The Art Of Hacking Your Brain Without Smart Drugs: A Podcast With Immersive Journalist, Adventurer & Author Neil Strauss.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, I often find that heartbreak is sometimes the best motivator for change because you're really in, like, a primal emotional pain. So when someone's sort of heartbreak is greater than the situation that happened, it's really not about them. It's about mom or dad. It's about that primal attachment moment. Your relationship has nothing to do with the other person. It's all about you and the way you relate to the other person. And basically, we have templates that are created by the way we're raised and the way our brain is wired that cause us to be in functional or dysfunctional relationships.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. You look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. My lips, I have just been informed, are still blue from either this morning's crazy pool workout up at Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese's house in Malibu, or possibly from the. From the surfing we just did outside my guest's house. He's sitting right here with me. His name, as you've just learned, is Neil Strauss. And he's a lot more than just a book writer or an author, I guess we should say. That's probably a little bit more smooth than book writer. Neil, how you doing?

Good, man. It's a seven hour journey to doing this podcast. Seven hour journey started seven hours ago.

I think it's hard to get done in Malibu. We woke up this morning, we went and did the pool workout right.

Which was intense.

So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, Neil, describe the pool workout to me.

So Laird Hamilton, the incredible big wave.

Surfer, big wave surfer, does 100 foot.

Waves around the world and so much more, kind of developed this pool workout where you're lifting and swimming with weights in the water and so you might grab two 40 pound weights, sink to the bottom of the pool, you'll walk. And a lot of it's about sort of seeing how long you can hold your breath and really playing with breathing and oxygen.

Don't try this alone at home.

Don't try it alone at home. We've had people Literally black out in the pool and hit their forehead on the side.

Really?

Yeah.

I didn't know this. I'm glad you didn't tell me this before.

We started and we did something pretty hardcore today.

Well, so just to give you an example, and I just uploaded a video of Neil to the Snapchat page over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat where you can watch him going back and forth across the pool. You probably held your breath for almost two minutes, I'd say.

And it's not really just holding how long you can hold your breath. It's because the workout itself and the energy you put in use a lot of oxygen. The harder you're working, the harder it is to hold your breath.

Right. So for example, you grab the two 40 pound dumbbells, you walk them across the bottom of the pool, all the way to one end, and then you grab the other one. You held it to your chest.

And then you swim back up to the surface on the other side.

To the surface. But you don't come up for a breath. Cause then you go back across after with that same dumbbell. You go back across, grab the lone dumbbell that you left at the other edge and then run that back.

Right. And the crazy thing is when I was first told about this, I literally did not think it was possible. And it's mental more than physical. It's mental and it's knowing that when you feel like you're out of air and your body's. It's just your body's warning signal, you still have a lot of oxygen left.

I learned this when I took a free diving course. When you're diaphragm. So you know that feeling. If you're listening, you've probably kind of heard this before. If you do any amount of underwater work, it's kind of like.

Like your.

Diaphragm starts to contract and you feel that and you just keep going.

Yeah. And you can learn to do little things, little like tricks such as I'll just exhale a little bit when I really feel like I'm running out of air. And that'll just allow me to go a little bit further.

Right. And then another example that Neil showed me is you basically do. What are they called? Seahorses.

Yeah.

So you have a dumbbell basically up by your crotch. You're holding an 8 between your legs or a 10 or a 15 between your legs and you're treading water. Your feet are up in a V shape. And tell folks about that workout that we did this morning after what you just described.

So what you want is you're sort of facing forward with your. You want your entire feet out of the water, and you're propelling yourself forward so your body's in a V shape and just propelling yourself across the water with your hands. With your hands. Feet out of the water. And your head can be out of the water or underwater, it doesn't matter. You go to the other side, 10 push ups, hop back in, go across again, 10 push ups. And after maybe six of these, just your arms are so gone. Just pulling yourself out of the water is brutal. Yeah.

I mean, dude, I played water polo, where we would have people, like, standing on the edge of the pool, dropping a medicine ball. You're treading water, you're throwing the medicine ball back up. Right. Without using your hand. So it's all egg beater kick with the legs. We did those type of sprints where you'd sprint across the pool and get out and do pushups, but we never did this kind of stuff where you're actually going back and forth under the water.

It's amazing. What's so amazing is that Laird is literally inventing a new workout, and you and I are getting to sort of experience this new workout being invented in front of our eyes, because every time you come back into town, there's a new exercise we're doing. It's got a new name, and it's amazing to sort of be on the ground floor of this, and it intuitively just feels good in your body. You're in the water. You're outside in the sun. You're not working just with strength. You're working with oxygen, with movement. It's incredible.

Yeah, it's a full body and full mind routine. And then the other thing is, there's a barrel sauna and an ice tub. Tell me about what you do with the barrel sauna and the ice tub that are right next to the pool.

So, yeah, so when you're done, it's the sauna, which is about 220 degrees. You do the sauna for about 15 minutes, and then you do the ice for three minutes. And it's funny because people at that workout have the personality that as soon as you can't really say, hey, look at what I did. Because as soon as you say, look at what I did, someone will say, oh, do it this way. So maybe you're in the ice bath and you say, hey, I just did five minutes. And then Laird will. Someone will say, oh, do it with your hands underwater.

Right.

Someone else will say, well, I did it fully submerged for a minute underwater in the ice tub. So every time you think you're getting good, they're getting better.

So you've got heat, cold breath, strength in the water, out of the water. So many components that you work. And you do this how many days a week, Neal?

Three days a week.

Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You go in there and we were there. We showed up at like 8:30 and we were there till almost 10:40, almost 11. Yeah.

Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Just basically going back and forth. So we delved down this rabbit hole when you were saying it took seven hours for us to podcast. But bear with us, because then we went to Sunlife Organics in Malibu and.

Had the most expensive smoothie in America.

Okay, so I've got the ingredients pulled up here in front of me. This is called the billion dollar smoothie. For those of you who want to replicate this at home, it is. Okay, here we go. Because this was your first time drinking this as well, right?

And this is similar to what you normally drink in the morning, right?

It's kind of similar to what I make at home in the morning. I haven't had explosive diarrhe, but it's young Thai coconut meat, spinach, raw cashew butter goat, colostrum, chlorophyll, aloe, vitamin C crystals, collagen, silica greens powder, grass fed whey protein, E3 live, which I think is like a brain nootropic type of thing called. It's called brain on MCT oil, a 10 mushroom blend from. From our friends over at Four Sigmatic, which is like Reishi and Chaga and cordyceps hemp milk. The list goes on and on. And it's what, 28, $28? You nursed yours for like two hours. I punished mine in five minutes.

You had dinner with the owner last night and he's a friend, so they gave it to us for free. But I was really thinking like, like every sip is like a quarter, right? Yeah, you know, it's like you can do the math. Cha ching cha ching for it's really hard to justify.

And then. And then we surfed Very, very active day leading up to today's podcast and played a little Oculus Rift. If you hear voices and shouting in the background, there's still people in Neil's gaming room library playing. Is it htc?

It's the HTC Vive. So what it is, the Oculus Rift is the one that's kind of been really famous in that they. Right now, it's just the goggles. They don't have hand controllers publicly available, but they're making them pretty soon. But the HTC Vive is what they call room scale virtual reality. And they're freaking out right now, and.

You can just, like, run around the room. What's the game he's playing right now?

So he's probably. He was doing Brookhaven Experiment, which is a zombie one. And it's terrifying. When my wife did it, she literally ripped off the goggles and had tears in her eyes. It was so scary. It's so real. And they're playing maybe now Raw Data, which is kind of a robot one. That's crazy. But what's cool about room scale is you can literally move around the room and it really feels real. And you have hand controllers you can pick up and touch, and it feels incredibly.

I just took the. I just took the Oculus Rift off my head, and I haven't done much work. Reality at all. It is crazy how realistic it was.

When you do it. You start to realize that what's happened with augmented and virtual reality will be a revolution, maybe bigger than the Internet, because people are going to just walk around the world and decide what level of reality they want to be in at any time.

