How To Lose 131 Pounds By Eating Meat: The Rick Rubin Podcast

All right, pop quiz. Question time. What are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Johnny Cash, the Black Crows, Slayer, Jay Z, James Blake, the Dixie Chicks, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Black Sabbath, Neil Diamond, Metallica, ac, DC Aerosmith, Weezer, Cheryl Crow, ZZ Top, Lady Gaga, Shakira, Rage against the Machine, System of a Down, Mick Jagger, Eminem, and just about every other other world famous band or musician you've ever heard of have in common. Well, they were all produced by today's podcast guest. His name is Rick Rubin, he's an American record producer and he's the former co president of Columbia Records. In 2007, MTV called him the most important producer of the last 20 years and he's been on times 100 most influential people in the world list Dr. Dream, a rapper, for those of you not on the hip hop scene, has stated that Ruben is hands down the dopest producer ever that anyone would ever want to be. Ever. Apparently Dr. Dre likes to use the word ever. But Rick has a personal passion outside of music that many people don't know about. And that would be health, nutrition, fitness, and even a bit of biohacking. Rick and I have gotten to know each other pretty well over the past couple of years, sharing little nerdy health tips with each other. And in the episode that you're about to hear, Rick and I sit on his back porch and we watch a relaxing sunset after a hard morning Laird Hamilton pool workout. And we had a pretty intense discussion about veganism and paleo and Rick's weight loss journey and some of the cool habits that he's used to shed a lot of weight but also hack his way into really, really optimal health. So you're going to get a ton of stuff in this episode like his stim stem sh and you're going to learn a little bit about neurofeedback based EEG and ayurvedic pulse taking techniques. The hardest workout in the world, sleeping Monk tea, all sorts of very interesting things that we discuss. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

I was a vegan for 23 years, believing it was the healthiest diet I could have. And through the vegan diet I got to the point where I weighed 318 pounds. Just to be around someone like that was so different than the musicians that were around. And it was fun for me to see someone who's really good at something different than the people that I know who are really good at something. I was completely uncoordinated. I'd never done any of these things and he was such a good teacher who would just will me to do things that I just didn't believe I could do. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people.

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The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. This is probably the most beautiful setting in which I have ever recorded a podcast. Rick, do you want to frame this for people or should I?

You can do the honors.

All right. We're sitting on Rick's back porch here in Malibu, and the sun is setting. Bright orange, a little bit of red, a little bit of blue. Towards the bottom, the ocean waves are humming a bit in the background. You might even hear them. And you've framed. You framed the ocean, Rick, with.

Your.

Architecture and the layout of your backyard. The trees are forming a perfect frame around the setting of the sun. Was that intentional?

It is.

It's perfect. It's perfect. I like your style, man. So tell me about what you just finished doing, because you appear to be somewhat relaxed. You are actually. Let me finish painting this picture before you dive in. You are shirtless, howled, sipping tea, as am I. And I just woke up from a nap. And you did what?

I did an infrared sauna for 55 minutes and then did a long cold shower.

So infrared sauna for 55 minutes. That's a long time. I go 20 to 30 minutes and I'm sweating profusely.

I was sweating profusely, but it doesn't get our infrared sonic goes up to maybe 150. So it's hot enough for you to sweat a lot, but not so hot that you can't stay in for a long time.

You need to do like I did and stick a wine cork in the temperature sensor and insulate it.

That.

That does a little bit of a. Of a difference in terms of the heat capacity, but 150 for 55 minutes is still quite some time. You also have this barrel sauna.

Yeah. And the reason I don't make the infrared hotter is the barrel sauna gets really hot.

It does.

And I use them for different purposes. So the barrel sauna will be for 15 or 20 minutes in between ice baths and the Infrared sauna is for one long round. Because if I were to do ice and get back into the infrared, it wouldn't be enough to really.

Yeah, that's what I found. I go the infrared for a while, and then you finish up the cold for you. Is this, like, for detox? Do you do it for relaxation? Is this some kind of a novel health method that you discovered somewhere in your. In your journey of health, or. When did the hot and the cold come into the picture for you?

It started with a hockey player friend of ours, Chris Chelios really swears by the sauna. And I was working on an album with Kid Rock, and he invited me to go to Chelios's house to do sauna and then jump in the ocean in the middle of winter.

In the middle of winter, yeah.

And I was really dreading it. And both. Both. I had no experience with either. So the sauna was surprisingly pleasant. And then the idea of going into the ocean in the winter seemed terrible, but coming out of the sauna, it was really doable. And then we did a bunch of rounds of that, and I loved it right away and started doing that regularly. And then Laird got the ice tub. Laird Hamilton, and we started doing sauna and the ice tub.

The big silver ice tub.

Big silver ice tub. And I started doing it. And at first I could do maybe a minute, and then I worked up to five or six minutes. And then I had David Blaine come over.

The magician?

Yeah, we were just talking about magic stuff.

The magician who has spent copious amounts of time submerged in ice.

Right, exactly. And holding his breath.

And holding his breath.

So when he came, he talked me through the process of sitting in the ice, and I was able to do like 12 minutes or 15 minutes just by him talking to me and telling me that all the things that were scary were normal. And, you know, the teeth chattering and shaking and all the stuff where you feel like you're dying, that's all part of the process. And you don't run away from that. You just go through that.

You get to a certain point where your body almost becomes numb, and you do get a huge dump in nitric oxide and your skin starts to turn pink and then red. It's kind of a cool survival mechanism. And it's part of the very potent health effects of doing something like that. You know, the increase in.

Yeah, I found of any of the things that I do it. Beyond the health benefits, which are. I mean, both on the sauna side and the ice side, it's a Long list. But just what it does for my mood is the magic bullet for me.

Yeah.

I just love, love the way it makes me feel after.

Yeah. I would issue a dare to people listening. If you've never done you, you sometimes go for a couple of hours, right, Rick? Yeah, the last time I was here, when a couple hours do like, like the protocol Rick described with the dry sauna plus the very cold shower, preferably an ice bath for. For like 15 on five cold, 15 hot, five cold for about two hours. Right. So what's that come out? Four or five times, six ish rounds. Yeah.

And usually the way it works, if you're doing it with a group of people, the timing is different. Like if you have five people in the sauna, you're kind of waiting to go in the ice and you're in the sauna maybe longer than you want to be. So maybe the sauna sessions turn into 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes.

Yeah. Some of the Russian spas have like a cold plunge that. I was just doing this with a few of my friends in LA a couple days ago. We spent two hours at the sauna.

Great.

Lavoda Spa in la and their cold plunge there was a big score. I think six of us guys were.

In the cold pool. Yeah, it's a pretty big pool.

Yeah, it is. It works. What got you started down this road of figuring out things that you can do to enhance your mood or enhance your health? I know that's a very loaded question that will rabbit hole, but I think it's going to be a perfect thing for people to realize is this fact that you haven't always been geeked out on this stuff.

Well, I've always been health conscious, but I didn't always have good information. So I was a vegan for 23 years thinking that it was believing it was the healthiest diet I could have. And through, through the vegan diet, I got to the point where I weighed 318 pounds and was pretty much dying. And I went to a Tibetan doctor who does pulse reading and he said he was a doctor who treats the Dalai Lama. And he said, leave here now and go get some bone broth. And I refused to do it because I was vegan.

