The Meaning Of Life, Making Friends, Plant Medicines In The Bible, Daily Spiritual Routines, Rites Of Passage & More With Ben Greenfield & Aubrey Marcus.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

I love cultivating community. You know, I have a deep, deep network and many different communities. Some of that community over for dinner right after this podcast. Right.

A lot of guys are all thinking that every other guy is busy with their family. You know, a lot of times you send a text to be like, yes, exclamation mark. Let's do it. Thank you. Enjoy life. You can save your family and build community and not be grasping, grasping, grasping and rushing and stressing. And so help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Welcome, welcome, welcome. What you are about to hear is actually a podcast I recorded with my buddy Aubrey Marcus when I was in Austin, Texas. We sat down at his house and had a great and meaningful chat. I think you're gonna dig it. Aubry's a cool guy and always, always we have interesting discussions. So the show notes for everything Aubrey and I talk about, you can find@Benandaubry BenGreenfieldFitness.com Benandaubrey that's the way you do it from the get. Because I recorded my kitchen table sometimes, and I just. Just from the get go, from the start of the pod, I'll just say, hey, you're gonna hear FedEx, you're gonna hear UPS, you're gonna hear my dogs, you're gonna hear my wife and sons coming home from yoga and jiu jitsu and just roll with it, folks. You're at my house. So if you hear the cats. Well, here we are, cats copulating or whatever they're doing back there by the window.

Ben Greenfield.

Yes.

And our cat children. Well, not our cat children. Not me and you, but me and my wife's.

Yeah.

And they're going fucking wild.

This is purposeful. Do you do this with podcast guests just to kind of get on their nerves, let the cats unleash in the room?

Totally. Just let them run wild.

Right, Exactly.

Yeah.

And you practice for years, like, meditating with your cats.

Well, you rub yourself with salmon jerky regularly as an emulsifier.

I rub myself with salmon jerky as an emulsifier. I haven't tried salmon jerky yet. Tried coffee. Ground coffee works pretty well.

Yeah.

Ground coffee has a lot of use.

Trying to attract bears or cats. Yeah.

Have you ever used ground coffee as a meat rubber?

I have.

It's pretty good.

Pretty good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ground coffee and ground cacao nibs. Like, if you do the cacao, never Done cacao nibs. Pretty good. A little paprika.

Well, you are now the author of a cookbook, so, you know, you're kind of an authority on this.

Well, no, I wasn't. When I decided that I wanted to write a cookbook, I had total imposter syndrome. Then I wrote the cookbook because my wife's a really good cook. Like, she's a rancher girl, make everything from scratch. She taught my sons from like the age of four to make souffles and homemade raviolis and risotto. And, you know, they do meat cooks and roast chicken everything. And I kind of started to do a little bit of cooking. Like, I don't know, man.

We were in. We were in Hawaii. We spirit a bunch of fish. Yeah. Cook the little ones, right?

Yeah, I did cook the. Out of that pair of fish stuff with the avocado and the mango and the ground. What we do, like the mashed taro with coconut oil macadamia. But.

And then you would eat those little tiny ones. We got whole.

Yeah, those are good. Like a whole fried. Like the. One of the few times I'll have fried food is a whole fried fish where you can eat the tail and you can eat the head and like the whole thing's crunchy and fried. Kind of like an underground pig roast where the whole thing becomes edible. The ears, the cheeks. I just did a 150 pound underground pig roast for my wife's 40th birthday. And oh, my goodness, it was. It was absolutely amazing. Not only the meat, the flavor that the meat gets after it steams and cooks for 12 hours under the ground, but just the entire process, process of digging the pit and making the fire at 4am in the morning and burning it down to coals and then getting all these rocks. You don't get rocks from the river because they explode. So we use all these rocks. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so you stuff the pig with these rocks after they've heated on the fire for a couple of hours. And then you stuff the pig with banana leaves and you cut little slits all over in it and stuff all that with salt. You rub salt into it. And then it took five of us guys to carry it over into this junk giant pit that I had dug. We buried the pig, but before you bury it, you cover it with burlap sacks and a canopy and put about 3 gallons of water in there over the fire. And this steam just comes pouring up through the canopy. And then you cover that with dirt and you watch it for like an hour and Continue to cover up the steam holes and get it all kind of settled in bed. Then you walk away. And I had a temperature probe in the ass and a temperature probe in the shoulder. And once it hits about 145, that's past raw pork temperature. But you want to get up to like 185. So you got like, nice crunchy skin and everything's just super cooked. And so we dug up the pig. I had all the dinner guests arriving at 4. We were going to have dinner at 6. And I go out there at like 5:30. And it's about like 1:39, 1:40. And so I had 75 people at the party. So I called a bunch of the guys out, we dug up the pig, and we just started cutting slabs off it. And we finish it on the Traeger, which was actually pretty good with a bunch of Hawaiian barbecue sauce. Anyways, back to the cookbook.

What you see when you ate those fish? Yeah, that was one of those moments where, like, it's one of those times where I do a lot of things. They're kind of manly. And then there's sometimes I meet somebody and like, oh, wow. That's where this person is more manly than me.

Raw fish, we cook them up.

I know, but you ate the whole face. Yeah, I don't eat face.

That's where the DHA is.

And the face.

Okay, so. So that I just don't eat face. That entire pig's head is in my freezer. And when I get home, I'm gonna bake it with barbecue. I bet you are.

You're a facey son of a gun.

The nose, the ears. The cats are breaking stuff over here.

Yeah, Playing chess.

They're playing chess now. So the cookbook thing, though, I wanted to go ape nuts on molecular gastronomy and like biohacking food and smoothies and cocktails with ketones and sous vide ones and pressure cookers and smoking and combining different cooking methods. So that was why I wanted to do the cookbook, was just put all that together. And what happened was I learned so much along the way that I freaking love to cook. Now it's up there probably with my top few things to do. I play tennis. Not baby tennis like you, but real grown man tennis.

I will play you some grown man face eating motherfucker.

Pickle. Let's go. Pickle tennis. Pickle. Name. Pickle.

Pickle.

Pickle. And then, you know, like, like hanging out with my sons, playing guitar, sex and cooking. Like, I just.

Coming from the man who more Often than not, plays a baby guitar called a ukulele all the time. Not that I'm shitting on a ukulele. I like myself a ukulele.

Ukulele is right there with pickle for a baby word.

Yeah.

And so I. I put all this together. I did the cookbook, and at the end of the day, I just love to cook. I mean, the end of the day. Every day at our house, at the end of the day is a party. What I mean by that is we don't necessarily have people over, but we gather the. I can't say the boys anymore. We were talking about this before the podcast. Gather my son. Yeah. They've been through the rite of passage into adolescence, and I'm still working the boys word out of my vernacular, especially when I'm around them.

I think that's really rad. By the way, is just a side note. To stay on that tangent is to make it real. Like if you go through a rite of passage, everything shouldn't be the same afterwards. That your tribe, your family, your everybody should respond differently.

Oh, everything changes. Not only do you have a ceremony, not just a cutting of the cord ceremony, but they have a giveaway feast where they invite all the family, grandpa and grandma and uncles and aunts, and make a giant meal and give away gifts. And there was a ceremonial kind of fire afterwards, actually, up at Tim Corcoran's place. A previous podcast guest of yours, she's a great wilderness survival instructor and also facilitates rites of passage up there in Idaho. And when they come home, just the vibe is different in terms of the chores that they are expected to do and the amount to which they're expected to pitch in to help with the house. Or even something like the family dinners I was talking about, where they're preparing a lot more and expected to do more prep and cooking and cleanup and chopping and blending and helping dad and mom in the kitchen. Just everything is different in terms of what I expect of them and what they expect of themselves, and there's more responsibility. But at the end of the day, we all gather and it's like 7pm Work's done and we make a glorious meal together. We sit and play games for hour, hour and a half at dinner, we drink wine, we taste olive oil, we try different spices. It's just like this giant feast. And then we play music. We go up to the bedroom or up to the living room and play music, and they bust out the drums and the rat. And then we go up and we read stories for Like a half hour, just everybody laying in bed reading stories. And then we go to bed, and every single night's like that. And it's like my carrot on the end of a stick. Like when you're working during the day, you know, every night you get this grand party with your family. Yeah, it's just. It's so fun.

