Loneliness, Community-Building, Introversion, Church, Monogamy & More With Chris Kelly Of Nourish Balance Thrive.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, there's a lot of stuff that we miss out on, a lot of stuff that I think is built into us from a real ancestral standpoint.

You're missing a workout, not getting to catch up on that reading that you wanted to do. It always feels right when you make that decision. So it's actually a lot easier, I have found, to be an asshole when you're wearing a mask, you know, so you have to do some forward thinking when it comes to what makes me happy versus, you know, what makes other people happy or what makes God happy.

Help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. So the podcast that you're about to hear was recorded at a place called the. The Ancestral Health Symposium. Not a place. I suppose an event called the Ancestral Health Symposium can learn more@ancestryfoundation.org I think is the URL for the ancestry Foundation. But anyways, a lot of really fantastic speakers and attendees there. I wound up going on a walk with a few of those folks, including today's podcast guest, Chris Kelly, who has a show of his own called Norrish Balance Thrive. We had a beautiful walk on the UCLA campus in the sunshine, talking about Roan Reinash. That's an insider joke for any of you who have seen Team America superstars. I think it is. Yeah, the dictator there talks like that. Rowanrie, he has a song called Ronery. But this song is about roariness. Now, I can't say it. Loneliness. It's about loneliness. I hope you'll really enjoy it. All the shownotes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Chris and Ben. And then the other thing that you should know is that I included as part of today's podcast, the entire talk that I gave there on, you guessed it, Loneliness at the Ancestral Health Symposium. So this podcast is a real good one two combo for you. Enjoy. Chris, do you feel like a frat boy walking around campus?

No, I think it would take more than that to make me feel like a frat boy at this point. I've never seen a university like it. I can't imagine how much money has gone into this. This is not what it was like in the year, oh, my goodness, 1999 when I was at school.

No, there's definitely a lot of money, at least going into the athletics because that's the section of this UCLA campus that we're on last night. And just for those of you listening in, Chris and I are walking right now through UCLA campus, we're at the Ancestral Health Symposium down here. And it's just too beautiful a day for us to be locked away in a hotel room recording. And so we figured we'd get some vitamin D and go for a walk and have a chat. Yeah. Last night during our welcome dinner for the conference, there was the football practice, I think it was the football practice for UCLA happening outside of our dinner. And I went over there to take a look at it. And they even had like, security guards over there keeping people from watching the practice because. And I asked the security guard about this, and he said they wanted to, like, keep their plays and stuff a secret. And they didn't want, like, scouts from other teams coming in and watching them, like, scrimmaging and practicing. You know, almost like the, I don't know, like Russian spies coming in and collecting top secret information about, I don't know, tackle height or whatever it is they don't want people to see. Yeah, anyways, I just revealed my complete lack of working knowledge of football security.

Yeah, me too. Sorry.

Yeah, but anyways, so onto other things, I guess, for my audience, because I think we might release this on both of our shows. Chris Kelly is a guy who's been on my podcast before, and he has a company called Nourish Balance Thrive that does everything from blood work to system based analysis, or almost like artificial based analysis of your biomarkers. He interviews really great researchers and scientists and physiologists about all manner of things, things related to body and brain optimization. So that's who Chris is. It's Norris Balancethrive.

NorrishBalancethrive. And I should thank you for starting that business. You were the one who in 2014 gave us the leg up. I'd recently quit my job at a hedge fund to start a health coaching business. Can't say that my wife was particularly fond of that decision at the time. My daughter was six months old. She here at the Ancestral Health Symposium now. She's seven. It was super scary. And you had me on with our co founder, Jamie, who's a medical doctor. And that was what started Nourish Balance Thrive. I still get. People come to me today and say, oh yeah, I heard you on the Ben Greenfield podcast. I'm like, that is completely amazing.

I'll say this over the sound of the leaf blower. Well, we'll always be sure to tell.

You guys if you can anticipate sound pollution in the background. But anyways, I was just gonna say, Chris, thanks for my royalty checks.

You asshole.

What do you think about being rich? I want your firstborn son.

Yeah, I should say that we've really just been hanging in over here since then.

Yeah. Anyways, this conference has been interesting.

James Nestor, a breath expert, is here. We were just talking with Diana Rogers, who just produced the film Sacred Cow.

I believe that.

And share it, too. It's an important message.

Yeah, yeah.

She was sharing how they've had trouble.

Getting it on Netflix due to its controversial content. But any. Anyway, so just a. A quick thing about this ancestral health symposium. I believe if you were to, like, Google it, or I think it's ancestryfoundation.org or something like that, all the. All the audios and the videos are available to.

To watch.

And apparently mine will just be audio because I was roaming around while I gave my talk and. And they were trying to keep me in front of the video cameras. But anyways, though, so if you all want to check out the symposium, you can go there. So what do you want to talk about today, Chris?

Well, I want to talk about your talk. I thought it was timely. I thought it was heartfelt, I thought it was really important. I don't hear that many other people talking about loneliness. Perhaps we should start by you telling us why did you choose that topic? I think I saw in the schedule that you were going to talk about something else and then maybe. James, is that right?

Yeah, I was supposed to talk about.

Hyperthermia and cold thermogenesis, which is my super making me sound smart way of saying hot and cold these days, especially because I'm speaking less and less, just mostly due to Covid restrictions and me wanting more family time. So picking and choosing my talks quite carefully, I was a bit remiss to give a talk that someone can download for free on my website or talk about content that really I put out on podcasts before. And for me, personally, I've been on a little bit of a. Of a journey of creating community locally, of sharing experiences that I'm having, whether it's food or workouts or travel or.

Anything else with other people.

Despite me kind of liking being by myself and being a little bit introverted and having a past of almost like priding myself on being a loner. You know, I've realized, especially during the pandemic, the power and almost like the ease of being able to build a community, the things that you can do to do that, the growing epidemic of loneliness, the biological implications of that, and.

How we can take steps to make.

Sure that we're not socially Isolating ourselves.

Or lonely to the extent where we're.

Actually producing a lot of the almost like the built in ancestral sympathetic fight and flight response to not being protected by your village, not being a member of a tribe, being a bit of an outcast.

Right.

Our body, ancestral times in days of old would have mounted some kind of a protective nervous system reaction against that situation because it would mean death or increased susceptibility to predation or lack of the ability to be able to find a mate or propagate future generations. There's all sorts of reasons why biologically our bodies kind of rebel against being by themselves, especially in a physical way. Right. We can talk about the digital versus the analog scenario but I've realized the.

Growing importance of this.

So I contacted AHS and I was like look, I don't want to talk.

About hot and cold.

That's not something I'm super passionate about.

Well, it's not passionate about but it's not like something that I felt was really needed. And so yeah, I gave that talk.

Yesterday about, about loneliness and social isolation instead.

I think it's very important. Yeah, I've read John T. Cacioppo has a fantastic book, Loneliness. It's kind of like Robert Sapolsky, you know, wrote a book about stress that all the bad things are going to happen to you when you're stressed out.

Was that the zebras don't get ultras book.

Exactly. And then John T. Cacioppa wrote the same book on loneliness and there's some really interesting stuff in there like the way that our immune systems change when we're isolated. Because when you think about it, when you're together with your tribe, I mean you're completely dependent on them and them on you, but you're more likely to contract communicable disease. And so you need one type of immunity. And then if you're on your own you need a different type of immunity, you need innate immunity. You more like maybe more likely to step on something sharp. You know, it's different but it turns out over the long term it's better to divert your resources to the communicable disease type immunity that's better for your overall long term health.

Well, I mean a part of this.

Too is when it comes to something that's been a hot topic of late.

Which would be herd immunity. It's almost this idea that the development.

Of herd immunity, when you look at.

The human race as a whole, or if you were to view the word.

I as being something more like a weird if you're talking about more of a universal treatment of who you are and considering yourself to be just part.

Of this massive human network, then theoretically.

When it comes to survival of our.

Species, it would make the most sense to basically focus upon activities that would.

Build the immunity of the entire species rather than the individualized immunity of one person.

And what were you thinking? Were you thinking, okay, so everybody's been under forced isolation to a certain extent over the past 18 months or so. That's about to change. Were you thinking, oh, well, people might have developed some bad habits and they need to do something proactively to try and change their behavior to become more in accordance with ancestral heritage, shall we say, the ancestral condition that we know is so important for maintaining health.

You know, I'd like to say that I had a really well thought out.

Intention when it comes to what I.

Wanted to see people do with the talk.

But I would say a couple of.

Things that come to mind is a, when you go to a conference, I think it's nice to have a reminder about how important those interactions are in between talks. The dinner conversations or lunchtime conversations, the workouts or activities in the morning are.

Spread throughout the day. And for me, being able to talk.

On the first day and kind of give people that reminder would thus create.

Perhaps a little bit less of a.

Scenario of people sitting inside of a lecture hall all day and then going back to their computers at night to catch up on all their email.

You know, and I personally need that reminder all the time because like, my idea of a good time when I'm.

Traveling is to typically duck out from.

Any social activities by about 8:30 or.

9 and curl up in my bed with what I call a beach book, which is usually like some work of fiction that allows me to completely check out. I'm reading Andy Weir's book Zero Gravity right now. He's the guy who wrote the Martian. And his books are just fantastic. They're humorous, they're intellectual, they're very mathematical and scientific and kind of a very, very well researched and believable.

