Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex.

Hey, hey, hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. I had a chance to sit down with my buddy Aubrey Marcus on today's show. Aubrey just finished a book, and it's really good, and we talk about it, and you're gonna enjoy this. I know he's been on a lot of podcasts recently, but we talk about things he hasn't talked about on those other shows. You'll find this interesting. Aubrey's a cool guy. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, one of the minerals that's really important for creating the compounds that break down toxic acetaldehyde is molybdenum. And molybdenum is found in hummus, chickpeas, beans, but you can also get it in a supplement. We have it in one of our key mineral supplements. And, like 300 milligrams of molybdenum will help give your body the raw materials it needs to start breaking that down. The wide peripheral gaze says no. Expand your field of vision as wide as you can and spread your focus throughout the whole spectrum as peacefully as possible. Seeing everything, but seeing nothing. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people.

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The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey, folks. Hey, folks. It's Ben Greenfield and one of my buddies, an amazing man and a real pioneer in the health and fitness industry. A guy who you may know as the CEO of the wonderful company Onnit that I've talked about many times before on this podcast. A man who has appeared on Entrepreneur, Forbes, the Doctors, the Joe Rogan Experience, many times. He's been on the COVID of Men's Health. He has a life coaching course called Go for your Win. And now he has a brand new book, an amazing book called Own the Day, Own youn Life. His name is Aubrey Marcus. He's been a podcast guest before, but he's really done it this time. He's actually written a book, a big boy book, an actual big book. Nice job, dude.

Thanks, brother. Yeah, and thanks for your help along the way. You know, I mean, we started this conversation about how to create this optimal day and put together One perfect, badass day, not just for your health and fitness, but to really live a day that you could repeat and love and enjoy and spend time with the people you care about and do something you could repeat over and over again. And it's been cool to be on this with you, man.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's why it's called own the day. You own one day, you own the rest of your life. So before we jump in, though, of course, every day in many people's case, unless you're. Unless you're one of those cold, skinny people that skips breakfast every single morning, which just to me sounds horrible, considering I just finished downing my Wendy's frosty smoothie that I think it's probably about 900 to 1,000 calories somewhere in that range. So I'm not much of a breakfast skipper.

Yeah, you dip the french fries in your frosty.

My justification is that it's a cue for circadian biology. So a cup of coffee with a sprinkling of MCT oil in it and some stevia just doesn't do it for me.

No. Wendy's Frosty and French fries. That's the zeitgeber you're looking for.

Exactly. Exactly. No, it's healthy. Granted, the french fries are sweet potato variety with crusty sea salt on them, but anyways, let's break the ice. Dude, what'd you have for breakfast this morning, man?

This morning I had a super ridiculous shake. A shake that could not be sold because it has so many things in it. I don't even know what the price would be. Like a filet mignon price steak.

It's like the billion dollar smoothie.

The billion dollar smoothie. Exactly. They actually have that out in one of our places out there in California, interestingly enough.

I know this. Our friend Khalil Rafati's wonderful Sunlife organics restaurants have it on the menu. I think it's more like $32, but it does taste like a billion dollars. So what's your version?

So this is the similar version. So vanilla exogenous ketones. I've been playing around with those in the morning. Been enjoying that mixed with our hemp force vitality as kind of like the protein base and the hemp force vitality power. Food vitality has the chia flax, some of those things that help get moving along with the hemp seed balancing out the omegas. And then the key genics, exogenous ketones that. That provides the whey. And then I added some avocado, some coconut cream. A bunch of like really high quality turmeric to make this kind of golden milk vibe. And then just kept layering in, you know, more different, some medicinal mushrooms, some other different superfoods in there. Until I use this other product from this other company called Vitamineral Earth. And I'll sprinkle a little bit of that in there which has, you know, like burdock and a bunch of nutritional herbs. And so it ends up being this kind of vanilla, spicy, creamy, fatty, golden milk. I'll sprinkle some of our MCT in there. Shake that. I just, I don't even with breakfast at the house, I just come straight to the office, get one of those.

That's amazing.

A lot of the mornings.

Yeah, that's amazing. My, my Wendy's Frosty Smoothie. I'm, I'm, I'm not kidding. It actually is the texture of a Wendy's Frosty Smoothie. Yours tastes amazing. I, I may have to, I may have to take a few cues here. Is that recipe in, in the actual book or version of it?

No, it's not. You know, we have a couple recipes in the book. The thing is, we stayed away from kind of name brand stuff in the book as much as possible. Even on it stuff, you know, we don't mention, you know, the Onnit formulas all that much.

You didn't want your book to be a giant on it catalog?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Wanted this to be something. Look, I know the Onnit stuff is great and a lot of the readers will as well, but wanted to make this more universally applicable. It's going to be translated in a million languages and there's going to be places where, you know, there's not going to be on it stuff available. And so tried to keep some of the brands out of it as much as possible, except when absolutely needed. So this one's not in there because it's pretty specific.

Nice. One of the things that you talked about in the book that I actually hadn't heard of before, but that apparently cleared up your wife Whitney's. Well, I mean, since it's in the book, we might as well put it out there. She had yeast and you fix it with this stuff. Tell me about this yogurt that you do.

Yeah, this is me again. I'm going to sound like such an. With these super expensive shakes and yogurts, but I was cruising through Erewhon and they have this like, it's horrible packaging. It's like, looks like it's printed on like a laser jet from like 92 or something like that. But it was this like 30, like $35 jar of yogurt. And it had like. And I looked, it said, and it was coconut yogurt and it had 400 billion CFU's. And I was like, damn, that's a lot for yogurt. A lot of probiotics, very low sugar and basically just coconut. And then the cultures as the main ingredients. And so, yeah, we gave that a try and we're absolutely addicted. It's like, it's creamy, it's delicious. And any kind of, you know, digestive yeast or any kind of yeast expressing anywhere else in your body. I mean, it does such an amazing job of combating that without having to reach for, you know, the antifungals and kind of the more supplement side of the, of the probiotic game, which I'm all for as well. But it was just brilliant to have something that was tastier than a milk yogurt, more effective than a milk yogurt, and that I could actually. We could actually see results, you know, within like two days. Amazing.

Well, for those of you listening in, if I can find that yogurt, I'll link to it in the show notes along with. I imagine you're probably going to have a lot of things to go click on if you're listening in right now, because Aubrey and I tend to find all sorts of random fun toys to enhance your life. I'll put everything over@bengreenfieldfitness.com OwnTheDay But I agree, dude. I also feel guilty when I'm standing there with my raw carob acai chia smoothie bowl. When I'm ever, I'm in LA at Erwan and preparing to swipe my credit card for 42 bucks for four spoonfuls of breakfast.

Yeah, totally, totally. Well, it's a luxury that we have for our health, but there's so many free doctors and a lot of this book is just talking about taking the minimum effective dose of all the free doctor.

Yeah.

Air temperature, sex, sleep training, all of these things that we take for granted. You know, you don't need the $40 carob power bowl or the probiotic yogurt. You know, if you, if you're mindful of taking the. The full dose of all these other things that are free, you're probably going to feel, you know, as good as anyone out there.

Yeah, you get into a lot of that in the book, like air, light, electricity and water. I was listening to a podcast a couple of days ago and A health expert was asked, what's your number one tip of the day? And he's like, well, I recommend everybody start off your day with just a big glass of water. Which is great advice, but it's also kind of old school, outdated horse that's been kicked to death advice. You kind of take the water up a level in your book as far as what you recommend people drink when they get up, what they should add to their water. You have a special kind of water routine in the morning. Can you walk me through that?