Is there utility for giving? Because all the listeners love to biohack their bodies or improve their brains. How could you use something like that to actually get a better body or get a better brain?

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the things. It's funny that people aren't doing that with it yet, and I would love them to do it.

Yeah.

But what I'm thinking would be amazing for people who sort of being able to follow, I think would be able to be able to follow the journey of the food once it's in your body. And see, okay, when I'm eating this, look at where it's landing and look at what's happening.

What do you mean you would eat.

Something and be able to imagine if you just showed somebody who's drinking sugary beverages, like soda or something.

Right.

Imagine if you can show them the journey that that coke takes in their body, and they could follow it. Oh.

See, what I was thinking was some kind of, like, a mentally challenging game or some kind of, like, a physically rigorous game that you could do with virtual reality.

It's funny because you definitely have to be in the right space because someone just dented my wall.

Yeah, your library's a little strong.

Trying to kill a zombie.

He actually. I was in there eating A salad as this guy was playing a virtual reality game, and he literally stuck the little wand controller right in my.

Sal.

Yeah, Cameron. Who's in there playing right now?

Cameron. Cameron Dallas.

Cameron Dallas. Some famous Internet personality I've just learned is a famous Internet personality. I guess you could probably Google him. Internet, I don't know, heartthrob kind of guy.

Yeah, he's just sort of. Instagram is his art. Or vine and Instagram those. That's his art form. Yeah. But as far as mental things, also, I also think would be good for sort of trauma healing, getting over phobias, because you realize how fragile the mind is. Because once you go into that virtual reality and you know it's not real, it feels and looks real. Yeah. That's interesting. So I think we haven't sort of. What's.

What's the most physically rigorous thing that you've done using virtual reality?

I would.

You're not allowed to say virtual sex. This is. Well, I guess we can mark this podcast as explicit if need be. I know, I know. You've written some pretty explicit books.

You wrote to the topic. But the truth is, my wife and I tried to experiment with that. It didn't really. We tested it out. It wasn't as. Maybe we tried the wrong thing, but it wasn't there yet. It felt like they were gigantic.

Virtual reality sex was, like, gigantic, pixelated.

Yeah. Their perspective wasn't right. And also, like, when your goggles are on, you really don't know what's around you. So you could be, you know, all your friends could be surrounding you, laughing.

Or you could be humping your bookshelf.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There'd probably be some foolish videos coming out, but I would say some of the. Some of the kind of. But again, like, it's right now. It's not really a substitute for actually doing what we did today. But some of the shooter games, you're really out of breath because they're coming around.

You mean not a substitute for, like, an underwater pool workout, for example. That's my concern is, you know, even for my kids. You know, when I was wearing the Oculus Rift in there just now with you, I thought, wow, this would be really cool for my kids. But not as cool as them actually going outside and, you know, hunting a rabbit with their bow and arrow or.

What I think it is.

And I'm sorry, if you love rabbits. For everybody who loves rabbits, go ahead.

Cute little bunny.

Cute little bunny rabbits.

So what it is, is educational, though. You can really have empathy. I Think there are a lot of great videos being made in, you know, in displaced persons camps in Syria, and you can really see what it's like. So what I think people are doing now is allowing you to have experiences you want because it really feels interesting. And once they have haptics. Haptics is haptics. Haptics is. This is the next level. Next level is haptics is where you actually get the touch and feeling of stuff. So kind of where a lot of the kind of tech science is right now is around working with haptics. So when that dinosaur was breathing on you, you would feel the breath and.

The wetness, so you wouldn't just see it, you actually feel it. You would wear sensors on your fingers, on your toes, anything where you wanted. Sensory perception.

Yeah. Or a bodysuit. I was just with at. This isn't even what we're talking about on this podcast, but it's fascinating. I was just at a place called Two Bit Circus, where it's sort of a group of people who are working a lot with virtual reality and they have things where maybe you're in a race. It's kind of like the junkyard version of it, in a sense, not to. And they're doing great stuff, by the way. Very advanced. But where you're maybe in a race car and you're in a seat that's shaking, there's a fan blowing on you, so it feels like you're really there. So that's sort of the. The sort of homemade tinker version. Even though they're doing advanced stuff of haptics, so people are doing really cool stuff with VR right now. And I'm really thinking with my baby, who you might have heard in the background earlier, who's 18 months old, I really think when he grows up, he's not gonna want to see flat screen photos of himself. So I wanna get a 360 degree camera.

So boring.

Yeah, you're not gonna. Eventually movies are gonna be in them, looking around in the center of the action for sporting events too.

That's nuts. I'm so torn on this because it's like I really want my kids to grow up in the woods, surviving and living with the dirt and the elements and all the negative ions that we get from the world and not spend all their time indoors on virtual reality and plugged in and getting all the blue light exposure. But at the same time, it's freaking fun. And you could see a ton of utility for learning and for gaming and for. I mean, the sky's the limit with this stuff.

Yeah. I even think as a writer that I would love to create the perfect writing environment to write in on that sort of.

I see what you did there. We're supposed to be talking about some of these amazing books that you've written. We don't have to. But what I'm curious about, actually, because you've got. So I know that you're best known, and for those of you who are familiar with Neil, you're best known for this book, the Game. But you have some books that have quite a bent towards optimal brain performance and even some pretty physically rigorous activities, like Emergency, for example, which I want to ask you a little bit about. But have you always been into getting more out of your body and your brain? Or were you just like a geeky journalist that eventually discovered underwater pool workouts along the way? Or where did fitness and health or nutrition start to become an interest for you?

Yeah, I think there's several questions in there. So I think the first thing is I know that life exists outside your comfort zone. So number one is I'm always want to be outside my comfort zone. If I'm scared of something that makes me want to do it. And so a lot of my books are about there's maybe if I say I can't, or there's a challenge in my life where I'm really stuck. I don't write about what I know. I write about what I don't know and maybe become an expert of it in it by the end of the book. So it's a perfect job because you can just say, oh, I'm horrible at this point. This is really a big area in my life where I feel like I'm missing out. For example, last book, the Truth was about relationships. All my relationships went wrong. It was, of course, always the other person's fault. I started to realize, well, I'm the common denominator, right? And so I really explored like, well, what is it about relationships? And you really go deep and you don't just talk to the experts, but you actually go through the experience. You can come out the other side.

With some knowledge and you can go to specifics. I can mark this podcast episode as explicit if need be, but I think that would be a fascinating way to illustrate how you do go deep. What'd you do when you wrote this book, the Truth?

I started off in sex addiction rehab. And I wouldn't say that I'm a sex addict, but I. I think so. I was in love, or so I thought. And I Cheated on the. On the person and got caught. And I just thought you cheated. I'm angry.

On your wife.

My wife?

Yeah. You were married at the time. Your wife who's in the room next to us.

Right. And we have no secrets.

Right, Right. It's quite obvious. You wrote a whole book about it.

Yeah, I know exactly. No secrets.

Actually, I own this book and I read it and I think the first page, it says, ingrid, don't read this.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

And the last page says, ingrid, I hope you did read this. That's the journey from I don't want to. I have a secret life I don't want to share with you. I want to share all of me with you. So. And I just thought you cheated on your wife.

You went to sex addiction therapy.

Right. And so I just thought. I thought I was a good person. But how would a good person lie to someone they love? Deceive someone they love, hurt someone they love? Like, really, what's wrong with me? And our friend here doing a podcast with Rick Rubin, he's also in the book, really said, hey, if sex was so important to you that you're willing to hurt yourself and other people to get and lie and violate your ethic system, maybe you're a sex addict. And I said, I don't know, but what if I just. And at this point, it wasn't a book. It was just me trying to, like, realize, try to figure out what was wrong with me. So I actually checked myself into sex addiction rehab. And what I found there was not a bunch of sort of perverted, you know, people you'd expect, but other people who'd cheated on me.

A bunch of creepy guys with dark colored glasses.

Yeah. In my sort of group, except for one guy, everybody was there because they cheated on their girlfriend or wife. And it's interesting, it's interesting that.