And you know, I'll take a book like that and just disappear. Kind of like in my talk yesterday.

Like I did when I was a.

Kid, except when I was a kid.

It would be all day long.

And now it's just at the end.

Of the day after I've done some socializing. But that reminder to myself that social.

Interaction is so important, so crucial, and.

It'S not just about me, it's about.

Other people being able to be loved because it appears that a lot of.

The physiological benefits of being with others.

Specifically loving others, comes not from being.

Loved, but from giving love. It's more of that altruistic, empathetic emotion that appears to elicit a lot of the effects on the immune system, the decrease in inflammation and lowered blood pressure and all these things that being with other people give us.

It appears that one of the more.

Important components of that is actually giving.

To and loving others. And so, you know, when I give a talk like that, it's about encouraging.

People who are at the conference to be more social and to give and love more. It's a reminder to myself to do so.

And it's basically kind of this mentality.

I've been increasingly having, that if I'm.

Going to be in front of people.

Talking, I want to make it as.

Meaningful and as relevant as possible. And rather than just like, squander the.

Stage, so to speak, with, you know, just some type of echo chamber type.

Of talk that's, you know, discussing, again, things people could download for free on.

My podcast, for example, and talk about this introversion thing. It's funny, this has come up in the two podcasts I've recorded, most recently people who identify as introverts. Where do you think this comes from? I think it's a modern phenomena. I think that Joe Henrik wrote about this in his book the Weirdest People in the World. You know, when they try and find the big five personality types in indigenous people, in hunter gatherers, they don't find them. They just find two. They find indigenous. They find industriousness and sociability. Like, you're either building your dugout canoe or you're socializing. Like, there's no introversion. There's no programmers, there's no accountants. Right. Like, it doesn't make any sense to be an introvert if you're a hunter gatherer. And then, you know, I was talking to Lucy Mailing, and she pointed out this could also be. She thinks for her, it's like a product of her childhood. Like, that was something that she developed there, and now that shapes her into the adult that she is today. But the point is, it's plastic. And I wonder whether you identify with any of that. Do you think your introversion is the product of your upbringing?

There's a definite combination of nature versus nurture when it comes to extroversion versus introversion, if that's what we want to label the MAZ. I was homeschooled K through 12, and.

As a result, was almost, you know, Forced, so to speak, into a great deal of comfort, being by myself and being able to entertain myself, being able.

To independently learn and be motivated to.

Learn in the absence of other people, even teachers, you know, forming my own solutions to problems, being comfortable being inside my own head. Yet at the same time, I have two brothers and two sisters, and I.

Am probably the quietest of all of them.

I'm probably the one amongst all of.

Them who is most happy or satisfied.

Being by myself for long periods of time. And I think that part of that.

Actually is the way I'm wired up, so to speak. I think that when you read a.

Book like the Power of Introverts by Susan Cain, you can really become aware of the fact that introversion is something that does not necessarily mean being a.

Private or moving out into the forest and living like a unabomber in a cabin with a scraggly beard.

Programmers, right? It's like every knowledge worker is an introvert, right?

Even though I'm working on my scraggly beard, you can steer that introversion towards a great deal of social good.

A couple examples of that would be that introverts tend to be very good.

Speakers and actors because extroverts, when they get up on stage or when they get in front of a camera, they tend to be themselves. And sometimes being yourself is accompanied by all the pressure of what if people don't like who myself is? Or, you know, what if I'm not performing well today?

I really only have one voice, one character to depend upon and that's who I am. And many extroverts actually kind of get nervous in front of the camera or get stage fright.

Whereas introverts, because they almost develop a greater tendency to be able to create the character that they want to be.

On stage or in front of a.

Camera to almost like hide their shy, vulnerable self, tend to actually perform a.

Little bit better in those type of social situations, or I guess I should.

Say more public facing situations. So, for example, when I get on.

Stage to speak, I often am imagining.

Or visualizing or picturing who it is.

That I want to present that I.

Am not in a fake, inauthentic way. But if I'm going to give a.

Talk that's highly motivational, you know, maybe I'm visualizing like a Tony Robbins or I don't know, like a Joel Osteen.

Or someone who's just like, they're moving.

People with highly motivational words.

Or if I'm in front of a camera and we're filming a cooking Video, all of a sudden, I think, okay, so think of these folks like Emeril and Gordon Ramsay and. And these celebrity chefs that you see on tv, and how can I channel them? Because an introvert is almost better able to be whoever they want to be in front of a camera or on stage, rather than just be painted into the corner of being one person that they would be if they're extroverted. And then furthermore, introverts are very chameleon like, and I find this a lot.

For example, when I travel, I will.

Often very quickly take on the mannerisms and the characteristics and even the language.

Inflections of the region that I'm in.

Meaning if I'm in Japan, I will often start to talk like this and enunciate my words. Or if I'm in Italy, I'll start to kind of talk like this, but nearly comical in terms of the rapidity with which I take on the mannerisms of those who are around me. And so when you combine the ability to be able to kind of like, be who you want to be on stage, the ability to be able to, like, absorb and take on mannerisms and characteristics of other people, you can actually be a really dynamic, what you might call a social butterfly or a speaker.

Or an actor or a TV personality.

Or YouTube personality or whatever based on that. Although, you know, deep down inside, you're.

Also really, really happy, just, like, curled.

Up with a book, in bed with all the TV cameras off and no stage. So I think that the introversion is something that I'm a little bit more.

Hardwired to be attracted to.

I think that in reading and learning more about myself and about introversion in general, I've discovered that introversion is not like being by yourself, lonely, cut off from other people. It's simply a character trait that really allows you to perhaps know yourself better or be a better student or something like that. But it doesn't mean you're just like.

A super quiet, shy person or socially awkward person.

No, that makes sense. Okay, so you've convinced me that I don't want to be lonely. Perhaps that's as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. Obviously not something that listeners.

Actually, that was one of the studies I brought up, and I may even.

Actually push that talk out at the.

End of yours in my discussion as.

A part of this podcast, folks are.

Listening to so you can hear the whole talk. But yeah, I mean, they've done studies that show that it's on par with.

Smoking in terms of the chronic disease risks or manifestations.

So I see this as very low hanging fruit, but what's the prescriptive. You can't just tell people, oh, just go make some friends, you'll be fine. You know, this is hard, but it seemed like you come up with some very specific steps that have been helpful to you as an introvert, which is like, that's a big deal, right? So I mean, can you talk about some of those steps, those things you've done?

Yeah, and it's important to draw a distinction here because loneliness doesn't mean that you're by yourself all the time with no friends. Especially because now that we live in a social era where we've shown these same type of chronic disease manifestations related to loneliness and social isolation occur in people who are hyper connected, the so called igen generation, like born 1995 to 2012 or whatever the generation is that comes afterwards. It's not as though those people do not have social outlets, in many cases predominantly digital social outlets. But what loneliness is, is it's basically a disconnect between your perception of how many people friends interactions you should have in your life and the actual number of people friends interactions that you're actually experiencing. Whereas social isolation is really just like not having any social outlets whatsoever. And, and Right.

And that's an important distinction. I often hear people conflate those two terms. They use the terms loneliness and social isolation interchangeably. But one is much more serious than the other.

Perhaps. Yeah. So you can be, it's difficult to be socially isolated and not be lonely unless your perception of what friendship and social interaction is, I see is a bar that's set pretty low. Nothing wrong with that. But what I'm saying is like technically you could be really happy living out in the middle of nowhere with like two neighbors who you see like every other day and maybe have dinner with, which compared to someone living in, I don't know, like Los Angeles or Austin or New York City, would be a far fewer number of people with whom you interact with on a daily basis. But if you are comfortable with that amount of social interaction and you feel as though that's the type of or the amount or the volume of social interaction that you need, it appears that the biological manifestations of loneliness really don't materialize. Whereas if you are lonely and you are in a scenario where you are living in a really urban area with tons of digital friends and what might appear at first glance to be robust social interactivity, then sometimes that loneliness is not just produced by your external situation, but by your internal thought. Patterns about how many friends you have versus how many friends you think you should have or how much social interaction that you're having versus how much social interaction you think you should be having. So there's a little bit of a subtle nuance there and also a need for people to understand that solving loneliness is not about being at parties all the time or being with people all the time, and can often simply mean having a very few close friends and family members who, you know, that you can depend upon and who also related back to the, to the empathetic nature of this, can depend upon you and be loved by you. And so, you know, there's a little bit of a distinction between the two, but I probably like six or seven years ago, really identified in myself the absence of meaningful social interaction and friendship that extended beyond my family. My family and I are really close, like super close. We're together all the time. I have a home office. We have, you know, big long family dinners every night.

We.

So is this your immediate nuclear family?

Literally my wife and my. And my sons. I had very few male friends, especially, especially male friends with whom I could be vulnerable, which is one really, really important part of male friendship. Because we, especially men, tend to put up more of a protective barrier to hide our weaknesses or to make us appear to be a little bit more, more alpha. And it's very, very easy for guys to just like have guys that you might golf with or weightlift with and you slap each other on the back and see who's stronger, who can drive the ball farther. But there's no actual discussion about.

Guys like mountain bikers just talk about stuff, right?

They talk about forks and derailleurs and all these different seat droppers. It's like it's all about the stuff all the time. You go for a three hour ride and just talk about stuff the whole time, right?