That's epic. I mean, I remember we didn't have that much ritual and intention to it with my family, but family dinners, you know, I had three older brothers, three younger sisters, and family dinners were a thing. My mom always would cook and then I would be there. I learned a bit how to cook just because I was always hungry and I was just kind of hanging out watching her. And I still like to cook, but it's different when it's just now it's just me and Vi and I'll cook for her sometimes. And I usually cook most of the meals. But it's a different type of thing, you know, it's like kind of like with Cooking for Two is different than cooking for a family, you know, or cooking for a dinner party or something like that.

It's a lot more chill, you know, because sometimes the boys, then my sons. There I go again. Have a youth group or have something going on in the evening. And so like every Monday night, my wife Jess and I have Scrabble night. And typically it's like sushi and sashimi. Cause I get this sashimi grade fish and I make little poke bowls and sushi rolls and little sushi bites and stuff like that. And we eat sushi and play Scrabble every Monday night for a couple hours. We'll play sometimes and then just go head to head on Scrabble. And river and Terran get home and they always want to know who won and how the game went. And sometimes they want us to leave the game board so they can see what kind of words we made and how well we played. But it is a different vibe. And there's always that temptation just let's go out to eat, let's order in from the restaurant. But yeah, with the whole family around, it's amazing. And then typically every Saturday or Sunday night, we just have a whole bunch of people over and do the same thing. With the exception being that we do all the sauna and ice beforehand. So I'll pile like six to eight guys in the sauna and we sit in there while the girls are all upstairs drinking cocktails or wine and hanging out in the living room. And typically I've got some Kind of meat on the smoker. And then all of us guys shuffle out to the cold pool and do the cold soak. And then we all come inside, famished, and have this grand feast. And then, same thing, we play music afterwards. Sometimes everybody squeezes into the bedroom for story time. And it's kind of what we do every night. But we just have a bunch of.

People over listening to that. People probably know you as fitness biohacking, human health kind of expert. I mean, you go real, real deep with all that. But there's no greater thing that you can do for the entirety of yourself, holistically, than the shit you're describing. Of course, you mentioned a few things. Hot, cold, blah, blah, blah. But that type of community, that type of family time, the type of fun, the joy and doing that, it supersedes all some kind of extreme tweak on the diet, where you're cutting all of this out and eliminating this and doing all this. When you have love and that kind of connection. I'll take that a thousand times over anything else, right? Like, that's the thing we know.

For example, one of the longest livid humans on record of late, Jeanne. I think her last name is Calment, from France. She lived a very long and happy life. She smoked a cigarette every day. She had a glass or a serving, I think of Scotch or whiskey or something like that. She was getting a little bit of hormesis from her alcohol and her carcinogens. And she was always with people. Lots of glorious family hangouts and people always in the living room. And that was one thing she was known for, was relationships and loves and family. And I really did not have a lot of that prior to Covid, because I was traveling. I was on an airplane every week. I was still racing, doing Spartans and triathlons. So I'd have a race once or twice a month. And I was rarely home to the extent where I felt any urge at all to build community. When I get home, I just want to be by myself or with my family. I just wanted to check out and take a breath before the next big trip. And when I had, I mean, there was a period of time where I had, like, nine solid months at home without going anywhere. The incentive to go, get to know the neighbors and to build a community and to start throwing dinner parties and to have people over and to get to know my own hometown with all these restaurants and museums and parks and hikes that had been neglecting for, like, two decades. I mean, it's completely changed the dynamic of Living in my city and my community. Like, I know my neighbors names and, you know, rode my bike through the neighborhood several months ago and just dropped off invitations in everybody's mailbox like a paperboy and threw this huge neighborhood party and realized I didn't even know like three quarters of the people who lived within a mile of me who. It turns out, they're all like 70 years old. It was kind of funny because we threw this huge neighborhood party and my sons were the only kids there, the only young people there, but still, the idea of community building and actually taking the reins because you assume that everybody else is like, they know it and they prioritize it and everybody else is out getting to know their neighbors, a lot of people aren't like, they just don't do that. And so if everybody were to go out and get to know their neighbors and throw a neighborhood party and have community dinners, whatever, every Saturday night or every Sunday night, and not only build the family community, but build a local community, I think that's one of the blessings of COVID actually, is people actually developing this amazing neighborhood and community community. And it's just been. It's been really special for me and transformative in terms of the joy that you have after four hours of hanging out with your neighbors and eating food and making music and chatting. It's far more fulfilling than whatever meditation, breath work in the sauna by yourself or any of the workouts or anything like that. It's just so meaningful.

It's interesting to talk about neighbors because I love cultivating community. Community is, you know, I have a deep, deep network in many different communities. You know, we're having some of that community over for dinner right after this podcast, right? And. But the idea of the, the idea of the neighborhood, it's always been like a fantasy, but not a. Not a reality that I believe in, you know, because I remember in college you'd go to a dorm room and then all of a sudden all of the people. And I lived in dorms for three years and you know, little cinder block blocks, but you get to know every. And it was amazing. I mean, it's like the least luxurious place I've ever lived in my life. But it was probably the most fun because it was a community like people's. When people were ready to hang, you just leave the door open and you just cruise down and be like, yo, you want to play NHL 99?

Yes, we're in.

Like, you want to do this? You want to go like, you know, beer keg jousting or what do you want to do? Like, let's. Let's do something and throw the football or, like, chip a. Chip a golf ball or go hoop or whatever else. Like, and you just walk and you're just. Just always around each other. And if you're eating, you don't eat alone. You just kind of cruise around, see who else is in there, cruise in, eat food. And I think so many people are drawn to that again, you know, and it's the idea that it's. You're. You're already there, I think is a cool idea to explore. And then the other cool idea to explore is like, curating that intentionally as well.

It's hard for men. At least I. I think the majority of men. It becomes harder to make friends. It becomes harder to set your ego and your habits and your safety aside, to actually have other guys over and have them into your domain and begin to branch out. Now I'm playing frisbee golf and paddleboarding and playing tennis and shooting hoops in the driveway and having guys over in the sauna and having these dinners where they're coming over with their families. And it's really cool because, you know, up until that point, I thought I had a lot of guy friends because I'm part of all these mastermind groups whenever I travel. You know, there's all these. These folks I'm hanging out with, but it's different when it's at home. And these are all people who just live a couple miles from you. My neighborhood's different. We're out in the middle of the forest. You know, really, a neighbor is somebody who's like a mile, a mile and a half away, minimum. But it's. I didn't really realize the absence of strong, close, geographically meaning male friends in my life until I really started branching out like that. And now it's just cool at the end of the day to know that you can pick up the phone or text somebody and have somebody meeting you at the river with a paddle board an hour later. And a lot of times you think, oh, they're busy. They're with their family. They're doing their own thing. But a lot of guys are all thinking that. That every other guy is busy with their family. You don't want both. But, you know, a lot of times you send a text to be like, yes, exclamation mark. Let's do it. Thank you. And then afterwards, everybody, you know, they'll text you and say, oh, thank you for doing that. I needed to get away, you know, and it's just. It's really cool for me.

It's one of the things that's really necessary for me to bond with men is doing something that allows, like, that initial bridge to be. To be made, you know, so that's. That can be pickleball. That could be basketball. You know, I made a really good new friend recently, and it was just like, you know, met him. Oh, yeah. You know, you play pickleball, I play pickleball. And then I always look at him like, do you really play pickleball? Or whatever. I was like, all right, we'll give it a go.

