for the iPhone in particular, which is what I use, you can Google iPhone red light trick and you can actually set your iPhone. So it literally just like sucks all of the blue light out of the phone and turns it dark red. Kind of like how a lot of people who will do a dopamine fast will switch their phone to black and white for a week, which I think is a great idea. This will switch it to red. And so you combine all those factors along with preferably. And I'll do this a lot of time when I travel because I just don't have as much say over the light bulbs in the hotel room or whatever. Wear the blue light blocking glasses right at night especially. And so basically you're just blasting yourself with natural and blue light in the morning. And then complete absence of that same light at night. You want to get as close to just what would looking at fire look like at night? So light is one. And it's interesting because light can also be used to shift your circadian rhythm backwards or forwards. So let's say we weren't sitting here in la, let's say we were in New York, right? And so my wake time in New York being, let's say 6am would dictate that if I were back home on Pacific time, that's like 3am and if I'm in New York for a week, when I get back home to Pacific time, my body's all of a sudden waking up at 3am which is annoying and problematic. And I don't want to get up at 3am because there's not a lot, a whole lot going on. And I'm, I'm a total fan. Like I'm an early morning guy. Like I usually get up 4:30 or 5. But 3's pushing the envelope. 3's like you're dead by 11:00am yeah, you don't want to talk to people and you need a nap. And so anyways, the trick there is when you're waking up at 3am, if you do wake up and you have to get out of bed and you just, you just, you're going to get up, you're going to maybe whatever, go do some yoga or read a book or whatever, you trick your body into thinking it's still nighttime by keeping your phone in night mode, by not turning on any lights in the house, by putting those blue light blocking glasses that most people wear at night on in the morning instead. And when the time rolls around when you actually want to send a message to your body that this is the new time to wake up, like let's say that 6am Then you flip on all the lights and you blast the body with light. And after two to three days of doing that, that it's remarkable at how quickly you can shift your circadian rhythm backwards or forwards using light. And again, kind of like back to the whole biohacking realm. There are even in addition to those light producing boxes that you can put on top of your desk, they make ones that you can put in your ears. They look like headphones. They're called a human charger. And they blast your head with this blue light in either ear. And then there's also a pair of glasses that you can use called you.

Don'T even need to see that light.

Your entire body is a light receptor machine. And that's interesting because you could wear a sleep mask at night, but if your room's really light, like, if you don't have blackout curtains or just there's lots of blinking things in the room, or you walk into a hotel and you turn off the lights, and all of a sudden it looks like a spaceship. Because the TV and the WiFi and everything, like, even if your eyes are covered, all that stuff hits your skin. So when I say dark in the room, like, I make sure it's really super dark dark. But you were talking about temperature, too. Obviously. Temperature is. That's, like, the second component of sleep hygiene. So with temperature, I think you said you're doing what, like, 65, 66?

Yeah. Yeah.

I find, because I, you know, I coach some people still for their health and for their sleep and everything. So I get to look at a lot of data from an aura ring or from a whoop or whatever wearable somebody is using, and I've identified that about 63 to 65 Fahrenheit is even better.

Like, if you're even a bit lower.

My metric is if you're one of those people who. And I think this is a good idea for staying cold. Who likes to take off all their clothes before they get into bed at night or sleep in your underwear. If you have mild cognitive resistance to taking off your clothes at night before you get into bed because it's a little chilly, that's a pretty good sleep temp, right? So for me, it's like, if it's a little chilly when I take my clothes off, that's perfect. And then in addition to that, I actually have this pad underneath the top sheet of my bed. It's called a chili pad, and it circulates, like, 55 degree cold water under my body while I'm sleeping. My wife doesn't do most of the stuff that I do.

So you just have on your half?

Yeah. The shoemaker's wife wears no shoes, dude. So I just don't bug her about it. I let her do her thing. She likes to garden and hang out with the goats and chickens and go on walks. And so she just does her thing. And I don't force anything on her because I know what'll happen down the line. If I want to give my wife health advice, I'll tell one of my friends who's a doctor. I'll be like, text this to Jessa. And then they text it to her because. Because I just. I just know she's gonna know now when she watches this no, because that's the thing is she also.

She's not gonna watch this.

She wouldn't even know how to download a podcast. So that's. That's just who she is. So anyways, though, so I have the chili pad on my side, and I can. And my sons both have one, too, and they love it. We all, like. So we have these big, glorious family dinners at night. And like, right before dinner, all of us boys run upstairs and turn on our chili pads so we can sleep better. So the bed's already cold when we get into it. Another thing that you can do, and it's a little bit paradoxical, but it actually works, is you can pull on wool socks before you go to bed at night. And when your feet are warm, there's these little vessels are called anastomosis or something like that, but it actually allows the rest of your body to stay cool when you warm some of those tiny vessels in the hands and the leg. So you think wearing wool socks to be warm, but just wear wool socks and little else, and you can actually cool the body with that method, too. And then finally, regarding cold, you don't mind me just geeking out on.

No, this is beautiful. I love it. No, no. We dived into sleep. Sleep's gonna be everybody. Everyone's gonna try this out. Yeah. Because, I mean, you know, sleep's something that everyone's struggling with.

Oh, yeah.

I'm very happy with it.

It's so critical.

Please geek out.

So the. The thing with the, The. The cold is that if you do kind of like, break the rules, because there's all these rules now that all the scientists in their institutions have come up with that are annoying us. Like, you're not supposed to work out hard within three hours of bedtime, and you're not supposed to eat a heavy meal within three hours prior to bedtime, which for me can be socially problematic because I love to have big, glorious family dinners with people and go out on the town and visit new restaurants and. I mean, how often. Let's say you're going to be at 10. How often are you really going to be done with all that? Like seven.

Yeah.