That idea of shared experiences, there's nothing wrong with it. And as a matter of fact, men more than women seem to do a better job forming friendships via shared experiences such as golf or Frisbee golf or working out together or fishing together or adventuring or maybe going off and doing a triathlon or a Spartan race or something together. Situations in which there actually isn't a great deal of talking back and forth. But it's more, you're just sharing this experience together. Male friendship seems to be really well formed by those type of experiences, whereas a lot of women, and I'm painting with a little bit of a broad brush here, can just walk into a cocktail party and have four insty friends, you know, just by being a social butterfly. Whereas you know, the guys maybe have to go play foosball together or play a game of billiards or something together to form those same type of bonds. But yet even in those scenarios, the glaring lack of vulnerability and deep meaningful emotional interaction is something that I think exists to a significant extent, especially in male friendships and so identified that I don't really have a lot of male friends who I can literally say, guys, I like, I had a really bad fight with my wife last night. What, what do you guys think I should do? Or you know, you guys, I'm really struggling. Like the past three days I've woken up and like I don't even want.

To get out of bed.

Like I just, I don't, I don't know what to do. I feel like I might be having some kind of like depression onset or something like that. And to be able to have. And I realize I'm kind of talking to the guys right now. Some of the ladies aren't getting bored. But for guys to be able to have those type of vulnerable relationships appears to be something that's really necessary for men these days, especially when it comes to the loneliness aspect of things. Again, you can have friends and still be lonely, especially if those friends aren't people that you can be really vulnerable and open and transparent with and, and share your emotions and your vulnerabilities with.

I read a book by Keith Ferrazzi.

Called Never Eat Alone.

Okay.

And it was just about this idea of gathering around food initially and breaking bread with others. And when you're at a conference, just like going to a table and getting to know other people, asking about them, making it all about them, what you can do for them, how you can love them to a certain extent, just pouring yourself out for others in a very non transactional way. Not in a way that is driven by what can I get from this person or what kind of joint venture are we going to launch together? How can this person be an affiliate or help promote my business or how can we somehow make more money for each other, but instead just how can I help this person out as a fellow human being in whatever way that they might need. So that was kind of of like the entry level, like gateway drug for me was just like when I was at conferences just trying to be a little bit more dynamic in terms of the conversations I'd start and really doing it over food because food, it's so interesting, like it seems to relax people. It Brings people together. It gives you something to talk about together, even if you have no other similarities or similar interests. And so that's where I started. And then I, I wound up speaking a few times at an event called Mastermind Talks that you and I have both been at. And that's put on by Jason Gaynord. And it's all based around having dinners together. Typically six to eight people. You know, the phones are completely out of sight. There's like little table topics that you talk about. And he kind of curates these dinners. I went to those a couple times and again saw how powerful it was for entrepreneurs of, you know, a huge variety of backgrounds to come together to break bread and to make friends. When I say break bread, of course I'm speaking in fermented sourdough, gluten free. Don't worry, people who are Paleo can have friends too. You just have to break beef jerky. You have to break beef jerky sticks. So, you know, food was a big part of it. And understanding the importance of these like group dinners and getting people together to eat, you know, a few of the things that I found to be really key, probably one of the biggest just to stay on this whole, this whole meal idea is our family throws dinner parties constantly. One to two times a week. I have a whole list of all the people in the local community, all the friends who have been at dinner parties together before, what the people do. Like typically it'll just be like, you know, Dr. Sarah comma OB GYN or Caleb comma NFT and cryptocurrency expert or whatever. And so I'll kind of have a little bit of a way to jog my memory about who those people are, their contact information, what they do, how many kids they have. So I can kind of anticipate how many extra salmon burgers I'm going to need to make or whatever. And then it's kind of like making a recipe. I'll just choose and select people. And I try and choose some people who are well to do. Some people who might not be as wealthy, some people who are very intellectual, other people who you might consider to be like more blue collar. You know, I'll just basically put a whole bunch of people in a room together typically because most people have kids. I'll invite like three to five families and we have them over in the winter. It's usually like sauna, ice bath, you know, all the guys will go and you know, burn incense in the sauna and get a sweat on while the ladies are Drinking cocktail up in the. Up in the kitchen. And that's not because ladies don't benefit from hyperthermia and cold thermogenesis. It's mostly because I'm more into sauna and ice with the dudes than my wife is. And so don't you switch.

I've, like, done this for reals in Finland, and that was how they did it. There was that same gender segregation, but, you know, one goes first, and then. And then you switch.

Right.

Like, that's kind of how it works.

Yeah.

Yeah, we could do that, but we'd probably be eating, like, 10pm if we did that.

Okay.

I'll usually spend the whole day prepping meat, Smoking meat Barbie. Like, I'm super into cooking right now. It's almost like by the time everybody in the dinner party arrives, I've kind of, like, done my labor, and all I need to do when we get out of. When we get out of the cold pool is, like, a final sear or whatever. But, I mean, no, it's not a lot of work. So I have a home office.

Right.

So it's like, put the meat on the smoker, go down, record a podcast, come back up, check on it, maybe spritz it with some apple cider vinegar and maple syrup, and go back down. And then, you know, by the time everybody's getting around, half hour before everybody shows up, I help my wife get out all the plates, you know, wine bottles and glasses. And then sometimes she's finishing up her stuff while she's chatting with the ladies in the kitchen, and us guys are down in the sauna, and the kids are outside, you know, playing in the pool or, you know, or throwing Frisbees or playing cornhole or whatever. And then at like, 7 or 7:30, everybody just kind of comes together. And typically, I get out my guitar, and we sing a song, and we do some type of, like, breath work and gratitude practice, and then we eat. And a lot of times, I'll have people bring, like, a side dish to share. Sometimes it'll be a theme. Like, this Sunday, you know, it's about five families. The theme is crazy socks.

Right?

Everybody brings a healthy side dish to share, and we all just have an amazing time together. Typically, when dinner's over, if it's summer, we go outside and play yard games. If it's winter, we usually gather around the fireplace and play guitar and drums and. And we're literally doing that.

Yeah.

These are all local friends. Sometimes they're people who are happening to be in town. Sometimes I'VE got like podcast guests over to interview. But every, every time we do this, just like a massive party, people leave. Hyper connected people are texting me, like, hey, what was that one guy's name that did such and such? What's his number? Can you connect us? And I've found that two things happen.

As a result of that.

A, I've formed a lot closer male friendships in particular, because, you know, these guys are just basically sharing experiences and sharing meals with me in my home. And then in addition to that, there's not a lot of like minded folks where I live, like, who are super into like health and biohacking and nutrition and fitness, you know, all these things that you and I can talk about openly. But that kind of weird out a.

Lot of people, right?

Like, why are you putting on those weird colored glasses right now, dude, after we just finished dinner? Or why is this, why are you telling me this meat is grass fed? Grass finished? Like, why does that even matter? Or yeah, this sauna is fun and I like sitting down here and talking with you guys, but are there any benefits to us sitting in here? And so as that happens, you're educating people about health, or at least I'm educating people about health about all these things that I do. And all of a sudden, after several months of doing this, even though I would say that, like two years ago I didn't have a lot of people in the Spokane community who I could just sit down and talk with about all these things that I really like, now I've got a whole bunch of guys who are just like picking my brain about this stuff and who are interested in it. And then we're, whatever, texting each other on the phone, asking what half B session we used that day or, or check out this new sauna I got. And so it's almost as though if you don't have the community in your area that you would like to have and you feel like you're lonely because nobody lives there with similar interests, etc. Then create the change that you want to see happen and just start hanging out with people and bring them into your home and show them your life and talk with them and answer their questions, and you'd be surprised. It kind of shocked me, like two years later because I really started a lot of this during COVID I've got this whole group of fabulous people who are also interested in a lot of the same things I'm interested in because they experienced it at my house.

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Yeah, you Reminded me we've had a retired palliative care doctor, his name is Julian Abel, on the podcast a couple of times before, and he has a podcast and a book called Survival of the Kindest. He's the director of Compassionate Communities in the uk. And then after I'd interviewed him a couple of times, he got me on Zoom and said, look, Chris, I don't think you're really getting this. And he absolutely had a point. You know, we talk about diet and we talk about exercise, we talk about stress management, all these things that we do. And we're thinking of community as like some separate pillar. Oh, by the way, there's this community thing you need to do over here, like it's the, you know, the fourth or fifth pillar of health or whatever it is. And the way you need to think about it is all of these interventions you're recommending, like the food prep, like you just said, that's an opportunity to weave the communitas into your thing, right?

Yeah.

And at the moment, well, perhaps for the first few years of mbt, we were wasting that opportunity. We were not thinking, we were thinking too much about the individual, less about the social network in which they exist. Because nobody really exists in a vacuum. Right.

You know, it's not as though, because I understand a lot of people, they eat early. Like you eat early, don't you?

Yeah, we have dinner at 4:00 in the afternoon. We do like our early time restricted eating.

So that might be more difficult for you to do something like a big dinner.

Although that too, we do it occasionally.

But yeah, if it's like once a week.

It sounds exhausting even for me, like as. And I don't really identify as an introvert, it's just a lot.