Visiting Instagram, looking through his story and his videos. Where's the shot of this guy played? But I just gotta. I gotta stop.

But he comes over and he, you know, plays a good game. And we have. And then we start talking in between games as other people are playing. And then. But that thing of like. Like competing together is a real key part of kind of branching out. So there's like the basketball squad now, the pickleball squad, and then there's a shooting squad and the tactical shooting squad, and then there's the, you know, the on it squad, on it workout squad. There's all of these different groups, and we have a men's group. And it's pretty cool to feel that starting to come together in all those ways. But for those people listening and just from my own advice, and maybe you're like me if you're. If you're a guy, like an activity, building it around that activity has been the thing that makes it so much.

Easier for men especially. And I read this in a book recently. I don't recall the name of the book, but men form friendships around activities, and women often form friendships in just like a social gathering setting. Not necessarily playing pickup basketball or pickleball or Frisbee or whatever, but just sitting around at a. A restaurant or in a living room or whatever the case may be. Men tend to form close friendships and bonding friendships around either doing hard things or doing adventures or just going out and playing together. And it's kind of funny because that happens to me sometimes. Like, I'll invite somebody out for frisbee golf, right? And the nature of frisbee golf is such that you don't do a lot of talking. Like you're off in two different directions throwing your Frisbee. You meet up at the hole, and you child, and then you throw again and off you go. But there's like this invisible bond that gets formed as you're just doing that same thing together that I think men especially tend to develop good friendships around.

And for women, I think that is something that it's not. Like it's not available there, but maybe the inclination isn't. I don't know. I feel like it's almost like a technology for community building that is underutilized by women. It's not because it's not that it doesn't work, because it absolutely does, but it's just. I think it's using the same kind of ideas to get around that. Because what I've seen a lot of times is women will kind of hang on, like, hang on to friends, like a lot like friends. That. Because it's not activity based. It's like, oh, I'm gonna go see so and so. But they're not really excited to see so and so. It's just like they've seen so and so for 20 years. They're totally different people now. But this is like a habitual thing. But because there's no activity that keeps it fresh and makes it like, all right, this is something interesting that we're doing. And if you can't keep up, well, you, you know, might not get invited to that activity. We'll find something else. But it keeps this thing like a. Like a river that's just the water is circulating or a healthy pond where there's always fresh water going in.

And let's face it, like, women in general are just naturally, for the most part, stronger social creatures.

Right.

I don't think they need as much built in technology and trickery as us guys do to make friends. My wife, you know, she's walking to a party and have like six friends. And I'll be standing there in the corner waiting for somebody to throw me a football or something so I can make a friend, you know?

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's very fair. That's very fair.

Yeah.

Community being probably the most important thing that we have. And we've talked about a lot of the other simple stuff. When you start to analyze someone, like, let's say you go in blank slate. You're looking at somebody and you start addressing, you know, some of the. Some of the other big things that you see people missing that you find really valuable things that aren't are inherently obvious. But where do you start? Where do you start looking?

I think that one thing that you and I both know a lot about that you can identify pretty quickly in someone is their connectivity to breath. Like, just the way that someone is breathing, you know, watching everything from Nasal breathing, to how they breathe in response to stress, to how they carry their breath when they're exercising or when they're speaking with you. That's one thing that I think should be built into the core educational curriculum of every young human on the face of the planet is the ability to be able to have an intimate understanding of the best dial that we have built into our physiology for amping up or amping down our nervous system. And so I think that breath and relationship with one's own breath is one thing that I think it's something that says a lot about a person, just how they breathe. So that'd be one that I think a lot of people are missing out.

On breathing way better right now after.

Yeah, yeah, they're like, oh, people are now judging me based on how I'm breathing.

Yeah, for sure.

Gotta make sure my belly button's visibly moving through my shirt now. I think that there are certain core practices, again, apart from exercise or biohacking or eating healthy, that are just built into my core now. For example, our morning and evening meditations that we do as a family, they're something that we now all do when we're traveling, when we're apart. We hold each other accountable. We gather every single morning on the porch. And typically, you know, these days I get up about 3:45 or 4:00am and I just, I work for like three or four hours. Not just work, but I do all my stretching and having my coffee and doing my red light and sometimes hitting the sauna or doing the cold pool. And you know, I like to have a lot of my day done now by about 8am but around 7:30 in terms of having like eaten the frog and gotten my body ready and feel like if nothing else happens, that's productive the whole rest of the day. I've actually made a really good dent in things. And I always just thought it was absolutely crazy when I would see guys like Jocko or whatever show their 4am clock. And I had lots of fears about that I'm gonna be tired in the afternoon. I'm not going to be able to make love with my wife because we're on different schedules now and she likes to sleep till 7 and I'm in bed now at like 9 and we're like ships passing in the night. And that didn't happen. The afternoon tiredness, I found is easily solved. Even if you're sleeping six hours with 10 to 30 minutes of a really good nap, it seems to replace a good 90 minute sleep cycle. And once I Found that out. It was one to two extra hours every single day.

That's the biggest thing for me. And that was. I think you might have turned me on to his book, Nick Littlehale's book, which guided a lot of those principles.

And a lot of people know about Nick. They talk more about Matthew Walker or Michael Bruce or.

I love Nick's philosophy. I really feel it, like somatically feel it to be true. That 30 minute, 20 to 30 minute nap is just as good as an extra an hour and a half.

Yeah, yeah. And it can be something like Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about, like a yoga NIDRA cycle. I like to use the non sleep depressive protocol. I like to use the new calm. That's typically what I'll do. And yeah, I'll put on some kind of device to shift me into that state even more quickly. Like an Apollo for the vibration therapy. Or like the HAP B is another one I really like. It'll simulate.

It's got that one. Haven't tried it yet.

Diabromine or caffeine or MDMA or CBD or melatonin or adenosine. It'll just simulate any of those. And I like that.

No way.

I like, like the cbd. Yeah, that's what they do. And they just added theobromine. I didn't even try it.

You plug in MDMA protocol.

Yeah, yeah, that'd be like the. I forget which one. I think that might be the social one. There's another one that's alcohol. I actually put. I put it on my son Taryn one night at dinner just to see, and he got all loopy and goofy. And when I put the alcohol one on, the best way I can describe it is that I feel like I've had three cocktails when I've had half a glass of wine.

So wait, how does this thing work? It's like a halo that goes around your head.

Exactly. It goes around your head or around your neck. It's a magnetic signal that's imprinted with the same frequency as whatever molecule that they're trying to simulate. And it causes the same electrical reaction within the cell. But the cool thing is, as soon as you flip it off, that molecule is no longer hanging around in your bloodstream. So I can have it on caffeine as soon as I turn it off. It's not as though I'm up for four hours with disrupted sleep. It's like as soon as you turn it off, the alertness goes away.

So how do you measure the frequency of a chemical Like MDMA or alcohol.

Giant underground silo built deep within the ground, protected from all other frequencies that you then isolate that molecule in and measure the magnetic.

Wait, you're not kidding.