But you. And Weigh. But like I read that was just the beginning.

That was the first time we were.

Doing, like freeways in Paris and drugged out orgies, like in Europe.

Like, so I decided, and I think this is a conversation a lot of people have that, are we meant to be monogamous? In my head I was like, okay. And again, in sex addiction rehab, they had a very, very, let's say, Puritan take. They really said you should go on something like 20 dates with someone before you have physical intimacy and make an emotional connection first. Which, the truth is, it actually makes sense because a lot of. It's funny that I would say that now because I was really angry about them saying it, I thought they were trying to sort of, you know, impose, you know, Victorian morality on us. But the truth is, if you start, if you really want a relationship, start with an emotional connection first and then have the physical. Because a lot of people have a great physical connection and then a disastrous relationship for years.

Yeah. Oh, I've been married for almost 14 years now. And my entire relationship with my wife started off as us being really, really good friends for a year and a half before we had any romantic relationship, before we fell in love with, we just adventured together and there was a huge emotional component. Which means as we get old and really ugly and have horrible bodies and everything else that people might associate with bad sex or whatever, it's really not gonna matter because there's so many things in the relationship that go beyond that.

You really gotta look at the person and say, I'm gonna love you. Whatever we become, whatever happens to us and whatever we look like, you take.

A deep dive when you write these books. You're definitely the quintessential immersive journalist.

Yeah. So the question I ask myself, I just cut you off. I realized, I asked myself, was if you look at science, there's nothing in science that says monogamy is natural. Even the species that one thought were monogamous before they discover that not all their litter or their offspring have the same are. The DNA test doesn't match to the father. So they're sneaking around behind their back. They might be.

So sneak up at the fox. The swan. Is the swan a monogamous?

I think the swan was one that was thought to be monogamous. I don't remember that.

But then they found out the daddy swans were actually out and that was.

True with the fox. And again, I know you like to get scientific, so we'll do this. So the one, the animal they love to study, is the vole. Do you know about this?

It's funny because the voles have come up on the show before. The voles. When I interviewed Dr. David Minkoff about cancer, he got into how the voles near Chernobyl in Russia live for an inordinate amount of time. Somehow radiation has allowed them to have some kind of like an anti aging longevity effect in their mitochondria. But you found something else about the voles.

Yeah. So there are two kinds of voles. And I'm gonna get. I'm just going off my memory, so I'm gonna get this slightly wrong about which kinds. It's like the prairie vole and the Other vole, I don't know. We'll call the city vole.

You could make it up and I would not be able to call you out.

City vole. But it's not the prairie vole. It's another type of vole. And one vole, it is like monogamous and mates for life. And the other one is a player. Right. Just plays the field, literally. Right. And they sort of discovered that those who are naturally monogamous have a longer. Have a gene coding for a longer vasopressin receptor. So when I found this out, I thought, okay, I went to this guy Hasi Wallam, who'd done a lot of the studies. He was a. In Sweden and he'd also worked Ben Emory when they did this study. And he's one of the biggest guys studying the science of monogamy. I said, listen, if I don't have a gene code, prolonged vasopressin receptor. And I also maybe wasn't. There's a certain kind of psychological profile of the way you were raised that'll make you more sort of akin to monogamy. I'm like, if I have neither of those, should I even bother trying to be monogamous? And his answer was, first of all, I said, maybe I can get a transplant. But there's no. For example, they've played with. Playing with oxytocin vasopressin on humans, and it might make you sort of feel a connection after sex or something, but won't make you kind of mate for life.

Well, there are actually not to rabbit hole too much, but there's actually a lot of people using intranasal.

That's how they do it.

And a topical oxytocin to enhance your feeling of connectivity or romanticism towards your partner.

Yep. And that's exactly what he was talking about.

Which I think you need a doctor's prescription for, I believe.

And that works in the short term but not the long term.

Okay, so it's like a short term.

Really, man. Maybe you're with the wrong person if you have to do that. Let's just face it.

My concern, because I experimented before, I haven't used oxytocin. When I went to Thailand last time, I bought a whole bunch of their Thai version of Viagra because there's so much research on that for everything from sports performance enhancement to, of course, sex to. Although those are the biggest two. And one thing I noticed was the couple of times that I used it for sex, I started to get nervous when I didn't use it about what would happen, like, if I'd still have it or if I needed that, I'd be concerned about oxytocin, too. If you'd always need that little bottle of oxytocin in your pocket.

Right. And I think the fear or the worry is the same way. Sort of like heroin addicts, it's sort of their body stops producing opiates because to kill the normal pains, they're like, oh, I'm already getting opiates. I don't need it. In the same way where your body lessen its own.

So many negative feedback loops, even for topical or testosterone creams or progesterone in women, it shuts down, you know, endogenous production, which you may need to do short term.

I think. Let me, Let me ask, because I think the thing that I've really sort of learned since sort of we're in a world now, and your podcast is a good example that where you have. You have to be your own expert, you have to be your own doctor, you have to be your own nutritionist. And what I found is it isn't like most things are not good or bad. It depends on what you want them for. For example, we were in the sauna having a discussion with Darren, who is an incredible writer and doing some great studies.

Oh, that guy who does supplement research who's in the. In the sauna at Laird and Gabby's. That was amazing.

He has a great book called Super Life.

Oh, he does have a book. I didn't. I didn't know this. We were picking his brain and. And we'll get back to.

But he was. So there were all those recent studies about how coffee is good for you. And he was saying that coffee hurts your stem cells. So the thing is, it's not that.

Something'S good can actually kill what he called totipotent stem cells. So what this guy was saying was that we all have these totipotent stem cells that can be converted to any other cell, that they get released from connective tissue, but that if they are in the bloodstream and presented with oxidative damage from things that are even like mild hormetic stressors like alcohol or coffee or things like this, it can actually shut down longevity. And he's doing a bunch of research on how. I believe what I understood from what he was saying was that one, two combo of injury or inflammation or excess stress combined with coffee or alcohol or anything else that we might consider to be these hormetic stressors that in small amounts are actually good for Us are bad for us and can kill stem cells if we're already stressed out or injured or inflamed.

Yeah. And I think the main thing that I've kind of learned as well, everything has good and bad effects. It depends on what you want it for. And you really have to know. So you read something, decide, this is good. Well, what's it good for and what's it bad for? And you make those choices.

Right.

But I thought it was interesting what he was saying about stem cells, too, that a lot of the stem cell stuff they're doing is just useless. They don't, you know.

Yeah. Those stem cells that you get injected from bone marrow or amniotic fluid or I guess embryonic stem cells, they don't have the capability to differentiate into the same type of tissue that these totipotent stem cells we have in our own body can differentiate.

Now, was that the first time you heard the word totipotent?

I've heard the word pluripotent before in reference to stem cells, but never totipotent.

Yeah, same. Your memory is so good that you.

Could possibly have made it up.

Right.

Because I was in a sauna with no Google.

But he's. Yeah, I think he's pretty well connected.

Yeah, he was a very fascinating guy. And I asked him when we finished that discussion what his top two supplements that he would take for anything from cognitive performance to anti aging would be. And his response was not coffee, but coffee fruit, which is the combination of the coffee and the seed. And then not turmeric, but turmerones, which apparently are an extract of turmeric that are way different than like curcumin or curcuminoids or anything else, but they make anything that you take them along with extremely bioavailable. He said none of this stuff is available on the market right now, but coffee fruit extract, and turmerones.

We learned something new this morning, and he's a super. His main job is he's a superfood hunter.

Yeah, super life. I didn't know he had a book. But by the way, if you guys want in the show notes to access any of this stuff, you can find the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Neil as in N E I L. BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

And Darren, just so people know his last name, too. It's Darren Olian. O L I E N is his last name.

I'll hunt him down. He's kind of a beast, too. He was killing the pool Workout. Okay, so you immerse yourself into this book. You wrote the truth and to come full circle with what you're talking about regarding vasopressin and the volts.