So it is something that on paper looks exhausting, but in reality is energizing. Those nights that we have those parties are the nights that I go to bed and I have to like take melatonin and stuff to get to sleep because I'm just so excited and energized and buzzed by being around people. And yeah, there's always a little bit of extra cleanup and there's always a little bit of extra prep and there's even a little bit of a financial burden on like figuring out how you're going to feed, you know, like 50 people and their kids, like some kind of grass fed brisket. But this idea of loving others and sharing with others and experiencing the increase in energy that results from that, that sometimes lasts like through one to two days later, like it's like there's a lot of stuff going on here that I have yet to understand. Like when you wake up in the morning after one of those fabulous dinner parties and you've stayed up past your bedtime, but you don't even feel like you need coffee because you just have a big smile on your face and you're so energized and you wake up and when you do turn on your phone, you get like three texts from people who had an amazing time or who have follow up questions for you. And so, you know, there's so many other things that I talked about during my talk that go beyond just eating together. You know, I talked about opening yourself up to the messiness of other people when you're going out and doing something. This one's really hard for me because I like to work out by myself. I don't like to herd cats. I dig kind of like the buzz of having other people around sometimes. You know, like if I go to myself when I'm traveling to a steakhouse or whatever and I order and enjoy an amazing steak, that is probably a better experience than I would have had if I'd ordered room service up in my room. But it's kind of like when you go to the coffee shop to study, not because you want to visit with people, but you just want that buzz of being around other people. And so I've always been happier with that type of mentality in terms of just like going out of my way to share experiences with others. But now what I'll do is typically about one to two workouts a week, whether it's a paddleboard session or a hike, a restaurant outing sometimes, or a walk or anything like that. I just text a couple of folks from that Google Doc that I have and ask them if they want to join me. And sometimes it's yes, sometimes it's no. Is it always annoying? Does it always like add 10 to 15 minutes because you're waiting in your car for the other guys to get there who said they were going to be there, but.

And then suddenly turns up with a bike that's not functional.

Right. They want to spend 15 minutes fixing.

It before you start.

Exactly, exactly. Somebody gets a flat tire during the ride or whatever. You know, when you introduce the messiness of other humans into a scenario, it's always going to be inconvenient. But again, it's the love, it's the sacrifice, it's the understanding that the very greatest thing that we can do with our lives is to love our Fellow human beings. And what I tell myself as an introvert is, okay, Ben, there's plenty of time other times during the week for you to be inside your own head. You know, I get up super early in the morning. I'm usually up like 4:30 or so. I've got like two or three hours in the morning by myself. You know, I work on my own because I've got a home office and don't really work in a. In a group office scenario. Like, it's not as though I don't get my alone me time, but I just, I have been. And you must do this. It's kind of like sex when you're married. It sounds like it sucks all the romanticism out of making love, but sometimes you do have to plan it. Literally. Like, I'll go up to my wife in the kitchen in the morning and be like, hey, let's do it tonight, babe. And there's some amount of anticipation that builds up, et cetera. Like there are other benefits, but ultimately, like, you kind of have to plan it out. And the same thing with these things. Like, you have to say, you know, I write out all the workouts and activities I'm going to do. Typically on a Sunday night before the week starts, I'll write down which of those activities I'd like to reach out to other people to join me in. And it's always rewarding. There's always some type of piece of advice or something like that that you can give to someone else. Yeah, you aren't getting your audiobook or your podcast or your me time or your personal meditation or whatever in. But I think if you strike a balance and you just open up a few of those shared experiences to others, it makes. And they've actually done really interesting studies on this. I wrote an article on my website a couple weeks ago about the dopaminergic response and the amplification of sensory pleasures when experiencing something either painful or pleasurable with other people versus experiencing it by yourself. And there is a significant amplification of the sensory experience when you experience that with others, when you bite into a steak and you're looking into each other's eyes saying, oh, oh, oh man, that's good. Like you can get some of that if you're eating by yourself at, you know, at the bar, at a steakhouse, watching a basketball game or whatever, but not quite. Not quite to that level. So I would say, like, gathering around food is one big one. Going out of my way to deliberately organize shared experiences despite their inconveniences that's another. Another big one.

Have you come across any good tools for doing this? I feel like something important missing from, say, Strava. You're looking retrospectively at the things that people did today. I don't give a fuck about what you did today. Like, tell me what you're gonna do tomorrow so I can join you. That would be really helpful.

Exactly.

There's a book, it's a new book and I wish I'd have read it about two weeks earlier because I just finished it and there was a whole bunch more fodder and ammo that I could have used in there for my talk. But it's called Friendship in the Age of Loneliness. And since it was just written and we know how quickly the app website software landscape changes, but it has like 30 different kind of meetup esque type of apps and websites in there that are everything from for young people who love sports to new mothers who are looking for other supportive new mothers, to different ways to broadcast when you're in a certain city what sports you play, who you're looking to meet up with to play that sport. Like there's one called Open Sports that's like that. It's just like you choose your sports, you choose how long you're in a city, and it'll just list a whole bunch of other people who are around who are organizing, pick up basketball, tennis, whatever. And so, yeah, technology can be really useful for this. And in addition, that book has several contact management software recommendations. Right now I use one called Contacts plus. But all that does is so Contacts plus lets me pull, pull in all my Gmail contacts, my iPhone contacts, my iMessage contacts, and then it allows me to attach a tag to any of those. Like let's say the tag is Austin, Texas. And I've got like whatever, 18 different people in my Gmail inbox and on my iPhone who have that tag. But when I fly to Austin, Texas, I'll just type in the tag Austin and I'll have all those people pulled up who live there, who I might have forgotten live there, who I can reach out to and say, oh, hey, I had a free moment. You want to grab dinner or you want to go whatever, swim in Barton Springs or anything like that. But Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, because I'm still curating and trying out some of the newer apps that are listed in that book, seems to have recommendations for a couple additional friendship and relationship management software tools or apps that might make it even easier in terms of being able to List people's interests and how it is that you met them. And then reminders that pop up on a frequent basis. Hey, you haven't talked to this person or say, invited them over to dinner in three weeks. You should reach out. So sometimes that stuff can seem kind of fabricated or inauthentic. For example, I'm calling you because my software app just told me I haven't talked to you in three weeks. But you know what? I think that it's useful. I think that there are certain aspects of software and tools and technology that make this stuff easier. That honestly, I think people would love to have years before this stuff existed. So, yeah, there's some amount of management that can be done, but I mean, my primary way to do it is just that, Google Doc, because it's all the local people. One of the things that came up repeatedly in my talk was figuring out a way to get out into your local community and be there for people who you normally just never really take the time to be there for. These aren't the type of people you would have over for a dinner party. This is like when I go to church and I'm reviewing the church bulletin about who has cancer, who's just had a baby, who is facing financial difficulties, and then what I do, because, like, at our church, we use a website called Realm, which is a place where you can leave messages to other people in the church or look up the church director. Even if you don't have someone's name or number, you can find it there. And so at least once a week, I will reach out to someone at church and I'll cook them dinner or deliver them a meal, or my wife will often just go and help them out in their yard or do some type of community service for them. And I've found that church has been a really, really good outlet for being able to find needy people. You know, it's actually like, if you read the Bible, that's like one of the main things that Jesus encouraged people to do was like, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the widows and the orphans. And yet you see now government welfare doing that more than the church community. I think that the church, especially in America, has fallen short of taking care of people in the way that they are called to. But if you're like a member of a church body or you go to church, like, it's just like insty oodles of people who you can help who are super receptive to it. And so whether it is a church or whether it is Like Googling the name of your city, plus volunteer opportunities. Or like I talked about yesterday, even just like, when you're journaling or meditating in the morning, thinking of one person, you can serve that day. So 365 days a year, you're helping at least one person out. That idea of going out again, systematizing into your life, the habit of helping other people and volunteering and loving other people is something that has also been incredibly rewarding in terms of the biological benefits of altruism. Same amount of energy generated when I'll throw one of those group dinners. But it's also been something that deep down in your heart, you know it's right. Deep down in your heart, you know that despite the inconveniences that it presents, you're missing a workout, not getting to catch up on that reading that you wanted to do. You're going to be short on a podcast. You're going to. You gotta catch up on the weekends or whatever. It always, always feels right when you make that decision. And so just living your life almost like a Good Samaritan, or. I think in that book I mentioned friendship in the age of loneliness. Like, I think he calls it a sheriff of the good times. Everywhere you go, try and spread good times. Every time that we go out to eat and there's extra food left on the table, I used to, in a spirit of scarcity, feel as though I had to just, like, eat all that food and make it disappear because, hell, we paid for it. Somebody's got to eat it or whatever. I'll just fast in the morning or work out and punish off the rest of these fries because otherwise they're going to go to waste. Or you'll have some food that you know is going to taste really shitty the next day if you take it home and refrigerate it. Even though my kids and I joke that everything tastes good with scrambled eggs, there are exceptions to that rule. Like, I don't know, like, roasted vegetables or something like that. So anyways, every time I finish a meal at a restaurant now I get it boxed. And then I'll walk loops around the restaurant until I find a homeless person. And I give them that food. And it's kind of fun because I'll even, like, explain to them, you know, oh, these are the truffle oil fries.

With the special how spicy?

Aioli ketchup. And a lot of times they're just like, whatever. I'm just chewing the food. Plus, you get your postprandial stroll in, right?