Frequency. And the reason this sounds silly is because it sounds like I'm kidding. And then I talk to their scientist who does all this and that's basically what they have. Whoa, I thought, no, they've licensed this technology from some FDA medically cleared wearable that was originally designed for something like epileptic seizures or something like that. I forget. But they've done that same thing and I didn't really believe it until I started to use it. And it actually works remarkably well. Well, remarkably well. Yeah. But anyways, I put the CBD on for the nap. And back to the reason that I do that is because about 7:30 after I've kind of done all my morning stuff, I gathered the family on the porch and we all sit cross legged in the sunshine, or if it's the winter, we're in the living room by the fireplace and we basically all have a journal. And we close our eyes for one minute and just connect to our body. Just breathe and connect to our body. And then I have this little ding that goes on on the Insight timer app on my phone. I just have it programmed for seven minutes. So after the first minute, then it dings and for the next two minutes all we do is gratitude and we have our journal there that we can stop to write what it is we're grateful for about. But those two minutes is just all gratitude. Breathing the gratitude into your heart center and writing down what it is you're grateful for. Then the next two minutes are dwelling upon who it is you want to send positive emotions to that day, who you want to pray for, who you want to serve, who you want to help. And you write down that one person and you're just on them with laser focus the entire day. Whether it be just positive emotions you send their way, whether it's prayers, whether it's phone call, text, if they're someone local doing something nice for them, whether it's delivering dinner or just going up and knocking on their door, seeing they need help with anything. And then the final two minutes are just reconnecting to self. And then we finish with tapping. So when we're in that state, at the very end of the seven minutes, we'll tap over our heart center, over our wrist to create an anchor for that same feeling of peace that we developed after those seven minutes that we can then return to during times of stress the rest of the day with that anchor that we've set just by tapping in that same location. And so we then all get up and we do a giant family hug together and just hold each other for, like, a minute after we've done that meditation.

So the whole thing is eight minutes long.

It lasts about seven. Well, with the hug and everything, yeah, it's about eight minutes. And then I'll just ask about everybody's day. And that takes, like, two minutes. Okay, what's everybody doing today? Where are you going to be here? Where are you going to be here? And that way we can plan when's dinner going to start? When are we all going to meet? And then everybody's just off to the races the rest of the day. And I work from home, so we see each other and we cross paths throughout the day. And then at the end of the evening, right before we go to bed, we return back to those journals. We all close our eyes. In the morning, it's like a six count in, six count in or six count in six count out? Breathwork. In the evening, we go with a longer exhale. We'll do like, a four, eight breath work. You close your eyes and you watch yourself like a movie character through the whole day. Like, how did I wake up? What did I do? What did I read in the morning? How did I spend my morning? What did I have for breakfast? What did I do between breakfast and lunch? What did I eat for lunch? How did I spend my afternoon? How did I spend my evening? And the entire time you're watching yourself like a movie character in your mind, in the third person, you're asking yourself, what good did I do this day? Meaning, what was I proud of that character about? Where was I rooting for them? Where did I know that they were making the right decision? What could I have done better this day? Where'd that character fail? Where do I feel like they were more the villain than the hero? Where was I not rooting for them? Where do I wish I could have leapt through that screen and told them to make a different decision? That's not the right decision. And as we're visualizing that, you have permission to take pauses and write down in your journal what you're discovering. And then finally, the last question we write down in the journals is, where was I most connected to my purpose? Where's our most purpose filled today? Because what happens is sequentially, as you go through that every single day, you not only identify, even if you don't have a purpose statement, Even though we all do. And I think it's important. You can almost reverse engineer your purpose statement when you're doing this. Practice by identifying as you go through. Okay, this is where I was in the zone, smile on my face. Time was flying by as though I had no awareness of time. I felt as though this was coming easy to me. I felt like I was using a unique skill set I was born with or doing something I was really good at when I was a kid. Something that makes me happy and fills me with joy now. But you write down what it was that was the most purpose filled activity of your day and it stacks. Because if there's something you failed at, like for me, I was writing down for like a week, didn't play my guitar today, didn't play my manly guitar, not my pickle ukulele, but the full on big boy guitar. You caught me, right? I got through like a week of that. And. And for a while we would share. We would actually say, what good did I do? But we decided to start keeping it private. And if you want to share, you can. But it actually not only kind of.

Well, it might make it performative almost to a certain extent. To a certain extent.

You think about it, you think about what I'm getting and sometimes it'll be something super embarrassing. You just don't want to share it. You just want to keep it to yourself and dwell with that and work on it yourself. But one night, this was like three months ago. We finish it all up and then afterwards we'll say a prayer and then we all just go to bed. That's after story time, that's after dinner, that's after everything. I finish writing. I'm like, I am never going to write this down again. For the past week I've written that I wanted. So now, even if it's just two minutes, even if it's one song, even if it's the G, D, C easiest song on the face of the planet. I take out my guitar and I at least strum it. So. So I never have to be watching that movie character in my mind wondering why they're not doing that. One thing they know brings them joy. They know they love. They know just connects them to the frequency of music and the joy that they get from it. But they're skipping it every day. And so these things stack or I was most purpose filled when I was writing today. I was most purpose filled when I was writing today. I was most purpose filled when I was writing today. Oh hell, maybe God made me to be an author, maybe that's actually something that I'm going to be happy doing.

Till I'm 90 or at least for now.

Right, exactly. This is the chapter in my life where that's what I need to be doing because that's what was most purpose filled. So back to your question. I think that that's another thing. In addition to community building and breath work, this idea of beginning your day and ending your day, bookending the day with a practice like that that is palatable in terms of time investments, where you're going to keep doing it every day, you know, because I've tried like TM, you know, the two times 20 minutes a day, I just like can't do it. But seven minutes in the morning, you know, four to five minutes in the evening with the family, you know, and having that accountability with the family and knowing that even, you know, the young men in our house, they can handle that and they can sit with that amount of time, it's pretty meaningful. So that's another big win for us. Yeah.

Really listening to you say that, I mean, there's truly no reason the cost benefit of what you just described is so wildly in favor. Favor of doing it. Yeah, like there's very few things that I've ever heard that have a more favorable cost benefit than what you just described.

And you know, it's a win too because. Because there's a lot of stuff that, you know, noodles I've thrown at the wall to see if they stick for home practices, you know, like whether. Whether or not we would share what we'd written in our journals or the amount because. Because we all read scripture every morning. Like how much are you going to read? Like, is it a section, is it a chapter, is it a discovered is that. For example, with the journaling practice, I do it when I travel whether or not any family's around or not, because it's something that just freaking works. That's one metric for me is if I keep doing it even when nobody's around and nobody's watching, it's something that I know is really valuable.

When you have a lot of these possibilities, a lot of these interests, a lot of these different things and.

Giving.

Yourself permission to and actually structuring how you allot time to all of these various things. This is something that, you know, I personally find challenging because I have so many things that I love to do and I have so many things that I can be productive in and so many things like if I have an extra hour, how I spend that hour could be so many different options that I could, like, offer. I could create something, some piece of content I could write. I could, you know, mastermind this new product that we're coming out with. Or I could practice pool, or I could play, you know, play music, or I could learn how to dj, which I'm endeavoring to do. But there's so many things that it's like I. I'll do something, but everything feels like it's on such a long loop that sometimes it'll be like, Fuck, it's been 25 days since I played my flute. But I have been doing other stuff, but I feel like it's preventing me from real progress in anything.

It feels like horizontal, shallow living because of the number of opportunities that are presented as a result of a. The connectivity that we have that enables us to dip our toes into just about any hobby or interest or book or food or. Or skill on the face of the planet that for thousands of years we just never would have known about. Like, we wouldn't have known that the sport of underwater torpedo Existing underwater torpedo league.

Are you in one?