Unless you're just like a total, I don't know, just a boring social outcast. Sorry. To all the people who aren't eating dinner, but basically, it's not that hard. You just get the body's core temp back down. So if it's the winter and I finish a dinner, I'll go for a brisk walk outside in the cold weather. And if it is the summer or warmer season, just like a lukewarm or a cold shower before you go to bed. My sons and I just went down and watched the fights down in Vegas when It was like 115 degrees on the Strip. And we'd walk every night, and we'd walk home from the fights and the shows and everywhere we went. And every night before I get into bed, there's a little bit of resistance to this, but that's okay. You can overcome the resistance, but just take a cold shower before you get into bed, and that helps to lower the core temp if you have had to exercise or you've had a heavy meal in those three hours prior to bedtime. So you've got the light and you've got the cold, both the ambient temperature and then your sleep surface and then your body itself that you keep cold, cold. The other two that you want to think about for sleep, in addition to light and cold, the first is noise. And in the city, this is a bigger issue. But, I mean, even I. I've got roosters that like to get up kind of early because they're naturally programmed to wake you up. And I've got. I live out in the forest, but there's a road nearby that sometimes semis go down and I can hear off in the distance the. Like, the braking, like to, you know, when semis go downhill. So I wear earplugs, like just soft wax earplugs to bed. But then they've actually done studies on the different forms of ambient noise that help you to sleep at night. You know how they make, like, sleep machines that will make white noise and brown noise. And one of the forms of noise that they make is pink noise. And pink noise, it appears, is the best background noise to have playing in the background.

I've never even heard of sleep.

It's just like, I don't know why they give colors to certain noises, but it's the frequency and the pitch of that noise. So I've got an app on my phone called Sleep Stream. I think it was free or the cost was incidental, but it's got all these different sleep tracks on it, and I don't use anything on it except the pink noise function. So my phone goes in airplane mode next to my bed, and then I push pink noise on and I put the earplugs in, and then I'm covering up all those ambient sounds. That technique works a lot better when I'm traveling, When I'm staying in a hotel near busy roads, When I have a roommate or something like that, if I'm at a conference and I'm sharing room with somebody and they're getting up early or they're going to bed late. So the sound is another component, especially if you're a light sleeper. And then the final component is safety. And a lot of people don't think about the safety component. So your bed should be a place where from. From a nervous system standpoint, you're not wired up in work mode. Your sympathetic nervous system is not activated. If anything, the bed is almost like an anchor that activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, if you are one of those people who business books on your nightstand, or maybe you open your laptop up at night, or really at any other time during the day, that would give your body the impression that the bedroom, or the bed particularly, is an appropriate place to work. I would say even that television, just because psychologically, we as humans are still hardwired to see that television. And it's as though a whole bunch of other people and other experiences are in your bedroom. Not to mention the fact that there's some really interesting data that television can replace dreaming, right? So essentially, we live now in an era for the past several decades where all of the colors and imagery and imagination and visualization and creativity that your brain should be churning out during sleep at night to process memories and to process trauma and to process creativity. A lot of that can be replaced by staring at a television before you go to bed at night. So I don't have a TV in the bedroom for those reasons and also for the light reasons, and also for the reason that I want my body to associate the bed with pretty much nothing but sleep and sex. And then I'll keep a boring book or a work of fiction next to the bedside. Now, I used to, when I'd get to a hotel room, I would just like, you know, plop on some. Especially a small hotel room, like a suite. Usually you've got more than enough room, but, you know, the small hotel rooms, a little crappy workstation in the corner or whatever, if that's that. I just like, plop on my stomach on the bed and open up my laptop. I think a lot of people know what I'm talking about and just lay there on your belly and work on the laptop because it's a comfortable spot to do that. And the problem is that sends your body this cognitive signal that the bed is the place where you work. So now I always make sure my laptop, even in a single Room, hotel room, is not in the bed. And that sends the body a message that the bed is a safe place, not a workplace, not a stressful place, not an email jumping out from your computer place. And if you really want to take that safety thing one step further, this has become quite popular now, this idea of gravity blankets, meaning folks will sell like these 10, 15, 20 or 25 pound gravity blankets. And it sounds like it would be totally paradoxical to what I was saying about staying cool, because it sounds heavy, but a lot of folks are doing a good job making like a gravity blanket that will stay cool. That one company I was talking about, Chilipad, they even sell a gravity blanket that will like circulate cold water through the blanket. But there's something about very similar to, like how when you were swaddled as a baby, you felt protected and you felt like you were in this quiet cave. It's that feeling when you pull on the gravity blanket. And so when you combine all that stuff, the light, the cold, management of sound, and then presence of safety in the bedroom, you create a real, real nice nest for getting those hours that are arguably the only hours during your life, arguably that third of your life, that your nervous system should be repairing, that your body should not be wired up to have everything activated, that you shouldn't be exposed to lots of electrical signals. And I'm not one of those guys who's like, go full on, move up to the mountains, don't use Internet, cut yourself off from everything. But it appears that the issue with constant exposure to all these electrical signals that our bodies, from an ancestral standpoint, haven't been exposed to for thousands of years, is the fact that the cells don't get a break, right? So when we're looking at WI fi and Bluetooth and the constant opening of what are called calcium channels in the cell that allow a whole bunch of ions to spill into the cell, that disrupt metabolism, or that give you brain fog later on in the day, that's actually all pretty repairable. The body's actually pretty impressive and magical in terms of how quickly it can bounce back from certain things. Just in the same way that it could recover from a hard exercise session and remove all those muscle fibers or repair all those muscle fat fibers. If you give it rest, if you give it recovery. The thing is, it's the same thing with electrical exposure. Like, if you can turn your bedroom into a safe, quiet, cool place that also doesn't have a whole bunch plugged in like WI Fi, routers and phones, et cetera, you're all of a sudden giving your cells a chance to just go. It's like when people camp, you know, they're just cut off from all that stuff. They feel great when they come back. So it's not as though you have to live like a Luddite. It's that sometimes you have to press the pause button, give your body a chance to step away from all that electricity for just those seven or eight hours or however long you're in there, and then emerge back out repaired and ready to tackle the day again.