Yeah. I mean, I think the water is a good idea. You know, you lose over a pound of water overnight just from your water vapors. You know, your body is has a much higher level of humidity than the air, particularly if you're in an arid climate or it's the winter and the heat is on. You know, you're going to be losing a lot of water overnight. So getting that water back in is good. But it's not just any water that you want to put in there. Obviously spring water is going to have the natural mineral balance that's going to be better. So that's level one, you know, spring water. Level two. Add a pinch of Himalayan sea salts. Any sea salt is good. It has a bunch of trace minerals and electrolytes. Himalayan has a little bit of extra iron. So for women out there or anybody who needs a little more iron in their diet, Himalayan is a great move to add to that. I like it myself. I think it has a great taste. It's also pretty pristine in that it's 60 million year old deposits. So before there was sea doos and ocean liners dumping oil into the water, these oceans were a little cleaner, maybe just dinosaur turds. And then adding some lemon for bioflavonoids, adding some apple cider vinegar, just start to level it up. We actually have a mineral electrolyte drink, drink mix now that has some extra calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium bicarbonate in there. I'll sometimes play around with that and you just kind of escalate that to get like a really badass morning cocktail. So not only do you get the water, but, you know, kick it up a notch and it's pretty easy to do.

When did you figure out that your body did better? When you started adding like salts or electrolytes to your water.

It was actually like there was like a real watershed moment. And I remember I was trying to go to sleep and I could actually hear my pulse in my ear and it was like I could listen to my heartbeat. I was and it felt like my adrenal system was really stressed. And I remember mentioning that to Dr. Dan Engel, who's, you know, a holistic doctor.

I know, you know, good guy. He's been on the podcast.

Yep. And I mentioned that. And he's like, have you tried, like, five grams? You know, I just texted him, hit him up like, man, like, I can't really relax. I'm feeling this. He's like, all right, try 5 grams of sea salt and let me know how you feel in. In, like, half an hour. And I did that. And the. The sea salt, 5 grams and some water. It really just, like, relaxed my system. And what I realized is a lot of our body systems rely on those minerals to function properly. And when starved to those minerals, things like your adrenal system will start to go, you know, hyperactive. And that's what was happening with my pulse. And just that insight of like, oh, I didn't get enough salt today. You know, I'd worked out really hard. Maybe sauna. I forget what I'd done that day, but I'd sweat a lot. And then I just had regular food and regular water. But I didn't pay any mind to, like, salt supplementation and that after that moment, you know, I've really tried to put salt on or in most of the things that I've had. And my performance and just general overall feeling of being able to relax has both. Both improved.

Dude, five grams. That's some pretty salty water.

That was salty. And I think that was. He was just trying to, like, prove the case because I was in real deficiency at that point. But, yeah, I mean, typically it's closer to around 3, but. Yeah. And if you get up to 10, then you might. Your pants.

Yeah, well, you know, you will your pants. And I speak from personal experience because my boys and I thought it would be a special project. After I was talking with. With Paul, check who charges his water. He builds these rock charging stations.

I've been. I've been there.

Yeah. He takes his big glass water carboys and fills them with water and glass jars and surrounds them with rocks. And I thought I would one up Paul and add, like, Himalayan. It's called Soleil salt. These big, huge chunks to the water. So I had my kids take a porter and a messle or mortar and pestle, if I can talk this morning. And you know what I meant, they would crush all this up and they'd put it in the carboy, and then we let it sit in the rocks for about a week to Charge brought it back in and I started off my day one morning with a big glass of big ass glass of very, very salty rock charged water from Paul Check. And I down the glass with a big smile on my face that I had just hydrated my body possibly for the next month and within about a half hour I was just blowing chunks all over the backside of the toilet. So more is not better when it comes to salt. But what I do like about the book is you kind of walk people through this each of these steps, right? You get out of bed and bleary eyed you go, and here's what you put in your water and then here's what you do next. And one question that I had for you because I've gone back and forth with different podcast guests about this is the morning workout deal. Do you crush them morning workout or what's your take on the morning movement routine?

You know, I've gotten in the habit, especially now that my pool is cold. I swim about 10 to 20 laps in my pool in the morning and I feel phenomenal. And that seems to be exactly the right amount. It's not enough that requires me to like need to eat a big breakfast to replenish glycogen levels, but the combination of the cold exposure that early in the morning and the breathing that I do before getting in and then that basic amount of movement, I mean I am wide awake, alert and just excited about the day after that, you know, And I'll and I'll literally just groggily go straight to the water, drink the water and then take my clothes. You got nobody else in the house other than Whitney. So clothes go off completely, Goggles are there in the water, naked lapse. And then by the time I come out of this, this whole thing takes like less than 10 minutes. And if it's sunny, then I get out and I kind of dry off and let my body temperature warm up back in the sun and kind of with my eyes closed, look at the rising sun. And when I do that, man, I just cannot express how much better my day is. And it's taken like 15 minutes.

A lot of our female listeners are going to be Google earthing your house, by the way. Now.

Please, please do go for it. I don't know if you'll be that impressed from that high up.

That sounds amazing. I tried it this morning, the cold water swim. And the problem is it's winter up here in Spokane. I can last about five minutes in my pool. Right now it's about 38 degrees and so I mean it's freeze your nuts, that's freezing cold. But when I'm traveling, when I'm for example, if I'm in California or if I'm anywhere where they have good outdoor, especially like mineral cleaned pools instead of chlorine, that's my favorite thing to do. Because you get the cold thermogenesis, you get the stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system. I'm convinced it takes you back to your womb when you were just kind of floating in this water like fluid medium in your mother's placenta. It's just this very relaxing, almost yoga esque feeling. And one of the things I do is I just take a big breath and, and I'll swim underwater back and forth, just holding my breath for as long a period of time as possible. But in terms of parasympathetic nervous system activation, cold exposure, vagus nerve activation, because you get that mammalian dive reflex when you hit the water. I think you're onto something. I mean, if there was one workout I could do each morning, it'd be underwater 100%.

You know, another thing I've been doing too in the cold water is I've been diving down to the bottom like I was spearfishing. And I know we've had the chance to do that before, but just going down to the bottom, you know, obviously regulating my ears to the atmospheric pressure and then just, and breathing out my air and just laying with my stomach on the bottom of the pool and it's so still, like it's just impossibly still down there where there's just the pressure of the, of the water surrounding you and that kind of atmospheric pressure with the absolute silence, which with the cold. And just sitting down there for a little while too is another like amazing way to get, you know, 20 seconds, 30 seconds of like absolute peace.

That's fun. I used to do that when I was a boy. I'd blow out all the air and just go sit at the bottom of my parents pool. Sit there and it's very peaceful. I've forgotten about that.

I've done that too, sitting, but like getting in like stock position, like imagining we were like hiding under coral with your actual belly on. The pool bottom I found is so much radder and I'm just like imagining training for that moment where we get good enough, you know, where we can actually dive down 15, 20ft and wait for that grouper, you know, to come.

Out that actually, that actually works. I mean when we were shallow water spearfishing, in, in Kona. One of the things, I don't know if it was, it was the guide there that told us this or somewhere else, but when you lay motionless on the bottom of the, the ocean, the fish actually swim up to you compared to if you're swimming around. They come up to you, they get curious and well, this is going to be horrible for anybody who loves cute little fishies. But then you shoot them when they, when they, when they actually come up to you all curious like that.

And then you eat them.

Yeah, yeah. And. And we actually. We ate a lot of fish. I think we ate a lot of fish. Like 10 fish when we were down there. Yeah.

You ate the heads too? No fish was wasted.

I love fish head fish gills. You get all the DHA up in the eyeballs. Please. You mentioned breathing, and I'm curious about the type of breathing that you do before you get in the pool.

Well, I do that kind of classic Wim Hof style. And that's basically breathe in. And it doesn't matter which hole. He's famous for saying that. It's one of his favorite lines. Doesn't matter which hole you get it in. And so breathe in. Nose, mouth. And then instead of focusing on the exhale, which a lot of like yogic pranayama traditions do, is you just let the air escape with as minimal resistance as possible so in. And then just let your chest fall without even the exertion of. Of a, of an intentional exhale. And so just focus on the inhale and release. Inhale and release, Inhale and release. Till you just get those like baby tingles going and you get that kind of life, that inner, inner fire fast right as. Nope.

Oh, really? You go so slow.

So that's more. That's more the pranayama style. That's more like Breath of Fire because you hear yourself intentionally forcing the exhale. So this sounds. It's going to be a little bit hard with the microphone, but it sounds like this.

Okay, interesting.