What do you mean he did a pulse reading? Do you know, just tested your radial artery. Like your heart rate or.

No, not heart rate. In like Ayurvedic. And in Chinese medicine they do like six different pulse readings on your wrist.

Really?

Yeah.

You have to look into this. I'll find a resource for this. For those of you listening in, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rubin R U B I N and I'll find out more about this pulse test.

I think if you go to any good, a real proper acupuncturist will like.

A traditionally trained Chinese medical practitioner, and they'll do this pulse test.

Yeah, yeah.

And he told you to go drink bone broth?

He told me eat meat and drink bone broth now, like, immediately.

Really?

Yeah. And that was slow.

Like, right. Like walk out the door and go find. Yeah.

And I still went for years without.

Oh, really?

Just was sick for a long time.

Interesting. And did you. Did you keep seeing this doctor?

No, I.

Which I guess would have been awkward for him to know that you were still just eating.

I went to see a lot of doctors. There was a point in time where I went to. I probably went to a doctor a day, whether it be sometimes two a day, sometimes physical, sometimes mental, just to try to feel better because I felt so terrible.

So when you say you were having all these health issues, like, what were they? I know that you gained a lot of weight.

Yeah, I was obese, was having trouble sleeping, couldn't breathe at night, was in a terrible mood most of the time. Lived a backwards life. So I slept for most of my life. I slept all day and was up all night, worked at night.

Was that because the music industry.

It was mine. It honestly was my natural tendency. I mean, it played into the music industry. But even in. Even when I went to college, I never took a class before three because I knew it wouldn't make it.

Really. I wonder if you're wired like a. Well, I don't know if you've. You've heard of this new book called the Power of When I'm actually gonna interview this guy for the show. But it's about how some of us are lions mourning very early people. Some of us are bears, which are kind of like normal circadian biology. Some are dolphins who are just all over the fricking map. And some of us are wolves who are night night people, like, genetically hardwired to do better on. Almost like a reverse circadian biology. I always wonder how much of it is entrainment with artificial light and lifestyle and how much of it is that genetic biology for a different circadian rhythm?

Yeah, I think in my case it was entrainment because since switching, it has gotten. Everything in my life has gotten a lot better.

Interesting. Okay, so we had sleep issues, probably inflammation.

Terrible inflammation.

Yeah.

I'll give you an example, if I was going to go, if I wanted to go on a trip somewhere, I would check to see if handicapped people could go or someone in a wheelchair. It's like if someone in a wheelchair could do it, then I felt like, okay, I could probably do this, but other than that I felt I couldn't do anything.

That's a pretty scary standard to live life by. The wheelchair rule.

Yeah.

Wow.

And I was totally sedentary my whole life.

Were you? You know, you see these days a lot of people are doing a, you know, a plant based diet like you were doing, but they are using vitamin D and vitamin K and sprouting, soaking and fermenting. I mean, playing devil's advocate here. Do you think that you could have eaten a plant based diet and done it the right way?

I honestly don't believe it's possible. I think you could do a plant based diet, but I don't think you could do a limited to plant, plant only diet.

Yeah, yeah. Why do you think that?

Because I think there's some, there's something, there's something to the idea of the relationship between protein and carbohydrates. And for, in, in all the vegetarian sources of protein, for this amount of protein, there's still this amount of carbohydrate. So it's not like when you eat meat.

When you say this for those of you not getting the visual, his hands went from very, very close together to very, very far apart.

Yes. So again, I don't know the exact numbers, but if we look at the amount of, for meat, what's the amount of protein versus carbohydrate?

There's a little bit of glycogen content in meat. If I were to give me, God forbid, cut off your arm and eat it, I'd be getting some of the carbohydrates in the storage of muscle glycogen. But it's relatively low. I don't know the ratios either, but no idea. It's not enough to really even spike insulin levels. Like when you consume meat, would it.

Be 20 times of the protein to one?

I couldn't even throw a number at you, but it's pretty small. When you look at, let's say somebody who switches to a very low carbohydrate diet, we could do the math in our heads. Or a ketosis based diet, you'll tend to see that rapid weight loss, an average 200 pound person is going to lose somewhere around 20 pounds or so. Right. In that first week to two weeks where they're experiencing the keto flu or the carb flu. And if you look at that as a percentage of their lean body mass, it'd probably be, I would guess like a 8 to 1, 10 to 1 ratio, something like that.

So the argument would be the vegan diet tends to be the exact opposite picture of that.

Yeah. And it's interesting when you look at, a lot of people will say, well, you know, kale has protein, spinach has protein, even cucumbers have miniscule amounts of protein, as do apples. If you look at the label or you go to nutritiondata.com to get as much protein as you might need and it's not as much as a lot of people think. There is that anti aging effect of somewhat of a protein restricted diet. To get as much protein as you need though, from those type of sources, it's a copious amount of insoluble, insoluble fiber. And we don't have a ruminant stomach, we don't have a gorilla colon. And so it's, it's difficult for us to just sit there and ferment the amount of fiber that we need.

I also, one, I don't think it's possible for it to be a healthy diet. And second, it depends on what your, what your goal of the diet is. If it's a healthy based diet, I don't think it's a healthy diet, the vegan diet. Two, if it's, if you want to do anything physical, it's not a good diet. If you wanted to be a monk and sit on a mountaintop in silence, there's definitely a spiritual benefit to a vegan diet. You feel more connected.

What about the isolated forms? And I realize I'm throwing the hard questions out there. What about the isolated form like pea protein or hemp protein or rice protein? I mean, I know that they have done. I think I even shared this study with you a few months ago because we were talking about protein powders. A study in which if you take a digestive enzyme prior to consuming a vegan or vegetable based protein powder actually makes the amino acid availability of that the equivalent of a whey protein isolate or a steak or some other form of protein.

I've never experienced, you can't say, well.

It does require eating. It does require eating protein powders instead of eating food. Eggs or. Yeah, food. Exactly.

And in, in my vegan days, I probably ate a lot of soy instead of eating food.

Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, I also, I have this philosophy that we don't live on the same planet as the planet was originally meant to be. I think industrialization, I think the, the lack of ozone. I think at one time that, you know, every, every culture has a story of there being some kind of a great flood where a bunch of waters fell from the heavens and came up from the earth and just wiped out the planet. And I think that there was even a different water canopy perhaps above the planet. And all of this, if you look at fossil records, shows that plants used to be a lot bigger, animals used to be a lot bigger. You know, there used to be dinosaurs that can no longer survive on our. On our Earth's environment. I sometimes wonder if there was a time when people could have gotten away with eating just plants as food and not animals. And there were, you know, there would have been no, you know, death or these other things that bother people about animals. But now I agree with you, it is. It is very difficult to actually achieve health.

Well, there's also, again, I don't know enough about it, but there's something about the cycle of life on the planet where we eat plants and animals, we animals move the soil, they poo, we poo, they die and become soil. We die, we become soil, the soil comes back in plants for the animals to eat. And there's a cycle. And animals living and dying is part of that cycle. And it seems like us eating them is part of that cycle too. Now, maybe not the industrial, not the industrialized model, but in the natural model, it seems to be the case.

Yeah. Yeah. What about insects? Do you have any thoughts on cricket proteins or. I was reading in Men's Health. I was actually sharing this on a podcast this week. People are eating like buffalo worms and june bugs and ordering cricket protein powders.