No, I want to get. No, I'm up in Washington State, and it's not California, but yeah, it's on my radar. Or. Or the 10 packages that show up at lunchtime every day at my house right before I'm about to take my relaxing lunch. And it's like three devices that I have to plug in and figure out and download the app for. And I feel guilty if it sits in the corner neglected, because I know I have to get to it someday because it's part of my, quote, job to test these things out and let the world know about whether the magnetic device that they hide underneath the solo or the silo deep in the underground works or not. And then there's the two different musical instruments, the banjo and the little miniature hammer dulcimer and the tiny didgeridoo box. So you can learn circular breathing, but really you'd be happy with just the guitar. And so it's hard also when you are in the position of being an influencer who's highly accessible by all these companies who are exposing you to lots of things. Companies and people plus, yeah, all the things that everybody else gets exposed to just on social media and the Internet in terms of cool new things to learn and to do and the FOMO that you get with that. And so what's really helped me out with that, in addition to just knowing what really satisfies your purpose in life and actually Analyzing that at the end of the day and playing your day like a movie in your mind to see what minutes and what hours are wasted on things that maybe weren't that fulfilling is the idea, which I suppose I would say is more of a belief that I am going to live forever. I'm going to live forever. And I believe that there will be a new heaven and a new earth and that heaven is not going to be a bunch of us sitting on a cloud, on a fluffy white cloud with angel wings, like bored out of our minds playing a harp or some shit. And neither do I think that heaven is going to be some amazing, blissed out, DMT infused journey where you're just floating and you have that sensation if you don't have a care in the world and you're just, your body is just laid out on one giant blanket with colors going through your head and you feel as though you could just lay there forever. And as anybody who's gone through any type of significant journey has experienced that one spot during a journey where you're just like, I could be here forever. This is amazing. I could just live with this forever. Just pure peace. Just leave me here. Leave all these molecules in my bloodstream. I'm good. I'm not guilty about not accomplishing anything in life. This is just a perfect place. I don't think heaven will be like that either. I think that heaven will just be exactly earth as it is now, but perfect, where we can still create and we can still build and we can still draw and color and take baths and play music and make love and be with our pets and do everything that I really think that we are intended to do in the first place, but in a pure and clean and toxin free and sin free environment where everything's just perfect. And so because of that, when an opportunity gets presented to me, or a new skill or a new instrument, or watercolor versus oil versus scratchboard versus sculpting versus glassblowing, I think to myself, you know what? I have infinity. I have infinity to be able to do any of this stuff. Because I think that that's what heaven's going to be like. And I realize not everybody believes that, but dude, like once that kind of like light bulb went on in my head like that, that whole idea of just being guilty about not doing all the things just vanished.

That's huge. I mean, obviously I have a different religious ideology and cosmology than you do, but.

Which is why I'm going to behead you after this podcast. Take you Bonus home to my family. I'm going to paint a little mark on my chest of another one I took down, another one I took down.

Let's go. You will play big tennis and then Highlander. There can be only one afterwards, but first we play big tennis. But ultimately the idea that because there is some value to the stoic belief, memento mori, remember, you're going to die, because it gives prescience to the, the, the preciousness of the moments we have. But it can also, if you twist it just slightly off and, and miss the point, it can put you in a rush, you know, And I feel that myself, like I'm in a hurry way too much. But when you're talking, you know, the idea of, like, live like you're going to live forever, there's something like my whole body just went, ah, yeah, that feels good, right?

Let's say you're not going to live forever. Or let's say it's mental trickery. It's pretty damn good mental trickery. And it works. And you do have to, as you've just alluded to, strike a balance. That doesn't mean you lay in a hammock all day, because you're going to live forever. So it doesn't matter. There's a great book called don't waste your life by an author I really like named John Piper. And he gets into this idea. He never wants to be 70 years old with his wife, driving golf carts around a beach and fishing for hours on end. He wants to help people and love others and. And I think about it this way. If you were going to. Let's just play the game. If you were going to live forever and if you knew that you were going to experience immense joy and the ability to do anything, everything pleasurable on a perfect earth for the rest of all time.

I don't even need a fucking perfect Earth. I'll take this earth. This Earth is pretty rad.

Yeah. This Earth is amazing.

And I think almost this is a choice to make it at least close to heaven. We have that choice available.

Yeah. And my belief is that the world's getting better. I don't believe in the coming apocalypse or anything. I think the world is getting better and better. We've got speed bumps along the way. But I'm actually, technically, you'd call me a post millennial Christian. And what that means is that I believe that all the talk in the Bible about, in Revelations about dragons and apocalypse and people think this, the Chinese black helicopters and the beast is Bill Gates and What I believe all that was just prophesying the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem and that everything you read about is just that took place between about 60 and 80 A.D. and that from that point on the world gets better and better and better and we're not going to hell in a handbasket. And yeah, we have little things that happen along the way, but my belief is this Earth is just gradually becoming more and more perfect. And so I have a very positive mindset when it comes to that. But, but back to that mind game. If you did believe that you were going to live forever and it was going to be that good and you did have all this time on your hands, what would be the number one thing that you would do? And the conclusion that I've come to is the number one thing that you would do is you would go tell everybody, hey look, you're going to live forever. You guys slow down, you can enjoy life, you can save your family and build community and not be grasping, grasping, grasping and rushing and stressing. And so basically that comes down to some semblance of the golden rule, right? If you were going to live forever, what's the number one thing you would do? You would love others. Because by loving others you're spreading that wealth, you're spreading that message. And so I think that, and love.

The Earth too because obviously if we make a hell out of our environment.

By loving the Earth, you are loving others. And that's definitely not, I mean that's another thing that I'm not ashamed of when it comes to being a Christian. But it's certainly something that I think is sad, this idea of what is called in Christianity the Dominion Mandate. God made the planet and handed over to human beings and told them, take dominion over this Earth, it is yours. And so we build factories and we strip oil from the ground and we overfish and we in some cases over hunt and we eat Doritos and Cheetos and monocropped soy and wheat at the church potlucks. And the Dominion Mandate was a call to be a gardener, to care tenderly for this planet that we've been placed upon and to foster animal husbandry and taking care of the soil and learning all the plants and knowing the sacred intelligence of all the herbs and growing things that were placed around us. And instead this post Reformation scientism, logic, rationalism based Christianity has resulted in the complete loss of a connection to the sacred intelligence of the planet and caring for it. Because God forbid we be all woo woo like the pagan shamans and Be whatever. Talking to vines. And so, yeah, there's this total disconnect that I think is. Is kind of sad to a certain extent because, well, that can we live. We live in a magical world.

And this conversation like this is probably helping push that evolution is. The thing is, is that people think because the Bible is fixed and no new passages are there, that a religion like Christianity isn't evolving. Well, bullshit. I mean, look at the Christianity of the 1700s, 1600s and the 1400s Inquisition. Look at it now. Look at it from the 80s when people were still, still promoting hellfire and brimstone and gays were all going to hell. And now you look at that and like the whole thing is evolving. It is far more living than people realize. And that gives me actually a lot of. I like that. I like when things are like, flexible and things can be replenished and refreshed with and re evaluated.

Even something as simple as plant medicines, which are. Are often vilified, especially in Christianity, because they are considered to be the equivalent of a lack of sobriety, of drunkenness, which is warned against in the Bible for what I think would be sound societal reasons. Right. You don't want a bunch of drunk people walking the streets, throwing bottles at windows and getting in fights and whatever. That makes sense. Right? It's just built in societal stability. But when you go back and you look at even something like the Bible and you look at two different forms of cinnamon, Ceylon and cassia, Asian cinnamon, that technically are acting as cytochrome enzyme inhibitors and allowing for other molecules to stay active in the bloodstream for longer periods of time. And those are combined with, for example, myrrh and frankincense and even some forms of cannabis. And there's actually a tree that's very much like ayahuasca. And I'm blanking on the title. Yes, the acacia tree. There's lots of examples, especially among early Jewish practices, of these type of things being used we read about in the Song of Solomon. These crazy mixes that when you look at them and you analyze them chemically, are technically very strong aphrodisiacs. Or you look at.

Have you ever tried to make one?

No, I haven't. It's actually on my list of things to do. I'm gonna live forever. No, I have. So I vaporize sometimes organic tobacco with a little bit of cannabis with essential oils like blue lotus or nutmeg or myrrh or frankincense. I haven't done the exact recipes that are in the Bible yet because there's two different things that are used I'm gonna live for forever. And trust me, we got Bible bag, volcano knife. I have an Evernote document that's full of things to make, things to do and things. And both these are on the anointing oil and the incense used in early tabernacle worship. If you look at the ingredient list of those, you're looking at a bunch of cytochrome enzyme inhibitors and topical ingredients that when apply transdermally.