So there's like no intention on the exhale. So it's just as much as you can get in and then just let it all go. As much as you can get in and then let it all go. And working with Wim at the house, that was kind of the style that he showed me. And there's many ways to do it, but that to me builds that inner fire the fastest. And then obviously being mindful of shallow water blackout, and I'm pretty comfortable in that space, but I just want to always throw that caveat out there when you're using cold water and breath. But that to me gets me there the fastest. And I just get that little warmth, that little tingle and then straight into the water. And the other key thing with the water is like, know that it's going to be hard, know that it's supposed to be tough, know that it's supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to be timid and, and maybe not want to do it. And part of what makes it so badass is intentionally pushing through that like asserting your dominion over your petty fears and over your petty concerns. And that's a huge win. When you start the day, like, if you can say I am stronger than my discomfort and my fear, then anytime anything else comes up throughout the day, you can carry that same attitude with you. And that's something I really enjoyed highlighting in the book. How important those mental, mental victories are in all of these processes.

Now compare that Wim Hof to the Lamaze breathing that you talk about in the book. Not a lot of people talk about Lamaze breathing.

Yeah. And that's, it's interesting because, you know, that's something that has this really strong external pressure source and that's going to be a lot of pain and a lot of difficulty in childbirth. So when you have a strong external resistance point, an acute stress, you come up with ways to adapt to it. And one of the classic ways that we've come up to adapt to that is through breath. And it's interesting that we've just siloed that to birth. You know, like, women only breathe that way when they're going through birth, but we don't tell them to breathe that way when they're, you know, going through any other hardship, an emotional hardship or a breakup or, or other kind of physical hardship. It's like, oh no, this is just for birth. But, but why? And I think that was a really interesting point to highlight because basically Lamaze breathing is a variation of this kind of Wim Hof style or pranayama. You know, it's very deep, prolonged breath. It's actually a little slower version in as far as the tempo. But you're doing the same thing. You're intentionally breathing and you're intentionally hyper oxygenating, which is going to just change your mental and physical composition, change your blood pressure, change your mental state. You know, there was a Japanese study that showed just six deep breaths alone drops your blood pressure. Yeah. Raises alkalinity. I mean, it does amazing things. And we don't need to use it only when we're going through something as impossibly challenging is pushing a football with shoulders out of our vagina.

I have. I actually have a story about that. But. But our mutual friend Porengui Guy, pouring guy, he's gonna. He's gonna kill me if he hears this. And I always mispronounce his name. Sorry, porn guy. He. When I laid down on his table to do a sound healing session there in Sedona, he actually had me doing kind of like a Lamaze style. Breathing deep from the diaphragm, in through the nose, out through the mouth. But you had me doing it for, like, the whole 90 minutes, the whole fricking, you know, massage, sound session, and almost got me into this. This hypnotic state. On the complete flip side, though, my wife and I did, like, a natural home birth for our twins, or attempted. I should say a natural home birth for our twins. And we both took a Lamaze breathwork class going into that. And the style of home birth that we did for this Lamaze technique, it involves the man being there the entire time and actually embracing and holding his woman during the birth. There is support, but for me, it basically involved. My wife has very pointy elbows and very pointy knees, and it was basically just my entire body getting crushed and poked. And, I mean, by the time the childbirth was over, I was covered in bruises. And of course, she's pissed at me the whole time because women are just pissed at everybody in the room when they're having a baby. And, you know, we had, like, a little pool in our bedroom, so we'd go back and forth from the water birth to the bed. But the. The. The primary thing that I remember was her attempting the Lamaze breathing, me attempting the Lamaze breathing. But all I could really think about was, oh, her elbows hurt so bad right now. Here it comes again. She's contracting. I mean, I'm. I'm guessing it hurt me a lot more than it hurt her. It had to.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it did. I'm sure.

I swear. Yeah. Okay. So the other thing, in terms of cold is. I know. Down there on it. And for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of going to Austin, Texas, and working out of Aubrey's facility down there, he's got this gym, DeFranco's gym down there. But they have cryotherapy and a sauna and a great little smoothie bar. They also have the cryotherapy, like I mentioned, But I'm curious if you've developed any little hacks for cryotherapy. Aubrey, as far as things you've studied up on to enhance the experience, enhance fat burning or enhance the amount of time you can spend in there or basically increase the benefits one would get out of a cryotherapy chamber because a lot of people are visiting those things these days.

Yeah, I think the number one key for me from an experiential standpoint is I have to get my head cold. And if my head doesn't get cold, then I only get part of the kind of mood benefits and the energy benefits that I get otherwise. So that's one of the reasons I like full submersion. So in a cryo, sometimes you get those walk in cryos that are full body and those are freaking awesome. But even here at onit, we have one of the cryos where you have to stay above. Now the, the way that it works because it's cooled with liquid nitrogen, so it's. You're not really supposed to breathe any of that in because you can actually pass out. Right.

So that's the type of cryotherapy chamber somebody died in.

Exactly. So you keep your head above all that and then you know, it doesn't really rise that much and you, whatever little amount you breathe in is fine. But what I would do is, you know, hold my breath and you know, this is something that's more experienced move. But I'll hold my breath. I'll keep my arms above the. Because there's always an attendant in there. I'll keep my arms above the, above the unit and I'll just kind of tap my fingers lightly and then I will like basically old school snorkel dance my way, snake my way down into the tank and then just tap my fingers on the rim, let everybody know I'm fine. Making careful not to breathe at all until I get back to the surface. And that allows that cold to like seep in through my eye sockets and then feels like into my brain. And it feels like it cools the brain fog and brain inflammation. Neuroinflammation.

Oh, absolutely. That's, that's my complaint about these cryotherapy chambers is you don't activate the mammalian dive reflex and get the vagus nervous toning effect because your head doesn't get cold. So you're basically fixing that by A, holding your breath so that you don't breathe in the nitrogen, B, getting your head under and then C, making sure people know you're not freezing and dying. A horrible nitrogen fused breath by tapping on the surface.

Exactly and that is like a hundred percent the best move if you got one of those tanks, because then you get the full. And you get the full, the full experience. And you know, you might have to do that a couple times during the three minutes, depending on how good your breath hold is. But that makes all, all the freaking difference in the world for me.

I love it. It's brilliant. Do you take any special supplements beforehand to enhance fat burning or anything like that?

Yeah, I'm so lean already, man, at like, kind of like you, you know. So for me, that's not something that I really focus on. But obviously when it comes to the fat burning, for me, I mean, I think the ketogenic supplements and following that kind of largely ketogenic diet, you know, if you look at my shake, there's almost no carbohydrates in there. It's, you know, herbs, protein, avocado, coconut cream, MCT oil, fiber, all of these things. And that's what I typically keep going all throughout the day. And then at night it really helps my sleep. Like last night I was pretty much all protein, fat and fiber all the way until like 11. And I was like, I got way too much energy, like there's no way I'm gonna sleep. So I just cooked up some brown rice pasta before bed and just crushed this.

Get that serotonin going. You're making me feel guilty about the french fries in my, in my Wendy's frosty.

Aubrey.

I'm just kidding. I don't put French. For those of you listening in, do not go put french fries because you heard it on the Ben Greenfield fitness show. That was a joke. But, but seriously, one thing I don't know if I told you about this Bitter melon extract enhances conversion of white adipose tissue to brown fat. So now what I tell people to do if they're going to do like a cryotherapy session or a cold water swim or something like that, is get your hands on a lot of these. Calorie restriction mimetics will do it. Berberine is another one. Bitter melon extract is 1. Exogenous ketones to a certain extent can do it as well, but they'll enhance the white fat to brown fat conversion that you want from the cold. So that's something you can actually take before a cold session to enhance the effects as of.

I think it also mitigates blood sugar elevation, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So if your liver is stressed and you're getting glycogen release from the liver and it's amping up blood glucose because the cold is stressing you out, it can help mitigate some of those effects as well. As we learned in. I think this was also in Hawaii. Anything that sensitizes you to cold, including any type of psilocybin mushroom or anything like. And by the way, you need to ask your homie Kyle Kingsbury about this too, because he may or may not have tried to swim across the entire Spokane river after dosing. And ask him about that experience. I'll let him share it with you. I forget if he talked about it when I interviewed him on my podcast or not, but mushrooms sensitize you to the cold, so that would probably be a. No. No.