Yeah, I'll say. I haven't gone there yet, but I'll also say when I tried to eat. When I tried to eat red meat after not eating it for 20 some odd years, it was like eating human flesh. It was one of the hardest things to retrain myself to eat meat again.

Now what was. What do you mean? It was like eating human flesh?

It's the same.

Which, by the way, I think I brought up first on this podcast.

No, it'd be the same. The idea of flesh, animal flesh. If you're vegan for a long time, the experience of eating flesh goes away. And if you don't eat it for a long time, you sort of lose your taste for it. Seems pretty disgusting.

I've heard that a couple of times. I've Never experienced that myself. The longest I've ever gone plant based was six months. Yeah, I lost too much muscle and stopped.

Yeah.

But how long did it take for the. I guess the taste for, for meat to return?

I had probably. We would, we would. At the time we were eating fish, me, Me and Muriel would eat fish. So we went to. It was on my birthday. We started and I'll tell you the whole story, backstory of why we started. But we both ordered fish and we ordered one steak and we both looked at it. She was vegetarian as well. And we looked at the steak between us and then we like each cut off a tiny piece and ate the tiny piece. And it was kind of like getting in the ice bath the first time. Similar where it's. Even if you know.

Or doing a burpee for the first time or anything.

Even if you know. One of the things about the ice bath, though, is there is this red flag of this is something that we're not meant to do. And when you're vegan for a long time, that first bite of meat, there's a real sense of this is not okay. Like this.

This is stressful.

Well, this is. You want to throw up in the same way that you would. That's why I use the example of. For most people even who eat meat, the idea of eating human flesh is.

Right.

That's a turn off for most. So I'm using that as an example. If you imagine it's like we sit.

Down for dinner, either Rick or I endorse cannibalism, despite what you guys might be thinking here.

So you could imagine if you were imagining eating human flesh, what that would feel like. That's what a vegan feels like eating beef.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I had that experience. It was terrible. And we did. We. Because we knew it was healthy and because we were eating it as medicine, we, over a series of weeks would eat a bite or two bites once a week for maybe four or five. Probably by the sixth week we ate the steak.

That's not, that's. That's one to two bites each week. That's not a lot. Wow.

Well, just to get, to get over the. It's all mental. It's not really physical. It's mental. Same with the ice bath. The trauma in the ice bath is much more of a mental challenge than it is a physical challenge.

Yeah, yeah. And at that point, how much did you weigh?

At that point? I weighed probably. Well, I had already lost all my weight at that point, so I probably weighed. Yeah, probably weighed around 200 pounds.

Gotcha. So you lost your weight when you, when you started eating the meat based diet?

Well, I started eating a protein heavy diet, fish and eggs, because in my mind I was still a vegan. In my mind, I was still a vegan. I ate fish and eggs for medicine. I cut out everything that's not Paleo, basically, grains, dairy.

Gotcha. What, what, prior to that, what would you have been eating? Like, what would have been a typical, like, healthy diet for you, prior to you introducing fish eggs and then eventually me?

Well, it wasn't a healthy diet, but I thought it was healthy. It's what you get it eventually.

What you.

What you get at a vegan restaurant. So it would be as some sort of a soy nut loaf with yeast brown gravy.

Oh, gosh.

Or gluten gravy. They would make gluten gravy. And if you're vegan, that would be like. It'd be like Thanksgiving dinner.

Right, right. Inflammatory firestorm in the nervous system, even if it doesn't hurt your gut. I mean, there's some very interesting recent new studies on that. And again, I'm not one of those guys who's full on gluten free. I'm personally not even paleo. I mean, I have goats and I drink raw dairy and my wife makes fantastic sourdough bread. And I mean, I consume a lot of these traditionally prepared foods.

I think most people consider raw dairy to be Paleo.

To be Paleo, yeah. Yeah. But these other foods that you mentioned, and they're pretty typical still on, like I walked through, I was just in Erewhon over in la, which is kind of a cool store, honestly.

Great store.

They've got a lot of seitan, or seitan, however you want to pronounce it, and tofu and soy and gluten powder. And yeah, it's really an inflammatory firestorm that it can create or introduces a lot of phytic acids into the side order of wheat. Gluten, Right, Exactly. Throw some gluten powder on there for me. Throw some gluten on my gluten.

It's also a very sweet diet. So if you go to any vegetarian restaurant, the thing that most vegetarians talk about, most excited about are the vegetarian diet, the vegetarian desserts, which are basically soy and a ton of unprocessed sugar, you know, but a ton of it.

Yeah. To be fair, we could say that high amounts of dairy or high amounts of meat are heavily insulinogenic and could. Could potentially create insulin insensitivity in the Same way that those foods do, just a different biomechanical pathway. And that's. That kind of returns to something I hinted at earlier, how they're, you know, I don't think either you or I are arguing, but correct me if you are, that massive amounts of protein are the key to weight loss or the key to longevity or health.

No. But I will say, for whatever reason in my body, my body tends to do better with more protein than fat.

How much protein do you eat?

I would aim like during my weight loss phase. I was having probably 200, 225 grams a day.

Mm, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a decent amount. I mean, that's over what, a gram per pound of protein. Yeah, yeah. And typically, I mean, what I've recommended in the past to folks has been like 0.55 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Granted you brought up an interesting component there, that biochemical or metabolic individuality and the fact that some people may do better on slightly higher amounts of protein. It is one of those deals where we're talking about a curve. I, as the professorial one, should know the title of this curve, the parabolic curve. I believe it would be where a certain number of people fit into the large clusters in the middle. And then you've got the trailers on either end.

And I lost my weight using more protein and then I shifted to more of a ketogenic and more of a fat based diet. And it didn't, it didn't seem to work as well for me. So now I'm going back to more protein.

So you shifted to protein from, from a weight of like, how much was your original weight?

318. I got down to probably 185. And that was before really exercising. And then when I started exercising, I started putting on muscle and I probably added about 20, I would guess 20 pounds of muscle, but with that, some more fat, as tends to be the case. A little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you weigh now?

Today I weighed, I think 212. And I think my goal now, my current plan will be to do low heart rate cardio every day until I get down to about 200 and then do heavy weight based. I think I'm gonna lose the weight first and then add some things.

But you're still like, for example, tomorrow morning, I know you mentioned you're gonna go do Don Wildman's workout.

Yes.

So you're still lifting weights.

I wouldn't. Other than that, you were here.

I want you to experience. So tell me about this workout that we are going to experience. Is this the one that was in Esquire magazine slated as the hardest workout in the world?

It was. But we don't have to do it as hard as don't.

I haven't blamed for punishment. I'm about to go hunting up in the mountains. I won't be hitting the gym anytime soon. What do you do in a workout like this?

It's a lot of these Kaiser machines. So they're air based.

Yeah. Pneumatic pumps that increase or decrease resistance.

And so they're all very different than the layered workout where the layered workout's much more. Every exercise that you do is a whole body exercise. This is the opposite where it's very seated target old fashioned bodybuilding.

Bodybuilding style. Single joint.

Yes.