What is it?

It basically allows any molecule that is co ingested or co applied along with it to stay active in the bloodstream for a longer period time. So almost like an ioi, similar concept as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, right? Very similar concept. Same enzyme pathways, everything. But when you look at, for example, the anointing oil of myrrh and frankincense and cinnamon and cannabis and these different extracts that were applied as an ointment, and then you look at what was burnt as an incense again, frankincense, myrrh, cannabis, things that would arguably be considered psychoactive substances that were burned in essentially like a four layer thick, thick small room this tiny, called the holy of holies inside the tabernacle, which not to blaspheme or make this sound the wrong way, but essentially almost like a tiny hot box to a certain extent. And the priest literally had a chain around his ankles. People could track whether or not he passed out in there from this heavy incense in the air that was a highly psychedelic substance. And.

And.

To be able to intentionally interact with the divine in that environment and for the exact instructions and recipes for those to be given out in the Bible. And then for guys like Brian Marascu, who wrote the Immortality Key, recently showed that very similar entheogens may have been used in things like the Eucharist in terms of the spices that were mixed with the wines. And he has a massive book about that. When you put all this together, what you come down to is the fact that to disconnect ourselves, especially in Christianity, from that sacred intelligence and from those type of blends that were used to enhance a spiritual experience or to connect more deeply with the divine, I think it's a little bit sad. And I in no way would argue that therefore these type of things should be unleashed upon the planet. And everybody know, at church on Sunday morning should be drinking a, you know, Eucharist based wine spiced with frankincense and myrrh and cannabis. Because I also believe that certain people are called and certain people are not. Right? The Role of a priest or a shaman or anyone in that position traditionally has typically been to go to that place on behalf of the people and to come back like an oracle with the message it depends.

Depends on the culture. Like, one of the cultures that I'm very familiar with, which was Don Howard's lineage, was Shavin. And so the priests in Shavin would offer huachuma, which eventually the church renamed San Pedro because it was the gateway to heaven. So that's why they call it San Pedro cactus. Right. It's incredibly hard, open, masculine derived experience. But in Shavin, which flourished for about 800 years, and during that 800 years is marked by the fact that there was no sign of warfare amongst neighboring tribes and communities. One of the reasons why is they would offer wachuma to all pilgrims who came through, didn't have to pay for it, whatever. They often brought gifts, but they would just offer huachuma to anyone who wanted to come. Big, massive ceremonies of wachuma. And that medicine in particular, I think is well suited for that. And obviously, I'm sure they had a great technology about how to manage such a situation. But then they also had vilca, which is a combination of five MeO, DMT, NN, DMT and bufotonine. And they didn't give that to everybody. That was just for the priests down in the catacombs in the black. And they would snort that, and that was their medicine, and then they offered it for everybody. So there's so many different ways to look at this. And I'm not saying that, you know.

I think it depends on the substance for everybody. Like henbane, for example, right? Which is very similar, like what the Viking berserkers would use. That's another molecule that you can find in ayahuasca. I mean, if you look. Look at the flower, Levite priest's headdress. It's the henbane flower, Right. It's not animeda. But that molecule is found in ayahuasca. I don't know if it's found in anime. I don't know if there's henbane in anime or not. But is that nicotine, by the way, that you just popped?

It is. You want some?

I have a piece of nicotine gum in my pocket and I'm just gonna pop that right now.

Yeah, let's go.

I mean, if we're both going to be on the same substance here, so. But an example of what you've just alluded to would be like manna that came down from heaven, right, Which Most likely was an ergo based fungus that very similar to a Lysergamide, technically more like an LSA than an lsd, but a fungus like substance that falls from heaven, that spoils overnight, that must be therefore baked and cooked and prepared properly. But it's very, very likely that's, that's what manna was. And so technically you would have all the Israelites wandering around the desert who actually had this total feel good chemical from ergo, from manna in their bloodstream. And that would be an example. And at the risk of 8,000 pastors calling down hellfire and brimstone on me for blaspheming right now, I'm not saying that there is concrete evidence that the Israelites were wandering around the desert on lsd, but what I am saying is that there is a great deal of evidence that plant medicines in many different formats were an enormous part of the entire Judeo Christian religion. That I think that post Reformation scientism and logical thought and this idea of pure sobriety has kind of beaten out of us. And I think that there are more cons to that than pros.

I almost, you know, a lot of people who've had issues with addiction in their family or something, they will equate doing plant medicine with drunkenness, you know, or addiction. And you know, I think in my conversations with Luke Story, who came from that, you know, and when I met him, he was in his sobriety for 15 years or something like that. And classic sobriety, aa sobriety, nothing, nothing on nothing, nothing. You know, the conversations that we've had in my own experience, even though I've never had addiction issues, but a lot of times these medicines are what Don Howard would call Claragens. And it almost creates a hyper sobriety in which on them you're more sober than you are in your daily life. When you're addicted to your drama, you're addicted to your own thought patterns. You're addicted to the conditioning of the world around you and all of these other endogenous chemicals that are keeping you locked in a certain, certain prison of perception. And all of a sudden you break three and you're like, oh shit, I'm awake and aware for the first time.

It's not an escape, it's an altered comma, elevated state of consciousness, which many people who have not been in that state simply do not understand. And they say, well, that's just like you had two bottles of wine and it's nothing at all like that. It's like your brain has become a 20x supercomputer with merging of the left and right hemispheric activity and the ability to be able to creatively solve problems or to have an enhanced spiritual experience. And so yeah, it's entirely different. But back to the Bible. There's firm instructions in that book that say if this is causing your brother or sister to stumble, just leave it at the door when you're hanging out with them. Like if wine is something that you know, someone has a previous history of abuse with, with or addiction to, or their parents were alcoholics or there's some sort of negative association for them with it that would make it very uncomfortable for them or tempting for them or problematic for them if you were to consume that in your presence. And that could be meat, it could be vegetables, it could be plant medicines, it could be wine. Best to just leave it alone. Which I think is sound advice. So yeah, you do need to be careful about someone's previous history and their association.

But and, and people can abuse plant medicines and people. I've even seen one example at least of someone who is using ayahuasca as an escape. And then ultimately that's not the use for it. And you know, that takes the roots that come from the feet of being on the earth and sweating and living normal life and it, you just kind of went off into the air for quite a while. And that's like the risk of using these things as an escapism. So a lot of it is intention, absolutely for sure.

But it's the fruits too. The fruits that it produces are pretty self explanatory. And if someone has massively transformed their relationships in a very positive way and their life and their productivity and their clarity and their vision and their purpose, those are pretty darn good fruits in my opinion.

Isn't there a saying like you will know them by their fruits, you will.

Know them by their fruits. In many cases, Jesus in the Bible.

He would.

He would actually curse a tree that had bad fruits, that had a bad vine that didn't produce. There's even a book, and I think it's called the vine that gets into this. Just this idea of stepping back and analyzing. And this is another reason I like that evening process of self examination, analyzing which activities are producing which fruits so that you're aware. And yeah, you can certainly tell back to the abuse of plant medicines how, how you know when they're producing good fruits in someone and when they're not. I think that's something else to pay a lot of attention to for anything in life really.