Yeah, yeah. They're an interesting beast. They're an interesting beast that should be used with discretion.

Exactly.

When used correctly can be pretty bad.

Exactly. I know you have very good history with those and those certainly influence, as a matter of fact, those influence the formation of your company, right?

Yeah. Well, a lot of the plants did, you know, from ayahuasca to psilocybin to, you know, a lot of the traditional plant medicine ceremonies that I've been in.

But, but your first product was, was, was based on mushrooms?

Oh, yeah. Well, not the very first one. First one was off brain. But yeah, Shroom Tech Sport, you know, was focused on the Cordyceps mushroom, which is that, you know, pretty rare high altitude mushroom from Tibet that helps with oxygen utilization. And you know, we've since clinically proven it effective with, in studies at Florida State University for high intensity interval training and the things that you would expect from better oxygen utilization and ATP production. So. Yeah, but that, that was based around the, the Cordyceps sinensis mushroom.

Nice. I'm, I'm actually a fan of that. I tend to consume it with my, the. What's it called? The four Sigmatic Cordyceps Chaga coffee blend. That's one that I'll do in the morning. I do have one other morning routine question for you before we move on. And this is like my million dollar morning routine question I gotta put out there. Are you an enema guy? Are you, Are you on the coffee enema bandwagon?

No, I'm not, but I'd like to be. I'd like to be. It's not because I'm afraid of things going around my butt because I was fully colonic. We have these great things called angel of Waters here, I think it's called. And it's like this self, self colonization machine where you like actually like sit on this hose.

Nozzle I like how they give it a clean name like that. Angels. I mean, they could call it, but, you know, Brown Demonic Streaks of Death would be a more appropriate title. But they decide to call it Angels.

Yeah, Hydro Demon Sodomy. Exactly like that. Yeah, that would get less. That would get less adaption, but yeah, so you kind of wiggle yourself onto this thing. And so it's a constant flow of water. So it's not like flow in and then suck out, like when you have a colonics practitioner. So you sit on that thing and it just constantly expels. So no water goes back into the system because it's constantly pushing and it's thin enough so that, you know, you. The water comes in, you let in as much as you want, and then you just. Whenever you feel the need. And then that goes around the little prong, like the little water. Water spigot, and, you know, goes into the toilet. And so it's just like basically like breathing water with your butt for like 45 minutes. And you go through like 30 gallons of water. And, you know, it's not only the. The feces that comes out, but you'll start to see like orange, you know, bile and liver. You know, they. They're saying this is. Oh, this is your kidneys releasing. This is your liver releasing. And you'll see these, like, different colors, materials that's coming out.

And you just feel, oh, it definitely jump starts. Bioproduction.

Yeah, yeah, it feels like, you know, feels like a religious experience. When you're finished.

This is fresh on my mind because I actually just finished interviewing the author of this other book called the Rain Barrel Effect. And he went all over the world studying all these ayurvedic medicine practices and came back with this 1, 2, 3 combo of. Of lymphatic massage, meaning like dry skin brushing or rebounding or anything that addresses a lymphatic system. And then sauna, where you'll do like 20 to 30 minutes in the sauna, but then you finish with a coffee enema. So yesterday, before I interviewed him, I wanted to make sure that I was intimately familiar with the methods in his book. And it's been a long time since I actually, I kind of got off the coffee enema bandwagon just because it's not. I mean, let's face it, you know, filling up an entire book bucket full of coffee and dragging it up to the bathroom and trying not to spill it so you don't, you know, piss off your wife and then putting it on the counter and putting the tube up your ass. Then laying there and figuring out what to do for the next 20 minutes and then getting it all out and then putting the stainless steel bucket in the dishwasher and figuring out where to clean the tube because you can't put that in the dishwasher because you don't want like a poopy tube all over everybody's plates. It's a process. But you do feel pretty, pretty. What's the word? Angelic when you finish.

Analic healing.

Yeah. Yeah. And my, my digestion has been amazing since. I mean just in the past 24 hours. It feels like my gallbladder is just like churning out bile like nobody's business. So I sold me.

But you. But you're, you're not an old brew up the poop someone. That's the way we're going to roll.

Someone needs to sell a self cleaning enema kit though.

I mean, come on, just disposable.

That needs to exist by now. Or disposable. But mine is stainless steel. So I'm not shoving, shoving plastics up my butt.

Okay, so even putting plastics up your butt. No, you want to keep those phytoestrogens out of the rectum.

I do want to ask you though, to remind later on, I want to ask you about toxic sex products because you get into that in the book. I want to ask you about that, but not yet because we're going to kind of get. I'm going to do this chronologically because we got through some of the morning routine and obviously there's a lot more in your book, but I wanted to cover some of the basics. And then a lot of people after their morning routine is done, they're going to commute to work. Are they going to find themselves driving? They're going to find themselves sitting in a car. You get into in the book about how you make your car a traveling university and you sure you're very productive while you're driving or commuting, but you also have this three step protocol in the book for when you're commuting to make your body or your brain better. Can you get into that?

Yeah, I mean I think the basic principle is the car is the time. You don't want it to be wasted time and you don't want to be, you don't want it to be something that's deleterious to your life. Like you want it to be part of a productive own day. And so there's really two options that you have and you either fill your mind with useful or you empty your mind of the unuseful. You know, mindfulness, or mindfulness is what we call what we talk about. So obviously, filling your. You can listen to audiobooks, you can listen to podcasts, you can learn. You know, we have these super computers, we have entire libraries available to us on our phones. And it's just a simple choice of figuring out what you want to learn, what you want to explore. Obviously, people are listening to this podcast now. They're aware of that. So on the other side, how you empty your mind and keep the drive from being something that you know, by the time you arrive, where you're going, you're just more stressed and wrapped in beta state and you're trying to check your phone and every little stop, you know, every little pause in traffic and you're flipping Instagram and you're just kind of working yourself up into this frenzy. Try to go the other way. And again, I mentioned before, six deep breaths is enough to create a state change. So it's not take a deep breath, it's take six deep breaths. So I always start with that whenever I'm doing any kind of mindfulness practice is get six deep breaths. Start. The first step.

That was a tip from Dan Engel.

That was actually. That was straight from the research looking at what the minimum effective amount of breathing was to create a state change. And this Japanese study, they went through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then 6 was like the tipping point where they could really reliably measure statistically significant blood pressure readings. Dropped after 6.

I didn't know there was actual research on that. So six is the magic number.

Six is the magic number. Yep.

Interesting. So you get in the car, you put on something to listen to. You call it mindfulness. Very clever. And then you do your six deep breaths. And actually I went through your book and I got the six deep breaths. I didn't realize it was research based, but that makes me feel even better about myself. I have been doing that when I arrive at the door, before I walk in, when I get home, right before. Before. Because you know or I know when I open my door. I guess you don't have kids yet. Here's how it goes. It's nice and quiet in the garage. You've pulled into the garage, you know, you can hear the car kind of cooling down and creaking and doing his car cooling down thing. And you're standing there at the door, preparing to turn the door handle. And you know that as soon as you open that door, it's gonna be Loud Disney music blasting the hell at your ears. Two kids standing there with Nerf guns wanting to walk you through the 8 billion Legos that they just finished building and have a Lego battle while they shoot Nerf guns at you. And your wife is cooking dinner. And at the same time, because she's cooking dinner and doesn't have time to. Needs you to go to take care of the goats and the chickens and the one rooster who is sick who needs this special feeding protocol. And you. You have to be prepared for that onslaught, for that battle before. And don't get me wrong, I love my family, but you ha. You have to be prepared for that. I mean, it's like, go. It's like getting ready for a workout when you walk in that door. So I've actually been using this, you know, when I finish my commute, you know, when I actually get home from, you know, wherever I might have been, you know, playing tennis or going to see the chiropractor or whatever.