So I just thought maybe this is not the way we're naturally meant to live. And so I started thinking maybe I should find the type of relationship that's natural to me. So I experimented with polyamory, with open relationships, with swinging, with maybe not having your sexual partner the same as your romantic bonding partner. And I kind of tried everything. I tried living. I just thought wouldn't be cool just to live in sort of a commune situation where everybody's sort of connected and relationship fluid and just living with a bunch of friends in this freewheeling paradise. On the third day, somebody tried to kill me over jealousy with an axe.

Yeah, the full story of that is in the book. It actually is a quite interesting book.

And what I learned was that when every one of these things went wrong or turned into some sort of disaster, that I had to kind of face up to the fact that it was my own emotional unhealthiness. And I brought it with me to whatever kind of relationship I was having.

So ultimately, what did you find out in the end there?

So, yeah, what I found out was if you're unhealthy, all your relationships will be unhealthy. That's the first thing. But the second thing, like the big lesson, and I really would love to dive deeper into this, is into the kind of. The more hardcore psychology of it, but that your relationship has nothing to do with the other person. It's all about you and the way you relate to the other person. And basically we have templates that are created by the way we're raised and the wiring, the way our brain is wired that cause us to be in functional or dysfunctional relationships. And so, for example, if someone hasn't done the psychological work on themselves, and if they tell me the way they were raised, I can guess how their relationships are. If they tell me how their relationships are, I can. Usually I can tell the way they were raised. There's like a one to one correspondence.

I remember when you and I first met. The very first thing you asked me was how my relationship with. I think you asked me about my relationship with my mom. If I remember correctly. I thought it was such an odd first question to ask someone who you've never met before.

Well, what I was curious about with you, and let's sort of discuss it here, is obviously there's a control issues with you around the way you live your lifestyle. Right. So you really control what comes in, what comes out.

Strict, regimented measure, type A.

Right. And it's. And your extremeness in it is what is your talent, in a sense, and why your podcast is so great and why I trust you with that kind of information. But I also think that comes. That it isn't. It comes as a response to something. So my question was, what was the environment you were raised in that led to that? Yeah. And what's the answer?

Yeah, so. So my environment was actually a relatively strict, controlled environment. You know, I was, I was homeschooled K through 12. I, I had a really good relationship with my parents, but it was also very, very kind of strict upbringing. Some, some would say like, you know, a sheltered, you know, stereotypical prairie muffin, homeschooled type of, type of upbringing.

But. And to figure this out, you almost have to go one level deeper. Right. That's the sort of postcard version, but in a sense, like, and maybe one way to say it, I guess we can start here, which is first of all, strict in what way?

Okay. Anything goes on this podcast, you can delve deep and ask me embarrassing questions.

So we'll start. Let's go with that. 3. Your 11 or 12 year old, were you Ben? Benny? What were you? Just little Ben. Benjamin.

Benjamin. If I was in trouble, right?

If you're in trouble, you're a Benjamin. So give me three words as little Ben that describe, say, dad as you saw him through your eyes.

Then at 12 years old, quiet.

In.

Almost like a standoffish kind of way. He was not very physical, right. Like, not a lot of like, you know, hugs or, you know, you know, piggyback rides, stuff like that. That's something that also stood out to me. I know this sounds like I'm saying a bunch of bad things about my dad. I'm not. I'm just saying it how it is. And you know, I guess one of the other things that comes to mind is that I didn't feel like I learned a lot from him. That's something I'm very careful with my kids, is to teach them how to shave, how to fish, how to hunt, how to do what we might consider in our culture to be like, manly things.

And by the way, when we do this, I think the hardest barrier to people with their own personal psychological growth is the desire to protect one's parents from saying anything so called badly.

Yeah, I mean, especially knowing that, that, you know, this is a podcast, right? It's gonna be in Public. And my dad might listen to it, and he might.

And listen, it's not a relationship with anybody if you can't be honest with them. Right, right, right. And imagine if you can't understand.

There's actually a really good book about this I just read called Radical Honesty.

Yeah, yeah. Brad Blanton. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great, he's fascinating. There's some great mini documentaries on them on YouTube. They're worth watching. And just to kind of press that point, what you want to think about, these are the variables that make you. They are the variables that make you, you. And we're looking at them as variables non judgmentally. In other words, all human beings are imperfect, thus all parents are imperfect. And some of those imperfections get passed on to you. But if you want to know your own, the operating system you're running on, you have to do sort of this virus scan on yourself. And you do it by figuring out, well, what is the way I was raised. And if you look at it again, sort of, you know, scientifically is, you know, you're born, you've got your brain, and the architecture of your brain is built in those first years. And they're being built at an astonishing rate. A three year old has twice as many neural connections as you and I, and then after three, while you're still learning, but a process called, there's that saying, cells that fire together wire together. Right. So as you're having these experiences that whatever. Dad is distant and so I got to learn stuff for myself. So that's the first lesson is, okay, I'm not being taught for my dad, I have to learn it for myself. Guess what? We were talking about my books. I have the same kind of dad. Exact same. Almost really interesting, all of my books, if you think about them, we're looking for these father figures. It was mystery in the game, in the truth, a lot of it was Rick in a sense. In emergency, it was the survivalists and looking to get those skills that I never got from my parents. Right. And same with you, that's why you're.

So I'm on a constant quest to find those mentors, find those people who will teach me things, go on adventures and discover and learn, usually from experts in their respected fields. And, you know, it's a big part of what this podcast is about. Right. Then bring that knowledge to the masses.

And that's the gift of the trauma and the gift of that upbringing the hardest. There are some people probably listening right now that maybe the hardest person to see Themselves in this way is, and this is the toughest is when mom or dad, and often it was dad. When you lived in a family where dad was always right or mom was always right, they were never wrong and there was no arguing with them because what happens is your parent takes almost that's sort of God. They call it spiritual abuse because the parent is God and they're never wrong and they're always right. And of course, even when they are wrong. And so as you get older, to question your family system is almost like blaspheming God. And those are the hardest people to get to sort of see themselves. And so to go full circle. When I talked to Hasi Wallen about monogamy, he said he always had to the geneticist. Oh yeah, who did the study with. Yeah, by the way, it's prairie voles and meadow voles. Who he said, you get to change things. At any point you can change things. The older you get, the harder it is because all those repetitions have really of that behavior have really wired in those beliefs. But what I found was if you can shift your beliefs on a belief level, everything changes. A lot of people, for example, and going off on a small tangent, but a lot of people want to change their behavior. So if you think, oh, I want to quit this habit or start this habit, it should be easy enough to just do it right. You make that choice. But if you can't do it, if your willpower is not enough, then you have to start looking at your beliefs because your beliefs are what drive that. And they're harder to change than behaviors, but their reward is they shift everything.

Interesting.

There's a model of NLP which I love and I always think about this for change and transformation.

I realize neuro linguistic programming.

Neuro linguistic programming. And this is the model for change. So on the outside, there's your environment. So I know so many people who think I'm going to move to this place and have a new life or I'm going to move to this place and I'll quit drugs.

I personally believe that to make I believe the phrase goes, to radically change your habits, you must radically change your environment. Isn't that a saying?

Yes, and I don't think that's true. So it's the shallowest, simplest way to change your habits. So the outside is environment. The second level is your behaviors. So hey, maybe I'll start doing this and change the behaviors. So one, deeper than behaviors is your capabilities, what you're capable of doing. The deeper you go, the More change radiates outward to the outer layers. I wish I could draw this beneath capabilities. Your beliefs. So the belief is if you believe deep down, let's just say sometimes someone whose father wasn't around and let's say their mom was very critical, they might have the belief that I'm worthless, I'm not good enough. Right. If I was good enough, dad would have cared for me and mom would have not been so negative. And so they'll take that belief that I'm not good enough to everything they do, and it can. A. The positive side is going to drive them to greatness. But the downside is they'll always be miserable because they just feel like I'm not good enough no matter what they do and what they perform with. So beneath beliefs is identity. Identity might be your way of being. Who are you? Are you joyful? Are you negative? Are you stressed? Your identity is just really who you are. Any guesses what the deepest level is that shifts everything Below belief, below identity? Yeah.