You just told everyone how to make their bedroom into a sanctuary. That was a sanctuary. Yeah, that's what it sounded like the way you were describing it. I was just like. And that's what it has to be. A sanctuary is safe, a sanctuary.

It has to be. And I think a lot of people. People beat themselves up, too, because, you know, there's a lot of really great sleep researchers out there now. You know, you've got guys like Matthew Walker and Nick Littlehales and. Gosh.

Who.

Who. There's another. Another person who's been doing a lot of work on sleep. Michael Bruce is another guy. But over and over again, what you see is you're supposed to sleep seven to nine hours a night. And a lot of people feel bad because they don't. And I felt bad for the longest time because I didn't. And I'm like, like, what, Am I gonna, like, die of cancer early? Or am I. Am I gonna. Is my body gonna fall apart? Am I gonna, like, accelerate aging because I just. I've got too much going on or my body just, like, my eyes open wide at, like, 4:30 and I just want to go crush the day, right? Which. Which I think many people who are dialed into perhaps some of the things that you talk about, like your ikigai, your life's purpose, your. Your plan. David, you know, speaking of Sardinia, this idea of your purpose for life. Well, if you have a really strong purpose for life, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you're just like, baby, let's go. Bring it on. And for me, you know, with our big, glorious family dinners, and I read my son's stories at night, and I play the music on the guitar and make love to my wife and read some fiction. So, you know, even with all that, I can usually do a pretty good job being close to asleep by 10. But getting up at 4, 4:30, that's six to six and a half hours. So the thing is that if you do that, but also you Take a nap. Like a post lunch siesta, for example. The siesta, even if it's like 20 to 45 minutes long, can simulate what you get out of a full 90 minute ish sleep cycle. So the way that I live my life is I sleep six to six and a half hours a night. And then like clockwork after lunch every day, or if I have a meeting after lunch, sometimes it's slightly later in the afternoon. I try not to push it too close to bedtime. Cause you want some sleep. Drive. Going into the night, I take a nap, I take a siesta. For me, it's 20 to 45 minutes. I do kind of. This is where some of the biohacking comes in. I'm like, okay, I got 20 to 45 minutes. I wanna make this effective. So what I do is a, I have something similar to like that sensory deprivation float tank that you use down at Pause. I actually had a float tank for a while, but it was too much upkeep for me.

I can imagine. Magnesium.

Yeah. It's just like my whole basement looked like a freaking pool house. So I have what's called a hyperbaric chamber, which is like this chamber that they use in hospitals for repairing wounds and, and, and they'll use it for like cardiovascular problems and increasing red blood cells. And it pressurizes you at about what's called 1.4 atmosphere. So it's like you're 23, 25ft under the ocean. You with the pressure, but then you're breathing pure oxygen. And so the combination of the pure oxygen plus the pressure drives that oxygen into the tissue, accelerates repair, clears the brain. I mean, even if you weren't napping in it, you feel amazing when you get out. And so I climb in that. And I like it too, because I have to zip myself up and it's kind of like nobody can get to me. It even takes three minutes to decompress me. So if the house caught on fire, I'd be kind of screwed. But I climb into that. So I'm just like, I'm locked off from the world, right? And then I have a couple of technologies that I use. One is called a HAP B. Oh yeah. Have you seen this? It's super cool. I've been messing around with it for like five months now. It uses a magnetic signal that simulates the same molecular signal of a few choice compounds. Like for simulating wakefulness, you could choose like the caffeine setting, the nicotine setting. It's got like an alcohol Setting.

But what's it doing?

So basically all it does is it causes your cells to respond as though that particular molecule were attached to the cell receptor without you actually ingesting a compound or taking a supplement or consuming something that's going to stay in your system for a long period of time. So let's say I want a wakey wakey. Prior to going out to a dinner party. I could put it in coffee mode, right? Put that around my neck or on my head, get that hit, wakefulness producing hit of caffeine. But then when I take it off, it's not like the caffeine's still floating around in my system. Same thing with a nap. So what I like.

So it's in your system only for as long as you have, right?

It's just. It's as though I were blasting you with the electrical signal of coffee without you actually having to drink the coffee, which has a half life of, you know, ever six or eight or 10 hours, depending on how you're genetically wired up. So it's really cool. And I didn't really believe, you know, I'll interview a lot of people on my podcast. I'm like, yeah, that's a little woo. But then I tried it and it actually works surprisingly well. So I put it in. My preferred mode for nap is the one that's. It's called relax, but it mimics cbd, right? Which is. Which is nice for me because it just kind of settles down some racing thoughts, gets me down at the end of the day. So I put that on. And then I also have this other device that works kind of similarly, but instead of using a magnetic signal signal, it vibrates and it's a tiny vibration that elicits a brainwave signal. That could be like an alpha brainwave signal or a kind of more like a hyped up beta brainwave signal or a deep relaxation like theta or delta brainwave signal. And that's called an Apollo. And that also similar to the HAP B, has like a wakefulness mode, a social mode. I even put that HAP B1, which also has an alcohol mode on it. I gave it to my son who wanted to try it out at dinner one night. And it was in like social alcohol mode. He got like super funny and he was joking, he was really relaxed. Then as soon as I took it off of him, he was just normal again.

That's quick.