Like, lines of demarcation, like, make. Make little points where you can just draw just a little dashed line throughout your day and say, okay, you know, time for another chapter. And all you need to do to do that is six. Six breaths. And then. So what you're doing is you're taking away everything that's come before your work, wherever you were before, whatever mode you were in, hit that six deep breaths. Allow yourself to intentionally move into the next chapter. And when you're ready for the next chapter, you can repeat over and over. It doesn't. It's not hard, but that. That combination of the physiological change with the intentional change, like, all right, here we go. It's just going to make a huge difference, and it's a very small ask. And that's one of these things that I think is we got to take advantage of when there's a really small ask and a really big reward, you know, like some really hard workouts. All right, maybe that's a big ask for somebody, you know, and you got to work up to that, and it'll have a real positive change. Or like, nad infusions, you know, it's gonna be horribly uncomfortable. No, I haven't. But I've watched a lot of people go through that.

It is pretty uncomfortable.

That's a pretty big ask, right? Like, all right, you gotta get hooked up. You gotta pay a bunch of money. You gotta get this infusion. It's gonna feel like someone's slowly twisting your nutsack. Apparently, like, that's an ass. It's very asking for six breaths. When you're going to change the intention of your next chapter of the day, that's not much because it's just gonna feel good, and it's gonna make everything that comes after it feel good and also allow you to sort everything that came before it. So it's just like this little minimum amount of organizational mental hygiene that will really make a huge impact.

Now, you also talk about the wide peripheral gaze. Yeah, tell me about that.

So when you're. Whenever you're meditating, there's really two strategies. One is to restrict the amount of information. So think sensory deprivation tank. In a sensory deprivation tank, instead of all of this external input, there's virtually none. You have no sight, no sounds, no feelings, no smells. You know, you're floating in water the same temperature as your skin on a bunch of Epsom salt. Salt water. And you can't see anything. You can't hear anything, can't smell anything, can't taste anything. And you're. That part of your mind that's constantly looking for information slows down and drops, and you can drop into a really powerful meditative state. The other way to do it is actually to overload your mind with so much data that you stop thinking about things as well. And one of the ways to do that is to overload your mind with visual data instead of focusing on one thing, which allows you to basically prioritize that visual information, and then your brain can process that many bits of information. The wide peripheral gaze says no. Expand your field of vision as wide as you can and spread your focus throughout the whole spectrum as peacefully as possible, seeing everything, but seeing nothing. And as you do that, your brain feels like your brain literally has no, like, no ability to add any other thought. On top of that, when you're really focusing on just pushing as wide out to the sides and as tall. Tall to the top and is stretched down to the bottom and seeing everything, tracking every little tiny movement. A leaf that's rustling, you know, some. Anything that's happening, the way the air conditioner is moving, you know, some little thing over in the corner. If you're outside, there's gonna be way more information, too.

Do you actually look at the person next to you when you're at the stoplight with your eyes, like, super wide, googly open and just freak them out?

I know because I would run it.

I could just see these huge dilated pupils, like a. Like an evil, wicked clown smile. And your eyes are just huge. With your wide eyes, as soon as.

You look at anything as soon as you look at anything, it's over. It's the game's over. As soon as you look at a thing, then your mind's like, okay, thing, and it identifies thing. It deprioritizes the rest of the information and then thoughts come back in and then the thoughts are what keep us kind of stressed. But if you, if you deprioritize everything, so in which case you prioritize everything, then at that point you just can't really think anymore. And it's this technique that was taught to me in a book by Tom Brown, who was a Native American tracker. And they use that technique to get super mindful in the forest and also see like any animal movement patterns, anything that looks kind of out of line in the underbrush or anything, and they'll just kind of let it all soak in the subtlest little movement.

That's how I originally heard of this. It was called the owl gaze. When I went to a wilderness survival camp with my kids and we learned this peripheral gaze. It was a Native American meditative sit spot technique where you sit and you taste the air and you smell the air and you feel your surroundings. But then you also engage in this wide owl gaze, very similar to what you teach in the book. I'd never thought of doing that when I drive and I actually haven't tried this yet after reading about it in your book. But I'm gonna have to give it a go, so. So it's a three step protocol. A, you put something on that makes you smart, not the morning news or top 40. B, you have this wide peripheral gaze and then the last one is the six deep breaths.

Yeah, I typically do the breaths before the gaze and then the gaze. You know, you have to be, you have to have some practice of like if you're in a tricky driving space, you know, be mindful of it. But obviously, even in defensive driving, they remind you to look in your periphery. So, you know, I feel very comfortable and safe doing that in most situations, unless I'm making a turn and I need to focus on my rear view or blind spots. You know, you got to be mindful of the driving. But definitely anytime you're stopped, or definitely anytime you're kind of locked into a very comfortable place because it's almost like a martial arts position where you're not looking at your opponent's punches because then it gets really hard to dodge them, but you're just looking at everything they're doing and seeing everything. So I feel pretty comfortable in most situations. But of course, recommend people play with it stopped first or in really safe places first.

And knock on wood arbor. You might wind up on the front front page of the Austin paper as being, you know, that guy or the LA paper, perhaps that guy who's pulling out of the Erwan parking lot with a mouthful of coconut probiotic million dollar yogurt, who hits some old lady because he's got his eyes peeled open trying to see what's going on in his right and left side. You never know.

You never know.

Your book gotta create a lot of drivers. You talk about some things in the book that you don't find in a typical health book. Namely, there's a chapter where you expound upon tobacco and nicotine. Those are considered to be vices, typically. Why do you include those in the book?

I think nicotine is one of the most important plant allies that we have. And the problem with nicotine is how we get it in the body. Because there is no freaking doubt that tobacco, when smoked in a cigarette, is gonna kill you. Like, there's just no doubt about it. It's deadly. Cigarettes are deadly not only from the tobacco in them, but from everything else in them, but also the process of repeatedly utilizing and stressing those lungs with the lungs are capable of inhaling, ingesting smoke for as an acute stressor, but not as a chronic stressor. You know, that's not what they're there for. They need ample time to recover from any kind of process like that. And the problem with smoking is that it's chronic and it will 100% kill you. But the fact of the matter is that nicotine can be incredibly valuable. Ally, I think there is, you know, one meta analysis that I looked at had like 41 studies and it showed that nicotine safely improved like fine motor skills, attention, accuracy, response time, short term working memory. And I mean, so many benefits from nicotine. And then you look at, you know, all right, granted, cigarettes kill you don't do that. Then you look at like the London College of Physicians, Royal College of Physicians, and they say that if you do non combustible forms of nicotine, like the Swedish snooze packs, which I freaking love and is probably my favorite drug on the planet right now.

What is it called?

The snus packs. It's like a smokeless tobacco. These little pouches you put, you put in your gum.

How are you spelling that?

Sn us.

Okay.

Yeah, it's one of the cleanest ones. It has the, like, the fewest additives. I like this one called Volt, which is really strong. Don't start there. There's this other one that's mixed with lingonberries. It's a lot better if you want to start with there. But you know, they did an analysis. Yeah, it's incredible.

And so, so what exactly is it? Is it just tobacco?

Yeah, tobacco and some salt usually. Because the salt increases the absorption into the gums.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah. So I'll put one of those pouches in and you know, within minutes just feeling that kind of combination of. It almost feels like when I'm underwater, you know, like the atmospheric pressure increases, but my alertness and enjoyment of the current moment increases. And from a safety standpoint, like I said, that London Royal College of Physicians say that that's ten to a thousand times less hazardous than smoking, depending on the product. And the Swedish snus is by far, you know, by far one of the cleanest ways to do it. Probably second only to like a nicotine patch or something like that, which is really not very fun and not enjoyable. Part of the process.

Yeah, see, I've been vaping just a little bit this organic tobacco. I think it is a Swedish organic tobacco and I get a great little cognitive high from that. But the other thing I've been using, although your pouches kind of seem to blow this out of the water and be this on steroids, I've been just chewing on these 1mg nicotine toothpicks. And it's actually like when I'm on an airplane. I've been doing a lot of flying lately. I just posted this to my Instagram account. I've been having a cup of coffee on the airplane with one of these cinnamon flavored nicotine toothpicks. And I can write for hours.