You know, I just had a really powerful, sober encounter with. At least, maybe it was perhaps my own imagination of Christ. Perhaps it was Christ. You know, you never. I always say whatever. If I encounter an entity, a being, you know, I leave it to. It might be my own projection of them or whatever. But I was going through and I was tapping into, you know, a lot of my own, you know, fear about certain things in life and my stress. The fear is always behind the stress, you know, and where that was coming from and what I'm afraid of. And there was also shame in. Associated with that fear and fear of fully stepping into my purpose in life, fully, fully accepting what I believe I'm here to do. And. And there was the shame about stepping into it. And there's a fear of what might happen. And. And I was being kind of facilitated by a great kind of body worker who guides you through this meditation. And I think she helped open that conduit. But Jesus came through, and I was in this. And she really encouraged me to go into that fear and go into that shame and really feel it and then get help. And Jesus is kind of who I called and who came to help, help. And Jesus came in the most loving way, and he saw me in my fear and he saw me in my shame, and he just looked at me and he says, me too. And that was one of the most profound moments that I've had. And again, this is sober. But it was this beautiful thing of. I think we sometimes think of Jesus as only the perfect being, not ever having had, you know, these. These doubts, these fears, this not feeling pain, just being unbelievably courageous through. But when he looked and said, yeah, me too, I was like, oh, man, thank God. Oh, wow. You too?

All right.

I guess I'm doing okay.

Me too. Like. Like a freaking deity who had to take on, like, a broken human fleshly body and have to, like, be born and. And shit his diaper and get zits and. And, you know, and get cuts and scars and have to, you know, work all day in the hot weather, you know, as a carpenter, and then eventually got the worst curse ever imagined. Nailed to a tree, tortured, beaten. And then at that point, basically none of the pain or the shame had even started because then he had to take on all the shame and sin and suffering that anybody ever had experienced for the Holocaust and Genghis Khan and World War I, World War II, and every rape and every murder. Like, he had to live through all of that in order to actually take on the sin of the world. So when you saw Jesus, and Jesus said, me too, I mean, he really, really meant it. Like, there was nothing shameful or horrific or painful that has happened to anyone. Like the deepest, most shameful thing that he did not experience himself. And that's why you can actually leave all that shame behind, is because he took on all of that. So, yeah, the me too isn't just like, yeah, whatever, I got cut up too, and fell and bruised my knee when I was a kid and I had to deal with peer pressure. No, it's like every last torture that you can ever imagine, every last piece of flesh being ripped off your body. Like, all of that.

Yeah. And I had also, you know, in that. In the meditation, he gave me a. He gave me a cross. And on the cross was inscribed me too, as like a reminder. It was like something. Because there was a message like, I need to remember this. So when I get lost in my own, you know, self reproach, my own self judgment to remember, like, you know, as. As all of us. Because if you embrace the totality of everything, you know, life, like Christ consciousness is. It's the all, it's the divine. And of course, I'm putting in some of my own beliefs in here. We'd have slightly different beliefs, but that's why we're going to battle after this. Yeah, that's why we. Highlander, when we're done. But fundamentally. And then I understood, and that was like a beautiful reminder to me, like, all right, me too. And so it removed all that judgment. But then the cross itself, you know, was a really powerful symbol that I haven't really connected with because I've almost taken it as just a signifier of your belief in Christianity. But, you know, I understood that there was that moment before, you know, when he knew he was going to be crucified, and he still said yes, you know, but he was going through it that night. I mean, you read about it. God, why have you forsaken me? Right? There was this, like, feeling of abandonment, like, why is this my path?

Crying bloody tears, Right?

Like, but he still said yes. And there was this amazing courage. And so to me, that cross. Cross was like, reframed in my own mind at least, is like, holy. That is a symbol of ultimate courage to say yes to no matter what life throws at you, right? And just be like, okay, is.

Is a symbol of courage. And up to a certain point was. It would basically be, if you were to get a cross tattooed on you, the equivalent of getting, like, an electric chair or a Noose tattooed on you. It's like, why the hell would you do that like that. It's a, it's a freaking curse. It's a sign of murder. It's a sign of death. And not only that, a sign of like the worst, that the worst criminal would be given. I believe it was Cicero who wrote how it was the most horrific death imaginable, like a crucifixion. Why would anybody want to get something like that tattooed or put on the door of a church or something like that? But now it no longer means that. Now it means victory. Now it means courage. Now it means complete setting aside of shame. Now it means a new heaven and a new earth.

Earth.

And it's like this symbol that went from being a curse to being a blessing, that went from being the most horrific thing imaginable to being the most glorious promise available. And so, yeah, like, the cross is something different now than I think it was before Jesus. And yeah, I think it's a super powerful symbol now.

Yeah. You know, as we go through this conversation though, we're starting to make the, a, a lot of different, different categories of things that once they're fulfilled, you live this rich, rich life. I mean, we've talked about community and we've talked about these meditative practices and connection to nature and then the rituals, the rites of passage that your children run through the, you know, then everything that you're about. But then also this kind of belief and this, this deep belief that you have. And everybody's belief doesn't have to be the same, but really, really walking the walk of that belief, not just kind of intellectually kind of believing it, but like really living, living in your belief and that's deeply fulfilling. And then having your belief and then your purpose and then everything woven together and guiding principles, like live like you're going to live forever. You've painted this beautiful picture in this show of really kind of a formula for living a life that's as rich as can possibly be lived in, giving the opportunity to turn this life into, into heaven. You know, I was on Tim Ferriss's show and he said, if you going to make a billboard, you know, put one thing onto the billboard, what would it be? And I was like, well, it'd be welcome to heaven population. Everyone, you know, like, like, here we are, everybody. Like, here's our. Here we got it. Like, here we got it. Are we going to make it that or we not? You know, this is, this is a choice we have, right?

And, and, and it does really come back down to that foundational principle that was pretty much the essence of Jesus and that was love other people. Love other people. And it sounds so simple, but once you start to frame everything that you do in the day, including the way that you build your business, how many lives are you going to touch? How many people are you going to love? At the end of the day, the budget does have to be attended to, but will take care of itself if the bottom line is how many people can we reach? How many people can we help? How many people can we love? And it's the same with our personal lives too. Just this idea of not living selfishly, not grasping at straws because you have that confidence that you're going to live forever. And then knowing that with that life, the very best thing you can do is just go out and love other people. And loving other people means loving the planet. It means loving God, it means loving yourself.

But it's all framed more blurry between all those things. When we try to pretend we think, oh, this is me and this is my house and then this is my neighbors and my. It's like we make separations between this or my mind and my body and my spirit, everything is so much more blurry than we realize. Like we're interacting with each other's field constantly. And that which we cast aside and cast judgment on it cannot escape from casting judgment upon ourself because we're connected. That thing that we do that's bad to somebody else, that hurts somebody else, hurts us even if we pretend that it doesn't. This is the unblinding when we really start to see that, right?

And one thing, I guess this would be my last comment on the living forever part is many people will say, well, Jesus was like Mother Teresa to a certain extent. You just live in poverty. Like he said to the rich young ruler in the Bible, just leave everything and follow me. So are we so supposed to just forsake our houses, forsake our wealth, forsake our families, forsake our nice clothes and just waltz off into the sunset in the desert in our sandals to go out and just serve other people the rest of our lives? But that is, I think, almost like a guilt producing version of Christianity and in some cases other religions, this idea that therefore our best calling is to forsake everything, including ourselves, our wealth, our success, success to serve and love other people. I think there's certain people that are certainly called to that. But when I ask myself like, dude, so if there's a divine Being and a God. And I believe that there is, and he made us, and I believe that he did. Why did he make us? Why do you just throw this rock down here with a bunch of greenery and ocean and moon and the sun and some stars and then throw a bunch of people on it? And it's because if I'm at home and I have this home that I've built and this property that I've created and this life that I've given to my sons and my wife, and I look out my office window and I see them playing cornhole in the backyard and eating a Popsicle and my wife sitting there in the hammock and drinking a glass of wine and maybe scrolling through some cool stuff on this magical little box that's got an Instagram on it. And it's actually kind of a cool creation. And then the sun's shining and the grass is green, and I look out at all that, and I'm super proud and really happy about what I made for my family. This is really cool. I could just stand here and take immense joy out of just seeing them savor this tiny creation that I've helped to build. Right? And when I think about God, you know, he makes this magical planet that we kind of fucked up a little bit, but hopefully we're gonna get on track. And I think that we are on track. It's this amazing creation that he made just because it's pleasurable to watch all this cool, all these human beings and these people and life and the breath of life. And now they're enjoying all this stuff and amazing steaks and food and wine and pickleball and ukulele and sitting around and talking and hearing the sound frequency of each other's voices. And after this, our taste buds will be entertained with some amazing food. And then we'll sleep in bliss and have crazy dreams and visions and wake up and have an adventure that brings a lot of joy to the Creator. And so I also describe myself as basically like a hedonistic Christian in the fact that I believe that one of the things that we can do that makes God the happiest is to savor his creation and actually own nice things and drive a cool car fast on the highway and have a comfortable house. And yes, don't live so far beyond your means that you aren't able to love others and still have that philosophy and that approach to spreading the wealth and loving other people. But don't forget to savor God's creation, too. We do kind of live in a fun little big circle. And it's nice to also be able to savor that. So I think that you need some amount of balance between loving others, loving yourself, savoring God's creation, but also sacrificing yourself to others. And I think it's a balancing act.

