The Renegade Pharmacist: How To Increase The Effects Of Psilocybin, The Secrets Of Colostrum, Fixing Constipation With Breathwork & More

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast, everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. Hey, I am so excited for this interview. I was just, I was taking notes right and left. You must go to the show notes after you listen to this because it's just the amount of information, like we take a little while to warm up, in my opinion. But man, once we dive in, we dive in. So this one's with the renegade pharmacist. Is his name the renegade pharmacist? Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I was in Tallinn, Estonia several months ago. I gathered a few guys to go visit the sauna with me and one dude that showed up turned out to be this total breathwork ninja. He's Wim Hof's right hand man and has done some courses with Wim Hof, known as the Iceman, the guy who uses breath to make himself relatively impervious to the cold and enhance his immune system. And this gentleman who's with me on the podcast today is actually trained as a pharmacist. He's from the uk. He's trained as a pharmacist. So he has this broad knowledge of pharmacological medicine, but he actually got a chronic illness that he'll go into today and he used these special forms of breath work to heal himself. Now, some of you before may have heard me talk about how I do this. It's very similar. It's not holotropic breathwork, but it's kind of like it in that I pretty much, for lack of a better description, can get myself high as a freaking kite and supercharge my body with oxygen and, and nitric oxide with this special one hour breathwork protocol that I do while laying on my back in my sauna. Admittedly, I do actually take a little bit of psilocybin and lion's mane before I do this protocol, just because it seems to Enhance it. But the dude who invented it, like, it's all choreographed to drum work and music, and it tells you when to breathe and when to stop and when to hold your breath. Is actually my guest on today's show. He is known as the Renegade Pharmacist, which is a sexy title, but his actual name is Niraj. And Niraj, I'm not even gonna try to butcher your last name. So how do you pronounce your last name?

You can say Nayak. That's the most accurate way to say it.

Noak.

Nayak. Nayak. Or like Naik. Like Nike Air Max.

Like Nike without, like. Like Nike shoes without the long ears.

That's it.

Okay.

Yeah, the way the British people say Nike.

Cool. And also, by the way, before you delve into your. Your story, I should mention a couple of things. A, for anybody listening in, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Renegade for the show notes. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com renegade just like it sounds. And then also you should know that Niraj has created what is the world's most famous infographics on his website, like, one of the most viral infographics of all time, particularly in the health sector. And it is an infographic entitled what happens one hour after drinking a Can of Coke. And it's quite entertaining. I'll link to that as well. So, Niraj, first of all, welcome to the show. And second of all, of course, the million dollar question. How did you develop the world's most famous infographic?

That's a great, great question to start with. Well, firstly, I want to say it's an absolute pleasure being on this call. It's been a long time coming because I don't listen to many podcasts, but yours is one of the few that I got hooked onto in the beginning because it's just such a treasure chest of knowledge. And so I became a total junkie of your podcast. So to be on your show right now is a real honor. So, yeah, I want to give you a load of kudos for that. Well, how did it all start? So actually, it was kind of. I mean, there's a long story, but I'll try and make it as short and concise as possible. I became good friends with this guy called Uri Geller, who is, like, one of the most famous, like, controversial psychics on the planet. And he's, like, amazing with making stuff happen, like attracting people into it. Like, Michael Jackson was like, his best man at his wedding, and who was.

The best man in his wedding, Michael.

Jackson, he's a guy called Urugella. He was the guy who's famous of bending spoons. You know, the whole shirt. The scene in the Matrix is kind of inspired by him. But we became friends for a while and he always, he said to me as one thing was there's only one thing worse than bad publicity, and that's no publicity. And he really loved the whole mission. The renegade pharmacist mission was about my backstory with being in the healthcare industry and then healing myself from a chronic disease. And I really wanted to get my knowledge out there. So one of the things I observed really bad, like as a serious problem was the link I saw there was a real link between fizzy sugary drinks that people drank and metabolic diseases. It was just very obvious.

No kidding.

Yeah, but like you'd be surprised like back in the time when I was really working as a community pharmacist back in the mid 2000s, how like kind of ignorant doctors were medical profession was to this. And so I'd written this infographic which was based on some like other research that was out there and I put together a whole article based on my experience of getting people off fizzy drinks and getting on to more healthy things. And I, I got known as like the renegade pharmacist. It's a long story of how I ended up there. But what happened was since I met him and he basically really made me think about publicity and I do all these crazy rituals in the sauna like you do with breathing techniques and stuff. And I just one day really meditated on like, I really want to get like. I was really frustrated with how dumbed down the healthcare system is and how hard it is to just get alternative knowledge taken seriously, especially in places like the uk. And literally, I'm not kidding, like a week later I was checking my email and suddenly I had like Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, Independent. I had like the Radio one in Mumbai. I had like the news co au, all these huge, huge like media outlets, all on my case about this infographic that this guy had shared on Truth Theory, which is this blog that's quite popular. And it suddenly blew up. It became like for two weeks running, Facebook used to show like the top trending articles. They don't kind of show anymore for some reason, but it was the number one trending article on Facebook for like two weeks running. I had like over a million hits to my site in literally like few weeks.

So. So for you, what's. What sparked it was this dude from what'd you call it?

Truth Viral Truth Theory. Truth Theory was the blog published it first. Yeah.

So they shared it and then it just got caught up by all these news media outlets.

Yeah. And like I think there's over 60,000 like sites linking to that one article. So what it did was it gave my own website so much authority. For those of you who are geeks about SEO, I had like the heads of one of the big publishing companies, you know, mindvalley, who, you know, one of the SEO wizards. He basically said what's happened to your site can only be explained like an act of God because people would spend millions trying to create that kind of power of authority of your website. So I now as a result of that have really strong ability to rank for the keywords related to the things that I'm really passionate about. Yeah. So I'm helping a lot of people like get more awareness, get knowledge and heal people from these autoimmune conditions that if you look on, if you type in, for example, one of the symptoms that I was suffering from really badly with ulcera colitis is blood in stool. It gets about 10, about 100,000 to like 2 million searches a month. Like it's a serious problem. Like, you know, bleeding from stool is scary. But if you go on there, most of the websites on there are just scaremongering, fear mongering, kind of government funded sites or Wikipedia, things like that that basically just tell you this is incurable, that there's no cure, you're going to be on drugs for the rest of your life. Just like the information I received from the consultant. So now if you go on there, like my site's one of the ones up there that actually shows you there's another way, there's another path.

Yeah.

And I've helped so many people as a result of that. So it's like been super blessed, you know, like, so I have to like now like do what I can to help as many people.

Yeah, I want to, I want to talk about that and how you healed yourself. But a, hopefully this isn't boring for people who aren't kind of like, you know, Internet, I guess, people who make a living on the Internet. But man, getting an infographic to go viral is one of the best things you can do for your business. And a lot of people are building their business now around infographics, like having people develop because you can get people from like, you know, what's it called, upwork or I think elance is another one. Or some folks will do it for like five bucks on this website called Fiverr. You can have amazing infographics made out of articles that you write and then simply disseminate those across the four corners of the Internet planet. And you do have to kind of get lucky and keep your fingers crossed. But it's this concept of creating good infographics and then being everywhere. I've actually, I've thought about all the articles I write at Ben Greenfield Fitness, getting them turned into infographics. I just haven't really done it yet. But I mean, you know, I write 3,000, 5,000 word articles. It'd be be so easy to just get them turned into graphics and spread around the Internet. I guess I just need to hire somebody to do it. But the Coke one that you did, it actually is kind of interesting. A lot of people just hear about how sugar is acidic, period, and the high fructose corn syrup is going to make you obese. But you actually get into a lot of other things like how the phosphoric acid binds calcium and magnesium and zinc in the lower intestines and some of the urinary excretion of calcium and some of the adjustments in neurotransmitters. It's pretty interesting. Have you done one, by the way, for Diet Coke? Yeah.