Great. Great for getting swole or actually it's. And I've actually I've seen bits and pieces of the routine here and there. If it's. It's the one I'm thinking of. And it's also good for a couple of other things. From what I understand the ability to exercise if you aren't able to do say a squat to overhead press or a power clean or something like that, but then also you actually create and I experienced this when I was a bodybuilder. Boatloads of lactic acid. When you isolate a muscle group like that and there are actually a lot of. Speaking of hormesis, there's a lot of horizons. Hormetic mitochondrial density, increasing effects of just like pumping one muscle part full of lactic acid. You get a, you get. It's almost like cardio and weights at the same time.

Yeah, it is like that because it's long and it never stops. It's different than you know, heavyweight low rep. This is more like heavyweight high rep. Endless, endless.

I will hunt it down and put it in the show notes. For those of you who want to perhaps try this workout for yourself. I know there was a magazine article written on it at some point. So those of you who want to try it out go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rubin R U B I N I'll put a link to that. So let's get back to nutrition. We were at the point where you ate a plant based diet for 20 plus years. Then you switched to fish and eggs and lost a lot of weight. And then you began to introduce meat, tiny bites at a time.

Well it's even a little more complicated than that. So I, when I switched to fish and eggs that was at the Suggestion of Phil Maffetone, who. Who changed my. Changed me to a proper circadian. Changed my hours.

Fixed your sleep.

Fixed my sleep.

He's a smart guy.

He's a great guy. So he got me to change my hours first, change my diet to add fish and eggs. He wanted me to eat meat, but I wouldn't do it. Fish and eggs seem like the. And both of those were foods I didn't really like. So it was more like again, medicine eating them as medicine to try to come back and doing low level cardio every. And I did that for two years and lost maybe five pounds. But I got much healthier. Much, much healthier. Then I went on a variation of that diet with a doctor at UCLA who. And this only worked, I think, because of what I did with Phil first. Dr. Hebert. UCLA put me on a high protein, low carb, calorie restricted diet. And that's where it really changed.

Interesting. Were you guys just calorie restricting every day or were you doing this new thing that people are doing now with.

Their cycle calories, seven protein shakes a day, fish soup, salad.

Would you do that now or has your dietary philosophy changed?

Well, I do sort of a version of that, but I just don't need to do seven shakes. Like it took me seven shakes to get through a day without wanting to eat something, something else. Now I could probably do it with two or three shakes.

But you don't do quite as well with fat.

I don't seem to. I do okay with butter.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Do you, do you include things though like avocado and coconut oil and seeds and nuts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

But if I go to like a real like bulletproof diet, I tend to get bigger, not interesting. Digesting fats properly.

That's what I was. That's exactly. We're on the same wavelength here. I tend to notice, especially when I do like blood testing in older individuals or not blood testing, stool testing, you see high amounts of what are called fecal fats, triglycerides, fats in the stool, et cetera. Reflecting. And you see this in people who eat the high fat diet. It's often paired with low levels of pancreatic enzyme production, low amounts of gallbladder bile, basically low amounts of what is necessary to digest fat. Have you ever experimented with things like ox bile extract and hydrochloric acid and lipase and digestive enzymes?

I've taken some, but probably not specifically targeted for fat while I'm eating fat.

Yeah, it would be interesting to kind of see what Your what? Your gallbladder and your bile and your. And your enzyme production. Everything like that looks like sometimes that can be like the next part of being able to switch to higher fats. I know that you know that that's a horse I kick to death. The shifting to higher fats for the cell membranes and the hormones and the steroids and also for what I consider to be the anti aging effect of what they call this protein restricted diet where you're eating enough protein to maintain or slightly build muscle but then stopping where you reach that law of diminishing returns. So you mentioned Phil Maffetone. Many of our listeners are endurance athletes. They might know of the math method. He's a legend in Ironman for having coached Mark Allen, you know, one of the winningest Ironman triathletes in history. How did you hook up with Phil?

I read a book by. This is when I was really heavy and could barely walk. I read a book by Stu Middleman who was a runner who ran a thousand miles in 11 days.

Oh, wow.

And I read that that sounds healthy. And I thought, wow, how can. It's like I can't, I can't jog down the beach. He could run a thousand miles. Eleven days.

Eleven days.

I feel like there's something I can learn. So I read his book and it was really inspiring. And he talked about different ways.

It looks kind of an underachiever not to hit 100 miles a day though you'd think he could have stepped it up.

But anyway, in the book he. I'm reading the book and it's fascinating. And then he said, and then I was at this triathlon and I met this guy, Phil Maffetone and he changed the way I trained. And from there everything changed. And I thought, okay, this is a guy I need to meet. He might know the secret because like, it's not like I had been lazy. I wasn't a vegan because I was lazy. It's hard being a vegan. It's hard being a vegan out in the world.

Yeah.

So I was a diligent vegan thinking I was really taking care of myself. Just the results were the opposite of what I was hoping for. But I believed another thing about the vegan world. It's a little bit cult like that. When you're in it, you can't imagine anything else is possible. It becomes almost like a faith based diet.

And I know we have some vegan and vegetarian listeners who are possibly jumping through the microphone shouting the same thing about paleo and crossfitters and Ironman. It's very easy to get a cult built up around anything. But yeah, you're right. I've seen that. But to be fair, I've seen it in many situations from a dietary standpoint and an exercise standpoint. So you. You met Phil.

I met Phil. He got me to start eating some protein. Sort of reluctant, reluctantly on my part, but he really said, there's no other way. You have to have animal protein. He's like, there's. And at the time, I guess there was no other protein. I don't know if there was hemp.

Protein 10 years ago, if there was rice, people probably thought it was something that you'd smoke.

So this was started about 10 years ago, maybe even more, maybe 12 years ago. He said, unless it's animal protein, it will not do what you need it to do. So fish and Eggs were the mildest version. Started with making protein shakes using real eggs. That was the. You know, and I, again, I didn't like the taste, so I would have a berry shea.

But if Rocky Balboa did it, you could do it. Yeah, right.

So Fish and Eggs did that for a while, then started. He kept always saying, you gotta try another kind of try to get some other protein source. And the next one was turkey, which we would mask in like a veg. We'd make a vegetable chili and kind of hide turkey in it. So it would be, you know, ground turkey in the sauce. It would be really like parents do.

To hide their vegetables.

Exactly.

Children's marinara sauce. Exactly. Yeah. So the blender tray.

And then I was able to get some extra protein that way. And then so then after losing the weight, using the shakes and doing the restricted during the fill time, I was not restricting my calories. And it turns out, even though the things I was eating were really healthy, they tend to be my taste tended towards very calorie dense food and my metabolism slow.

Yeah.

And even though calories do count it.

Even if they're from healthy sources, it did.

So if I was eating 5,000 calories a day and burning maybe 2,600 a day or 2,800 a day, I was never gonna lose weight.

Yeah.

Even though they were good calories.

Right. You can't eat healthy calories in copious amounts and get a six pack.

Not forever. You can't do it. You can't do it forever. Yeah.

Yeah. I know that there's a thought out there among a lot of people that if you are eating eggs and fish and paleo foods et cetera you can just stuff your face all day long, lift weights and you won't gain weight. But I've certainly seen that not to be the case. So Maffetone put you on this diet. It was a little bit too high in calories. So you cut the calories down.

Yes. It wasn't that it was high in calories, it was that he still believes you don't have to count calories, which I think if you have a good handle, I would recommend to everyone spend some time counting calories because when you learn. Oh, a third of a bottle of almond butter.