Hours.

You get this very, very cool, stable cognitive high. With of course, the risk being that it can be mildly addictive, the nicotine. So you need to be careful.

That's the, that's the only thing to be, you know, really mindful of. And it's not that there's no health risks with doing smokeless. You know, there are some, I think in vaping they found some, you know, some issues with cellular repair ex vivo. There's not a lot of studies on what vape does, but it seemed to slow wound healing when they studied it on different cells. But it's not causing near the damage that the smoke will. And when it comes to smokeless, there's still some stress that's happening to the gums and the tissue there. But just be mindful that as long as you're giving your body plenty of time to recover, the body's pretty good at healing itself. It's just that chronic bludgeoning and repeated use, that's an issue. And then when it comes to addiction, just make sure you give yourself full breaks. You know, like, don't tell yourself, oh, I could quit any time. I just haven't, like, test that, you know, like, don't trust yourself. Yeah, because you know, the body will hijack the mind and you'll rationalize anything if you are actually addicted. So, you know, prove it to yourself. Just like, okay, if I can quit this, I can and will and should. And so I'll take a week off or take two weeks off and make sure that, that you actually can. And that way you can be mindful that you're driving the decisions. You know, the plant isn't driving you, Right?

Yeah. A lot of these things have gotten such a bad rap, right? Like coca leaves versus cocaine or organic tobacco or, you know, mild amounts of nicotine versus, you know, a Marlsboro cigarette. So, yeah, it's, it's one of those things where you can't lump it all into the same category. And I like how you walk people through a lot of this. In the book, you also talk about the ceremony of mapacho and rape hopping.

You were going to call it rape. I, I just knew that you actually.

Say in the book it's pronounced hape, but just wanted to put you on the spot.

It feels like rape at 100%.

What is Mapacho and hoppe?

Well, mapacho is like a hand rolled nicotine nicotiana rustica, which is a different type of tobacco plant. It's like a hand rolled cigarette or cigar with just that plant. So you smoke it like a cigar so you don't take it into your lungs, which is much better for you because the lungs are a lot more sensitive than your mouth tissue and you're not smoking it all the time. But they use that as a way to communicate with the spirits. So they call it a chakaruna or a bridge. And that bridge allows them to talk to the plants in their, in their own framework. You know, you're probably thinking like, okay, Aubrey's lost his mind. I'm just explaining how they describe it. And it allows them to talk to the plants, talk to the spirit guides, talk to, you know, any other kind of entities they work with and actually just communicate with the best part of themselves. So they, you know, they use it as a bridge plant. A lot of Times. And so it's in a lot of the ceremonial use and also used to move energy, either call it in or move it out. So they'll be smoking mapacho during ayahuasca ceremonies, preparing for ayahuasca ceremonies, using it to cleanse the ayahuasca before ingestion. A variety of different uses with this particular South American variation on the nicotine.

Interesting. And it makes you more sensitive to other chemicals. You explain in the book. So if you use something like this, or even if you use nicotine, you'd want to be aware that it might enhance your sensitivity to, say, caffeine, which is probably why my toothpick. My nicotine toothpick coffee trick seems to work pretty well. Because the nicotine is enhancing my sensitivity to the caffeine.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So always be mindful when you're mixing any different sets of compounds, because sometimes they're synergistic, and sometimes they're gonna be too accelerating, and sometimes they're gonna, you know, be. It's gonna be like throwing on the brakes.

Right.

So. Sure.

Okay.

And then hoppe. So okay. So hoppe. So basically, you can do it to yourself. Most of the time, somebody else does it. They load this, like, little tube up with this little. Kind of looks kind of like a. It has, like, a little hook on the end, you know, so it goes down through this tube and then up, and they put one end of that in your nose. And then the tobacco rests at the bottom of the tube in the little elbow, and the elbow part before it goes up into your nose. And they pack that with tobacco and sometimes ash or charcoal and other, like, medicinal herbs. And then they just blast that into your nostril.

Wow.

And it is one of the most painful experiences you will have. And then they very quickly reload because it burns. It burns. It burns, like, so deep. It's like you just ate a fistful of wasabi. Like, you took a giant bite out of the biggest. Like, you thought wasabi was guacamole, and you just packed a whole chip full of it and you just ate it. I mean, it's that kind of intensity of burn. And they know that you won't have much time. Like, you won't want to do it again if you wait. So they pretty quickly get you to come, and they blast the other nostril. And then what happens is you just get flooded with. You get flooded with this nicotinic reaction. And it's one of the coolest feelings for me for, like, a minute as your Body is just like heavy and like vibrating and pulsing with energy from the, from the tobacco. But then, man, the nausea kicks in because that, you know, on the upper end dose, whether you're snoozing or cigars or particularly with Hoppe, you know, on the back end of that, if you have a little bit of a higher dose, you're gonna be wicked nauseous.

Have you ever had the nasal cranial release, the chiropractic one where they take the inflatable balloon and shove it up your nose and then blow the balloon?

Yes, yes, I have.

Yeah. Which is less comfortable because I've had that done. I haven't had this hop a done.

Well, this, the one, the nasal cranial release that happens and it's uncomfortable, but then it's over. This one is uncomfortable, then incredibly pleasurable, then you're incredibly nauseous. So I don't know, I mean, it's kind of hard. Like one is uncomfortable and then there's a release that feels good and then this. But with the hoppe, it's terribly painful burning followed by ecstatic full body energetic orgasm followed by two hours of nausea. So, I don't know, choose your poison.

You, like travel to South America to do.

Yeah, yeah. This is something you want, you know, it's. It's part of like a cleansing ritual where they kind of blast you with this and.

Okay, so this isn't like the back alley behind an Austin barbecue.

No, no, no, Definitely not. As a ceremony, it resets the nervous system kind of patterns. Because when you get that much energy in your system and if we think of ourselves as energetic, energetically expressed beings, I mean, all of our cells are in atomic motion. All of our brain waves have certain cyclical patterns. I mean, we are rhythmic beings. You know, this isn't any woo woo. This is. We literally are in different sets of rhythms and I think some of these rhythms can get discordant. And I think this really helps just like reset, like a hard reset by putting you to a different vibration and then allowing you to settle back. So that's really kind of what it feels like to me.

Okay, got it. So there's a lot of other things that you go about throughout the day, but I want to cover some of this stuff in the time that we have left. One is you, like me, I believe, are a big fan of squeezing in a nap when you can. I have this elaborate napping protocol where I take my Reishi mushroom extract before lunch and I have my Biomat turned on before I sit down to Lunch. So it's nice and toasty warm by the time I go up there, and my NormaTec boots are right there on the bed, and I slip into those, and I lay down on my Biomat and I put on my bi Noral Beats and my essential oil diffuser, and I just do infrared and compressive therapy on my legs for about 40 minutes. And that's my nap, and that's glorious. But I also know that you're a fan of a nap, so walk me through any.

Yeah, man. What am I gonna say to that?

Perfect, man. I need something to add. I need to make it more complex, obviously. So I want to hear any napping tips that you have.

You know, honestly, that's. That is. That sounds to me like an ideal protocol. And really, for me, generally, all I get is the binaural beets and maybe some scent therapy. You know, I'll use. I use a lot of palo santo. I actually gave you a stick of that, which is like a smoked scent.

I remember that. I love that stuff. So you actually. You use that, like, for sleep?

I use that before I go to sleep, yeah. Just kind of like that. That to me, because I've anchored that scent. I've anchored that scent to all of my meditative states, all the times when I'm really relaxed, and now I'm anchoring it to when I'm going to sleep or when I'm going to take a nap. It's like a scent trigger. So the minute I smell that, it's like, oh, it's not time to work. It's not time to stress anymore. This is time to let go. And so that building that scent trigger has been probably the only thing that I could add to that. So, you know, you talked about your essential oil diffuser, but I would encourage people to have a particular scent or two that signifies, let it all go, man. Like, I don't work on my computer when the palo santos, you know, when the palo santo smell is there, that works in reverse.