Yeah. So that was the follow up, and that also went massively viral. So those two articles, like, generated so much publicity for me. I was on Fox News. Fox News did a whole show on it. Like they actually. On a daytime tv, they had my infographic up there and they were going through it and they had a Harvard doctor backing up everything I said. It was insane. Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

I know. It's actually really good too. Like the combination of caffeine and aspartame. You talk about how you get that excitotoxin release that basically exhausts your brain by overstimulating the neuroreceptors. I need to send this to. There's a guy who's been on the show before, the dude who runs Quest Nutrition, Ron Pena. He talked about he drinks a lot of Diet Coke. And we had a little bit of a debate. And he said, well, you could shower in Diet Coke without getting sticky. There's such trace amounts of this artificial sweetener in it. But I think there's a little bit more artificial sweetener in there than most people think. And I will link to this infographic as well for people who want to check that one out. But I want to turn to some practical tips for people and the topic at hand, and you can kind of delve into your story here, but I know that you were a pharmacist in the UK and as you've already alluded to, you began to experience some pretty intense digestive issues and ulcerative colitis. And. And I'd love to hear your story a little bit and kind of dive into some of these alternative methods that you use to heal yourself.

Totally, yeah, I'd love to. So basically, I actually worked my way up to the head office of like one of the biggest supermarket chains in the uk, which is owned by Walmart. And what happened was I got very good at getting people off the drugs in the pharmacies and I created this healthy shopping list service where you, a pharmacist, would write out healthy shopping lists based on people's conditions. And this was actually, again, very controversial because there was very little awareness in the mainstream about the effect of diet and nutrition on your health. I mean, even like we're talking like in this was like 2009, right? So you would think that we would have more awareness of that. But in the uk, people really kind of like behind when it came to, especially doctors, when it came to like diet and nutrition. And I just came up very simple kind of method of getting people off drugs, especially chronic use of like, things like blood pressure medications, diabetic medications, just by getting people off fizzy drinks or getting them to swap, you know, like processed ready meals, they're full of sugar with just healthy things that they can make themselves. And you'd be surprised at how few people actually even knew how to cook their own food. It was. It was amazing. So what happened was the Walmart loved this idea of creating a healthy shopping service on their website, but the previous employer hated it. Actually, they actually fired me for my job for mismanaging the pharmacy. I mean, that's another story in itself. But I ended up getting into this amazing position where I could help millions of people in the uk. But what happened was about six months into it, the director, who actually was like a renegade director in the company, he left to become like the vice president of Amazon in the UK and left me in this kind of extremely cutthroat corporate world where everyone's like working cubicles, you have to like, you know, really kind of book your time to speak to any of any authority. It was a real weird system. Like, it was just a very cold environment. And I suddenly was faced with the fact that the legal team and a few other people just thought that my idea was Way too renegade, too controversial to go out on a mainstream way in the way that I created it. So they tried to water everything down that I said. Any kind of claim was taken out, everything was wore down. And also like they're big corporations so they have to be very careful of what they say. But everything that I was talking, I'm talking about then has now been become like way more mainstream knowledge. Like the fact that fats, essential oils are good for you and sugar is not good for you and causes heart disease. Just simple things like that back then were so controversial, you know. So I ended up like faced with a situation where I had to go back to being a pharmacist. And this was the most soul destroying profession, you know, like you can imagine. Like there's more people now leaving the pharmacy profession than joining it. So you know, I was really scared. Like fear, like the fear just crept inside and it was a fear of like what is going on with humanity. Like I'm trying to help people but I'm getting shut down by a company that I thought had good values. And I saw so much corruption as well within this corporation that I mean that's a whole, I could write a whole book on that. But basically I ended up getting the symptoms of colitis at this point and slowly it turned into well, disease like ulcerating conditions. Is fear manifest like. Or negative emotions manifested as physical symptoms and the ulcerative colitis kicked in.

Is that pretty typical for ulcerative colitis to kick in in response to stre versus diet or for you is it a combination of both? I mean it sounds like you're already aware of eating healthy so maybe it was more psychological related, but I'm just curious if that's common.

I think it was pretty much like psychological. So I mean I, okay, I, when I was university I destroyed my gut as a lot of people do with like alcohol and I was pretty, I was in the rave music scene.

Join the club. I used to party hop with, with, with a bottle of Everclear and I into, you know, a few parties a night and, and jam with whatever jungle juice they had there. And that's, that's how I lived in college for about four years.

Yeah man, and alcohol is the worst thing for the gut, man. It destroys everything. I mean like in moderation it actually can kill some of the bad bacteria but in high doses like we do at university, it just kills everything. So I already had a pretty bad digestive system from university, but, but it was a stress that broke me that Fear manifests. I see this over and over again, that the trigger for most people when they have autoimmune conditions is some emotional trauma that is manifested at that point in their life. And quite often just with changing the perception of the illness, you can actually reverse some of the symptoms. And that's why breath work can actually help because it changes your emotional state quite dramatically. But that's what happened. So I ended up becoming housebound. I couldn't leave. I was so shedding blood like 40 times a day. I was ready to, oh yeah, I was, I was ready to give it all up. Like, I was ready to, to call it, you know, a day, like a life, you know, because I, I had no life. Like, I, I lost like three stone in weight. I. The doctors told me, you're gonna be on drugs for the rest of your life. I was faced with either being a guinea pig for a drug that's never been tested before or have my colon removed and then be crapping a bag for the rest of my life. So the age of like 31, it was like so depressing to hear that. So luckily, like they say, God stands for gift of desperation, right? And right at that moment of absolute desperation, like somebody came to me who's like, I'm forever indebted to. She's now a very close friend of our family, Swami Ambikananda. She runs one of the top yoga schools in the uk. She regularly goes on mainstream media to talk about yoga. She's quite a spokesperson for Yoga Now. And she actually came to the rescue. She lived in the same area and she basically said to me, look, you've actually got a gift. If you can heal yourself now with your knowledge, your scientific background, your passion, you could be an amazing role model and inspiration to other people. So she basically really changed my perception immediately then and gave me some hope. And she said, look, you can heal this. Here's the evidence why. And she had cured herself from cancer in the past. She had actually even had a heart, heart disease at one point, which triggered her into becoming a yogi in the first place. So I believed her. I, like, I believed her. So I went for it. And I wasn't very spiritual back then. I wasn't tool into this stuff. I'm very kind of left brain in that way. Like I really need science, you know, I need evidence to prove to me these woo woo things where they were. So anyway, I kind of surrendered to her and followed the basic principles of pranayama, yoga, meditation, and some ayurvedic principles. Which we can talk about as well, because I know you like your, your subjects like that. So I literally just within a few months was completely back to full health. And it was a combination of something that you know very well, colostrum breath work from Pranayama, and a change of perception, my mind and just basically creating the right environment for the gut microbiome. Because a lot of the diseases of autoimmune begin with the gut. So that's also an Ayurvedic principle. That is most disease, majority of disease begins in the gut. And so they most Ayurvedic treatment starts with firstly the mind, because the mind is actually the true source of all this. But the gut mind connection has now been known.

What are, what are some examples of Ayurvedic principles that are used to heal the gut?

Okay, well, one of them is colostrum, because colostrum actually comes from. Is the first milking of a cow. Right. So Ayurvedic doctors thousands of years ago knew that the cows have two parts of the milk, the first milk and then normal milk. And the first milk actually is very, very rich in immunofactors, growth factors. It's like a complete food with all the vitamins and amino acids that you need.