Yep.

Has a lot more calories than this big salad.

Right. Just being able to eye a banana or eye a bag of nuts at the airport and just know what it means for me. When I was a bodybuilder I went through about nine months of being very. Counting calories completely off of alcohol. Eating tuna out of the can with ketchup and relish on top of it would be a typical meal. And I too, I was sponsored by a protein shake company. So you were doing seven. I was probably closer to 10 of these ABB in the BPA line. Can shakes per dad just crack. Because they'd send them to me for free. They were my sponsor because I worked a at gym and I would crap out a straw and have horrible digestive issues.

Gas.

No libido. Yeah. But that was how I was convinced that one should lose weight or burn belly fat or burn body fat. So you progressed from this Maffetone esque diet.

So it started with Phil's diet, then moved into the low calorie version of similar. Similar foods and lost the weight and then started including meat and other healthy things.

Got it. So did you ever. Did you ever along the way? Because I know a lot of people are into supplements and biohacks, etc. Did you start to introduce supplements like anything bottles, pills, capsules, things like that.

Fish oil. A lot. From the beginning Phil had me take a lot of standard process stuff. So things like.

Standard process being a supplement company.

Yeah. Do you know many of their.

Yeah, they make good stuff. They're one of those. Those companies I believe is a doctor's line or physicians line where a lot of physicians are able to order. Yeah, I mean they do multivitamins and. And they do.

But I think the way it's all food based and it's really low dosage.

Yeah, yeah. And when it's whole food based, usually they're blending it with whole food components. So it's a boatload of actual Capsules that you swallow in most cases with a whole food based multivitamin or something like that.

And I think they were even sometimes they would be. You would chew them even though they weren't necessarily chewable because they were food.

Right, Exactly. And they, the absorption, they've skirted a lot of those issues in the past several years by introducing things like liposomal technology for superior absorption or nanoparticles to allow you to take less and get more delivered and you know, into the bloodstream. But yeah, for a long time, whole food based for a supplement, that was the way to go. So how long ago was that that you were. That you progressed from Phil into this calorie restricted version?

The calorie restricted version, I'm gonna say was eight years ago, seven years ago. And then that took. It took 14 months to lose the weight. Then I started training with Laird. Just because I met Laird, I was never really interested in exercise at all. I pretty much lived my whole life in my head. And I met Laird and just like him and his enthusiasm and he's like Superman.

Oh, he's pretty. He's a very dynamic Superman. Yeah.

So to just to be around someone like that was so different than the musicians that I'm around. And it was fun for me to see someone who's really good at something different than the people that I know who are really good at something. So. And he said, well, you know, you lost all this weight, why don't you start coming to the gym? So I started going to the gym really more to hang out with him and just learn. But I couldn't. The day I went to the gym first time, I couldn't do one push up.

Oh, wow.

And I, you know, through training with him, I worked up to be able to do 100 consecutive push ups and did a lot of really and even things like he would teach me an exercise and I couldn't do it. And, and I would say, I can't do this. And he said, no, don't say you can't do it. Say you haven't done it yet. And he'd say, okay, now let's break this exercise up into three pieces. Let's try the first piece of it. It's like, okay, you could do the first piece, let's try the last piece. You could do the last piece. Let's do the middle piece. You could do the middle piece. Now let's do the first two together. Now let's do just two and three together. And just get it to where I could because I Was completely uncoordinated. I'd never done any of these things. And he just made it. He was such a good teacher and would just will me to do things that I just didn't believe I could do.

Yeah. So you just show up at his house and train. Yeah.

And it would. There's a group of like six guys who would come every Monday, Wednesday and Friday were gym days.

Yeah, gotcha.

And I did that for years. And then he started doing the pool workouts Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And those have evolved. We did that this morning.

Hard workouts. We were there for a couple hours.

Those have evolved over the years. Where they started as really just carrying heavy dumbbells from the shallow end of the pool to the deep end of the pool and back. And that was the only real exercise.

Just a farmer's walk down and back, down and back.

Or you try to stay down at the deep end as long as you could. And then you'd walk up your, you know, the staircase in the middle of the pool. You'd walk up the staircase.

Don't try this alone by yourself. By the way, if you're listening, there's a lot of people there. Super. I mean, I know even today there was a brief moment and somebody was like, where's Dan? And the very first thing everybody did was they all put their heads underwater and did a scan of the pool. So, yeah, not something to do by yourself.

Tricking things for grass. Since we've been all doing Wim Hof breathing, the combination of doing the breathing and breath holds and swimming underwater has. While it definitely makes you strong, you really don't want to do that alone because at least half the guys have passed out in the water.

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Like, I came close this morning. I met Wim Hof sun this morning, by the way, down at Sunlife Organics where I was having my billion dollar colostrum and. And coconut flake and who knows what else smoothie that disappeared way too fast. It disappeared disappointingly fast. So you got into the exercising floor, which you're still doing. Are you still on a calorie restricted, protein rich but plant inclusive diet? Is that how you describe what you do now?

Yes, but where I went from counting calories through the time that I spent counting calories, I learned more about calories and now I don't keep track, but I just make. I make better choices than.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's what I do now. There's a new. I was looking at Kickstarter recently for this thing called A bio ring. And what they're claiming is that they can sense fluctuations in glucose through this ring and, and approximate the number of calories that you've consumed based off the glucose going past. I don't know how accurate it is. I raise an eyebrow at it, but coming from an old school exercise physiology background where you have to put a giant mask on your face and measure your breath at all varying levels of intensity to get accurate calorie data. But it's interesting. We may not need to count calories or even eyeball calories at some point in the future now. I mean, you're a voracious learner. We were just looking at your bookshelf, which is all color coordinated. It's one of the first color coordinated books. Rather than organizing by category, organizing by author, you organize by color, which is interesting. I get the aesthetic pleasure of it though. A ton of books on health, fitness, nutrition, et cetera. I'm curious why what a typical day in your life or ideal day in your life would look like now, utilizing a lot of these strategies that you've discovered along the way from people like Maffetone and Laird and all these books that you've read. What's a day look like for you now?

I typically wake up in the morning. I'll do some sort of a morning practice, which might be tm. It might be a different type of a meditation. I was. I've been doing one where TM being.

Transcendental Meditation, which you introduced me to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you been doing it?

Yeah. Okay. You like it? I. I don't do the 20 minutes twice a day. Yeah, I do once every couple of days for about 10 minutes. That's what I've been able to pull off, which I. I've talked with Philip, who I interviewed on the podcast. I'll put a link to that episode that we did with him. And I feel like, like a little bit of a slacker. But not only is. Is it difficult to squeeze in all these little. Probably a lot of the little things that you're about to get into. But I also have been experimenting now with some, some EEG based neurofeedback training for the brain.

Great.

And I'll probably fill you in and our listeners in on that at a later point. But that seems to be a form of meditation as well. It's very interesting. It actually exhausts your brain, depletes glucose very quickly. You finish sitting and staring at a screen, flying a shaped spaceship with your mind, and you're famished. It's crazy. You actually burn a ton of calories doing this. It's called EEG neurofeedback. So it seems very intensive. I'm interested to see how it pairs with Transcendental Meditation. But my plan now is to do my TM one day and then do my EEG the next day because they sent me home with the whole training kit. So I actually take this home and I train. There's a practitioner who I contact each day to give me my protocol. And then I.