I wasn't giving my son actual alcohol. This is just simulating the effects. So I put the Apollo in relaxed mode. I Put the Hap B in relaxed mode, and I climb into that hyperbaric chamber. And then I've got, like, lavender essential oil in there. And I lay back, back. And then I play this, this track. And I. I discover a lot of things through podcasting. Half the stuff I learned is from talking to people I'm learning right now. Super duper smart who'd normally never give me the time of day. And I get to pick the brains of these scientists.

Well, you're doing that for me today.

For, like, for like 90 minutes, twice a week. So it's way better than my college education just talking to all these people and find out what works and what doesn't. But a couple years ago, I interviewed this guy who has a company called newcomer.

Yes.

And NuCalm has an app that plays special signals. And this sounds like 8 billion other apps out there that will play relaxing signals at night. There are dime a dozen on the app store, but this one in particular, it just seems to work for me, most notably in the way that I can put it on 20 minutes and I'm dead to the world within two minutes of that thing playing. I'll wake up at the 20 minute mark and feel like I've slept like an hour. This is something else. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I asked the guy when I interviewed him, well, could this just replace, like, the pink noise that I play at night? He said, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Because it pushes you through a sleep cycle so well that if you put it on to sleep at night, you'd go through your sleep cycle from, let's say, like 10 to 11:30. Then you'd wake up wide awake at night. Right. So this is something that's better, in my opinion, for natural naps. The other time I'll sometimes use it is if I wake up, let's say, at like 3:34, and I want to snag an extra 30, 40 minutes of sleep or whatever, I'll put it on that. So I do the nap of the Apollo, the Hap B, the hyperbaric, the oil, and then that Hap B. And even though I'm sleeping six to six and a half hours a night, I get up from that nap and I'm kind of groggy for like 10, 15 minutes. But what I do is I go and I jump in that cold pool and then I'll have some kind of stimulant. I'll just pop a piece of nicotine gum or, you know, have a little leftover Coffee from the night before, whatever. And then boom. Like, it's like, I have a second day. I feel amazing. I'm fully present with my family that night at dinner. Whereas if I push through that afternoon slog, it's just kind of like it's a dinner and you're just kind of like, I can't wait until bedtime.

Yeah.

And I don't like that feeling.

Personally, I'm just impressed at your charging skills. Like, you must have the most organizing charging schedule for all these devices.

What's it. Oh, charging, charge.

Like, they all need to charge. They all need to be like, I'm in prison. Like, most people can't even charge their phone. You're like, here. Yeah, it's kind of seven devices, so it's amazing. And I mean that genuinely. I'm not just.

Yeah, I've got one charging station in the dining room that I just kind of keep everything plugged into. So, yeah, I've got like four or five devices that I'm kind of charging during the day. Or the reason that I plug them in is not because they have a low battery life and they need to be charged. And this is important for people to know any of these devices or anything I try. I have a hard and fast rule that it must be able to be placed in airplane mode for the reasons that I stated earlier. So if somebody's like trying to. Trying to like sell me or have me try, like some crazy new sleep system, you know, mattress self quantification device or whatever, one of the first questions I ask is, well, can I disable the WI Fi or can I put it in airplane mode so that during the time I'm using it especially for rest, I'm not getting bombarded by signals.

I'm so happy you brought this up.

Yeah. And so most of them can. But the problem is when you place a device in airplane mode mode, typically to reconnect it to your phone, because most of these are run via some kind of an app on your phone. You have to plug it back into a charger and that, like, I'm not an engineer, it takes out airplane mode, basically. And so a lot of times I do have to, like, plug things in, you know, get up from my nap, plug the Hap B and the Apollo in so they're ready for the next day. But yeah, it's there. There are ways, especially in our day and age, that you can definitely get by without just swallowing hook, line and sinker. You know that the eight to nine hours of sleep a night message like, there's a lot of ways around it.

Yeah. Tell me about a time, Ben, when, like, for you, this, you know, you've always been athletic. You, you, you are an athlete. You've been an athlete. You spoke about it before, but you also mentioned that there have been times when you, you didn't feel this way. And I want to hear a bit about that, about how your life was before you really understood the body as deeply as you do today. Because, Because I feel like for a lot of people, when they see you, like, to me as well, and I really mean this in a genuine way, I, I see you as like, wow, this guy's like, just, you know, really understands the body, really understands the mind, and, and you're an expert, so you sound like an expert, but I know for a fact that you weren't born that way and, and that's not how you've always been. And I'd love for people to hear about that. Journey around. Tell me about a time when you didn't feel boundless, when you didn't feel as like, now it's like, you know how to turn this and you play with this, and now it's an experiment and it's fun and you enjoy it. Tell us about when you kind of were like, did you ever feel broken health wise? Did you ever feel like everything was just a mess? Were you ever in the place that most of my audience may be feeling, like, where they're just like, Jay, I. I'm just struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Like, I don't sleep on my. I've got like, bloated. I'm feeling gassy. Like, tell me about when you felt like you were at your worst as opposed to what we see now.

There's three things that I want to tell you right now. When I was a kid, I was homeschooled K through 12. The emphasis of my homeschooling was really more on a classical education centered around Latin and logic and rhetoric and the great books and tons of reading, which I loved. My happy place was the library and my parents would have to take me out of the bedroom and almost like threaten me with punishment if I wouldn't come out and socialize with people because I just wanted to be in there with my books. I played the violin for 13 years. I was president of the chess club. I loved to take apart computers and design video games and figure out how my hard drive worked and was an early adopter of a lot of these technologies in a very geeky way. You Know, prior to the advent of social media, et cetera, when you actually had to kind of have a working knowledge of some of these technologies. And I was pretty much like a geeky little Christian homeschooled kid. I remember the stuff I got mad about when I was a kid was like when some kid would like quilt a doily at our homeschool talent competition and beat out my watercolor painting. Right. Like, and so was it your mother.

And father that were both. Oh, or was the home school like, there was a group of kids and teachers both.