Yeah, I use colostrum as a staple in my diet. I don't use it all the time because it is a pretty potent. And this is actually useful for muscle gain. It's a pretty potent insulin like growth factor precursor and can increase growth hormone even in people who don't want to take growth hormone injections or athletes who can't because they're competing in sports that are sanctioned for doping. And growth hormone is banned. Colostrum is amazing for that as well. But it's also why I cycle it. Like I want to do kind of press pulse cycling to have my body go into higher mtor activation, higher IGF1, and then I kind of cycle it off to go back into cellular autophagy and cleanup. But I mean, man, I'll let you continue explaining how amazing colostrum is. We keep going.

Yeah, yeah. So it's really good for digestive health. So what happens is the reason why it's very simple principle. So the cows are given colostrum by the mother because baby calves, they don't have a form perfectly formed digestive tract yet. So the colostrum comes in and allows the cow to actually use normal food like proper adult. The adult cow would have. Same thing for humans. Humans, the first milk that you're going to drink is colostrum. The colostrum comes down and it actually gives us our first immune system. It gives us the first fully formed digestive tract so that we can actually digest food better. Now the cool thing is, is that if you didn't get enough colostrum as a baby, and I actually saw this coloration actually like mothers who didn't breastfeed their babies for long enough or just didn't breastfeed them at all. Because Nestle also made a big campaign to get to fool everyone into using powdered milk instead of colostrum and first milk and breastfeeding. And so what happened was there's a whole nation actually in Africa, this actually happened where mothers were deluded into using Nestle instead of breastfeeding their babies. And then so many children were born with problems in Africa. This was a horrible thing that happened. But this was also happening in the uk, America, even to this day. So I actually didn't fully get as much colostrum as I should have got. I know a lot of people who have ulcerative colitis have had some of that issue. And the quality of the colostrum is also important. So you know your mother's emotional state will have impacted the quality of the colostrum that you get.

Geez.

The cool thing is, is that you can actually use cow colostrum. You can use bovine colostrum. So cow's colostrum has a perfect translation into humans. And the cow produces four times the amount of colostrum that the calf needs. So farmers extract the excess, which they then put into banks to actually give to calves that are not getting enough because the mother's not producing enough for some reason. So then the excess of that is then taken freeze dried and used for human consumption consumption, so no calf is harmed in the process. And that means that we can now use cow colostrum as a healing tool for all these issues that are now being more and more prevalent, which is especially digestive tract related gut issues, ibs, leaky gut. Leaky gut is a huge problem that people just still not fully aware of, especially doctors. And this is what I had. I had like stress induced leaky gut syndrome, which I think triggered then also colitis. And the colostrum was magic. It just, it's so powerful. But again, I'm like you, I don't take it all the time. I like, I take it now and then.

What about dosage on colostrum? Are there any standardizations with dosage? I mean, for you as a pharmacist I'm sure stuff like that is important.

Yeah, super important. So basically you have to get the right source of colostrum. The colostrum has to be full fat, whole fat colostrum, because that's where most of the nutrition is contained in colostrum is the fat. And the fat is also like essential for you to absorb the nutrients properly. So there's a lot of colostrum out there, different brands, and majority of it actually is where the fat's been removed and it's not going to be as effective. I've tried those brands, they don't work anywhere near as good as full fat, whole fat colostrum. So that's the first thing you need to go for that. And you need big doses in the beginning. Like you want like two or three massive tablespoons and you want to take it raw so not with anything else. You put it in your mouth, like the whole tablespoon. And it's a bit weird at first because the texture of it is quite clumpy, so it's a bit dry.

So this is a.

You kind of.

Are you doing a powder?

Powder? Yeah. I always go recommend powders, actually. But some people, they need the caps because if you really want to get it into the. Into the intestines, you need the caps. So the caps can. Some. Some cap. Some companies make entericoated caps. That helps. And some people have problems with swallowing and things like that. I prefer to use. The reason why I prefer to use the powder is because a lot of the colostrum is absorbed in the guts. Sorry. Not in the gut, in the gums. So you put it in the gums, really? Yeah, yeah. This is the thing that not people know too much. You put into the gums and you just swallow. You like kind of let it stick into your mouth. You make into a little bowl and you just leave it and you suck it kind of for about 5, 10 minutes and then you swallow it. And then it kind of absorbs a bit through your gums because the gums are great absorption source so that your stomach acid doesn't kind of destroy or denature it. And then the rest, because you create like a saliva ball, the saliva will allow it to pass better through the gut into the. Into the intestines.

That's interesting because I know some people. There's one product, I think it's called Sovereign Colostrum that is popular on Amazon. It's like a liposomal delivery. It sounds like if you're kind of like letting it sit in your Mouth as you've described, that that type of delivery mechanism might not be 100% necessary.

Yeah, yeah, maybe. I just think that you shouldn't adulterate colostrum. It should be exactly how it comes, you know, like obviously you got to freeze dry it, but I think that you shouldn't change it. So I don't know about Sovereign. I think they're one of the defatted ones, but I just don't think you should remove the fat at all.

Well, if people go to the show notes, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Renegade I'll put links to a few different forms of colostrum up there as well as I'll get Neeraj's info on the one that he takes and include a link to that as well in the show notes for you guys. I know that we really want to focus on breath work, but before we take a deep dive into breathwork, in addition to colostrum, were there other Ayurvedic strategies that you found to be particularly effective for gut issues brought on by stress?

Yeah, so Ayurveda actually is a whole complete kind of medical science on. It's a holistic science from India. So it has thousands of years of kind of history to it. And you have to understand Ayurveda from a perspective of the mind and body are one. You can't separate the mind and body. And the most chronic diseases like long term disease, a disruption in the spiritual nature of a person. So when you go off your spiritual alignment or it's usually when you start to feel a lot of negative emotions. So fear, grief, sorrow, sadness, if you hold on to anger, grudges, you know, if you blame, if you're a blaming kind of person, which I was at that time, I like, I hated the world, man. I'd lost my love for the planet. You know, I really become disillusioned. I stopped believing in God or the higher power. All of these things like led to me getting really sick. And so the first thing with Ayurveda is to retain, regain your emotional balance. And actually Ayurveda is all about balance. It's about creating a balance and harmony in your system. So like the thing with Ayurveda is that there would be, it's like a prescription. So you'd have yogic postures, you'd have pranayama techniques, you'd have different kind of diet protocols based on your energy types. So Ayurveda takes into account that you are, you're not all the same. Everyone's an individual and not one size fits all. The problem with modern medicine, this reductionist scientific way of looking at the world and putting averages on everyone is that it actually it's completely against what the human nature is. Humans are irrational, we're illogical and we are not. We can't be like compartmentalized into averages and numbers because what's your average cholesterol or what's high for you may be low for me, you know, and what's a good blood pressure for you maybe completely different from me. So this reduction in scientific view does is completely. Doesn't work. Like there's so many side effects caused by drugs and by creating averages and things like that. So the Ayurveda takes into account that we all have characteristics. And through those characteristics you can work out your personality type, your energy type and through that you can create more of a holistic approach to the health so you can work out exactly the right kinds of foods. For someone like yourself who's a very strong pitter energy fire, entrepreneurially driven, strong muscular physique, you could know that because.

You'Ve never done like an analysis on me. You just know that I can do.

That from just your voice by looking at your presence.

I mean and you are spot on. I've read many Ayurvedic books and taken many Ayurvedic quizzes and I am full on pitta.