Is it in every other day? Is it recommended? As in every other day it recommended.

Recommends it three days a week. He says I can do it more. But I believe the phrasing that he used was I might fry my brain.

Yeah.

Which I think he was joking. But either way I'm gonna play err on the safe side.

Well, let's talk a little bit about getting in the tm, which I would say it's an old, it's an old TM adage that giving up the 20 minutes to do the TM, you gain more time than that in the day. So it's not by using that. It's not like you're using up 20 minutes. So you may want to consider.

I'm writing this down. I've got, I've got my, my little moleskine journal that I use to take notes as I, as I, as I pick the brain of folks like you.

Yeah, 20 minutes, I would say if.

You could do you do 20 minutes a day now?

It depends. I go through phases where I do years on and years off or I'll do. I like. I did it for from the time I was 14. I learned when I was 14. I did from 14 until college. Then I stopped in college, then I moved to California. Then I started up in California and I did it for probably five years. And then I took a few years off and then I started up again. And it's been on and off different times. And now I'm in a phase. I think I'm about to start an on phase. But now I've been using it more like on a flight. I'll do an hour long meditation often in the morning. I'll do. If I, if I don't do tm, I'll do a different kind of meditation, like a guided meditation. I like those two as you go through.

Sorry. Sorry to interrupt, but when this, this thought popped into my head. So I want to make sure I ask it your mantra that you use for transcendental meditation. Because. Because everyone has a mantra that Changes over time. Yeah.

No.

Oh, really? So I can use this same mantra that I've been taught the rest of my life? I didn't know that. That's interesting. Okay, good to know. So you start your day with the TM or something like it.

That'd be the first thing I would do, is wake up and in bed do tm, then start my day. I'll have a shake, a protein shake that has all of the. The. We call it the stim stem drink. That has all of the different stuff that's supposed to.

Stimulate stem cells. Yes, the stim stem drink. We were having a discussion about that in the sauna. And actually I interviewed Neil Strauss earlier this afternoon. We were actually discussing this guy in the sauna, Darren, who wrote a book called Flip Back in my notes here. Super Life is the name of his book. He travels around the world finding things that increase stem cell health. I know that some of the things like aloe vera and colostrum turmerones. Isolated from turmeric. Not turmeric, but turmerones. What was another one he talked about? Coffee Fruit extract was another. And I know Dr. Mercola, who I interviewed recently, he was talking about Pau d' Arco bark tea. And then what. What else? Shawn Stevenson, who I interviewed, talked about chlorella and spirulina as stem cell supporting foods. But you start off your day with this stim stem. It's called.

That's what I call it. I mean, that's just. Okay, just a protein shake with as many of the supplements for all manners.

Probably some of those I just listed or others.

Some of those. And maybe the mushroom. The four square.

The four Sigmatic. Yeah, four Sigmatic mushroom extracts. That's good stuff.

The ocean's alive.

Mm.

You know that one?

Yep. Ocean's alive. They do magnesium sprays and they do a marine phytoplankton.

That's the one.

Yeah. Ian Clark, I interviewed him. It's fascinating. And again, you guys, I'm taking notes on this stuff, so I'll put it in the show notes.

I'll get you the. I'll get you the whole recipe.

Yeah. Oh, send me the recipe. Let's post it in the show notes for, folks. The stim stem. I want to try it now. It sounds very much like the billion dollar smoothie.

It's really good. It's mainly the main base. It's coffee and chocolate whey protein. And it's so good.

Oh, my God. Okay. Maybe it's just because I'm hungry now that we're approaching dinner time that I'm making my mouth water. Too much surfing and water workouts today. Okay, so we've got tm, we've got this stim stem shake.

Yeah. And then I usually go to the gym. And on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Friday it would normally be a weight training. And then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday would be pool training in the summer. And then when the pool stops happening, it would be either jogging on the beach at my target heart rate for an hour or elliptical at my target heart rate for as long as I can do.

So you cycle throughout the year, change.

Up the typically one and the other and, and now I think I'm going to do a phase of just cardio for a period of time until I get to my target weight and then do a heavy muscle. And I was talking to Mark Sisson about, about creatine and he was saying if you do like a six week with creatine heavy weight thing, it really does something. So I thought maybe I'll.

Oh, there's never.

I don't know anything about it.

As long as you're not in a, in a world Anti doping associated sanctioned sport or you saw the sanctioned sport, you can do creatine. This is a stack. I've got some guys I'm helping with muscle growth who we're doing now, we do creatine, fish oil, amino acids, peptides. There's peptides. They have weird names. BPC157 and TB500 are the two. And you either inject those or you take them orally. And then these things called SARMs, which are selective androgen receptor modulators, they go also by weird names like LGD4033. And there's a stack. I recently wrote an article about it on Ben Greenfield Fitness. And we stack all this stuff together along with the 5 grams of creatine per day. And I mean, you can watch the muscle appear, but you're not taking testosterone. You're not introducing some negative feedback loop where you're shrinking your balls. You're not taking Schedule 1 controlled substances that you can't carry across borders like Sylvester Stallone did when he got arrested. It's just basically little known things along with common things like you're talking about. I would like to.

How long do you think do it for?

That is. So the SARMs are four weeks on and four weeks off. The peptides are daily. They're natural. You can take them as much as you want. Same with the fish oil, the amino acids and the creatine you don't need to cycle off those at any point during the year. You can just take them all year. But when you inject them into a heavy training phase, they're very efficacious. And what I would like to do is get the recipe for the stem. Stem shake that you do and send it over to some of these, these guys and see what they think of that. You know, once, once we add, you know, chlorella and spirulina and some of that stuff into the mix. I love, I love playing with the human body. Right. It's like a piece of clay that, that is responsive to a variety of tactics. So what have we gotten to them your mid morning?

Yeah. And then I'll have a iced Americano is my next snack of the day. And then I usually have some quiet time for I would say about an hour. It's usually by then around 11. I usually go to work around noon. So the sort of calm down from.

You work in the music industry. So that's an appropriate time to go to work with a bunch of night owls.

Yeah. So if also like if I've done a heavy weight day, I might come home and immediately do a bath. And baths seem to really like an.

Epsom salts bath or something like that. Yeah.

And that'll just help with the lactic acid buildup.

Well, it actually I don't want to, I don't want to be contrarian, but I'm gonna be. Lactic acid is typically gone from your muscles within a few minutes after workout. And so what is it that hurts? It's calcium. You get calcium buildup and magnesium actually offsets calcium. This is why in PC, people who have poor mobility or fibromyalgia, chronic pain, stuff like that, a lot of that is hypercalcemia, calcium deposits, calcium buildup. And magnesium is kind of like the yin to calcium if calcium is the yang. And so you offset a lot of that calcium buildup, magnesium topically, magnesium baths, oral magnesium, if someone has a lot of pain and they combine that with things like traction, like mobilizing joints with inversion to tables and stuff like that, foam rolling and deep tissue work. And then there's. There's one other thing that you can do which is basically like to milk joints. And this is a technique from Kelly Starrett where you'll wrap like a rubber bicycle tube above one joint, below one joint and kind of work it through a range of motion. You can, you can milk all sorts of nasty stuff out of muscles and connective tissue. It's, it's almost like a recovery cycle that you'd go through at a certain.