We had a pretty good homeschool collective, so I didn't completely miss out on social life. I was a weird kid in that I was very independently driven to learn. And I am still that way now.

Definitely.

My parents would literally just give me books and walk away. They would literally give me the whole year's math curriculum and then just like make sure I took the test. My siblings were not the same and needed a lot more kind of hand holding. But I've always been curious and driven from, from an independent learning standpoint standpoint. And it really wasn't until I discovered the sport of tennis that I became interested in physical culture at all. When my parents wanted to create a really cool environment for all of us to grow up in. So one day they announced that they were going to bring in some folks and we were all going to pitch in and learn a little bit of construction and lay asphalt and build a tennis court. So we built a tennis court and they hired a tennis instructor and her name was Michelle and I had a big crush on her, which helped with my motivation to play more tennis. But I also loved tennis and I got really good at it and it came really naturally to me. And I started to run up the hills behind my house and my dad took me down to the local sporting goods store to buy little 10 pound dumbbells. And I started to figure out like, you know, how to drink milk to get strong and the kind of things that made me faster and how to stay hydrated and water and minerals. Girls. And I had a couple of mentors. A guy who was my. My younger brother's best friend's dad was a bodybuilder. So all of a sudden I'm learning about nutrition and working out from him. Another friend is a power lifter. So by the time I'm like 15, I was done with high school. So I'm like, you know, I don't want to go program computers or paint, watercolor. Like I want to go learn more about this body and tennis. So I walked on to the local college tennis team when I was 15 and started playing tennis, started studying exercise science, got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics and wound up opening a whole bunch of personal training studios and gyms in Washington and Idaho and just have been hardcore in the health and fitness and nutrition scene ever since then. So initially I really wasn't interested in much of this stuff at all. But at that point I spent like 20 years competing in all these crazy hardcore obstacle course races and Ironman triathlons and open water swims and adventurous races. That was my Life for like 20 years, was using my body as a guinea pig, using all these races and events as like a battlefield to test stuff out. I was coaching, I was competing, I was traveling, and I thought I was the bee's knees when it came to fitness. I would say that if you were to look at me and judge me through what our world considers to be fitness, which I think is a bastardized version of fitness, I was one of the fittest humans on the planet. Planet. I really did look good in spandex and could ride my bike really fast, run up hills. And to reply to the meat of part of your question, it was about nine years ago or so when I really got into self quantification. Testing of blood work, testing of biomarkers, sleep, nervous system, all these things that we can easily test now that you normally would have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the Princeton Longevity Institute or some executive facility only available to wealthy CEOs. We can now get all these tests in our own home. And I got super interested in this stuff and I started to get all these tests and I realized, oh crap, I'm fit on the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. High inflammation, low testosterone, dysregulated thyroid, gut inflammation and gut issues and constipation and brain fog and all these issues that technically somebody with low body fat and muscles who can run and lift weights you wouldn't expect to have.

Yeah, that's.