Like, I do mint, and I do rosemary in my office. And rosemary, they've done studies on this how when you study while being exposed to the scent of rosemary, and then you actually take a test or perform some cognitive task associated with what you were studying while also smelling the rosemary, your performance improves. So you can do relaxation association with scent and also a performance association with scent.

Yeah. And lemon increases people's ability to, like, typing accuracy when they study people who are stenographers.

Interesting.

They tested typing accuracy with the scent of lemon and actually found Interestingly enough, while lemon made them type better, more accurately, fish. The smell of nasty fish made them type worse. So Lemon, the thing that masks the fishy smell. It was just kind of interesting to read that in the research.

That sounds like a pretty dumb study. Of course the fish here smell this rotten fish. Then type. Now don't smell the rotten fish. And type, tell me which one feels better. Yeah, and you've got a lot of research in the books about how naps outperform high doses of caffeine for cognitive tasks. I mean, you take a deep dive.

Into naps and overnight sleep. Like, that's the thing that people don't get. Like, if you're comparing more overnight sleep with a nap, it was like, oh, yeah, of course, overnight sleep. It's the most important thing, because that's what everybody's trying to tell you. Wrong. Naps will. You will outperform in cognitive tests when you take a nap versus get more overnight sleep.

Interesting. Okay, so in addition to the naps, you've got a lot of other sleep tips in here. But rather than taking a deep dive into sleep tips because, you know, we've kind of kicked the sleep horse to death a lot before on the show, I want to cover a few other things that I haven't seen covered before in other books. Like, you've got tips for keeping the appetite satiated that a lot of people don't talk about. Like, you know, chopsticks, for example. Can you go into. Into some of, like, the calorie control or the appetite satiation tips you cover in the book?

Well, one of the things that we don't pay attention to is how fast that, you know, how fast we eat. And there's a lot of research on the speed that people eat and how obese they are, like fast eaters. Like, one study shows that fast eaters are up to 115% more likely to be obese. And then there's like another study of like 4,000 people showed that people eat very fast, gain the most body weight since age 20, you know, and if and when you chew more and slow down, you end up eating less. But we all, all the time. So part of that is mindfulness, but part of it is just the incredible efficiency by which our tools give us to eat. You know, and I think chopsticks, the beauty of chopsticks is they're an inefficient tool. So it's like a physical override to prevent us from eating super fast. Now, if you look at, you know, some. Some ways they do it in Japan, and, well, they'll actually, like, lift the bowl and then use the chopsticks.

They can get pretty damn efficient with those chopsticks.

So. So, like, I get it, but for. For us, if you don't do it that way and you actually, you know, use a cocktail fork instead of a big fork, use. Always use the teaspoon instead of the big spoon. If you're having, you know, soup or anything with that, or mashed potato, whatever, like, use the smallest tools you can, and it'll actually force you to be a lot more mindful, to chew more, to eat slower, and that's one of the best and easiest things to do. Now, I also like to layer that with some mindfulness before. And I have this process of saying grace, you know, which I actually got from Aldous Huxley's book Island, where before you take a bite, you create the very best perfect bite. It's like that show they have on the Food Network. I forget which one it is, but it's just like the very best perfect bite of everything on your fork. And then you think about where all that food was sourced from, you know, where it came from, the soil that it was grown in, the life that the animal lived, everything that had to conspire. You know, the people who cooked the food, how they plated the food, the place that the place would, you know, where the plate came from, where the silverware came from, where you were to be in this position. Like, just take a moment to take all that in with gratitude before you take your bite and then taste, you know, let it roll around in your mouth and taste every bit of it for as long as you can. And just appreciation for the ability to express physical love through the ingestion of food and, you know, sex with life itself, that experience through all of the. All of the pleasurable senses, including eating. So that combination of that really mindful state with potentially using some less efficient tools, and you don't have to change what you're eating, it's just changing how you're eating. And you're going to see a massive benefit.

It actually, it enhances the. It's called the first phase of insulin response. You're supposed to have a normal insulin response when you consume food and when you eat it fast or you eat without mindfulness or you eveni mean, they've even done interesting studies on, like, bitters and digestives and, you know, everything from fennel seeds to lemon. I know you guys have youryour digestive supplement that has things like Ginger in it. All of these enhance a normal insulinogenic response that causes your blood glucose to a meal, what's called your glycemic variability to decrease after you've eaten. And I mean there's an actual increase in these incretin hormones and, and insulin when you do this. I got like a good increase. Plus it's, it's kind of hard to eat. You know, pizza and, and peanut butter. Captain Crunch with chopsticks. So there's that too.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Every year you should write a follow up book called the Chopstick Diet.

Totally. I actually really wanted to make, I wanted to make really heavy handled, really heavy handled silverware with really tiny, like tiny heads on it. I actually almost went through with production on this and I was just like, I just got too much to do. But so it's like you're holding something really big and heavy in your hand but you have this really tiny end on it. So you're like working your wrist mobility and you're like, you're kind of training yourself.

There's such a small niche population that would ever consider even buying that. I know, it's like, yeah, there's products out there that I just think are going to have a lot of difficulty. Like the chili pad. It's a great product. I own one. I've got one on the left side of the bed, one on, on the right side of the bed. My wife can sleep at her temperature. I can sleep at my temperature. I don't think millions and millions of Americans are going to be rushing out to get that though. It's just, it's a small niche product and your heavy, heavy chopsticks might be right up that alley. And by the way folks who invented the chilipad, listening in, I love your product. I'm just saying. So, okay, a few other things that you get into and I alluded to this earlier so I got to bring it up. What intrigued me in the book is how toxic sex can be in our day and age. Go into that a bit because I know you even have a history of having worked in the sex toy industry and I believe you sold some form of. What was it?

The Fleshlight.

Yeah, Fleshlight. What was the Fleshlight?

Yeah, the Fleshlight actually didn't have any of those toxic elements in it. It's mostly mineral oil, like 90% mineral oil. So like food grade mineral oil. So that was on the better side. But a lot of those sex toys, they're coming out of the cheapest, lowest grade plastics, rubbers, silicones. You can actually smell it coming off there. And that's going to have all of the issues with the plastics that, you know, we're ingesting orally. I think a lot of people, they misconstrue the fact that the skin absorbs at an incredibly high rate. You know, like, whatever you put on your skin gets in your body. It's not. You don't just have to take it in through your mouth or take it in, you know, in some other way into your digestive tract to absorb it.

Oh, I think a lot of people know that, but even I don't. I honestly don't think a lot. Like, once I get down to my genitals, it's like something turns off in my brain. It's like, oh, this is built for sex. Okay, I'm gonna smear this all over her vagina and my dick and shove this up and get it. All the places where things get absorbed, where they actually give you supplements and suppositories and everything else that allows you to absorb all these things into your bloodstream. But, heck, it's sex, so it must be healthy.

So the worst of all these things actually isn't a part of the sex act. And you should be mindful of all the lubes and all the toys. But honestly, the very worst thing is tampons. Like, there is nothing worse than tampons. Tampons have not only styrene, which is a neurotoxin, but also chloroform, which is that thing that they put on those rags and knock people out with in the movies, which actually doesn't work that way. And all kinds of toxic chemicals that aren't regulated because it's not something that, you know, the FDA considers an ingestible, even though it's in one of the most highly absorbent areas of a woman's body. And over the course of the year, I mean, over the course of a lifetime, they'll use, like, 11,000 tampons. And 11,000 times. They're basically putting a toxic suppository into their body. And, you know, I mean, a lot of these things associated with menstruation, you know, one of the conflating variables is, oh, yeah, also, did we mention that we're putting a neurotoxin in chloroform into your body during the whole process? No wonder it's uncomfortable. You know what I mean? Like, a lot of shit. A lot of shit is going on hormonally. I get it. But that's only making matters worse. And I think it's something that everybody should be really mindful of, you know, and whether that's using pads or using other brands, like the brand called Kora is a good one. There's a bunch of natural tampons. Yeah.

They make natural tampons.