Yeah. So I can tell that from just your appearance. But it goes a bit deeper in Ayurveda like so you may have certain mind traits that makes you more vata at certain situations. So your energy types also are changed by how stress affects you as well. So in Ayurveda there's a lot of questions to figure out who you are. There's a lot of series of self inquiry to know thyself and by knowing thyself actually everything becomes a lot more clear. And you then realize actually there is no pill for every ill, but there's definitely an ill following every pill. And that's the problem that we've got in the medical system is that people are too reliant on pills without looking at the whole approach to what makes you healthy and happy. And actually Ayurveda begins with answering this question. And this is actually the principle, like the most important question of all that you should ask yourself every single morning. Am I waking up with absolute enthusiasm to do a hard day's work? Because you don't want to be sitting idle weaver and being lazy because that's not healthy. But to Actually, do hard days work? Are you waking up enthusiastic? So if you're waking up feeling like you have to do something to survive and that's like most of your life, then you're gonna, it's gonna lead to chronic stress, you're gonna get sick. That's just how it is, you know, it's what happened to me. It happens to so many people. But the people I know who are super enthusiastic for life, they love what they do. They work really hard, they. They don't take supplements, they don't drink. I mean, they don't follow like strict diets or regimes. They drink clothes, they smoke when they want, they do what they want, but they love what they do. And I have friends like that who live into their 70s and 80s.

That's, that's very, very common. If you, if you look at, for example, National Geographic and I'll link to it in the show notes, because you could find it for free on YouTube. They have a wonderful documentary called the Age of Aging, I think is what it's called. And one of the things they touch on there is the idea that many of these centenarians and blue zones are living a long time not because of their lifestyle practices, but despite their lifestyle practices. They're equipped with a series of genes for everything from limited responsiveness to excess growth hormone, which you already touched on with age, meaning they produce growth hormone, they just become less responsive to it as they get older. To genes that protect them against high amounts of the cholesterol variant lp, to a host of even immune system modulating genes in the gut. These folks are just as unfair as it may sound. Genetically hardwired to live a long time. I mean, it's almost like, you know, for me, a close to home example is my wife, right? Like, her blood work is always just flawless. She doesn't really do much to take care of. She doesn't take any supplements or anything like that. But she's got these hardy Montana rancher genes, right, where people, you know, her parents, her grandparents, lived, you know, into their, I think, late 90s or early hundreds. You know, just basically just, you know, taking care of skinny cattle out and out in freaking Bozeman. So, yeah, it is very interesting how many of these things are not necessarily connected to time spent in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber or, you know, time spent, you know, getting an NAD iv. Like a lot of this stuff is, is genetic. And, and also, as you've alluded to from the emotional standpoint, very relationship based, right? Like you're gonna Live longer if you're smoking your cigarette while you're playing poker with a bunch of your buddies or girlfriends or family members at night. It's, it's very, it's very paradoxical, but it's, it's fascinating.

Yeah. And the other thing is like the next question I think is actually equally important and that is, do you wake up feeling like you, you want to be compassionate to other people or do you do it because you have to be compassionate? Like, is it like wanting versus have to, to survive? So like when I was in the pharmacy, I actually had nothing in common with anyone I worked with. They were all very negative and I just faked being nice to people, even though I just couldn't stand being where I was. And it was all fake and I wasn't really genuinely compassionate. And that again is going to make you sick. If you're in that environment all the time where you don't like anyone, you have grudges with people or you're angry about things and situation, you got to get out of that situation and find the place that is your right environment because you become your environment. And that's one of the biggest things in Ayurveda is that we are a community. If you look at the evolution of human beings, we started off as tiny single cell organisms. They multiplied and became organized cells. They were community of cells and then they suddenly formed, you know, fishes and then amphibians and then, you know, land mammals and then became us. But we're still all we are is an organism that is a community of cells, intelligent cells with a consciousness. Each cell has consciousness of its own. So we're just like we're a collective consciousness of many tiny little cells. So with that said, we have to look at each one of our cells with equality. Like the cells actually of our body. Human cells is not all that we have. We actually possess, I think three or four times more than just our humans as bacterial cells. So what are we really? Are we bacterial? Are we human? What are we? But we actually are like a symbiotic harmony of trillions of cells all living in harmony with each other. And this is a great line that I love from a doctor who is very, very dear to My heart is Dr. Hegday from India. He's one of the top doctors in India. Are you spelling his name Dr. Hegday? H E G D E. I really urge everyone, anyone who's interested in anything to do with health to check out his stuff.

I'll hunt him down and include down the show Notes.

Yeah, yeah, he's a top dude and basically he says this really beautiful line which is that what's the first two letters of wellness? It's we. Right. What's the first letter of illness? I so people who are very, I focused very much all about them, me, me, I, I, I egotistical, they tend to get sick more than the people who are more community based. We focus on, who are like always contributing and looking out to how to help other people. And we are a collective consciousness of many different selves. So we should also treat our environment like that. We should build community. It's one of the reasons I live in Thailand now because I run this big conscious music festival out here, run all these retreats and I'm surrounded by so many like minded people. We're all into the same things. It's a big wellness community here. Probably the biggest concentration of people into wellness that I found in the world. And we have so much in common. It's just I have so many friends. Whereas compared to back at home, I was sick all the time and it was just me. And I used to be so kind of introverted and I'd hardly talk to anyone all day long and then I'd go home and I'll be on my computer and it's. And I got sick. It's no surprise that people are getting sick, you know, being so lonely, you know, nuclear families and stuff, you know. Johan Hari, another guy, great stuff on depression. He wrote a whole book on this about depression, about how the community is the cure, you know, and how getting back into community and having a sense of belonging is the cure for depression. And it's so true. So true.

Yeah. That's interesting. By the way, when you say, they say Hari, you made me think of something I wanted to bring up. Way back when you were talking about some of the issues with sugar and GMOs and chemicals and additives in what you were finding in the uk. There's this author named Vani Hari and this is fresh in my mind because I just finished her book yesterday called Feeding you lies. And it's kind of shocking because she goes into, in that book about how some of the key American brands like Kellogg's and Pepsi and General Mills and Craft, they actually are creating what could be argued are much healthier versions of their packaged foods and their fast foods in the United Kingdom versus the United States. Meaning like McDonald's, McDonald's french fries in, in the UK, basically it's like potatoes, some sunflower oil and dextrose. And then they use a little salt after cooking. And then if you look in the US they're allowed to use potatoes, canola oil, citric acid, dextrose, hydrogenated soybean oil. Then they use something called dimethylpolysiloxane as an anti foaming agent. They can add so many extra things because we're so much more lax in the US with what's allowed into foods. I mean, you think it's bad in the uk and for any of you listening in, I'll link to this book in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Renegade I'm actually, I'm having my kids read it now so that they're a little bit more aware of what's in some of the things that are served over at their school lunch program at their school. Because even at their school it's not flawless and it is shocking. I know it's a complete kind of rabbit hole. But when you brought up Hari, it jogged my mind that I wanted to mention that as well.

It's just, I think she's the food babe, right?

Yeah, the food babe. Very controversial, fear monger. But the book is pretty good anyways though, I want to make sure that we kind of steer the direction of the conversation now towards what I really wanted to hear a little bit more from you on and that is this idea of what I think you call Soma S O M A because this intrigues me. It's very related to this breathwork protocol that you know from your. You have like a 21 day breath program. And I've got, I think it's from week three. I have one of those audios on my MP3 player that I do in the sauna and I'd love to take a deep dive into Soma, what that is and how that originated.

Yeah, so, okay, so Soma is actually, it's something that's referenced to over 50,000 times in the Rig Veda. Rig Veda is the oldest religious manuscript that exists and its roots are from the ancient Indus civilization, which is the origins of yoga, Buddhism, meditation, all these things. So if you imagine like thousand, thousand, thousand years ago, nobody quite knows exactly when that there was a time where there was a golden age on the planet. There's far few people on the planet. It's like the Garden of Eden kind of story, right? There's far few people on the planet and people lived in harmony with nature. There were these rich, these shamanic kind of people called Rishis who would like, they would basically Bring the knowledge of civilization to the people there and they would revel in this psychedelic ritual called soma. Soma has many different hypothesized substances. It could be. So one is the amanita mascarena, magic mushroom, the red, red and white toadstool. Another one is, it could be the kush cannabis, this indica cannabis, which is like, if you take a bit of that, you reach super enlightened states with it as well. But then there's the blue lotus. So you see like in some of the Hindu kind of paintings and murals that you'll see Krishna on like a lily, a lotus lily, right, and. Or a lotus coming out of, of the background. Well, the what Blue lotus, believe it or not, is full of dmt. So if you produce it in the right way, it's actually a psychedelic plant.