Oh, that's right. That's right. And you're wearing a CGM right now, aren't you? So we all know how important the postprandial structure.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I talked yesterday about the importance of pretty much making every decision that you have in life, whether it's a business decision or the formation of a purpose statement or what you're going to do with the leftover food after a meal. You just think, how can I love others? How can I love others with my business? How can I love others with this meal or this experience that I've just had? How can I love others when I'm at the grocery store? And this is, I think, something that's increasingly occurring when we're all masked up and we're just a little bit more. What's the word? When you are. When you're wearing a mask, someone doesn't know your identity.

Yeah, faceless. It's.

Yeah, we're faceless. We're nameless. There's another word, but I'm forgetting what it is. It's one of those easy words that was on the tip of my tongue anyways, though, so it's actually a lot easier, I have found, to be an asshole. When you're wearing a mask. There's something about people not being able to see you, like a bandit, that kind of, like, makes it a little bit easier to be less personable to other people, to smile less at the grocery store clerk, to kind of, like, give a nod to the Uber driver, but not really say much else. And so I think it's even more important nowadays to literally, like, when you get in an Uber or a Lyft, you should be thinking, okay, before this ride is over, how can I love this other person? And sometimes it can be something as simple as, how's your day going? Or when I get out of the car, I always say, God bless you. Have an amazing day.

Yeah, you've got to use your words, right? You have to use facial expression now. You got to use your words.

That's another thing that I've just realized is we're not independent automatons and that other human beings, even those who we don't know and who we may never see again, really thrive on what is arguably electromagnetic energy and photonic energy and emotional energy that all pours forth when basically every interaction that you have is performed in a spirit of loving others.

Would you say that the church has become more important to you over the years? I was listening to the podcast way back in the day. It must be what, 2012 or something. I started listening and, you know, back then I used to think, he's this crazy guy. He talks about all this stuff. Like, I can't believe that anybody's possibly doing all of this stuff. And then before I knew it, I sort of doing most of it, you know, like, it kind of crept in incrementally. But I don't remember you talking about the church so much back then. But now I hear you talk about it a lot, so something changed.

I've always felt really close to God in nature, often by myself. When walking through a forest and speaking with God and feeling his presence in nature, which is where I think that the Creator reveals himself to us in many ways, like, speaks to us through the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the lakes and the ocean and the wind and the hills and the greenery. And when I go into a church, especially when I go into a church that's just like a typical American church, like in a strip mall, you know, with a PowerPoint projector and some people on stage, an electric piano. And it's difficult for me because it feels kind of like trite and irreverent. In many cases, I'm like, whoa, this. If this is the God that built Mount Everest and this amazing forest and these glorious oceans and rivers and lakes and thunder and lightning, and here I am in a strip mall trying to talk to him. This just doesn't feel right. And that really was something I struggled with for a long time. And I also struggled because I was very judgmental of other people who weren't thinking on the same level as me. What do I have in common? When the pastor tells us to stand up and turn around and greet someone behind us with the plumber who's working a 9 to 5, who doesn't give a shit about anything regarding, like, nutrition or health or fitness or anything. I talk about who I've never met in my life who's like, maybe 12 years older than me.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of.

Kindred spirits at church. And church feels irreverent. And what I realized is a, there's something about what is called in the Bible and in Greek terminology, koinonia, like gathering together very similar to the shared experiences I was talking about that are messy and inconvenient and you feel like you're sacrificing for others. And sometimes it doesn't feel like exactly what you should be doing, but yet at the same time, after you've done it, it feels right. Well, at Church, you really are surrounded by a whole bunch of other super messy people who. Because it's not really like a club that you all joined that's like, I don't know, a mushroom and plant foraging club or, you know, a tennis club or something where you all have the same interests can seem really awkward and harder to make friends and harder to love people. But I've realized that the energy that you experience when you're there, and all of a sudden you all open your mouths and you start singing together and you realize, oh, my gosh, like, God does care that he's a plumber and I'm a trainer or a coach or a blogger and she cuts hair and she's a house mom. Like, all God knows is we're just all singing this wonderful, beautiful, glorious song together, and it sounds really nice. Or when you're sitting there and there's a pastor delivering some moving, energetic sermon that you're learning from, it's different than listening to that same sermon later on the hike or you're on YouTube and you look beside you and your wife has a couple tears rolling down her face, and there's somebody in the back saying, amen, brother. And it's just kind of a different, more dynamic experience when it comes to worshiping God. And so that was part of it. Realizing that I've been very judgmental and that I needed to understand that everybody is. If you're coming at this from a Christian standpoint, like, saved, it's not like Jesus just died for the good people or the rich people or, you know, the people who are cool or the people who didn't have struggles in life or the people who. Who had a great job like he died for. For everybody. And it took me a really long time to get that hammered through my stubborn head that I'm not special, right? That. That I'm not the chosen one, that I'm not the hero. I'm just another dude trying to live other people and make a maximum impact with my life on this planet. And who am I to judge, right? Who am I to judge? So setting aside that, you know, recognizing in myself that I tend to judge others and realizing that I'm no more special than anybody else was one thing that really, all of a sudden made church more palatable. Also, just that idea that, you know, for example, Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler talk about, I think in their book about flow. What's the name of that book?

Recapture the Rapture.

Yeah, well, Jamie talks about it in Recapture of the Rapture. Too Becoming superhuman. Something like that is that I forget. But anyways, they talk about these shared experiences. Koinonia. Yeah. Stealing fire and how group flow is something that has really, really significant origins traced back to religious experiences like worshiping together, experiencing God together, praying together, being anointed together, taking communion together. I mean, you know the recent author of a book about the history of plant medicines in church worship, Brian Marascu, I think his name is called.

Yeah.

He wrote a book about just like how, you know, even the, you know, the ego dissolving or the consciousness expanding elements of plant medicine are something that actually the church used to weave into a lot of these experiences. Experiences too.

He argues that Christianity is a continuation of paganism with a psychedelic twist.

Yeah. Which will be interesting. I'm actually having lunch with him later on today, so it'll be interesting to hear some of his perspectives on that. But I'm not saying like, you got to put psilocybin in the communion wine to enjoy the fellowship of church. Yeah. Or ergo, but this idea that we need each other and for me to be walking in the forest by myself, whatever. Maybe singing Amazing Grace is way different than standing with 300 other people, blasting at the top of our lungs and feeling the energy and the emotion that pours forth from that experience. And so when you combine those two elements with the idea that church is also a really great place to build community or find ways that you can love others or serve others more, church has become a lot more meaningful to me. Not to belabor this point too much, but I've also really, really realized, probably as a result of me getting older, knowing I have a broken body, realizing that ultimately all this fitness stuff at the end of the day is not that fulfilling, despite how perfect your diet is or how perfect your body is. I've just realized that caring for your spirit is one of the most important and meaningful and rewarding things that you can do. And so just that increased focus on spiritual health for me has naturally brought church up a few notches when it comes to another way to care for my spirit and to care for the one part of me that's arguably the most important part that I believe will go on to live forever versus my body just kind of fading away eventually. So why have it all about me? Whatever. Working out by myself? Is that what I'm going to be thinking about on my deathbed? Or am I going to be thinking about singing at the top of my lungs, surrounded by a whole bunch of other happy people, and then making dinner for One of those people who might have cancer later that night. So you have to do some forward thinking when it comes to what makes me happy versus what makes other people happy or what makes God happy. A lot of times what makes me happy is not exactly what's going to make you happy on your deathbed.

So you weren't terribly convinced then by Jamie Wheel's argument in Recapture the Rapture that we need a replacement for organized religion. You know, he's of the. And I'm sure you thought about this as well. You're sort of more cerebral intellectual side, you're reading Dawkins and Hitchens and Sam Harris, like, yeah, I think they find there's like a huge downside to this religion thing and maybe we should find other ways to create meaning. So that's what Jamie Wheel wrote about in Recapture the Rapture. But you've not found that to be necessary. And the church is not in need of replacing.