I don't. What would it be?

The deepest is spirituality. So your belief about the entire world of the universe and what's the shift in structure of the world, your kind of worldview is the deepest. That's why if somebody's going through AA or NA or alcohol, it's anonymous or something, it's all spiritual stuff. Because if you make a spiritual shift in your spiritual beliefs, everything changes.

Interesting, Interesting. So what you're saying is that, you know, to kind of get to one of the things that you and I talked about before we even started recording this podcast, you know, we're talking about, like, smart drugs and nootropics and how to. How to hack your brain without smart drugs. So in essence, if you want to change your brain or your mental function, are you saying that you start with looking at where you're at spiritually?

Here's where I would start. I would start with. There are a few signs when you're out of touch with reality, and I'll give you those signs. So one is, when do you overreact to things? So, for example, an overreaction could be getting angry, right? You might get really angry at someone or something, but the truth is, like, really, did whatever they did or happened justify you being in a rage or anger, out of control? Another form of overreaction is shutting down. Some people shut down. Another form of interaction is anxiety. You're in trafficking. You have a ton of anxiety, but does it really matter? Is it worth the stress you're putting on your own system? And your health, because you're going to be a couple minutes late to that thing. So. So whenever there's a saying where there's overreactivity, there's a wound. And that's usually attached to a false belief. And so the first thing is I think you have to be an invest. I say, like to be a scientist of your own lows. So where are you overly stressed, where you're depressed? Let's say you break up with somebody and you're just devastated. The truth is, like, probably, if you broke up, it was probably the right thing. And let's just say someone comes to you and the worst thing that could happen, they say, you know what? I cheated on you. I'm in love with someone else. Right. Like, do you really want that person back? They made a choice. Right. And you can respect that choice and move on and find someone that works for you. But that's not how it feels because it triggers a deeper wound. I often find that heartbreak is sometimes the best motivator for change because you're really in like a primal emotional pain. So when someone's sort of heartbreak is greater than the situation that happened, it's really not about them. It's about mom or dad. It's about that primal attachment wound.

Have you written about this in any of your books or is this all like neuro linguistic programming?

No, everything I'm saying, by the way we left, neuro linguistic programming was just those levels of change that was all. And this stuff is the stuff that's in the truth. Okay, so the stuff we're talking about is in there and in between the lines in there.

Okay, gotcha.

But I think if you start. So what is overreaction? Another one is this. Let me ask you. Are all people equal? Are all people have equal worth and value as human beings? Do we all have equal worth and value as human beings?

Well, my gut response is yes.

Yes, of course we do. Yeah. No matter who it is, whether the president.

I was wondering if you're asking me trick questions.

No, it wasn't a trick question. The truth is we all have equal worth and value as human beings. So anytime you feel less than others or better than others, that's a sign that you're out of alignment with reality. And that also comes from a core kind of wound.

Interesting.

And again, I'm kind of like going heavy without all the context. But understanding these concepts allowed me to sort of break in. And then I can say, okay, what's going on here? And the way I would sort of Map it out for myself is if I can figure out the core wound, the core, the false belief. So, you know, I'm worthless, I'm not enough, you know, I'm. Nobody understands me.

So that's step one. Figure out the false belief.

Figure out the false belief. Next step two is figure out where it came from. Because you can figure out where it came from. You can let go of the lie. Are we going too heavy without the context for it or no. Are we going too. Getting too psychological without context?

I think we're okay. I think now that you're kind of like summarizing the steps, this is helpful for people who are out bicycling or running and listening in the smoke coming out their ears.

Here's a good example. When I was in rehab, there were people in rehab for exercise addiction. There are people who are, you're doing it to be a healthier person. But some will do it to such an extreme that they're hurting themselves. Right, right. That they're like poisoning their system with the wrong kinds or too much, you.

Know, anorexics, over trained, inflamed exercisers, bodybuilders, people with like body dysmorphic disorder or an obsession with the way their body looks, that type of thing.

And the thing is, it's not what you're doing. This is my philosophy. It's not what you're doing that makes you healthy or not healthy. It's why you're doing it. So you're doing it just because it feels good and it seems right, like the pull workout. The truth is, I don't really know all the science of it. I know that I feel good before, I mean during and after I feel.

Good, I usually feel hungry.

Yeah, yeah, I feel good. I just enjoy it. And so I move to where that's it. But if you're doing it to sort of of compensate for inadequacy and also you look at your results, reveal to you your intentions. So if you're doing something and it's making you less healthy or your weight is getting worse, or you're depressed, or you're less happy, fatigued, over trained, then maybe you have to look at why you're doing it.

Right, right. That makes sense.

Oh, so it's doing that chart. Right.

Delved away from the chart a little bit. But you identify.

So you identify the beliefs.

The beliefs. Okay.

And it's crazy, like if you really start to think about your beliefs, really, really will just. I just see them just getting. I see so many people. And again, you Know, my other job is for rolling stone. For 20 years, I've interviewed the most famous people in the world for Rolling Stone. That's kind of been my job. Yeah. And I see that, and I know I'm going off a small tangent, but I see that fame and money don't make people happier or fix anything. They just amplify what's wrong with them. A lot of people quest for a certain goal, whether it's fame, maybe it's money, maybe it's health, maybe it's a certain weight. And then they get there, they achieve that goal. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, you achieve that goal, then you get to that goal. And this goes without exception. You get there and you realize, oh, now what do I do? Because I'm still living with myself and I'm still have the same emotions that I thought, sure.

Then you look at a guy like Robin Williams, might be perfect example of that amazing guy who achieved a ton in life and I think checked off most of anything that he wanted to check off in life. And by all extent or by all, by external measures, he was rich and successful and funny and happy. And then he committed suicide.

Yeah. And a lot of people, and this go, I would say almost with very few exceptions, they get there and they hit a depression as soon as they reach their goals. Because before you could say, oh, I'm not happy because I'm not there yet. And then you're there.

You see this in the world of, like, obstacle racing and marathoning and Ironman triathlons, these type of things, people will. They'll cross the finish line. And then what you see is folks get really sad for a couple of weeks unless they have another race to sign up for or unless they have another event on the horizon.

And is that any different than a heroin addict? You need the next fix? Not much.

You know, some would argue a healthy version of that, some an unhealthy version. But it's actually, you know, it's. It's brilliant marketing on the part of, say, like, Ironman Triathlon, because they open up registration the next morning, right? You gotta go stand in line and register and write your 600 or 800 or $1,000 check or whatever it is now to get into the next race. So all of a sudden you have that meaning thrust back in.

You've got that emptiness.

The emptiness is filled before you've had.

A chance to dive back into practice. That's the goal about the why. If you exist with your own meaning, then everything else is Just great to do. But if you find your, if you're looking for meaning outside yourself, you're just giving all your power away. So what it is, is you identify your core issue, then you identify where it comes from. So in other words, if I think I need to compete and win because at home I only got attention from my parents when I got good grades or excelled in this or that, or my brother got it because they excelled in this and that. And so I'm still competing for love, Right. I'm competing for attention. I'm competing for my own validation. Once you identify where it comes from, you can let go of the lie. You can realize, oh, it comes from that experience, it's not really a truth. And then you can kind of. Then the third thing is to replace it with the actual belief and the actual truth. So if the truth is, if you realize the false belief is like, I only feel worth and value when I have an accomplishment. The truth is I am have worth and value, period. As a person.

Yeah.

And you can start sort of re parenting yourself.

Yeah.

And sort of being the parent and give.

That's really interesting. I don't know if you run into this, if this, if people give you this response a lot, but like, for me, right, this, this strikes home what you're saying, right. Because I'm a hard charging, you know, high achieving guy who's always looking for the next big thing that I want to accomplish, the next way to make myself better, the next rung of the ladder that I can climb. And what you're saying is one of the things that you recommend that I do is go back and look at what beliefs I might have about myself and then where those beliefs came from and then generate a new belief that I actually am worthy and don't need to do all these things to prove to the world that. That I can accomplish X or Y or Z.