But yeah, it's a balance between working to save the world and savor the world. Don't get lost on either side.

Side. Save the world and save the world. Yeah, that's, that's, that's a perfect way to put it.

We've been talking about living forever and you actually, you know, probably know a lot about the different longevity practices, technology, and you've probably talked to a lot of people, a lot more people than I have. And I know there's some people who make this their life work to figure out how to extend human life. If you were going to actually, you know, from put on your scientific hat, not your religious hat, and say, like, all right, how long?

There it is, flip it around, there it is.

How long is a human being going to live? And at what point do we have to get to arrive healthy to this start point to where we get to be 150 or we get to be 200?

Right. Well, we know based on current epidemiological data and the extent to which people have lengthened their lifespans in the past two to three decades, decades, we've gone from 115 to 117, 121 tops. And we've kind of leveled out. We're not going much longer than about 115 to 121 right now. Now, there are a lot of people walking the face of the planet right now. And many people have predicted that the first person who's ever going to live to 150 in a long time is already alive. And that's based on medical care, that's based on technology. Everything's from hyperbaric oxygen therapy to NAD to stem cell therapy to all of these things that are the longevity hacks that people are doing now. So theoretically we could be extending lifespan, but from yeast to rodents to fruit flies, there's not a lot of evidence that we can appreciably increase far past about 121 where we're at right now. I would be pleased if I lived to 120 plus. But realistically, it would be pretty shocking if people started living much longer than 115 to 121 years old. But there's a capability built into mammals and even humans. If you look at the bowhead whale or the naked mole rat. Everything from carbon dioxide tolerance to the ability to be able to repair damaged proteins and DNA, DNA that there are built in repair mechanisms that could technically allow us to go for a longer period of time. And when you look at like whatever, you know, Methuselah in the Bible or some of these genealogies that go way back, people living 800, 900 years old, you also have to take into account, and there's a wonderful book I'm reading right now, just about this tale of a massive flood where all the waters fell from heaven. And nearly every culture on the, on the face of the planet has this story of some massive flood that occurs that wipes out everything and changes the Earth's atmosphere. Well, if there was a covering of water above the planet that had changed the gases and the atmospheric pressure and a lot of things that can influence longevity and carbon dioxide in the bloodstream and the nutrient density of plants and many other factors, and that all fell from the sky and flooded the planet and completely changed some of those gases and the atmospheric pressure. And just the way that the Earth operates, that the lifespan that people were able to have prior to that event is probably no longer realistic. I don't know if that's the case, but I really would be surprised if in the next few years we're seeing anything much longer than about 121 or so. Just based on everything that's.

There are those people out there that are like, look, if you can make it relatively healthy enough, another 10, 15 years, you got a good shot at 150. You know, what is the argument that they're trying to make that you think that makes that make sense, that when.

You stack a lot of these hacks that theoretically you could repair DNA at a fast enough rate, you could stave off immune system degradation at a fast enough rate, you could stave off the natural mutations that are built in to us. Again from a DNA repair standpoint at a fast enough rate, and you can build up carbon dioxide tolerance and you can repair tissue more quickly in things like hyperbaric chambers and use red light therapy and all these things that when you stack all of that, theoretically you could increase lifespan, but it's all just on paper right now. I haven't seen any hard evidence that that's actually possible. Yeah, I mean, some rodents, for example, they're showing a 20 to 30% increase in lifespan. But these are, are like highly controlled laboratory environments with specially bred rats and mice. And there's a Lot of confounding variables when it comes to humans, but does it matter?

Ultimately it hasn't. And that's why I haven't invited these particular guys on my show who are really proposing that. Because I get in there in the 90s, fuck, I'm stoked. That's a long ass life.

If you're making maximum. For me, it's about, about impact. It's not about like if I can make the. But if I can increase my health span to the point where the impact I'm making with whatever lifespan that I'm genetically programmed to have approximately, you know, I'm super happy with that. So it's just about taking care of your body so that you can, you can make the biggest impact that you.

Can and enjoy it for the longest.

Right, exactly. So I think we even had this discussion before. I don't want to be one of those guys who's cold and hungry and libido and lives an extra, let's say I live an extra 30 years, but I'm spending 20 of those extra 30 years in a hyperbaric chamber or a cold tank, or fasting or reducing my ejaculation frequency or anything else that we know could potentially help out a little bit with longevity. You got to draw the line at some point. And so yeah, I think that especially in the health world, there are people who are, who are kind of returning back to your idea a little while ago. Like how do I choose between all these activities? They're fritting away a lot of times trying to live a long time when they could just be out enjoying life and loving other people.

You talk about ejaculation frequency. I heard something from Kyle that was talking about how every time you ejaculate you're depleting magnesium and zinc through your ejaculate.

Not very much. I don't know if you've seen the size of ejaculate. I just did my daddy kit recently to kind of store my sperm and just check up on what the count is and everything. So I of course got to witness that. And the amount of minerals I'm depleting. I would imagine that by me putting some sea salt on my steak tonight and taking a little zinc tomorrow morning, that's easily one load right there. So yeah, that whole concept is more about like your jing, your chi, your life force. It's more about that than nutrients or minerals. Because yeah, your, your body does not grew through, I would say anything more than like a very, very small meal in terms of the Amount of nutrients and minerals necessary to make semen good. Or sperm.

So, yeah, coming every day then. It's fine. I'm back to it.

Yeah. I mean, you know, there's this whole idea of giving your energy away. I. I get the whole concept, but the concept is not one of nutrient or mineral depletion.

Right, right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. Ben, this is a beautiful conversation, man.

That was a great thing to end on, too. Like, how much sea salt do you need to make enough sperm? And at what point do your adrenal glands just not have enough to go around? And you're going to be out playing pickleball out there and you're going to cramp. You'll be like, oh, shit, I came last night. I didn't take my sea salt this morning. I'm sorry, guys. I got to go in the house. House. That's right.

You know, I mean, we got to keep it real for people, you know?

That's right.

Talk about.

That's right.

All different things for your health, for.

Your heart, Save the world, savor the world, and feed your semen.

Hashtag feed your semen.

That's right.

Yeah, Tadpoles need to eat. That's right, baby tadpoles got to eat.

That's right.

Anything you got going on, you want to tell people about.

You know what we kind of did when we were talking about the cookbook. Yeah. Because, like, I don't know, I think it hits Amazon, like, this week. And, yeah, it's got some. Some tasty in there, so it's dope.

Yeah, I've enjoyed cruising through it. Yeah. Beautiful, man.

Cool.

Great to have you, brother. Thanks for having me for tuning in. Peace.

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