The church is in need of fixing the post reformational church that's split off into Catholicism, which based on papal politics and greed and power and accumulation of wealth, despite there being many, many wonderful, amazing Catholics who I will live with in heaven, you know, forever. There's been a lot of corruption in the Catholic Church. And then when you look at the other off branching that occurred during the Reformation, you saw almost like the Protestant Christians, which is largely my background, kind of like Reformed Protestant. And they became very scientific and rational and logical and argumentative and stripped a lot of like the sacredness and the, you know, even things as simple as like imagery or iconography. You know, they stripped that away because they said, you know, to have pictures of the saints would be worshiping them and we shouldn't worship idols. So we just need to get rid of like art. And in many cases we lost a lot of the beauty and a lot of the aesthetics and even a lot of like the deep spiritual sacred aspects of communicating with God instead replaced by, you know, learn the Bible, you know, do the Noah's Ark felt animals but you know, deep meditation or trance like states and deep prayers that are that desert fathers and desert mothers would have experienced in the early Christian church. And the beauty and aesthetics of Christianity was kind of lost post Reformational. And so the Catholic Church retained some of that with cathedrals and stained glass windows and some beautiful worship settings. But there was power corruption. The Reformed Church or the Protestant Church lost a lot of the beauty and aesthetics while maintaining arguably like good theology and a little less political corruption. And then you have the third off branching which was the Orthodox Church. And the Orthodox Church, which is my father, is an Eastern Orthodox Christian. And they actually are the smallest subset of Christianity that exists now, primarily based originally out of Constantinople and now Moscow, Russia, is kind of the home of the Orthodox Church, so to speak. And they burn icons and pray systematically, multiple, multiple times per day, and have a very kind of like meditative and a structured meditative aspect to their worship. And there's a lot more like deep mystical spirituality woven into that particular religion. And so I would say of anything like the Orthodox approach seems to me to be the one that most, at least from my experiences, acknowledged a lot of the deep beauty and aestheticism of God that seems to have been stripped from the Protestant church. And the Catholics, they've done a great job retaining some of that beauty in their worship services or in their architecture, but yet been corrupted by politics. And then the Reformed Christians or the Protestants, they're just almost too logical, too in the head, too rational, too scientific. And there's not a lot of like deep spiritual mysticism. Like, for me to actually go to like a church and say, hey, let's work psilocybin into the church service to allow us to use the sacredness of a plant to more deeply connect with the divine right, that'd be considered like heresy. Whereas I think a more appropriate response would be, yes, God made all good plants are sacred and we should look into almost like the same way that the Levi priests burnt like special oils and incense and the holy of holies in the tabernacle, that did shift them into an altered state of consciousness. It's like those type of things are just considered like reefer madness, doing drugs, when in fact those two are probably an integral part of drawing closer to God or worship. So there's a lot of problems with the church. And when I talk about this stuff, I kind of have imposter syndrome, Chris, because, like, I'm not a theologian. I don't have a. I'm like a personal trainer. Like my education is physical education. Yeah, I'm still. Yeah, yeah, I'm slowly learning this stuff. And yeah, I think the church has a long ways to go, but I think in an ideal scenario, we have these beautiful, beautiful locations in the community that aren't ostentatious. We're not talking about multimillion dollar cathedrals and TV shows, but just like places that are aesthetically beautiful. You know, maybe a garden and a well built structure and, you know, an interior that's very peaceful and settling and these institutions or these locations within the community, primarily what they're doing is giving people a place to come together and connect to the sacred, connect to the divine, connect to God. And at the same time, these places are like the local community haven't for helping other people. Like, this is where all the money goes, then gets turned around and distributed to again, like the poor and the homeless and the fatherless and the widows and the orphans. And that's really what I think the ideal church scenario would be.

And you must have considered that the church is a modern solution to a problem they created.

Right?

We've seen this again elsewhere. Like people think, oh, all hail satisfaction. Science that gave us antibiotics and cured us of zoonotic disease. It was only, I mean, so we're here at the ancestral health Symposium. Right? And we're looking through these modern problems through the context of our ancestral heritage. And it was the sedation, right, like settling down and domestication with animals, the close proximity that created those zoonotic diseases to begin with.

Right.

I guess the disease of modernity. And I wonder if the same is.

True of the church.

The Catholic church, church in the 4th century BC invented the monogamous nuclear family and told everyone, oh, this is how you should live. No more marrying your cousins, no more kin based clans and all this kind of stuff. And it sounds like what you're doing with your group dinners is like recreating those kin based clans. We know that sharing food is an important way that you create kin.

Yeah, yeah, we're definitely creating that type of scenario. Actually, a church, we almost call that a parish, where there's little pockets throughout the community of people who support each other throughout the week. And then everybody comes together in one large church service at the end of the week.

But you see, my point is like they created the problem and then they come along, say, oh, we can solve that. But that loneliness thing you've got. Oh yeah, we got solutions for that. Come join us.

Right.

And there are subtle nuances there that, you know, I would disagree with you on. For example, you know, when I throw a dinner party, I'm not, you know, eyeing my buddy Angelo's wife as a potential mate for me that night or anything like that, because I do believe that there's some societal stability that is afforded to us by monogamy. And I think just the way we're wired up in terms of some things I was talking about last night, such as oxytocin. In rodent studies, that surge of oxytocin actually induces like more of a monogamous interaction between some species. Yeah, prairie voles, which obviously aren't humans. Prairie voles. But basically I think that there is a sacredness in terms of the relationship between a man and a woman that dictates that there's a great deal less stress and more societal stability that seems to be afforded through monogamy. And this is coming from a guy who I would say is like, I'm a little bit of a hedonist, right? Like, I love to explore every nook and cranny of God's creation and I love sex and I love big greasy ribeye steaks and I love coconut ice cream and I like using plant medicines responsibly and I love the outdoors and jumping in lakes and rivers and oceans. And I actually was thinking about this yesterday, this idea that we have this little bit of an ancestral mismatch. And I alluded to this during my talk, where we're technically built to preserve calories and to be metabolically inefficient. Because if we burn too many calories, and we were someone thousands of years ago without unfettered access to food like we have now, it would have been foolhardy to go and do a workout in the morning or to go jump in a cold bath or do any of the things that people do now to up regulate their metabolism or to burn calories, because that would just basically mean you'd die sooner or you'd strip more food out of the village if you're training as a warrior to be able to protect the village or something like that. Maybe. But now we live in an era where we're surrounded by unfettered access to food and we still have that same built in neurological mechanism, that dopaminergic response to, to food that would allow us to survive. Just like, oh, here's food. Stuff as much into your body as possible because you never know when you're going to see that food again. So of course that manifests in a lot of the chronic disease that we're seeing as a result of excess caloric intake. And that's related to a host of different chronic diseases. And we're just kind of following what we were ancestrally hardwired to follow. But then a lot of people have figured out that, oh wait, I can just go work out and burn all this off and that chronic disease won't necessarily manifest. And there's a lot of subtle nuances like over training and hormonal issues and all the things that are accompanied by the exercise. To eat, eat, to exercise. Vicious cycle. But yet I think that if you're saying I had a Big Mac and fries twice today and I'm going to go tomorrow morning with a big frowny face, crush myself on the elliptical trainer for an hour and a half and then like grit my teeth while I take a, you know, dump a bunch of ice from the gas station in my bathtub, that is like a form of, of hedonism that manifests as a result of, of, of wealth and what we have access to, that I think is unhealthy, but yet for someone to savor all of God's creation, have a massive ribeye steak a couple of nights a week with, with a wonderful glass of organic wine and some dark chocolate coconut ice cream or some sweet potato fries, and then the next day you're going to grab all your friends and go paddle boarding and then jump in the icy cold river afterwards, partially because it's fun, but also partially because, you know, you kind of need to because of that enormous wonderful meal you had the night before. I mean, to me that sounds like a scenario that our ancestors would have killed for. It's like, wait, I get to eat a whole bunch of wonderful food, go hang out with my friends, burn calories, swim in the river and then like do it again. And I think that if there's enough to go around, like, like for example, these dinner parties and cooking dinners for other people and things like that, like if you're sharing that hedonism with others and that type of scenario isn't performed selfishly, I actually think it's a pretty fun way to live. Right. It's just like savor all of God's creation, take care of your body, love other people while you're doing that. And so I call myself almost like a, like a healthy Christian hedonist.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And I just to go back to your earlier point, I wouldn't say there wasn't an upside to the monogamous nuclear family. The upside is economic prosperity. Right? So once we were organized into monogamous nuclear families, you would then cooperate with someone you didn't know. Whereas that's not true of kin based clans. Like everything you did was through business wise was through someone, a relative, someone you knew it was unthinkable to do business with someone, someone you didn't know. So that was the upside of the monogamous. And maybe that led to all the wonderful things that we have today. Right, that you just said that we get to enjoy that maybe the.

Well, for me, I look at it on a little Bit more of a personal level. And again, this is painted with the, with the color of me being a Christian. And so this is kind of, you know, kind of what I think about when I discuss this. But basically there's this, this deep, deep element of sacrifice woven into the hero's journey that is the story of Jesus Christ, how he just like, left everything as a deity in heaven and came down and lived as a messy human and was eventually sacrificed in a very brutal way and killed in a manner that would allow him to take on all the sin and suffering and burden and shame of all the horrific things that have been done and in the world. And that sacrifice is written about in specifically the New Testament as something that is mirrored in the relationship between a husband and a wife. Like being there for each other, or even, arguably even a son and his father, or a daughter and her mother or her father. When I looked at my son in the eyes a few days ago, because I always sit down with my sons and have a few discussions a week that are deep and meaningful, that involve a lot of eye gazing and talking about their life and what their dreams and hopes and desires are. And I ended that discussion saying to my son, you know, you know, river, I would die for you, dude. Like, maybe you'll understand someday when you're a dad. But I would literally like, not to use pop culture song lyrics, but I would throw myself on a grenade for you, right? I would throw myself in front of a train for you. I would do anything for you. And in a sense, that dynamic of a relationship between a child and a parent or between a man and a woman is something that I think reflects the love that I think God gave to us in the form of sending Jesus. And so for me, like, it's almost living out my Christian faith to the fullest extent by realizing that there's a person in my life that I would do anything for, no matter what, that I'm so committed and faithful to, that even if the world is crumbling all around me, I will care for and love that person no matter what. And it's very difficult, I think, to replicate that just because of the sacredness of sex and the way it interacts with twines people. It's hard to replicate that in a non monogamous scenario. So for me, part of it too is just about basically reflecting the love that God gave to humankind and trying to mirror that in the type of love that I have with my wife, if that makes sense.

It does make sense. I was wondering, is there just to Wrap up, like one tiny thing that you could give everyone to do. And maybe you've just given it to us. Right. Like that eye gazing thing. I lucked out. I happened to. To be standing next to Lucy mailing whilst watching your talk. That would have been super awkward for me had I had to do that with a complete stranger, but.

Right. Or somebody with Tourette's.