I remember you told me this. Keep, keep going. This is interesting.

Yeah, yeah, so, so there's a few prop, hypothesized, you know, ideas of what it could be. But what happens is, according to the legend is that as humans start to spread out across the land, they start to explore different parts of the world. The soma inevitably starts to run out because it grows in certain areas and because the Rishis are so hooked on this, one of the chief Rishis, the God, everyone was considered a God then. So God Indra, he goes crazy and tells everyone, you must go inward to discover how to create the Soma within, because we can't be dependent on this substance anymore for our bliss. So that is basically the origins of tantra. So tantra is the original art of moving energy through the body to create the bliss molecule, the spirit molecule, the dmt, the dopamine, the serotonin, the triptamines, you know, that gives you all the feel good psychedelic experiences and generally like raises your mood up to that level of bliss. And so, so that's basically the origin story of these ancient practices now become so popular around the world. But people have forgotten actually the real meaning behind it.

So. So Selma originally was a plant. It was like, like an Ayurvedic plant considered to have like this great, great power to be able to heal you spiritually or enable to you to be able to kind of like access different dimensions or perhaps very similar to psilocybin or, or LSD or the other mushroom, the amanita mushroom, to be able to dissolve the ego to a certain extent. And even though it's, there's a lot of hypotheses around which, like what the soma plant Was or was soma just basically a category into which a lot of these plants like marijuana or Blue Lotus would fall?

I would say it's more likely to be a kind of a category of different psychedelic rituals that people do.

That's very interesting.

Yeah. And you'd use this to go into the spirit world. And if you, I don't know if you've done ayahuasca or anything like that, but when I did ayahuasca, I had a one on one conversation with an angel goddess for like four hours. So I can understand where, where all this comes from. Like, because I've done so many psychedelics at pretty extreme doses in some cases.

Yeah. That Blue Lotus, by the way, that you told me about, it's very interesting because it's actually a very potent aphrodisiac. When I was, I think shortly after, before I was talking with you about it in the, I think we were talking about this in the sauna, about how it can be used in combination with psilocybin. Like if you make yourself, even if you're microdosing with psilocybin and you make yourself like a, like a tea in the morning, you know, typically 0.1 to 0.2 grams of psilocybin, you put a couple drops of a really good Blue Lotus essential oil in there. I use the one from Essential oil. Wizardry vastly increases probably because of the DMT release that you alluded to, the, the sensory perception that you get from it, but also because it's such a potent aphrodisiac. I mean like before, before sex, for example. That is absolutely amazing. And the, the, the guys at the human garage when I was there getting a treatment, once there, one guy was telling me about how he started using Blue Lotus as kind of like a, like a cologne. Like he put some on his wrist, in the back of his neck when he'd go out and his dog started humping his leg. And then he actually got. He had that happen two other times with two other dogs. Meaning that it's not just humans for which the aphrodisiac effect is elicited with the use of this Blue Lotus, but also apparently the animal kingdom. Just a fun fact for people for cocktail parties. Just be careful, there's no dogs around when you're wearing your Blue Lotus clone. But so, so anyways, I'm totally derailing you. But, but that's the, the origin story of, of Soma.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's basically it. So then obviously people were hooked on it. Like I see A lot of people now hooked on ayahuasca, hooked on mushroom or whatever, you know, like cannabis. There's so many people using these substances when they're doing out context. Like back then it was a ritual. It was a ritual to speak to God. But now people are doing it as a way to numb their senses and escape.

And, and we should clarify, by the way, that what you've just alluded to that would be like trip dosing. I, I actually don't feel that you need to have set and setting for a microdose that you're using to say, get through a day where, you know, like, for me, if I have a very intense day of writing, I will, I will use something like that to, to enhance my left and right brain hemispheric activity and kind of merge creativity with logical thinking. But when you're looking at a trip dose like ayahuasca or hey, I've got a free day today to walk around the city. I'm going to take mushrooms and make it fun. You know, I know people that do things like that. And you're right, it reduces and almost kind of bastardizes the deep spiritual meaning and the ability to be able to, to tap into a lot of these kind of stronger ayurvedic principles that you've alluded to when it comes to the use of these. I mean, it needs to be done responsibly. And as Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal talk about in their book Stealing Fire, it's very hedonistic. It's not something you do all the time. There actually is a pretty intense, and you would know this being a pharmacist, there's a pretty intense neurotransmitter flood that occurs of dopamine and serotonin. And, and you, you canyou can eff yourself up from a neurotransmitter imbalance point of view by just, you know, using this kind of stuff willy nilly to go find yourself every week.

Yeah, totally. I totally agree with that. So that's why this legend story is so profound, in my opinion, because it really speaks a lot about what's going on right now. The soma, you could say the external somas are like the drugs, the substances, the TV is one, you know, the entertainment industry, the, all the distractions in the world, you could say are external somas, but the internal soma is the inner pharmacy. So what the Rishis discovered was that actually by going inwards, they discovered that through these practices, Tantra basically is very much focused on Breath work. And pranayama is, if you imagine tantra was like. And yoga were like the first things. And then pranayama became a school of its own. Ayurveda came out of it. Buddhism, meditation, all came out as branches of tantra and yoga. One of the branches of yoga, there's many branches of yoga is Hatha yoga. So in Hatha yoga it's the practices, the special practices like pranayama of changing your energetic state, your emotional state using breath. Because the Rishis discovered that actually that the breath is the one thing that we all have conscious control over, but also it runs on autopilot. So we can let it run on its own. But because of that, it means we can tap into the autonomic nervous system. And through the autonomic nervous system we can actually wake up, awaken the inner pharmacy. So we actually have every single substance that exists in nature pretty much already contained within us. And through the breath and different yoga, asanas and eating the right things and things like that, we can actually. And meditation, we can actually change our physiological state. So we can make our own blood pressure medication, we can make our own antidepressants, we can make our own pain relievers, we can do all of the things that pharmacists give us as drugs, but without side effects. And here's the thing, scientists for a long time have educated the world into believing that we have no power of the autonomic nervous system. I mean, I can show you if, you know, I do have a video on this where I show people how to do it, where I can raise my heart rate at will, you know, up by 20, 25, 30 beats per minute and lower it by 20, 30 beats per minute. And I can show anyone how to do it, which completely proves all of that wrong and that we have absolute ability to tap into autonomic nervous system.

Absolutely. Not just the autonomic nervous system, but the immune system. When you look at the study, I think it was last year in the summer, the one that Wim Hof, who I know you're friends with and who you do some work with, the effects of cold exposure and breathing techniques on immune response in which they found that the meditation element, along with the cold and breathwork element, resulted in a significant amount of immunomodulation, particularly increases in plasma adrenaline levels and a decrease in anti inflammatory cytokines. And this was inflammation that they elicited. When you talk about gut issues, many of them are linked to this lipopolysaccharide, this endotoxin that's released in it can be aggravated from a leaky gut. And of course a high fat, high sugar diet can aggravate it even more. But human endotoxemia in this study was actually shown to be controlled via breathwork and cold and meditation. And I'll link to that study in the show notes. But I think a lot of this stuff, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think that much of it, because it's, it's so free, like it couldn't be more free to sit down outside in the cold, close your eyes and do 15 minutes of breath work that A, people don't really find it that sexy or intriguing because you don't have to buy something, and B, it's honestly not going to make any supplement company or pharmaceutical company much money.