Point, but not if you're injured. It's not for an injury what you're describing.

That technique could be used for connective tissue injury, but it's different strokes for different situations. And so for that I'm typically a fan of electrical muscle stimulation and using topical arnica and things that you can use electrostim to drive the lotion into the tissue. Ice, heat combined back and forth. You can take those peptides and talked about and inject them into tissue. There's all sorts of things. But you were talking about the bath. You do this bath?

Yeah. Again, if I've done a heavy weight day and it just might feel better for the. The rest of the day will go better if I do that then. Or I might come home and read for an hour or do some research on whatever it is that I'm interested in that moment.

Right.

Then I'll go to the studio and studios typically from noon or 1 until I would say most days about 6 o' clock at night. And then. And that'll be very focused work. Right now, when I say very focused work because it's a creative endeavor, it'd be like very focused fishing, you know, like you're, you're doing it, it's your passion and you're very intent on it. But there's a lot of time where there's nothing you can do to speed up the process. It's like it sort of has a life of its own. So patience is a huge part of it. And being able to stay very present while being very patient. And I think that's where things like meditation come in to really help.

I experience that when I'm writing, just typing on a keyboard or writing literally with a pen on paper, I get into the zone. Of all the things that get me into the zone, that's probably the one where I just disappear into work.

Great, great.

It's interesting. So you're at the studio and then you, you do you have like an evening routine?

Well, there's also, I would say I. I'll probably have. In the middle of the day for a snack, I'll have athletic greens with amino acids. The ones that you actually suggested. Can't remember what they're called.

Well, they're perfect. Aminos is one form.

I think that's what they are.

And then what I did was I actually I private labeled that product. So now what it's called is nature aminos. It's like a powder or A capsule and. Yeah, you put it in whatever. Yeah, freaking.

I use those and then I use fiber. I'll tell you the name of it. I can't remember what it's called with a G made from a root, you know.

Interesting. Gymnostemma like that to stabilize blood sugar.

It's. It. I don't know if that's what it is, but it does stabilize blood sugar and it's.

Yeah, there's one called Gymnostema that does that.

It's also a. It just takes away your appetite as well.

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like. And it makes sweet things not taste so sweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe that's the one we're talking about.

Yeah, so I have that in the.

Middle name and put it in there for folks.

And then if I'm at home working, I'll be standing at the stand up desk and standing on the foam stuff.

The Kai bounder. I saw that upstairs in your.

And I have a vibration pad as well.

A vibration pad that you stand on while you're working or.

Well, it might be more like a break in the work or it doesn't work for all work.

I mean, you know, I totally agree. I couldn't type if I were on.

One, but if I'm working for a while it's nice to sort of just stand on it for 10 minutes and get into like a horse pose.

Or do you ever drag it next against the wall and do like a headstand or a handstand? You should try it. You get this enormous blood rush to your head. It just drains your legs.

It's also amazing how if you do push ups on it, how many fewer push ups you can do.

That's actually the research that's been done. People talk about. You see the women at the gym holding their Jamba Juice standing on the vibration platform to burn fat. But most of the research done on vibration platforms, aside from the lymph fluid aspect, which is similar to rebounding on a trampoline, it's used to prime muscles or to exhaust muscles. Meaning you do a few quarter squats on a vibration platform before you go do a real squat under a barbell. Or you do, you know, like you mentioned, half push ups on a vibration platform or just holding a push up plank on a vibrate before you go bench press. Yeah, so that's, that's actually what is what is very efficacious for. But yeah, it exhausts your muscles. I mean just drop into an isometric squat hole and try and hold that for like a Minute vibration platform. That was also good.

One leg, you know, do bouncing on one leg on. It's really good too.

I forgot about this when I. When I was at University of Idaho when I first started training for triathlons. It was perfect because they had two vibration platforms and an indoor track. So you could do an isometric squat on the vibration platform, put a ton of lactic acid in your muscles, prime the muscles, then run one time around the track and then go back to the platform. That was one of my. My go to running routines when I was training. Training for. When I first started training for triathlon. So you've got your home office, your foam mat, your vibration platform. What other tricks are up your sleeve towards the end?

Just a lot of things like foam rolling and all different kinds of rollers.

You do all that at night?

Depends. Sometimes I'll do it before the gym, sometimes before and after the gym, sometimes before, after, and at night, whenever it fits, but I like it.

And then to wind down at the end of the day. Aside from doing as we are doing now, out on the beautiful beach of Malibu, staring out at the sunset, which is now set a very quiet, serene. I don't know if you need much more than this to fall asleep, but do you take herbs or teas or use any sleeping tactics?

I do. I take something called Sleeping Medicine Monk, which is a Chinese herb.

Interesting. Never heard of that one.

I use a healthy version of the Calm powder, the one without the.

The natural calm.

There's a healthier version of it. I can. I'll give you the name of the one that I use.

Are you talking about the. The fact that they. They tested some of that stuff for metals? Yeah, yeah. And found metal content? Yeah, yeah. We talked about on a podcast at one point.

Point.

There were. There were some issues with the testing that they did because I looked into it because that was something I used and I was a little bit nervous about. I'll try and hunt down the. Because we published a big Facebook post about it because Natural Calm wrote a letter, I believe, to the FDA pointing out some of the issues with the testing. But either way, I want to know the magnesium that you find for a replacement as well. So we'll put. You're making my job hard, Rick. You're making these show notes all of a sudden become very laborious.

But let me think, what else is it?

I'll make it work.

Then I take zinc Cal Mag pills. I think that's it. Zinc Cal Mag pills.

Sounds like the ZMA supplement some people use for sleep, which is like zinc and I believe it's got magnesium and calcium in it. It's very common. Sleep paid for a very long time.

And I started taking the phosphatidylserinine three.

Times a day to decrease cortisol.

I don't know what I'm taking it for, but I know it seems to have a good effect.

It decreases cortisol very significantly. Yeah, yeah. I used that in the past when I tested for very high cortisol levels. There's one by Thorne called Phospha. I forget the name of it. Phosphor something. Anyways though. Yeah. Phosphatidylseering for high cortisol.

Most evenings, I would say five nights a week we do sauna. And it'll either be sauna and ice back and forth or the infrared sauna for one long round.

Interesting. And then it's sleepy time.

Then I'll usually watch TV for about an hour. For some reason it really helps me. I try to watch something not. Nothing violent and nothing that I have to concentrate on too much.

Interesting. You're not concerned about like the. The blue light disrupting your.

I have a projector, so it's a little different because we're not looking at a. You're not looking at an LED screen.

The blue light, black lit screen, backlit screen.

Yeah. So that helps.

I was wondering why you had a giant projector in your living room.

That's why. And we also. Because we don't have blinds anywhere.

I also noticed that when I woke.

Up this morning you can only watch when it's dark. So it's sort of a forced good habit of not having television on ever unless it's at night. And usually it'll be either to watch a movie or to watch. You know, I grew up watching WWE wrestling, so I still watch that and that's a lot of hours I needed to.

No, I can't tell you this. I have a wrestling story, but it has to do with tv and I have a non disclosure agreement I've signed. I'll tell you about the wrestling thing later on.

Okay.