But really true fitness is not about going to a little fake box at the beginning of the day and pushing fake heavy things around for an hour and then walking out and assuming that you're good to go and maybe kind of sort of eating healthy like a protein bar or Trader Joe's or whatever. There's so much more. There's so much more when it comes to the body. And that's what I began to discover. My first big book that I wrote called beyond training was just that it was like, okay, so as an athlete, there's all these other things, things like digestion and hormones and endocrine system and inflammation and blood sugar regulation and immune system integrity and all these things that we don't think about when it comes to what it truly takes to have long health span and lifespan. And so what I discovered along the way was all of these things like not, I mean, Men's Health magazine or Women's Health magazine, whatever will tell you how to exercise and how to eat health healthy. Okay, maybe sometimes they miss the mark a little bit, but for the most part it's not rocket science for somebody to go out there and figure out, okay, eat real whole food that's recognizable, that preferably is as close to earth as possible, and then like move your body, lift heavy stuff and occasionally breathe hard, playing tennis or soccer, high intensity interval training or whatever. Like we've kind of cracked the code on eating healthy and moving. And most people can find that information for free pretty readily. But what most people don't pay attention to are all the things that the body really, truly needs to be optimized to produce ATP to produce energy. And this is a big part of what my last book, Boundless, was about. Light and how the photons of light interact with the human body to charge up the mitochondria to allow it to be able to produce ATP. The negative ions and the electricity produced by the planet Earth that dictate when you're outside barefoot or you're touching trees and rocks, rocks, you're soaking up all those negative ions and just restoring the natural state of electricity. The body, the body, which is like a battery is supposed to be in. When you get exposed to stressors of heat or stressors of cold, there's enormous variants that spring up in the human body like heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins and blood flow and nitric oxide. When you drink pure, clean water, that's chock full of minerals, right? Trace liquid minerals or sea salts or things like that that carries that electrical charge through your body. And I began to realize, holy cow, I thought you're just supposed to like go to the gym and eat a protein bar to be healthy. But oh my gosh, it's like sunlight, it's magnetism, it's water, it's earth, it's heat, it's cold, it's positive relationships and love and gratitude and all these things that we just, we forget about when it comes to being a full, complete, complete human being. And so that was when the light bulb happened for me when I realized I'm healthy on the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. And there's all sorts of avenues that this entire fitness world has yet to explore when it comes to what it truly means to have. You know, what I talk about in the book, you know, what I call boundless energy. So number number one is, no, I didn't always like this stuff, but I gradually developed a love for it. And I think my curiosity, my independent drive to learn and the fact that I was a real geek just tended to fuel my drive to learn a lot of these things about how people can really feel good. And then number two, I, after 20 years, realized my own mistake of just like beating up the body and expecting it to bounce back and thinking that was true fitness. And then finally see, and this is where I'm really driving a lot of my platform, my teachings, what I really want to focus probably for the rest of my life on, on is the fact that we can achieve all these things we've been talking about. Jay, you can sleep like a champ and you can have, if it's important to you, whatever, six pack abs or veins in your abs, or be able to do a triathlon or an obstacle race or just rule the CrossFit box or anything else that might be important to you, have a full head of hair, defy aging, low wrinkles. How many close to billion dollar industries have sprung up around us trying to optimize ourselves to ourselves as human beings. And yet at the end of the day, because I see this over and over again, not only in having experienced this myself, but having seen this in many of like the wealthy and successful executives I coach and pro athletes I've worked with and people who appear on the outside to be crushing it in life at the end of the day, none of this is fulfilling. None of this is ultimately fulfilling. Okay, Like, I can literally be like, like pose on the COVID of a magazine, whatever, with girls draped off of each arm, eating $100 steaks for dinner every night and experiencing what many people would covet as an amazing life. But I got news for you. I'm not happy in that state. And I've seen a lot of people also not be happy in that state. Because there is a yearning in our soul. Soul. There is a hole in our soul, right? There is this deep longing for some kind of fulfillment that in my world, we throw fitness and a healthy diet and the way you look and the way you perform into other people will throw cars, throw money, throw Sex, throw homes, throw experiences, throw anything else that seems like it might be that one, one thing that you finally discovered that's going to be the ultimate key to fulfillment. I finally about to cross the finish line of that Ironman triathlon. Oh boy, life's going to be different after this. It's going to be different. I've done it and now I can just be on cruise control the rest of my life because I've checked that fulfillment box. But at the end of the day, none of that stuff is fulfilling because people came before me who have identified this. This isn't new information that I came up with myself, but there is this. A great writer and theologian named Blaise Pascal would describe it as a God shaped hole in our hearts, eternity in our hearts. And the only thing that's going to fill an infinite abyss, an eternal abyss, a God shaped hole in your heart is God is some type of fulfillment that's everlasting, that's eternal. And once I realized that and realized, oh my gosh, like, I could train my body all day long. But even though physical training is a little bit beneficial, it's nothing compared to training for forever. It's nothing compared to gratitude, relationships, sharing with others, loving others, to volunteer, to service, to community worship, to having something greater outside of you and believing that a story is written for your life. Life. Now that I understand that all of these things that I've learned, all these fun little biohacks that we talk about at the end of the day are interesting but not going to make you ultimately happy. Well now if you have been doing those things, if you are taking care of your body right, and you do have a really good body and brain, you're biohacking, you're fit and you're healthy and you're eating well. When you put not what I would call the icing on the cake or the cherry on the cupcake, but really lay that on the core, on the foundation of a deeply meaningful spiritual life, then you're firing on all cylinders. And so I think that's what's really important for people to understand is the wool socks and the chili pad and the hyperbaric chamber. At the end of the day, what you should view those as is you should view those as a way to equip yourself to be more impactful with the purpose that you've been given in life, not as your source of happiness.

Ben, that was, was so powerful and you know, the way you just shared that and the way you even talk about biohacking and mastering the body. From the beginning of this interview, you can tell that it's to have these beautiful exchanges with your family, to have a meaningful dinner. And, you know, when I hear you talk about these things like, it resonates so deeply with me because what you just set up up is exactly why we do need to do these things. Who wants to be at dinner with their family and be like, have brain fog and have confusion and be stressed out and just be looking forward to bedtime or to be spending time with their partner, but not having the energy to go on a beautiful walk or a hike or whatever it may be like. And that's the challenge we're having, that our health is negatively impacting our relationships. Like, for those of us who are experiencing fatigue, for those of us who are experiencing bloating, for those of us who are experiencing inflammation, that's leading to stress and agitation in your relationships, you think that you're just not getting along.

It is. You cannot disentangle the body and the spirit. And there are some people that have taken this to extremes. Like if you look at the Gnostics, right, a very popular religion, about the same time that Christianity was rising in 56, 60, 70 A.D. they believed that all things fleshly and physical were evil and bad and that the only thing important was the spirit and that marriage was bad and that good food was bad and anything that even remotely reeked of epicureanism was bad. And one should be stoic, but stoic to the nth degree. And the fact is that the body is sacred, food is sacred. It's not just this physical biological interaction with your taste buds. Sex is sacred. It's not just two bodies rubbing together in mutual masturbation, fitness, and even the movement of electrons through the body. You know, in traditional Chinese medicine, you know, they call that the chi, the life force, the prana, the energy. In Western medicine, we call it the mitochondria. It's the same thing. There's a deep spiritual aspect to that. And so we are bodies with spirits, and the body must be treated as a temple that is to house the spirit. And the spirit must be treated as the one part of us that we care for the most, because that's what's going to go on for eternity. And that's what we really use as our deep fuel and our fire every day. And so, yeah, in an ideal scenario, when you wake up in the morning, in addition to impacting this world fully with whatever purpose you've been given with your life, in a spirit of loving Others, you should also be asking yourself, how can I equip both my body, body and my spirit today to be as impactful as possible? And it's both. And you can have both. You don't have to be like a. No offense, Jay, but whatever, like a skinny yogi monk who can't hold up a heavy weight without their bones breaking. You also don't want to be an Adonis at the gym who just basically doesn't even know what a gratitude practice is or how to pray to God, God or anything like that. But human beings, we are some of the most complex, if not the most complex creature on the face of the planet. Maybe a platypus or something might be up there, kind of interesting. But we have the ability to live our lives with this amazing body and an amazing spirit. And in my opinion, there's no reason that you can't have both. And man, when you get into that state of literally having your cake and eating it too, on the highest level level, life is amazing. And everybody, everybody, every single person listening in right now has the capability to get to that level as long as they realize that most people around them have settled for status quo. And if you realize that, you actually can rise above and you can train your spirit and you can train your body and all of this is learnable, all of this is teachable, all of this is practicable and habit formationable. And I'm going to stop making up words now, but anybody has this within their power to be able to accomplish.