But can you. Is there one tiny thing that you can give people to do to perhaps reduce their loneliness? Because it all seems just a bit overwhelming. I just want one tiny thing.

Right. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you actually brought that up about the eyes, because the eyes are the window to the soul. They connect us in a way deeper than even talk or hearing someone's voice or arguably even touching someone does. And I would challenge everyone listening in this week to make deep, meaningful, even slightly awkward or somewhat creepy eye contact with every person that you interact with, including. Because you might take this for granted and you might realize you're not doing this much at all. Your loved ones. When I started doing eye gazing with my boys three years ago when they were 10, I realized how seldomly I'd actually, for the previous 10 years, aside from maybe when they were little cooing babies, just looked deep into their eyes, sometimes without even saying anything, like, deep, deep eye contact. And that's the same for like the Uber driver or whatever, the airline stewardess. I always talk about travel scenarios when I'm traveling, obviously. Or, you know, or other people you're having dinner with at the dinner table. Like, try this week, that. That idea of eye gazing. And if you want to take it to the next level, one of the things that we do is I'll sometimes put on a favorite song that one of my sons and I have, and we'll simply play that song and. And do nothing but stare into each other's eyes and just like stroke each other's hair and sit there and just be there with each other with eye contact. And it's so, so meaningful. Many of us might already do that with our significant other, like after sex or something. If you're lying in bed during pillow talk, I think that's probably the most common time that most people listening in have experienced that kind of eye gazing. But try and weave that into all the interactions that you have. Not for your whole life. Don't think about that way, just for this week. Be that person. And I've personally found that to be incredibly, incredibly profound as far as understanding how deeply we are intertwined and interconnected and Interdependent as human beings. And it sounds like a silly way to start, but I would say just deep, deep eye gazing and eye contact with every single person that you meet, that you come into contact to or that you communicate with this week.

I love that. Do you mind if I start with my dog? I think my dog's pretty good at eye gazing, and I think I'd feel more comfortable about myself if I was to start with my dog.

Isn't that, like, a sign of dominance when you look at your dog in the eyes and they eventually look away? Like, the dog always looks away first, and if they don't look away first, that's a sign that your relationship, in terms of the hierarchy of dominance between you and your dog might need to be adjusted.

That doesn't sound. Yeah, I'm not sure that's what I'm gunning for. I think I can find a study that shows that eye gazing with other animals increases oxytocin, at least in dogs. So maybe it does the job, but it's just super awkward to me. But maybe that's what I need to overcome, is that awkwardness.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I know that we're kind of walking back towards the conference now, and as Chris alluded to, we're kind of getting towards the end of our chat today, which really didn't have an agenda going in, aside from we knew we wanted to talk a little bit about loneliness, but hopefully you guys have enjoyed our. What are we Ambling and rambling?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's a height cast, our ambling and rambling. And basically what I'll do for anybody listening in is all the show notes for what we talked about. I'll put@BenGreenfieldFitness.com ChrisAndBen that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Chrisand Ben. I'm certain that Chris, when he publishes this on his podcast, you'll probably tell people where they can go, right?

Yeah, exactly. You can come to nourishbalancethrive.com and you'll find the podcast there. We started with athletes, and more recently, it's turned into an exploration of all of the things that create performance and. And human flourishing. When I'm having so much fun with that.

Yeah, Chris does a really great job to you guys with, like, if I hear him record a podcast that I'm interested in delving more into the science behind. He does a really good job with with his show notes and, like, transcriptions.

And stuff like that.

Probably because he's like a computer Engineer really good at making websites.

No, I've just got great people. That's what it is.

I got great people.

Yeah.

And so the other thing is that, of course, the ancestral health symposium that we're at, we're grateful to them for putting this event on. And so if you go to their website, you should be able to find all of the audios and videos for all the talks that Chris and I.

Are playing hooky on right now to.

Talk to you instead. And again, either go to Chris's website or my website and leave a comment or a question or a feedback. Do you have comments on your website?

No, We've started doing a forum. I've got a discourse forum. And we have people on the other side of a Patreon paywall and we get a great discussion going there. I found that to be really helpful. Very personal.

Cool, cool. Now you're throwing around words like patreon and discord that make me feel like I'm. Well, either way, everybody, thanks for listening and remember to go eye gaze. And Chris, thanks for the fun walk this morning.

Oh, thank you, Ben. I really appreciate you, the talk and everything you've done for nourish, balance, thrive. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks, ma'.

Am. There's a lot of stuff that we miss out on, A lot of stuff that I think is built into us from a real ancestral standpoint, which is why I think this is appropriate to look at from an ancestral context. When we have no actual physical touch, we have no eye contact, when we don't produce pheromones that other people can detect and smell, when we aren't releasing or producing as much oxytocin, when there's no sensing between two human beings of the interaction between one person's heart or brain's electromagnetic field and another person's heart or brain's electromagnetic field, we are missing out on a ton of what it means to be human, to experience humans. And if you look at the Igen group, I don't know how many people are in it. Basically, like 95 to 2000. 12ish is the iGen group. Admittedly, I'm kind of a dummy. I forget who the group is that comes after that. Who's the group that comes starting in. Sorry, Aaron. Who's the group that comes in 2013 and onward? Is it. Am I now? All right, well, what's that? Yeah, I'm not sure what 2012 after is, but anyways, Generation Igen is basically some category you would fall into if you probably don't remember ever having had a smartphone. Just in looking us to be you probably I don't know who in here is in iGen like 95 to 2012. Yeah. So most of you remember the days when you, you know, when the phone would ring and you didn't know who it was unless you were one of the lucky people in the neighborhood who.

Had the caller id.

Which we actually did because my dad owned a telecommunications company so we were early adopters of like the brick sized cell phones. And you know, I would go to, I would go to like soccer practice with a paper looking like a little drug dealer just so my mom could page me to pick up the milk. And I grew up without a smartphone being necessarily an integral part of my life. A fifth appendage are a big one. We even know that there are studies on histocompatibility of mates and the immune system robustness of offspring from a man and a woman. When the woman in particular has been able to smell the pheromones emitted by a man and is able to choose or select or accept a mate that allows for better immune system. And people gather around that and it's just been amazing. The dinners are a huge one for me. Meetups. So I will put a list on the resources page because most people are aware of meetup.com, has anybody? Because I just started down the route of like throwing neighborhood parties, getting to know all my neighbors because I realized like even though I live kind of out in the sticks, I have neighbors, you know, within a four mile radius. Probably like 30 neighbors who I just didn't know that well. But I use Nextdoor which allows you to create community that's, that's geographically appropriate for where you are. Anybody use that one before? Yeah, it's really cool. It's like Facebook for your neighborhood. There's meetups. There's another, another few that actually they were brought to my attention when I was reading that Friendships in the Age of Loneliness book. There are a few I wanted to share with you guys. There's one called kind of Nietzsche Peanut. Shows you like minded mothers near you and makes it easier to meet. We three find the most awesome people nearby, meet new friends in groups of three. Meet me, meet, chat and have fun with new people.

Hilo.

Community management, messaging and collaboration all in one place. And then Dex is another one. Hi, Low and Dex are two that I'm going to start into next month to be able to manage all your friends and like curate or collect all of your contacts together and be Able to reach out to people in a little bit more organized fashion. And again, I'll put all these on the page for the presentation. There was one that was really cool. Walkie. A community where you say what you want to talk about and get to have a phone call with an interested person right away. It's still a phone, but it's something. And then there's one called Goodnight Zoom. Remote storytelling with an isolated senior. But you know what I have found, and this was more the case before COVID Nursing homes and care facilities. They're super open to you coming down and visiting. It's probably changed a little bit because the last few times I've called because my sons and I used to go, like to go down and most of them have a piano and we play guitar and play like old old folks songs there at the local. The Old Folks Center. And I'm like, what are you calling. What's PC? Can I say old folks center? But yeah, like, that idea of connecting with old people. I even read books by old people for old people because I find so much sage wisdom in them. Like, I just read a book called Gunlap, and it's just a book written by an old man giving other old men advice. And I figure, wait, if he's an old man who has a ton of wisdom telling other old men what to do before they get to his age, then I could read this and start doing this same stuff when I'm, you know, when I'm 30 or 40 or whatever. So look. Look for elderly people as well. That's another really, really good thing. Church. I, even though I grew up Christian, and I still am Christian, and I still love God. I love to talk to God and worship God. Like, I like to walk in the forest and be under the blue sky in the sunshine. That's when I feel most connected to the divine. Like, that's. That's where I can be deeply spiritual. So for me, church was just like kind of. I got to go there and sing the song and shake people's hands and pass around the plate. But I've actually realized, like, in the past couple of years, church is amazing. And I think it's because I started going to church more after Covid. But there's. You get to know people who are way different than you, who otherwise you normally may not have ever interacted with. You get to sing together. And when you walk into a church, like, the energy, the intense energy compared to, say, like walking into a funeral is amazing just because there's a huge amount of positive energy and peace and love and joy in there. The number of people who need help in terms of volunteer opportunities and ways for you to help people. Like, if you go into a church, there's so many people who need help and that's one of the reasons they're at church often. And I realize there's a lot of dogmatic religions who have done a great deal of horrific damage in history, and there's a lot of failures with, with the politics of church, but when it all comes down to it, that's yet another place most communities have that is amazing for building culture and finding people to have for dinner parties and finding people to help and volunteer with. Renewing forsaken family relationships. I started doing this a year and a half ago. I'm always complaining about people in my family, but I realized that nobody's perfect and they have issues with me. And so what I started doing was bringing the family together. As a matter of fact, this November, I'm trying this out for the first time. I rented an Airbnb and me and all my siblings are just going to go live in the Airbnb for three days and just hang out together and try not to kill each other. But you know, we have, we've been. Who else in here has like a brother or sister or a mom or a dad who your relationship is just kind of sketchy with and it's just kind of there. And we accept that that's normal, but that low level angst and bitterness and anger that we now know not only from traditional Chinese medicine, but then when we also look at the work of guys like, you know, Bruce Lipton and Biology of Belief or the book the Body Keeps the Score. Like, that stuff sits with you biologically and when it's a family member, it really sits with you biologically because it's part of your DNA too. So I just made a list of all my family members who I just needed to make things right with or have just a really good, open, honest, transparent relationship with. And I've been working on mending all those relationships and it's culminating in that big Airbnb get together in November. And so think about your family too, not just community and friends.