I can't do it on podcast though. But the interesting thing I wanted to tell you was that electrode treatment for my brain have been doing. You can actually attach the electrodes to your head, put in a movie and watch the movie and it will decrease the intensity of the color and also the sound from the movie which is disruptive to your brain. Your brain doesn't like that. If it's following a story. It doesn't like it when the story starts to disappear. You can do this with music too. And so your brain shifts into alpha brainwave production and decreases fast beta so that the movie continues to play. It's very similar if you're flying the spaceship. It's super interesting. I might actually turn into like a Netflix junkie. Training with this thing.

There's a. There's a. A way to improve our hearing. There's something that's similar to that where it plays music. You listen to music in headphones, and then every so often it. It either takes out certain frequencies or adds some sound that the brain has to work out what's going on. Because it seems like most hearing problems are brain problems more than actual ear problems.

Yeah.

So it rewires your ability to hear.

Interesting.

Yeah, I could probably send you the name of that as well.

Yeah, that'd be cool. I don't know how many of our listeners are suffering from hearing loss. They may be, though, because of listening to this podcast. So it might be something that they find utility in. So you watch the TV and then.

Take my supplements. And then I listen to a. I always go to sleep listening to a. Some sort of a spiritual lecture, and I'll listen to it until I fall asleep, and then it keeps playing until, you know, it's done.

Do you find that you dream about what you listen to or you. You somehow absorb that information?

I think I absorbed information. I don't dream about it. The main purpose of it, in addition to the sleep learning part of getting it, is that I have a pretty active. I have a pretty active imagination. And if left to my own, if I'm not listening to something, distracting myself, then I can think myself awake for a very long time.

I can do that. Not only can I do that myself, and that's one of the reasons that I'm doing this EEG training, because they identified an area of my brain that actually is stuck in high beta and is very difficult to shut down. So this is detraining that area. I might turn into a vegetable or become extremely unproductive. Who knows? But it is.

You may try my spiritual lecture method.

Well, yeah, I was going to tell you because right now I use beats and white noise, like, you know, binaural beats and white noise to distract me. What would be an example of your spiritual. Like, what would be an example? There's a good.

There's a good website called Dharma Seed that are Buddhist lectures.

Dharma Dhar DMA H A seed, R M A Seed.

And there's one teacher in Particular that I really like, named Jack Kornfield, although there are many I've heard of him. Yeah, he's resting. Wow. And it's really, really beautiful. And sometimes I like what they're saying so much. I want to take notes on it, but I'm already sort of half groggy and I don't want to do anything with light and I don't want to. I don't want to interrupt the sleep. So sometimes I even listen to them. I'll listen to it at night and then maybe the next day I'll remember. Oh, there was something I liked in that. I might listen to it again in the sauna the next day.

Yeah, interesting. I like that method. I'm gonna have to try that. You've got all sorts of notes jumbling around in my brain.

Oh. Another thing I'll say is that when I do the very hot sauna, I listen to music. When I do the infrared sauna, I listen to podcasts because of the duration, like the doing the hot sauna and going back and forth between the hot sauna and the ice. It'd be too much.

Plus the heat's very. The heat of the dry sauna is tough on the electronics, too. Yeah, I've. I've nuked some stuff in dry sauna before that does just fine in infrared.

I have a Sonos speaker in my dry sauna and we get up to 230 degrees and the light on it.

Speaker installed in there, the light on.

It turns red, which the Sonos people didn't even know it was possible for it to turn red because in normal use it turns either white or yellow, but it turns red, but has never stopped working.

Like this guy field tested the hell out of our device. A lot of people are probably wondering this. There's guys like you and me who will, whatever, swallow, you know, and Ray Kurzweil and, you know, a ton of different anti aging enthusiasts and people who live a long time, you know, Laird Hamilton, I know, does a lot of this, like, you know, supplementation and biohacks and better living through science. And some people will say, oh, this sounds laborious, or why would you do it? What drives you? And I guess my question for you, Rick, and this would be my final question for you, what is it that's driving you? I mean, it obviously started with just wanting to be healthier and lose weight. What is it now? What drives you to do all this now?

I've always. I feel like in some ways it's the reason we're here. Is to be our best selves, do our best work. It's. It's. It's less about the accomplishment and more about the process of doing it and the idea of being able to make something better, Whatever it is, whether it's my health, my body, my surroundings, a piece of art, whatever it is, my mission, my reason to be, is to make things better, whatever those things are.

The pursuit of excellence. Yeah, that makes sense. I see that in the music that you produce, the aesthetics of your home and in your yard and your setting here, and also in your pursuit of optimal health.

Yeah. I've always felt like I'm willing to do whatever it takes for things to be as good as they could be, because I really like things that work well. And it's funny because on the one hand, there is an aspect of me that's really lazy, but my. I'm on the one hand, really lazy, and on the other hand, I'm obsessed with researching things, and I want to know the best way, you know, I want to know how things work. I want to know. Maybe it stems. You know, I was a magician when I was a kid.

Oh, really?

And so much of magic. So when I became friends with Blaine, so much of magic is seeing what's. Seeing what's possible in a way that starts with something that's impossible. Like how. How do you make. It's like there was a time many scientific breakthroughs were magic tricks before they were breakthroughs. Photography was a magic trick before it was photography. Project projection.

Yeah.

Projecting light. Those all. When they first happened, they were used as magic tricks. And there's something about learning how. And. And there's something really beautiful in seeing the interconnectedness of things and how when you learn one thing in one area, how it affects other areas, and how something that you. Something I learned through working in a recording studio is a. Maybe a principle that ends up influencing the way I eat or exercise or, you know, the other way around. Like, it all seems to be that. That idea of how you do anything is how you do everything.

Yeah.

It's all one thing. And. And I'm curious and want it to be the best it could possibly be.

It's a pursuit of excellence, not grasping at straws. It's not trying to scrape together as many years of life as possible.

No.

It's simply that intense curiosity combined with the pursuit of excellence.

Yeah. And recognizing, you know, like seeing today, watching the sunset. I can't think of many more great experiences that we could have had in that time than that. That was pretty great.

That's pretty cool.

And I imagine when we're done with this podcast, we're gonna eat something really great. And this is another thing with me.

I was just gonna have a Ziploc bag full of kale chips and hop in the car.

I think we're gonna do better than that. But what I was gonna say is it's like if I eat, it doesn't matter how many calories a meal has. If it doesn't satisfy me by tasting good, then I'm still hungry. You know, there's so much of it is psychological.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like the satisfaction comes from the experience of eating something and really loving the way it tastes in the same way of loving seeing a magnificent sunset. That. So I guess in some ways it's pleasure seeking.

Yeah, pleasure seeking. And also to me, that ability to, as Dan Bootner says in his book, or Butner, or however you pronounce his name in his book Blue Zones. I mean, a big, big part of that is just living with mindfulness and having the awareness to be mindful not just of your body, but of these experiences. Like the, like the sunset, like our podcast here. Like, you know, those of you who are out there doing whatever you're doing, just that, that appreciation for life that comes with mindfulness, I think that's a big part of it, too.

Beautiful.

Well, with that and also with. With your mention of dinner, which was making me now salivate, I suppose we'll bring this to an end. Rick, I really appreciate your. Your passion for this, your knowledge, sharing everything that you did today. And I'll put the show notes for those of you listening again@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ruben. But dude, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me and thank you for sharing so much information that improves our lives.

Appreciate it, man. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Rick Rubin 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.