Yeah, well said. No, and I feel the same way. You know, for years I focused extensively on the mind. I focused extensively on intention. I focused deeply on gratitude service. And that's where I spent most of my life, because that's what I naturally gravitated towards. It's what my, my monk training was based on. It's what my heart was drawn to and everything you just shared. And, and I find myself now coming over to the other side, right. And wanting to learn more about the body.

Right.

And so what you just said is it, it sits very closely with my heart because I grew up as someone who dived deep into the spirit and the mind and the heart and the soul, which has been the foundation of anything that I do today. But I have come backwards almost.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying it's backwards or forwards. I just think I've, I've come to that realization that my spirit can only do as much as my body. And it's crazy because as monks, the order of our priorities were meant to be health, sadhana, service. And so health is health, as you're saying it, Your physical, your body, your temple health. Sadhana is your daily practices of gratitude, intention, prayer. And then savor or service is you then sharing that with the world.

Right.

So the pyramid was meant to be that.

Yeah.

But some of us, including me, decided to skip that first one and do two and three. And I'm almost, you know, the reason why speaking to you is so powerful. And some of the things that I've started experimenting with and playing with probably in the last couple of years have. Have been totally that direction of. I now want to understand my body so that I can serve better.

Yep.

So that I can serve for longer, so that I can have more deep, loving exchanges.

That's. That's the goal. Right. When you come at it with love others.

Yeah.

Right. Not how do I look in the mirror?

No, that was. That's why I never fast.

Can run a mile. It's loving others. And in the very same way that the best businesses are not necessarily built on a monetary goal, but are built upon a goal of how many people can we serve? How many people can we talk about, Touch, how many lives can we affect and the money will follow.

Yes.

I mean, for me, as a business person, right. Like, I have to make a living, and I'm a content producer, kind of like you. Like, a lot of my business is driven by me educating people. And when I write an article or when I record a podcast, or when I'm, you know, doing an Instagram post or whatever it is, I tell myself, okay, my goal, even if there is a product, a solution that's offered here as part of this post or this podcast or this story that someone can go by, my goal is that someone finishes digesting this content, listening to this audio, reading this essay, looking at this post, and walks away a better person, regardless of whether or not they actually purchase anything. Yeah, right. They walk away, whatever. Knowing more about the gut, knowing more about the hormones, knowing more about the brain, knowing more about gratitude, knowing more about whatever it is that. That I'm producing content about. About. I tell you what, when I write in that way and I teach in that way, and I produce content in that way, I don't have to worry about money. That just kind of follows. Right. Like. Like. And honestly, it follows in a better way because you create a more hardcore audience that trusts what you have to say because you actually care about them. And that's why you're getting out of bed in the morning. And so it should be the same way for yourself when you go to the gym. Gym and try this. If you're listening in right now, if you go hit the gym tomorrow or you go out of your basement and you're breathing hard and beating yourself up and doing your burpees or whatever the case may be, think about how you're equipping yourself to be impactful at work, to be present for your family, to have a lifespan and health span that enables you to be passing wisdom on to your great grandkids or your great, great grandkids. That level of motivation that you experience when you're doing things to love others, others, or arguably also doing things to equip yourself to, to just be able to more fully savor this amazing planet that we are on all of a sudden, man, compared to like, what's the scale gonna say today? It's just a much, much more empowering way to train for health.

Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, man. I couldn't agree more. Tell me before we get to the. We have final five questions of the interview. We're nearly at the end. I want to ask you, you, if someone you. You very emphatically stated that anyone who's listening to this, anyone who's watching can do this, can have both. I'm with you. I agree with you. I'm aligned with you. Tell me about what you said earlier. You were saying, jay, you know, I still work with a few people on coaching, and you were sharing to me, I should sleep between 63 and 65. That's going to be better for me than even 65 to 67. So much of this is habit change. You, you've created so many new habits in your life, experimented. For those of you who have not read Boundless, when you pick it up, what I love about the book is you break it down into tiny sections around explaining each part of the science, but then giving a practical thing that someone can do. Today you have technology that if people want to adopt it, habit change is a huge part of what you do. Where are people going wrong in their habit change? What have you seen through your extreme experimenting where habit changes actually worked for people?