Right. And a great example is that Michael Phelps, the swimmer. Michael Phelps, Is that it? Yeah. So he just went through a lot of some of the same stuff that I went through and went through a lot of rehab and stuff like that.

You mean sex addiction?

I don't know if I think it was sex. I think it was alcohol. I think it's all weed. Maybe it was weed, I don't know. But he kind of came out healthier and still killed. It didn't take away anything. So the thing is, you can keep the benefit of it and you could still strive toward excellence, but not keep the compulsiveness.

I don't Know, there's still a lot of Michael Phelps memes out there that.

I think he created. Yeah, yeah. And I think. I think. Yeah. And again, like, you're. It's dealing with this healing. The stuff is like the half life of radiation. You keep cutting in half and cutting it in half, but there's a little bit that's always there, but it's getting to the side where it's not compulsive anymore, where you're actually making the choices and you're in the driver's seat and these things aren't driving you.

This is really, truly. I didn't know we were going to talk about this, but it's very close to home.

Let's go to you, and let's sort of discuss it a little bit. And give me the three words for mom, and then I'm going to ask them other questions. I got a feeling it comes from the.

Okay, so three words for mom at 11 or 12 years old.

Yeah, Just around that age.

Okay. I would say that she was very protective.

Right.

Very protective of, like, everything. You know, how late we were out at night, what movies we were seeing. We, you know, we had like, even, you know, things like squawk boxes on the TV to keep us from hearing curse words and, you know, just like.

Right, right.

Yeah. Which was really funny because my brothers and I would study carefully the TV screen to figure out what they were saying and then go rush away to find out what that word meant. I was, like, obsessed with cursing.

But you can probably read lips well.

Now, like having this quack box that, like. Yeah. Made us into really good cursors. And what else? I guess when you ask this question, like, I personally start to think about flaws more than I start to think about.

Go with. Go with what you think about. I think. I think it's hard. I think us having this conversation in private might be slightly different sitting at.

Your dining room table in front of.

Microphones or just knowing that. But again, like, I think maybe the truth comes out. You guys can have cool dialogue.

Oh, yeah. No, I know. I know that.

So protective.

Like, this gets back to my mom and dad. That's. That's of no concern to me. They know I'm a pretty honest guy sometimes too honest. So the argument. There's no such thing over radical honesty.

Right.

Overprotected or overprotective, I would say. What else? She was very busy. Busy all the time. Like always. People had to be over always. Something had to be going on. Always. There had to be a conversation. There Wasn't a lot of silence. Right. There wasn't a lot of, like, you know, stillness, meditation, you know, and. And I've had to overcome, I think, in at times, my own propensity to go stir crazy, you know, when there is silence. I've actually gotten very good. I've used things like hunting and meditation and, you know, all sorts of methods to get better at just being alone in my own thoughts.

Yeah. Yet you're still doing. You're still, you know, you're still busy meditating or busy hunting. Because I think that's the. That's. That's. That message from there is like, it's a doing philosophy versus shifting being philosophy.

And then I'd have to say, gosh, what would be the. What would be the last thing? Tough to say, man. So a little bit overprotected, very busy. And I would say she was extremely involved in our lives. Right. Like, driving us here.

It's funny to say that. Say the one you really want to say because you feel like, oh, I got to end with a positive one. But say the one you really want to say, because I know. I feel like. I feel like I can see you. I'm sitting here watching you, and I'm watching you. I'm watching you think, oh, I really should end with something positive. Positive, right, Exactly. But I'll say, well, we'll stick with it.

Okay, so almost there. To almost like an annoying extent. Like, we had to have pagers when we drive around so she could page us and communicate with us. And now, you know, even still, it's just like boatloads of text messages and things like that. And. Yeah. So extremely, extremely communicative, perhaps to a flaw.

Right. So, yeah. So the pattern for you, and which is funny because it's the same for me, is so abandonment on the dad's side. And again, what people think, abandonment as dad is not there. Abandonment is sometimes when someone's not sort of just emotionally, physically present with you. They can be present. Like a friend of mine, her dad's a famous executive, let's say, in Hollywood. And I was always really working hard. It's a great, loving dad because he's never around. She always chooses guys who are not available no matter what. She's always with guy. And if a guy's available, she just doesn't feel any chemistry or connection because she needs that unavailability to feel that connection, which is why she's. And she's amazing. And it's just so hard for her to find a relationship that Works so.

Unavailable guy like a married man or something like that.

Or usually it's emotionally unavailable, won't be a married abuse. A guy who might not return phone calls disappears after a couple times of hanging out and just is like okay, let's make plans but doesn't really commit to a plan and she gets hung stuck on that. Where she meets a loving present guy and she's like I don't feel any chemistry with him. Well of course you don't because that's not your template. And so you have a sort of abandonment on dad's side and then enmeshment on mom's side and enmeshment.

Abandonment on dad's side, enmeshment on mom's side.

And meshmen is and a lot of people don't know this concept but it's the opposite abandonment. So abandonment is the parent's not is some sort of neglect. The parent's not physically or emotionally there and you kind of know it's an enmeshment. Is that the parent in your case is there too much. But the idea is this. The job of a functional parent is to be there for the needs of the child. Those needs include it's not taking care of all their wants to be there. Then child's needs comes first. In the case of your mom, some of her strictness was not for your needs to make you sort of the best person possible. They were for her needs about a what she thought you should be and about her not feeling anxiety because she doesn't know where you are. And so in meshem and is you're in a sense serving the parents needs. This can come if you for some people they become mom or dad's therapist or daddy's little girl or mom's kind of surrogate boyfriend anywhere she's sort of having all the emotional conversations with you that she should be having with her husband. Or sometimes someone has a depressed mom who they're always trying to cheer up and you're there for their needs. So a lot of your mom's strictness was really about her needs, not about yours. So that's the word for that is enmeshment. There's an engulfment is another word that's used for it and so it's a pattern a lot of people don't know and it tends to the result and this isn't true. I mean you've been married for a long time. But it tends to make people avoidant sometimes in relationships. Because if someone's too needy, I assume Your wife's not a needy person.

No, my wife's, like, freaking independent. And that's why it's crazy. Like, I just called my wife from your patio. It's the first time I've talked to her in a week. And I. Like, she doesn't text me or call me or anything when I'm out traveling. Like, she's just. She's super independent. She's just.

Her thing works.

Yeah.

Because if she needed to check in all the time, you would go nuts. Yeah, we'd go nuts.

Yeah.

Right. Because. And someone who was sort of raised with that in measurement, they might get in a relationship and someone's really needy and they'll just feel their skin crawling.

Yeah, I know. It's really interesting. My wife is, like, one of the least communicative people when it comes to. To constantly being in touch.

Right.

That I like. Like very few texts.

Very.

Like she could lose her phone for a week and not care.

Right.

And, you know, whereas I would be, you know, searching up and down and using, you know, locate my phone on icloud.

And.

And.

Right. So.

Yeah.

What was her relationship with her dad? Was her dad.

Well, her dad and her really close?

Of course they are. Because she is probably enmeshed in some way with her dad, and that's why she's a little avoidant, too. So you're like kind of two avoidants together. And it works really nicely in a way.

Interesting.

It's interesting, right?

It's really interesting.

Like, it really is like, it really is like the map of your psyche. And once you start to understand that, then you can realize, okay, what's working for me, what isn't working for me, you can start to do the work to change it. It's fascinating. Like, we're really running on these operating systems that were programmed the first 17 years. Yeah.

To hammer this home for folks. The three steps, again, are.