Natural tampons. Which is going to be a way, way, way better solution. And I think that's just going to become common knowledge. And there's other things they put in these tampons that, like, accelerate bleeding. You know, they're like cigarette makers. These are like cigarettes, you know, like, they're really, really bad cigarettes. And people just aren't, you know, aren't savvy to it. And it's. It just kind of feels like this extension. I studied classical civilization in antiquity, and in ancient Greece, they used to make these. Make women, like, pack their vaginas full of, like, horse dung, you know, and that was, like, the. The way to keep it, like, sanitary or whatever. I'm like, we haven't gone that much farther. We're still putting toxic stuff in women's vaginas.

Well, you may have just started a trend if this is taken out of context. And in all the biohacking forums, there's.

Gonna be horse dung van.

A bunch of farmers are gonna be just making bank because all these Silicon Valley exec wives are gonna be calling them up, asking for horse dungs to shove into their vaginas. Cause they heard it on a health podcast.

No, not. It's not healthy, and it does not result in anything positive. It's just doing the wrong thing during menstruation. Horse tongue and tampons. Not good.

So Kora tampons. And then I know you get into a lot of other stuff in the book, but basically the idea is, look at youryour sex products, your lubes, any of these things that are petroleum based, any of these tampons, and use healthy, natural alternatives.

Absolutely.

Okay, cool. Another question that I would be remiss not to ask, because I know this is really right up your wheelhouse, and it's also something that you address in the book is partying and hedonism and what to do to mitigate the damage when we're actually out and about or we're putting things into our body that might need to be detoxified. What do you do? How do you set your body up for a party or fix the damage after as quickly as possible?

Step one, I think, is doing it with intention and doing it not as an antagonist to your body, but, like, basically talking to your body Because I did this recently. I had my 37th birthday and I decided to do a grown up frat party. So we had beer pong and flip cup and an ice luge. And I was excited because I don't usually party like that. But I was like, screw it, you know, I'm getting older. I'm almost 40. You know, how many times am I going to play beer pong? Like I'm going to go for it. And so I kind of started talking to my body earlier. I was like, all right, body, we're going to be drinking a lot of beer. You know, we're going to be going through this, but we're going to have a blast. And I'm going to listen to you during the night and if you need water, if you need whatever. And it's just starting this dialogue. So it's not like you're completely out of touch with what's going on with your body. And I think that's a huge thing to remember is don't just completely disconnect. Your body will allow you to push the extremes, but just stay in communication. Don't just tell it to shut up, don't listen. I don't care about you. Just be like, all right, I'm going to ask a lot of you. I'm gonna ask a lot from you tonight, but we're gonna have a lot of fun. And, you know, the body will acknowledge that and you'll acknowledge that. And then you can, you know, be mindful throughout it. Because I remember even that night, at a certain point, you know, it was like 1:30am and I was drank a lot of beer. I had a lot of nicotine, I had a lot of other stuff. I was like, all right, body, what do you need? It's like salt water. I was like, all right, I got you. You know, so for the next 20 minutes, all I did was drink, you know, salt water. And the body was like, all right, thanks. I was like, all right, body, I'm going back in there. And it's like, okay, man. You know, and it's just kind of like, obviously it's not using words, but just kind of tapping into what I really needed. And really at the end of the night, you know, the next morning, I didn't feel guilty about it. I went into it with intention and I had a blast. And I actually felt pretty good. Now compare that to the times where I've completely shut off my body and just pounded drinks and not checked in. And not only do I feel guilty, I feel like I Made the wrong choice. I feel like I didn't listen to the body. So you know that from a mental standpoint is really important. And then there's some physical things that you can add on to that too.

What are some of like the. Either the supplements or the food groups that you would use to mop up the damage.

So mop up the damage. When you're drinking, you're going to create acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is one of those really toxic compounds that make you feel like when you've finished drinking. And one of the minerals that's really important for creating the compounds that break down toxic acetaldehyde is molybdenum. And molybdenum is found in hummus, chickpeas, beans. But you can also get it in a supplement. We have it in one of our key mineral supplements. And like 300 milligrams of molybdenum will help give your body the raw materials it needs to start breaking that down. So definitely supplement with molybdenum. Magnesium is also super helpful. And then glutathione is a great one as the master antioxidant for the liver that also helps break down acetaldehyde. So if you can get your hands on that either sublingual or intranasal or IV injection of that, that's going to be a great one. And then the other thing that happens is alcohol is a GABA agonist. So it's going to create more GABA in the brain. That's what makes you feel drunk and happy and everything. So. But the opposing neurotransmitter to that, so what the body does to compensate is produce glutamate. And glutamate is that thing that makes you feel cracky and makes it hard for you to sleep and kind of wired tired in the morning when you're hungover and so getting more. That's why the people recommend that hair of the dog method, because you're actually increasing the GABA again to balance out the glutamate. But that's not going to do it because then it just pushes the ball down the hill. So finding ways to increase the gaba. And some people can tolerate some kind of pharma GABA mechanism that can actually take supplemental gaba, and sometimes that's helpful. But actually L theanine is pretty closely related to the GABA mechanism. So instead of reaching for coffee, reach for Matcha tea, which is really high in L theanine. And that's going to be a better Alternative to help balance out that gaba glutamate balance. And beyond that, just hydration, electrolytes, minerals and forgiveness. Forgiveness for your body, for what you just did.

I like it. Have you ever read dirty genes by Dr. Ben Lynch?

No, I haven't.

Okay. He goes into different genetic pathways. You can take your 23andMe raw data and upload it to his website Strategene. And I had a fascinating interview with him. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But it turns out that I personally have a specific gene that restricts my ability to be able to metabolize alcohol properly. Which is probably why I'm like a one or two drink guy when I'm partying. Then I want to switch to a vape pen or something. But he actually has, he told me, well, if you want to drink, here's your stack. And he recommended this antihistamine supplement and molybdenum and then same, you know, very, very similar to some of these things that you've discovered. But it turns out that if you have these specific genetic steps, like you can feed your 23andMe data into this strategy and find out if you're somebody who really, really needs to enhance that pathway. So it's, it's fascinating stuff. Yeah, it's very interesting. And the whole chapter you have in here on mitigating the effects of a night of partying or other such hedonism is once again, it's very practical. I mean the whole book is just chock full of practical tips.

Yeah, I mean this is, this is. Look, if it wasn't, I wouldn't do it. You know, I live a really well, well balanced life. You know, it's not about my all about my performance in the gym or all about my performance in any one area. It's about loving and living as big and as enjoyably as possible. And you know, that's the process we tried to create step by step by step. Something that you could repeat and enjoyably repeat every day and it would just make your life better and better.

Yeah, I like it, man. I like it. Well, folks. Oh and by the way, Aubry, I should tell you that I actually did a search for your super probiotic coconut Yogurt with the 1999 food label on it. It appears that it actually is available on Amazon New Earth Superfoods original formula Non dairy Super probiotic coconut yogurt. Unfortunately, I don't know if this is because of your book. Could be, could be the Aubrey Marcus effect of on Amazon. It's currently unavailable. However, you can have them email you when the item becomes available, if you too.

That's funny.

I don't even know what the price is.

There's another one called Coconut Cult. Coconut Cult has one that they'll ship in cold packs to you too. It's not quite as good, but it's still pretty damn good. And actually GT's is coming out with one that you'll see in a lot more Whole Foods, but it's a little more sour. Like it has a little more of that lactic acid kind of bite to it.

It's good. It's. I did the, the, I did the LA Spartan Stadium race and GT's was there. They were sponsoring the event and they had that coconut yogurt that hasn't come out yet at the Expo. Dude, I punished like I just stood there talking to the person like, oh, this is, this is pretty good. You know, distract them, grab another sample. Yeah, yeah, it's tasty stuff. So anyways though, all these things that Aubrey and I have been talking about, from the alternative to pussy cigarettes to the snooze, tobacco packs, the nicotine, toothpicks and beyond, along with the link to his book Own the Day, Own youn Life, Optimized Practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleep and sex. I will link to in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com OwnTheDay Aubrey, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Thank you my brother. Pleasure.

All right folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Aubrey Marcus, author of Own the Day. Signing out for from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

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