I would say what comes to mind for me first when you ask that question is a big, big part of it is relevance and understanding why you're doing something. When I was in high school, I really hated math and science. And when I got to college, I just became a standout in math and science because I had had a teacher first year of college who Made math relevant by tying in a lot of wealth preservation and savings and investing components that made math super relevant to me. And so at that point I just developed this wonderful love for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So understand for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So understand why you're doing something. I think that the importance of education when it comes to habit formation is very important. Another one that I rely upon on a daily basis for either stopping habits or making habits is making something as accessible and convenient as possible. Meaning that I am probably from a fitness standpoint and a consistency of fitness standpoint probably just about as fit as I've ever been in terms of true health. And some of those parameters we were talking about earlier, earlier because partially I really haven't had to leave my house to go to the gym and was kind of forced into that because of COVID So everything I need is I gotta step over a kettlebell to walk into my gym. I gotta like walk underneath a pull up bar to go down the stairs in my house. I have to basically like walk past a cold tub every day. And you know, and you know there's just healthy food strewn all about the house. This idea of surrounding yourself and making everything convenient down to the point where if you're going to go for a run in the morning, having your running shoes and your shorts right there beside the bed, so there's very little cognitive resistance to starting. That would be the second thing that I found to be really useful is making things convenient. I think the last one is for me personally and I don't know if this is the way for everybody, but I like, especially when it comes to health habits, habits to be able to stack things. So anytime that I'm getting healthy, I'm also making myself a better person. For example, I really rarely listen to music when I'm working out. I view my workout as also a chance for me to go to university, right. So it's always podcasts, audiobooks, when the going gets really hard. There's actually some studies that have shown this to be a cool tactic. That's when the music goes on, like when you need it the last minute. So you're of kind, kind of like saving your brain to get to the point where it really, really needs the music and it's not just kind of used to the music at that point and can actually push past. I do like the red light therapy and the grounding and the earthing mats and the essential oils and this special water repair device called a nanov on my desk. But I don't go in there and just do all that stuff and have it be unproductive. Time. That's the time time when I bang out my first 45 minutes of emails for the day. So I always figure out a way to make something more palatable in terms of tying that habit into something. I mean, I even like, I got out of the habit because I'm a big fan of reading scripture and reading the Bible every morning. And I even found myself. And this happened a few months ago. I was sitting there reading my Bible. I'm like, why am I just sitting here reading the Bible? Aren't there other things that I could be doing? And you'd think that'd be distracting, but now I read my Bible while I'm sitting in a pulsed electromagnetic field chair with a biocharger on. And I'm still reading. But my body's kind of like getting better at the same time. So I love to stack healthy habits, and it's very rewarding when you stack them all and also figure out how to still be productive during the day. So it's not like you're having to rob Peter to pay Paul. It's like you're paying Paul and Peter at the same time. So those are the top three things that come to mind would be educate yourself about why you're doing doing what you're doing. Surround yourself with what you need to maintain positive habits while hiding the things that would cause you to form negative habits. And then basically stack habits and make the habit fun or meaningful or productive so you don't feel like you're wasting time engaged in that habit.

I love that. Ben Greenfield, everyone. Ben, that was amazing. I'm like, you need to come on for a part two, but we can't wait this long as we waited to do a part one.

Yeah. Maybe we can go to some other longevity hotspot. Yeah, Okinawa would be interesting. Sushi and a couple potatoes. I haven't been. I've spent a lot of time in Japan. I used to race over there a lot, and I've spoken over there a couple of times. But I absolutely. I love the. I love the food. Depending where I'm at, I like the culture. I would say probably one of my favorite places over there would be Kyoto.

Right.

Just great. Great touring, great walks. And yeah, I'm a fan of. I'm a fan of sushi. Although now I. I know we're trying to wrap up, but I'll finish here. I've been making my own sushi. I found this dish service called Seatopia and they deliver sashimi grade fish to my house every week.

Wow.

And so it's kind of spoiled me. I literally just take out my sushi knife, cut it in strips, put it in a nori wrap with some sushi rice, a little mustard, whatever I want to sprinkle on there. So my sons and I make poke bowls and sushi all the time now, but I do enjoy again. Good, good. Actual legitimate.

Yeah.

Japanese sushi restaurant occasion.

Of course.

Yeah.

Amazing, man. Well, Ben, we end every episode with our final five, which are our fast five. So answers that one word to one word, one word to 10 words maximum for each answer.

All right, so words have dashes. That's the most important part.

Yeah. So the question number one is, what is the worst health advice you've ever received?

It would probably be, and I won't have a whole lot of time to explain this too much, but it would be. Eat a post workout meal.

Okay, we'll save that for part two. Is that inboundless? Do you talk about that?

Talk a little bit about that. Okay.

Boundless. All right, great. Question number two. What's the best health advice you've ever received or given or heard?

Get out in the sunlight more.

I need to do that a lot more. I was talking to someone in my health life recently, and they were like, like, because of the color of my skin, I have to really be out there.

So I'm a sun worshiper. I'm a sun.

I love being out there, but I'm not out there enough. Even though because of my skin, we.

Have a giant battery in the sky and barely any of us use it.

Yeah, Love that. All right, third question. What would you describe as your current purpose?

To read and write, learn and teach, sing and speak, compete and create in full presence in selfless love to the glory of God. God.

Beautiful. I love that. All right, question number four. What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before you go to bed?

I walk over to the sink and I scrape my tongue from the back to the front using a copper tongue scraping tool.

Yeah.

Ayurvedic. At the very end of the day. Yeah, very end. Very, very last.

Very lasting. Yeah. Very last day.

I put my arm around my wife and I say a prayer with her. Her.

That's beautiful. I love that, man. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. That's great. Oh, yeah, we use My wife say Ayurvedic.

That's her coconut oil.

I love it. Yeah, yeah, My wife. That's her world. All right, fifth and final question. If you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Every day, write down the name of one person who you are going to help and then go help them on that day.

Beautiful.

Actually, I actually do that every morning.

I love that.

Super meaningful.

Well, thank you, Ben, everyone who's been listening and watching, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate all of you. Make sure you go and grab a copy of the book Boundless and Boundless Cookbook. That's out as well. We'll put the links in all of our captions. Ben, thank you so much for doing this. I think you should. I mean, there are countless parts of this episode that I'm going to use in my own life. I'm going to go home and tell my wife straight away to switch us from 63 to 65. That's going to change. We're going to be getting a few more changes in our bedroom. I think based on this bedroom is.

Going to look like a nightclub now with all the red lights. Yeah.

Yeah. I love it. So thank you. And everyone has been listening or watching. Make sure you tag me and Ben on Instagram to let us know what resonated with you, what stuck out to you, and what you're going to experiment with. That's my hope. My hope is that this episode gives you a whole new list of tools to experiment with and try out to see what works for you. And of course, Ben's books are a great guide. They truly are a guidebook and a map into some of the depths of all of this. We've just scratched the surface. If you want a foolproof plan of how to practice this, the Boundless book is going to help you do that. So, Ben, thank you for being here.

Thank you, Mr. Jay Shetty. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you. And sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product. It is indeed something I personally use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.