Yeah. So I think the. I think the steps are identify your. The beliefs that don't serve you. Figure out their origin. So those are your core beliefs. Then figure out what. What the origin. What this origin story of them is, and then kind of replace them with the new beliefs that are true. Right. Because most of our beliefs are total lies. And you'll see it if you start to think about it. You'll start to see it happen. You know, all the time in your life, you're out and you're like, oh, you know, I feel like people don't feel like I fit in or I don't feel like I did good Enough and you'll start to realize the other thing it's related to is your family message. So with you. And it's fun, but we're not trying to psycho. What we're doing is giving this as an example so other people can think about themselves. So every family has a message that's spoken or implicit. And for example, in my family, I used to think the message was, you know, do great and be successful. But the actual message was don't fail. Don't screw it up. Everything I did, they were always scared something was going to go wrong or something was going to happen. And that's maybe what led me, maybe to the game in a sense was I was trying to find out the science so I wouldn't get rejected in, you know, meeting women. Right. You know, I wanted. I figured there's a right way to do everything. I don't want to fail. Yeah. I even have this group called the Society, which is this sort of hundred person mastermind group.

Yeah.

And the motto is that's how you and I met.

I think you.

Yeah.

You look for it a society meeting at an anti aging conference or an anti aging institute.

Yeah, yeah.

Where the whole focus is on longevity.

Yep. That was it. And the motto is, you only live once. Don't blow it. In a way, that's my family.

That's the motto of your entire society. You only live once.

And I only realized afterward that, shoot, I just took my family missing into that. So what's your family message?

I don't know if I could put it into a succinct in my family now, like, oh no. Back in river and Terran or growing.

Up and all that matters when for the stuff we're talking about is the first 17 years.

I think you know what, to me it would be centered around something like. Have you ever seen that cartoon online called the Greenfield?

I might have.

Okay, well, the. I forget, is it like an old.

Newspaper cartoon with like a family?

No, it was one of. It was one of the very first like online animated cartoons.

Let's call it Green Cells. Is it after you?

I remember my brothers and I used to just like howl at it because there was like Nana Hooter this, this big huge like, like a woman in it with these giant hooters who were like she, she'd injure people with her hooters. And it. And like the, the. The theme for that show was we are the green fields. The mighty, mighty green fields. And it goes on. I don't remember the rest of it, but it Was. It was very much like that, where we were supposed to be the, the green fields, like the, the proud, mighty.

Right. So.

So the message is achieving like.

So the message, we are the green fields. And I haven't seen that, but the message is we are the green fields and we are the best.

Very, very unique snowflakes and the best.

Right.

Which that was. That was the message.

Yeah. Which is exactly how you live your life. Right?

Yeah.

Know the most.

Right.

You exceed and all in the. In the, you know, Spartan races and everything. And that's how you live your life. That's. You're living out that message. It's fascinating, right?

Yeah, it's.

It's. It's like we're programmed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Truly interesting.

And one of my main. I mean, the things I do the most is interview. Right. I've done that for Rolling Stone, the New York Times. That's really been my job. And what it is is because my mom would kind of come into my room when I was really young and tell about all the problems in her life and with my dad and stuff. And so I learned to have sort of an empathy for problems that I really, in life that I couldn't really understand. And that sort of set that up, that sort of model to be stepping in other people's worlds and understanding them and explaining them. It's fascinating, right?

It's super fascinating. You have written other books. We were just in your library. You've got lots and lots of books that you've written. One turn my head and it's actually way up there on my list of books to read. Your list of books to read is longer than my list of books to read, by the way.

Right.

You have a section on your shelf that's what, maybe there's 30 on there that you want to read. I think mine might be seven or eight right now and growing. Do you have the same problem where people just send you books out of the blue?

They do, but it doesn't mean I'm going to read those.

No, it doesn't mean I'm going to read.

They get in the way of what I want to read.

The way I'm wired is if it shows up and it's there, I kind of want to read it. I'll start to thumb through it. And then it's why I don't watch many movies is I can't start them and not finish them. Finish the story.

Oh, I'm the same way. My wife hates that me. But it's true. If I start a movie Even if it's bad, I need to make it to the end. Exactly. But I'm like, I just finished this article for Rolling Stone about fear, about the psychology and biology of fear. Because it's obviously a big thing in our nation right now with the election. And you see politicians, advertisers, other people exploiting fear. A lot of it's about how we make bad decisions around fear. But it was such a big article to write about fear. Rolling Stone also to step into the political kind of war happening in our culture right now that I really wanted to give up a thousand times. I really wanted to write my letter and say, this isn't for me. I'm not doing this. And I just push through and push through and push through. And then you get to a point where you do it and you're so happy you did it. And it's great. But I'm not. I'm like you. I'm not. I'm not a quitter. I don't give up on stuff. Yeah, well, finisher. But even of the really bad movies.

Yeah. You have a lot of books in there to finish. I do want to ask you, though, because you're such a prolific author. And again, like I mentioned, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Neil N E I L I'll link to all of Neil's books. I would like to ask you. I didn't forewarn you that I would ask you this question. I want to hear a few stories from your books. You have a book called the Dirt. Is that correct, that you wrote when you were following Motley Crue, the band around, just following them around the world on tour. What was one of the craziest things that happened in writing that book or one of the most memorable aspects of that book's creation that perhaps you. You haven't shared or that you'd like to share?

Well, I mean, I guess first let's consider the subject matter as Motley Crue. So we're not gonna be going. We're not gonna be going very deep here.

We're not gonna be talking about health.

Right. My interest in Motley Crue was. This was before the game. And these guys just seemed to be living the most decadent lifestyle ever. So I kind of wanted to tour with them and see what that was like. And I remember I was doing an article for them for a magazine, and that's how I met them. And we're going to get a dealt here. So, I mean, not in the language, but in the Visuals, I likes to call it explicit, mature themes. So I remember they were sitting around and this isn't the best story. This is what made me decide I wanted to write the book as a different person back then. And I think Tommy said, you know, remember that time that we were offered like $20 for any mother daughter that did the band? And then Nikki six was like, yeah, but, you know, then we started going broke because we were spending so much money. And then Vince goes and yeah, and then we decided to do it. Any mother, daughter, grandmother does the band. And Tommy did it and they would sit around telling these insane stories.

Does the band like screw the band member?

Right.

Mother.

It was first. It was for mother daughter. And that was happening so much. They did mother daughter grandmother. And so were they sitting around just telling these stories and like, just non stop or remember, like we used to just kind of rent Ferraris and then crash into the wall and rent another Ferrari. And like they just. It's almost like, here's the thing, if you're. This is the opposite of the philosophy that you just shared about radical personal responsibility, in a sense, and the way we're responsible for ourselves. What happens if you're sort of a rock star? Specifically more music than film. In film, you gotta get jobs and people have to like you for you to get jobs. In Rockstar, your job is to be a rock star and all these people around to just babysit you, to get you drugs, to put you on stage, to get you. I mean, I remember I was backstage and someone on the microphone. We're gonna get too crude. I'm not gonna say what they said, but they basically were on the walkie talkie and they said, we need this specific sexual act for the boss. And that was sort of brought in for them. And so basically, like you're in. It's an eternal hall pass to be an adolescent. And so there's no responsibility, get away with anything. And as long as you show up on stage, you're okay. I remember, like, would you say that.

Rogers are getting healthier, though? Like, I'm just curious for you, being a journalist for the Rolling Stones, running into a lot of these guys.

I'll tell you what, aging rock stars start to realize the toll they put on their bodies and get healthier, but that not all rock bands, by the way, I've toured so here, you know, I've toured, say with Beck or somebody, and he lives a very healthy lifestyle. And they watch. I wouldn't say very healthy, but they watch movies. It's hard to stay healthy on the road in a rock world. I was touring with a really healthy band and they still couldn't do the healthy stuff because there's just soda chips everywhere.

Right?

Everywhere you go. It's so hard to stay healthy on the road, but some people do it. But they'll travel with their own cook.

I was going to say you need to prepare in advance and take a lot of these meal replacement blends.

It's really hard. I mean, roadies, like the average life of a lifespan of a Roadie is like 50, 55, you know, at the most, you die soon. It's sad. I mean, that's so. But the. But the. Oh, but I remember the point that you. I remember once, my first book was with Marilyn Manson. And I remember I was at his house one night and he called.