Reclaim real conversation.

This is the title of the book by Sherry Turkle that I was telling you about. And really one of the big ones, one of the big ones for her is just like putting down your phone during meals and also figuring out how to have meaningful conversations during meals. Like something that goes beyond, like, where are you based out of. And this sweet potato slaw is really good. There's actually some really good ideas in this book. Friendship in the Age of Loneliness. We keep at our house these table topics cards on the table and sometimes bring them out to restaurants. And it's everything from what kind of superhero would you want here eating with us to you know, what's the hardest decision that you had to make last week? And I keep a list like this on my phone anytime. I mean, try it tonight at dinner. Who's going to the dinner tonight for ahs, like maybe not the best platonic sleepover you've ever had. I don't do a lot of sleepovers.

But, you know, if you could travel.

Anywhere tomorrow, where would you go? Who in your life makes you laugh out loud? When's the last time you cried? There's actually this really cool essay you can find if you Google this. It's called 36 Questions that Lead to Love. They actually developed 36 questions that when couples go out on multiple dates and begin to ask themselves these questions, there's a greater degree of intimacy and a greater frequency of falling in love. And they're actually really cool questions that you can do with your kids or your loved ones as well. I always, always have table topics on my phone, on the table. I mean, if any of you sit with me tonight at dinner, let's totally do it. Like, I love to play table topics, but this idea of reclaiming real conversation, I find one of the best ways, like the, the low hanging fruit for that is indeed table topics. Okay, the next is to love people. And this may seem quite simple, but I'd be remiss not to bring it up. Any decision that you make in life, and even this is even the way that I run my businesses, right? I don't look at the bottom line. I don't look at money. I don't look at monetization. I simply ask myself, how many people can I touch? How many people can I love? How many people in here have a purpose statement for. For life? Like a clear, single, succinct purpose statement that gets you out of bed in the morning. If you don't, you should. I'm serious. Like, having a purpose statement for life is one of the most precious and meaningful ways to live, right? And I have an essay on my website how to find you'd purpose in life. I have a book I just published called Fit Soul. And in that book there's a whole chapter devoted to finding your purpose in life. But I tell people, find your purpose in life, what'd you like to do.

When you were a kid?

What put you in the flow, in the zone now? What kind of things? Things you naturally good at? But you write that purpose statement, and then the one question you ask yourself when that statement, or perhaps the paragraph before you've dialed it down into a statement is sitting in front of you is, okay, how can I take this purpose and love other people? Or you can even just tack at the beginning or the end of your purpose statement, loving others, you know, with this or that or this. And living your entire life with the idea that loving other people is basically one of the most important things that you can do with your life. And making every decision in the context of, does this love other people? Or is this for loving me? Is this just for my own survival? It's an incredible way to live. It's an incredible way to live. So every decision that you make, think about, how can you love other people? And start with your purpose statement. Serving may sound like it's the same as love, but it's not. Serving is when you're actually going out of your way to do something for someone. The way that we do this at our house is we gather as a family to meditate in the morning, then we gather again as a family to meditate in the evenings. They're very short meditations, five to 10 minutes long. But the morning meditation, in addition to gratitude and breath work and tapping and a family hug afterwards for all those Pacinian corpuscles, is basically, what am I grateful for? And the other question that we, that we answer in the morning is, who can I pray for or help or, or serve this day the entire rest of the day? We might message that person, we might call that person, we might actually go visit that person. We might just send positive emotions and photons and love their direction and pray for them during the day. But every single day, we do that 365 days a year, we begin our day in a spirit of serving others, not with the self affirmation, me, me, me, I, I, I, I'm good, I'm great, I'm wonderful, and gosh darn it, people like me. That's great for building yourself up, but you will build yourself up even more if you wake up in the morning and at some point early on in the day, write down one person and you get better and better at it as you go. You begin to almost intuit who it is that actually needs you and your positive emotions and your positive energy that day. So weave service into your life. In the same way that you weave loving others into every decision that you make.

Shared experiences.

Shared experiences can suck. They're messy. You're hurting cats when you want to go work out, and then you got to get everybody else to come and join you. When you want to go to a restaurant and you just want to have that wonderful steak that you've grown to love, and now you got to share it with four other people and figure out who's going to go and where and how are you going to split up the tab. And, you know, you want to just go, like go to a sauna and a cold plunge, but, you know, you decide to invite other people into the experience. I have realized that it is messy. It is annoying. It feels like sacrifice. And especially for an introverted guy like me who likes to go off and do stuff by myself, opening up those experiences and sharing them with others is actually something that's super awkward and difficult to do when you first start doing it. And then once you realize how much better food tastes when you're sharing it with people, how much more meaningful a simple activity like golfing or going on a hike can be when you're sharing that with other people, how much more meaningful just basically attending a conference like this and sharing the information around a dinner table with other people afterwards can be. Open yourself up, share experiences. Embrace the messiness of other people. It's still something that I'm working on because I like to be by myself. But figure out things that you do that you can invite other people into, particularly things you enjoy that are dopaminergic, and then experience that dopamine release with other people. And then finally, I was telling Aaron last night about one of the more meaningful books that I've read of late. It's by Charles Eisenstein, and it's called Sacred Economics. And while there's so much in that book that I don't have the time to get into right now, a big, big part of that book is when we monetize or apply a value to food, to work, to the environment, to other people, we create a transactional scenario, not a transformational scenario, and we remove the sacredness from that relationship. Many, many of us, especially in an era where we're able to start our own businesses and have anything From Etsy to PayPal to Shopify, etcetera, et cetera, can tend to fall into a kind of a downward spiral of creating relationships for profit for someone who we can do an affiliate venture with, for someone who will mail out for us for Someone who kind of like that statement by John Altberg, like the rich people who might someday help us in some way, don't monetize relationships. Figure out how you can make a relationship meaningful and transformational. And this idea of not looking at people as currency, as dollar bills, is something that is actually quite different than the way most people operate these days, believe it or not. So look at relationships as a way to acknowledge the sacredness of another human being, not as a way to perhaps profit from them or make a deal or build your business. And now that you're aware of that, you might find that you have been doing that a little bit more, and it's something to stop doing and just think about how you can love that person, how you can serve that person, how you can share with that person. So. So I want to finish with something you can do today. I shared a few books with you. Never Eat Alone, Reclaiming Conversations, Mastermind Dinners, Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, Sacred Economics. There's also a book by Susan Cain called the Power of Introverts.

But first of all, before I leave.

You with my final words, I would like for you to stand up, if you would, and do burpees.

And turn.

To the person next to you. And you don't need to talk to them. You can talk to people on Facebook. You can talk to people on Twitter. Like talking is. It's meaningful, but it's just talking. We certainly do get sound vibrations and other things that occur when we talk to people, but I want you to just, with one or two or three people, look at each other in the eyes, which is really awkward. Look at him in the eyes.

And let's try. Let's try and keep.

And don't talk, don't talk, don't talk. Just look that other person in the eyes. If you're okay with that other person placing their hand on your shoulder or holding hands with them or anything like that, give them a head nod. If that's something that's uncomfortable for you. You don't need to.

You're feeling them.

You're looking into their eyes and also feel the electricity coming off of their body. You might smell them. Depending on how long you've all been gunked up in here, you might not touch. Electromagnetic signals, eye contact. It's really meaningful, you guys. It really is. And we don't do that enough, even with our own children. Like, I. You can stop now. Actually.

Every time I leave and I go somewhere like this, I stop and.

I look at one of my children in the eyes. And I just maintain eye contact for two minutes. And I'm almost done. I'm almost done. Look people in the eyes more, touch people more if they're okay with it. And even feel people, like, actually feel their heart and their brain when you're with them. So you can create the world that you want to live in. If every single person left here and started doing some of the things that I talked about, I mean, it's one thing to talk about it, but it's another thing to do it. We can affect change. Like, power is within our hands to do this. So I really, really encourage you to get out there, try a few of these things that I've talked about, begin to build real, meaningful relationships in an era of loneliness. And we can tackle this together. We just need to all help each other out. So thank you. Thank you. I will be outside. I've got two of my books here, Boundless and Boundless Cookbook. So I will totally devalue books for you and sign them, but I'll be right out there. And when I'm out there or at dinner tonight, happy to chat more about this stuff or anything else. And I promise I won't look with a creepy gaze into your eyes for too long.

All right, thank. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for Horizon hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes if you use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.