Exactly. And that's actually where that's the problem, that's the biggest problem is this unconscious capitalism, which is just based on greed and power, which has educated everyone out of things that are really useful and important and made shit ton of money for drug companies, like trillions of dollars. I mean, like another example is this whole cholesterol myth. And you know, the fact that they say the saturated fat causes heart disease, all of that has made a huge industry, the sugar industry industry booming and the statin industry is booming. But if you mess up with the cholesterol in the body, the human body's production of cholesterol, we are mostly fat, right. 60% of our brain is fat cholesterol. Right. So if you, if you actually stop the body from making it, what happens? You get Alzheimer's, you get dementia, you get the problems of hormonal imbalances. You know, you get all these problems are metabolic diseases, diabetes, all of actually you get 50% more chance risk of getting diabetes if you take statins. So we are making nations of diabetics right now. It's one of the biggest problems in the world and it's because everyone's taking these stupid pills that they don't need. Whereas I can tell people how to change their stress levels, make their own blood pressure medications instantly, like literally really far within minutes. I can lower some of these blood pressure just by showing them a couple of breathing techniques. I can show you how to raise your core body temperature in two minutes. You'd raise your core body temperature.

Since this is an audio podcast and we can explain this to people, give me a practical example of a way in which you would use breathing to change your physiology. In maybe one of the shorter examples for the purpose of this podcast, and just in case folks are driving, if you are operating heavy machinery or something like that, and Niraj demonstrates something here via audio, you may want to pull over or at least stay cognizant of your awareness levels.

Totally. So it's so simple that it's almost too simple that people don't believe it's possible. Okay, but if you had a pulse oximeter on you, right, and you put it onto your finger and you could measure your heart rate right now I don't. If you have one handy. But basically what you want to do, okay. If you want to create that burst of adrenaline at will, right now, all you need to do, okay, is you breathe. So when you breathe this simple principle. When you breathe in, your heart rate goes up. When you breathe out, your heart rate goes down. But when you breathe in, and you employ the most sacred actually component in yoga, which is the mulabanda. Mulabanda is activated by contracting your sphincter muscles up or contracting the muscles you'd use where if you really need to go for a pee, if you're going to hold in your pee, right? So you imagine it's, you know, it's like you're sucking something up your ass. I know that sounds gross, but.

No, I got it. I'm doing it right now. I get what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah. You basically breathe in, hold and keep squeezing, right? And what will happen is your heart rate will start going up, you'll start producing heat in the body and you will also produce that short burst of adrenaline. Okay. Initially in, I would say less than a minute, your heart rate will go up by 20 beats per minute. Your produce adrenaline, you'll create an anti inflammatory effect in the body. And other things can happen as well. You know, your metabolism goes up, a few things change just by doing what I just told you. And here's the thing. People who get constipation, okay, and people who are considered uptight because they're like a little bit anal, you know, all those words are anal, uptight. There's a reason for that. Because their blood pressure is high, right? The reason why is because they're contracting their anus all the the time or they have, they've got constipation, so stimulating.

This mulabanda region or they can't parasympathetically activate when they're actually on the toilet. That's very, that's why, that's one of the reasons people get constipation when they travel. You're so sympathetically Activated when we were actually, when we were in Estonia, I was talking with Eric Admitis about this, one of the guys who was there teaching with us at the Mind Valley event. And he told me his trick after he's traveled and. And he is constipated, is he focuses his gaze on the horizon and basically breathes out for very long periods of time with shorter inhales. And it kind of just relaxes everything down there.

Yeah. So that's the opposite side. So this was stimulating the sympathetic nervous system. And what happens is when you do the Mulabandha technique and you let release it, it will immediately stimulate bradycardia, where your heart rate will go lower than normal. So it will go down and your blood pressure drops and becomes stabilized. So it's like a reset switch for your nervous system. Okay. Now, the flip side of that is actually we can by extending our exhalation. That's why Eric's thing works by doing aum, for example, the Aum chant. What you're doing is you're extending exhalation. What do Tibetan Tuban singers do? They. And they do that for a long, long time. Right. By doing that, you're stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system. Your blood pressure goes down, you stimulate the vagus nerve. If you. There's certain ways to stimulate your vagus nerve. Like, one is converging your eyes, so you're looking at your nose, for example, all right. That stimulates the vagus nerve. So I like to do yoga by converging my eyes because it's. It just works really well with yoga. And the other thing is that putting a finger up your ass, believe it or not, like. So one of the tantric practices to really is to de. Armor the prostate. And you put a finger up the ass, basically. And it. Basically. So you mean.

You mean, like while you're having sex, you would put your finger up your partner's ass or you would do that up your own ass?

Oh, you could do it to your partner's ass? Yeah, why not?

Interesting. Yeah.

So these are just, like, things that the yogis discover. Like, you know, there's ways we can actually influence the vagus nerve parasympathetic nervous system. Lower heart rate, lower blood pressure, not get stress, switch stress off. Because we don't have an off stretch of stress like animals have. We store a lot of stress in the body. Because if you think about it, okay, thousands of years ago, we had an autonomic nervous system that served us very well because it does exactly what the neurology is designed to do when you're being attacked by a lion or a tiger in the jungle, Right. You need a quick mechanism to defend or run away. Right. However, now nowadays we are in concrete jungles and those, those lions and tigers and bears are replaced by deadlines, bosses, you know, jobs that you don't want to do and relationships aren't working and we can't escape that stress. We're constantly surrounded by that environment because we can't. We're not going to go and kill our boss. We're not going to run away from work and never come back. You know, so some people do, but, you know, we're not going to do that on a mass scale. So most of us are wallowing around in stress hormones with no offsuits for stress. So this is why I created Soma. Soma is really going back to the roots of where the ancient origins of pranayama comes from, where tantra comes from, yoga comes from, and going back to the ancient traditional style of yoga. So before the yoga industrial complex, which we have now, which has taken yoga and taken out of context and made it into a fitness thing, which it really wasn't, it was a spiritual thing to create bliss and to tap into your physiology and to do cool stuff with your body, which, and reaching God, it was meant, it was a way, a route to the divine. But that's kind of been taken out of context in this day and age. So I wanted to really go back to the ancient roots. And I've kind of curated a lot of knowledge from my swami. I have curated a lot of knowledge from my teacher in Himalayas, who's a doctor, who taught me a lot of the science behind all this stuff. Spending time with whimsical, you know, Wim's example of this. Yeah, Wim Hof. And so I've. Now then, what I've done is I've created a system which is based on all these ancient holistic practices. Has the evidence, the scientific evidence, with breath being the main component. Because if you think about it, what the Rishis were doing, they were doing this practice, okay. Which I call the Soma Awakening. It's this ritual that I've created which is rhythmic breathing followed by kumbhaka techniques. Kumbaka is like breath retention where you're, you're doing an intimate and hypoxic training.

Yeah.

Body.

Yeah. But by the way, like when I'm. When I'm in the sauna doing your audio, because I just put it on my MP3 player. So it's like your voice with choreographed music like this kind of like, deep spiritual music driving me through it. But then your voice is there, and you'll be, like, doing 1, 2, 3, 4 out, 2, 3, 4. And I'll do that for several minutes. And then you have me release all the air. I think I'm trying to remember. If I take the deep breath in and then release all the air, do you remember, or do I do the full exhale?

Yeah, you do the full exhale first. As long as you can. You repeat that several times to really create that hypoxic. Yeah.

And then it gets faster and faster. Like, I'm going, 1, 2, 1, 2. In, out, in, out. It's intense, but, dude, like, it. It pushes the reboot button on your whole body. And like I mentioned, like, it's. It's the highest I get without the use of any synthetic chemicals or anything like that. It's nuts.