What was that book?

The Long Hard Road out of Hell. And he called up his manager, he says, oh, I want to. I want to set the mannequin on fire and push it in the pool. Is that okay? And he's like, manager is just like, sure, do whatever you want. But literally, like, it's just stupid human tricks all day. They're just bored. And a lot of them get into drugs often because people on the road want to connect with them or they're just bored, they start doing drugs. So I guess I've been in a lot of worlds, so that's.

Yeah, you have been in a lot of worlds. You wrote Don't Try this At Home with Dave Navarro, how to Make Love Like a Porn Star, where you followed around porn star Jenna Jameson.

Right.

You wrote the Game, probably one of your more famous books. Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, how to Make Money Like a Porn Star, Rules of the Game. And then one that I think our audience might find pretty interesting and one that I'd like to hear your take on. Emergency. This book will save your life. The book with the picture. The picture on the front is like the fire. The thing that you pull down.

Yeah, the fire alarm.

To break the fire hydrant open or to break the case for the fire hydrant open. Emergency.

It's like the emergency pole.

It's like urban escape and.

Or what it's about. What's about. So the world we're living. Or so I kind of thought in a scary. It seemed to me like we're living in a scary world. Right. First of all, since 9 11, we live in a world where there are terror alerts every day. What's the terror alert today? What color is it? All of a sudden 911 changed the psyche of our nation and myself because all of a sudden you realize people on our soil could be here and try to hurt us. Then you. I remember I saw Hurricane Katrina and I thought realized oh, our government really can't protect it when their bodies floating the streets in New Orleans. You realize our government can't protect us from a natural disaster and they're not going to be able to rescue you. And so I started studying disasters and survival and preparedness. And literally if you talk to the fire department, the police department, they say if there is a disaster, you're on your own. You're on your own. They're gonna be putting out the big fire. The big problem. They're not gonna be able to deal with that. 911 is gonna be.

The random person walking through the street looking for water is not gonna be.

Yeah, exactly. Or broken leg or concussion. You know, like that's not any year any. Or shot. It's not gonna. Their system's gonna be overloading. They're gonna try to deal with the bigger stuff.

They're gonna be off fighting the zombies or attacking.

Hell yeah. And maybe if the whole system's not broken down, maybe three days later they'll get to you. And so I mean the first most basic thing that I learned is really if you don't have you know, a stockpile for at least two weeks, like you're stupid. Like have I. Sorry, I just call a lot of people stupid. It's just. Just really have enough food, water.

No, it makes sense. I'm shocked when I, when I walk into some people. So. And I'm a total prepper. Right. Like I have guns, gold, silver and people are going to be googling me to find out my address now. But, but yeah, I mean if crap hits the fan, I could survive for quite some.

Yeah. I'll show you my garage afterwards.

Two weeks.

Yeah, yeah. And get. If you just. But just have two like just have at least two weeks for the system to get back online. At the minimum, you know you can go as far as Ben and I if you want to kind of next level it. So what I did was. And it goes back to the father thing is I didn't have a father who took me say hunting like or taught me how to make a fire or do anything, change a tire, anything practical. And so I sort of just started learning how to be self sufficient, how to survive kind of like you do at your place, how to survive off the grid.

And I remember even in an urban.

Scenario Even in an urban scenario. So we. It ranged from one thing was, I think when you can survive for three days to a week in the wilderness with nothing but your clothes and a knife on your back. I. Sorry, your clothes on your back and a knife not in your back. A knife in your. Knife in your back. That would be hard to carry.

Clothes at your side.

Exactly. It's an. You, you, you have no fear anymore. You're. If you lose all your money, you're gonna be okay. You can survive, you know, you can live off the land. It's an amazing feeling to have. It's really, it's not just phys. It's really some emotional security. And then on the urban survival. And you've hung out with Kevin Reeve and the on point tactical people.

Yeah, on point tactical. I'm actually planning on doing one of their three day urban escape and evasion courses up in Seattle.

Great. And they have some great advance at the advanced one or the kind of first level.

I think I'm signing up for the advanced one just because I want to go from. Go straight into the fire pan.

They're both great. I would do them both. So what they do, what they teach is because the truth is a lot of the wilderness survival is. We're not really living, most of us in the wilderness anymore. We're living in an urban or suburban or rural environment. But it's not all nature. We have corrugated metal and we have all these other things.

Finding mushrooms in the forest might not be as important to you as figuring out a way to scale barbed wire.

Yeah, exactly. Or how do you break into the. You know that place that has food. Right, right. Like so really, if everyone's abandoned the area. So they teach you lock picking, they teach you how to escape from handcuffs, how to escape from how to get over barbed wire. How to. For one of the tests, you're handcuffed, put it in the trunk, a drive over or whatever, and you have to pop out of the handcuffs and escape from the trunk.

You did this. They threw you in the trunk handcuffed.

Yeah. You run with leg irons, you learn it all. Yeah. And there are a lot of people there who actually military who are maybe going over to Iraq or Syria or back then Afghanistan. So. And they might be caught behind enemy.

Is this also the course where they will attempt to chase you through the.

Streets and kidnap you, evade the final exam. You are handcuffed and zip tied to some of your classmates. You're driven off to the middle of nowhere and then you're Let out. So you have to escape, you have to run a mission. But there are bounty hunters looking for you throughout the city, and you have to sort of evade them. And I did, like, a very psychological trick, which was they paired, so you got in pairs. And I realized they're going to be looking for pairs, pairs of people. So I got onto social media and I said. I said, hey, I need five people to hang out with me. So I hung out in a group because I knew, like, visually they're looking for pairs that they see five people. They're not. Think they're not their students. So that's how it kind of social media. Well, you're allowed to prepare in advance.

Okay.

And what they're preparing was, is creating a cache. I have caches, by the way, like three of them. In la, a cache is where you bury your supplies. Right.

Wow.

So you can.

Before you do this course, you can go prep anything you want.

Yeah, you can go prep. So, like buries caches where you buried supplies. Yeah, I still have caches. Yeah.

You know, just like random parks and stuff.

Yeah. Different locations. I got water on Catalina Island.

It's a good idea.

I actually hid a cache and no one's found any other clues in the illustrations in the book to find the cache. And I hid one and gave people clues to find it, and no one's found it yet.

When I called you on the phone the other day, I think on your voicemail you said that had to do with that.

There's a hint. Yeah. My number's hidden in the book as well.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

And by the way, this book that we're talking about, just so you know, it's probably going to be the one that I would say might appeal the most to the folks listening in, because we've got a lot of adventurers and people who want to. Want to take on a challenge. But at the same time, we delved into some kind of deep stuff, too, and I think that's important. We went some places I didn't expect that we were going to go. But this other book, the Truth, also really interesting.

And maybe it's only because I just wrote it and it feels like Plant of my soul in a book. I would really. It's the emergency. The emergency stuff we're talking about, by the way, Take. Take this course, read that book. But like, doing that deep work on yourself will change everything. It can give you that winning edge. A lot of people don't succeed in life because they have an inward fear of failure. Or a fear of success. Some people are actually afraid of success because they feel like they're not worthy or they won't know what to do or just it's something they haven't experienced. We have these limiting beliefs that really screw up our lives and our relationships and cause self sabotage.

So if you've learned anything from this show and you're listening in, it is to go bury stuff in the woods near your house.

That's exactly the message it is. To make sure you mark it, though, on a GPS or something.

Exactly. Get yourself an oculus rift and also carry dumbbells back and forth across the bottom of the pool.

And then that's my family.

Also. Identify your limiting beliefs. Identify your limiting beliefs and identify your new belief.

Yeah, be a scientist of your own lows. Yeah.

Be a scientist of your own what lows?

Your low points.

A scientist of your own lows. Interesting. And that is how to hack your brain without smart drugs and so much more. I like it. All right, cool. Well, Neil, thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, it went to some interesting places.

It did. And if you're listening again, you can grab the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Neil N E I L and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield here with Neil Strauss signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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