And that's like the week three. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So that's in week three. So walk me through this. Like, if people take this SOMA breathwork course to learn how to do this to their own bodies, it's kind of like almost like it could be used for the WIM HOF style breathwork, but there's not really the cold component. Like, you're not like the WIM HOF program going out and doing cold soaks or walking outside barefoot as you do this. It's all kind of like, just focused on the breath work. But as people are going through this, this series, how long does it actually take to learn all these techniques? Like, how's the program actually work?

Oh, it's. I mean, it's not rocket science at all. It's super easy to learn the things. Like, basically, you're learning the core ritual, I believe. I think I've revived it. And the ancient Rishis called it kumbhaka. So rechaka kumbhaka. And you do bhastrika, followed by rushaka kumbhaka, which is basically rhythmic breathing, where you are breathing out carbon monoxide, breathing in oxygen, but you're creating a coherent state with rhythm because you're doing it to a rhythm. And that rhythm where you're breathing in perfectly for four, out for four, like, in a rhythm to music, to a beat, to a pulse, basically creates this stake or coherence. Our heart math, Actually, I've done a lot of studies on and show that you're actually. Your electromagnetic field of the heart radiates more. You connect more to other people who are also breathing in that same rhythm. If you ever done anything like nlp, One of the core foundational teachings of NLP is that when you model somebody's behavior, if you can match their breathing, you become more in rapport with them. So the same thing happens. I run these big breathwork ceremonies where everyone's breathing in a rhythm and people naturally just connect with each other a lot more by doing it. It's amazing, like the vibe it generates. So the first bit is all about learning to breathe in a rhythm and to do this as more of a daily habit as well. But this whole awakening ritual is designed so you do the river breathing, which is bhastrika, followed by two different types of kumbhaka, where it's the breath retention out, richaka and then puraka, breath retention in. And this combination, what it does is it follows this intermittent hypoxic training protocol which has been studied at great lengths by the Russians. The Russian Soviets, very competitive, they wanted to make their athletes the best in the world. And also what happened was in the Mexican Olympics in the 80s, which was done at high altitude, people were winning records left, right and center. So they wanted to know why. It's because training at high altitude trains you to be super efficient at using oxygen. Now, here's the thing. We've been deluded into believing that oxygen is this super essential thing that is, you know, is scarce and that we need to get as much of it as possible. It's actually the opposite. We actually have too much oxygen. And that's actually the cause of a lot of the problems in the world. Okay. And oxygen leads to oxytocin distress in.

The brain that confuses a lot of people. Because oxygen is supposed to like, you know, they have oxygen bars and there are oxygen sprays. A lot of times when you go to high altitude cities and you're going skiing, you know, they'll sell oxygen sprays. There are hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers that concentrate the oxygen under pressure. That's confusing to people. When you say oxygen can be deleterious, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is very, very confusing. So oxygen. Okay, let me just do, in a very simple analogy, imagine in your cell there's a furnace, a fire, alright? It's your mitochondria. The mitochondria in the cell produces energy in the form of ATP. What happens is oxygen burns with glucose, the wood, the coal, to produce ATP energy. Right? Which is fire. Okay, let's say it's fire. Too much fire produces damage look at the Californian wildfires. Lots of oxygen, too much fire, boom. You get cell damage from oxidative, stress free radical damage, reactive oxygen species. All of these things get produced too much if you have too much oxygen going into cells. And if you have too little, the fire doesn't burn at all. So what you want is super efficient mitochondria that needs the least amount of oxygen to burn efficiently. All right? That's what pranayama is. Pranayama means energy control. Pranayama, it's two words. All right? So by doing these special breathing techniques, okay, where you're simulating high altitude, you actually train your mitochondria to become super efficient using as little oxygen as possible. So if you look at why do the yogis go and live in Himalayas? Why do you, why is the Nepalese army, the Gurkha army, one of the strongest armies in the world, if not the strongest? Because they live up in the Himalayas and they train at high altitude, right? So these are all these principles. You can see, you can observe it out there already. And by dissecting that, you can understand now biologically what's going on. So actually, by doing these breathing techniques that I've got in soma, you actually train yourself to become super efficient using as little oxygen as possible. So firstly, what that does is your body adapts to having less than normal oxygen. That alone through intermittent hypoxia, it stimulates the production of more red blood cells, improves more blood flow around the body. Your capillaries basically wake up, you get more blood flow to your brain as well, and that can actually wake up dormant parts of the mind. In the brain, you get better blood flow to your heart. Actually, this is another phenomenon that has now been discovered that is that actually coronary collaterals, that's what it's created. It's like your natural heart bypasses are produced under hypoxic conditions. Your heart basically will produce its own capillaries to go against if you get a blockage in a capillary. And actually your heart is very adapting, okay, over time it may lose its ability. But basically, when you do these hypoxic training protocols and you simulate it through breath, okay, by breath retention. The Russians did it through machines, hypoxicated machines, which simulates high altitude training costs loads of money, thousands of dollars and all this stuff. But the yogis knew thousand years ago, just by holding your breath for a few minutes a day in the right way, you actually create the same effect. And through that, you become stronger, you become fitter, you Become healthier, you get better blood flow and you become really efficient using mitochondria. And the same thing with yoga asanas, okay? So yoga asanas, what they do is they, firstly, they also move the lymph. So that's another side to it. But the most important thing of all is that, okay, if you imagine, if you contract your bicep, okay, and so yoga is a static contraction, so where you're going to be contracting muscles to the point of exhaustion. So the reason why there's a lot of problems in yoga and why it's not being taught properly is because it's been taught as an aerobic exercise when it never should have been, should be anaerobic. So if you contract your bicep for a long period of time, and there's another form of exercise, this backs us up, which a lot of people talk about, I know you think talks about is functional isometric contraction or functional isometric training, right? So it's where you're doing, like, exercise, where you're doing maximum contraction effort to the point of exhaustion, right where your muscles are contracting and there's no more blood flow going to that muscle. So when you shut off the supply of blood flow to that muscle, the muscle is forced to use its nutrition, okay, that it's got available, it's myoglobin. All of those suppliers have to be used up. And when you do it, we shutting off the blood supply because you're constantly contracting. Okay. It means then the body creates a hypoxic state in the muscle and that triggers the release of stem cells, okay. Out of areas of low oxygen, stem.

Cells and also growth hormone, because lactic acidosis. Yeah.

Yes. So that, that makes the perfect chemistry for increasing strength and resilience to stress. So yoga should have been done, should always be done where you're. There's only a few asanas you need to do. You don't need to do a lot. So in soma, I only teach the very fundamental ones that you need to know. But you basically train every muscle to the point of exhaustion under static contraction to become super efficient using oxygen. So what that then means is that you can hold your breath for even longer. The only biofeedback tool I now use personally is my breath. The length of time I can hold my breath and how long I can hold a tone for. So me and my friends, we have competitions. How long can we sing a single note for? My record at the moment is 54 seconds upside down in a headstand. So there's little fun Things that we like to do. But that is actually the true measure of your health, because it's called your vital capacity. And doctors actually use this because if your vital capacity goes down dramatically or your breath whole time goes down dramatically to, like, you know, if it's below 30 seconds or 20 seconds and low below, there's a sign there's some problems going on with your heart, your. Your cardiovascular system, and you need to check in with that. Whereas average kind of breath retention times around 30 seconds. Athletes, probably yourself, would be, you know, 45 seconds a minute from just rest, holding your breath. But if you can, every morning just check in. How long can you hold your breath for at rest without doing any kind of breathing beforehand?

Now, is this similar to Dr. Patrick McCown's or author Patrick McCown's books, in which he identifies the. What's he call it? The cp. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where.

Yeah, the control pause.

Control pause. You take a light exhale and you should be able to hold that, ideally for optimal health, 40 up to 60 seconds.

Yeah, yeah.

This sounds slightly different than that.

Yeah, no, it's the same. Same principle. So Buteyko was the doctor that Patrick McCown gets his info from, and Buteyko is a Russian doctor. And so these were. They were really advanced in this knowledge because they studied the Himalayan yogis. The Russians had a strong relationship with the Tibetan region, with Nepal and Tibet and Himalayan region. They used to study yogis, superhuman yogis. That's what they did, because they wanted to make their athletes the best in the world. Buteyko was one of those Russian doctors. He was doing a lot of work around that area at that time. So they're just borrowing ancient knowledge that's been hidden up there in the Himalayas for a long time and just kind of recycled it. And so his method is like, do a control pause and measure how long you can hold your breath. It's a measure of your cardiovascular strength and health. Yeah, I also. I do the extended exit. How long can you hold a single note for? That also is another way, you know, to measure it. And you'll find when you do soma, these soma practices and do the yoga in this way, your length of time you can hold your breath for is insane. Like, so much longer.

When you. When you hold the note, do you breathe in as much air as you can and then begin to know? Okay, interesting. I think try this because.

Yeah.

Well, what'd you say a good time is for that?

Like, you know, I can get over 50 seconds to a minute. Sometimes I have to practice a little bit, but I've done it upside down on my head. Yeah, I've been ready in my flow.

I practice a lot of this stuff. When I'm out on a walk. I'll do a lot of. A lot of chanting, a lot of humming, a lot of breath work, A lot of breath holds, a lot of nasal breathing for me. Like, I'll strike out on a one hour walk sometimes and just put in a good audio book or some nice relaxing music and just do breath work for an hour while I'm walking. I find it incredibly, incredibly relaxing. You know, I know that we're getting a little bit long in the tooth here, and I know that you kind of designed all of this into an actual protocol that people can do. It's a 21 day protocol. And then you also have a webinar where. And correct me if I'm wrong, during the webinar, you just kind of like walking people through the basic principle. And then during the 21 day, you're taking a deeper dive.

Yeah, yeah. So in the webinar, I pretty much show you the techniques, some of the foundational techniques.

And the webinar is free, right?

Yeah, it's completely free. And it goes into a lot of the science behind it. And I show you, like, how to raise your heart rate and lower your heart rate, all that kind of stuff. It gives you the foundations and you even get a taste of this SOMA Awakening exercise with music. So music is a big passion of mine. I'm music producer and, you know, one of the things I unlocked when I quit my job as a pharmacist was the creativity and getting back into music, which I believe is such an important thing for your health, is to find some kind of artistic outlet for yourself.

Yeah, I agree. I have officially bitten the bullet and I hired a guitar instructor who trains me now every single week. So I'm deep into music theory and I'm incredibly happy with it. It just, it feeds my soul. And I actually, my. My aunt just wrote me this morning and showed me a bunch of pictures of all the, all the watercolor paintings that I used to do until I was about 13, because they were, they were down at my grandma's house and she's sending those up to me. So between watercolor painting and playing the guitar and then doing this kind of breath work and spiritual disciplinary practice that you teach in the SOMA breathwork course, you know, my, my goal is to really nourish and foster my spirit and my relationships for much of my life because I let a lot of that kind of get neglected on the back burner of my very kind of yin or yang, hard charging, athletic, you know, just completely brutal, masochistic lifestyle. And I'm realizing now that man, like life is so much happier and the body feels so much better when you, you, you skip out on a few crossfit sessions and you do this kind of stuff instead. So what I'm going to do is, is I'll link to that free breathwork meditation webinar that you have and then if people want to try the 21 day protocol, we have a discount code you can use for that. And I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Niraj is giving all the listeners 20% off the first full protocol, which is the one that I went through, that I, that I got that hour long breathwork protocol out of. And then finally you train instructors as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have like almost 100 instructors now around the world and we partnered a lot with yoga studios around the world as well. And it's creating a lot of abundance of people and people having so much passion, like as breath coaches, you know, so many ways. Really a coaching program really helps people.

If, if somebody wanted to and they didn't want to do the 21 day breathwork protocol because maybe they're a doctor or a personal trainer or a yoga instructor or a nutritionist who actually wants to work with people, would it be redundant to do the 21 day protocol and the instructor course? I mean like if you take the instructor course, you're going to learn everything that's in that 21 day protocol course.

Yeah, no, the instructor course includes the 21 days. So everyone goes through the 21 day protocol, like if they're instructor, because you really then understand the method and there's a lot more to it than just the breathing technique.

Okay. And it's online. You can, you can go through your own pace.

Yeah, well actually you can do it live as well. So we have two versions. We have a one which you just do on your own self study and we have the one where you do it with an instructor, which I really recommend.

Yeah, I love it. I'm actually thinking about doing it myself just to be able to teach this to people a little more effective. Because a lot of times I go to these events where I'm in charge of teaching the workout or I'm in charge of leading the morning class and it'd be fun to be able to just Bring people through some of these breathwork protocols without worrying that I'm going to cause too many people to faint or get too hypoxic. I need to make sure I know what I'm doing.

That'd be amazing. I love, I love that.

Cool. Yeah, Yeah, I love it too.

And.

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah. Plus you learn five other breathing techniques. So pranayama is like a school of breath work. So we. I basically have taken the five most evidence based ones and given that to you. So. So I've taken away a lot of the fluff out pranayama. There's a lot of other stuff that got added later, but the core foundational techniques are in there. One of them, which I think you're going to be really blown away by is, is this drinking air technique. It's called Kati Mudra where you basically drink air into the, into the guts and air oxygen basically kills anaerobic gut bacteria. So. And it also satiates the appetite. It's really good thing to do when you're fasting. It cleanses the bowels out. So I'll show you this technique. It's really, really fascinating. I think you're going to love that one. Oh, okay. Yeah.

I'm writing a note to myself to ping you later on about this. Do you think it's. It's something that, that, that I don't know if you've ever gotten this question before. The kids could do. Like, if I wanted to bring my twin boys through the course with me.

I. How old are they?

They're 10, but they're. They get a good head on their shoulders.

Yeah, I think I saw them. Right. And. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you could, you could try the first couple of weeks and maybe like, because we follow this intimate and hypoxic training protocol, so it gradually gets more and more intense with the amount of hypoxic kind of episodes you're getting each day. But I was looking at the study recently where actually you'd have to do over 15 hypoxic episodes a day. So that would mean like 15 repetitions of doing this rhythmic breathing followed by breath retention. We only do three or four, which is way beyond. So I think it'll be completely safe.

Yeah. Well, for anybody who wants to try this. And also I'll put a link to everything we talked about, like the infographic on the Coke and the Diet Coke that, that book I mentioned by, by Vani Hari, the food babe.

I'll.

I'll put a link to the colostrum that Niraj uses that we talked about the documentary, some of the books, the, the blue Lotus extract, everything. I'll make sure you guys got some really good, rich show notes to take a deep dive into this stuff because it's just, I love this whole world. I'm gonna put that all over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Renegade so you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com renegade for the show notes. And Niraj, dude, thanks. Thanks for all this information. This is wonderful.

Yeah, no, it's been a total honor, man, to be able to share it. I could just go on for hours and hours. You know, obviously you got next time.

We'Ll hook up in a sauna for round two sometime.

Amazing.

Awesome. Well, folks, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Renegade Like I mentioned for the show notes. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield with Niraj the renegade pharmacist signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and have an amazing week. Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can subscribe to my information packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right hand side of that webpage that says Ben recommends, where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of my company keon@getK-I-O-N.com that's getK-I-O-N dot com.