Two Nerdy Biohackers Reveal Their Secrets To Spiritual Health, Life Optimization, Plant Medicines, Rites Of Passage, Mental Models & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Sometimes it's not the fact that you're severely addicted to a substance as much as the fact that because it's constantly around you, it's a cue to partake in it.

Because I've accomplished so much spiritually, that part of me that wants to keep improving has tended to want to seek out those experiences with pretty rapid succession.

So my job is to go hike, learn, come back and talk to a really cool person and then press, publish, and tell the world about it. Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. So if you're familiar with my friend Luke Story, who is a fellow podcaster, a fellow, as much as I hate to use this word, biohacker, then you may already also be familiar with the wealth of knowledge that he presents on his website. And I always have fascinating discussions with this cat. Last time I was down in la, we sat down at his house and we had a really great conversation that was less focused on supplements and biohacks and fitness devices and tools and things like this, and instead kind of took a little bit more of a deep dive into the spiritual and lifestyle side of health.

We're here again with Ben Greenfield, folks, listening and watching. Last time Ben was here, we had every intention of sitting down and having a proper conversation, but then we ended up hanging out in the house and going through the supplement cabinet and room.

To room of your. Of your palatial estate, and it ended.

Up being like a two hour tour. We probably could have gone longer. And then Ben's like, dude, I can't record. I gotta go. So that became the podcast, but my original intention was to really sit and talk about some of the deeper life experiences with you and both kind of share our perspectives.

And for the video version of this, it's almost like that Funny or Die show between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. I don't think this is a fern.

No, it's not that we're sitting.

We're not sitting between it. We're sitting on either side of it. But yeah, we've got a plant and a really shitty book. A giant book, Boundless.

This is the first book that's dwarfed the plant. Usually there's a nice little symmetry here.

But all we're missing is a present or a celebrity who we can roast and ask stupid questions to and we'd totally be unfunny. Or die.

This is true.

Probably closer to die.

Well, we might be able to Match that content wise. So before we start, what's new and exciting? You're in la, you're visiting, what's the latest in your life?

New and exciting is all different these days. New and exciting is being parked in front of my computer working on new book ideas. I just finished a cookbook as a companion to Boundless, where despite me having imposter syndrome, meaning I never grew up as a chef and always feel like I'm really cowboying in the kitchen, I just want to take all these recipes from camel's milk kefir with gelatin in it for bedtime snacks, to my little coffee rubs in reverse sear process I do on steaks, to the little sprouts that I grow and how I dehydrate them and salt them for a snack. Almost like a blend between really novice molecular gastronomy and kind of a whole foods approach to diet with a few little supplements and mushrooms and things like that thrown in to add in even more better living through science. And so I put the finishing touches on the cookbook a few weeks ago, and now we're working on beautiful photos and everything for that. And now I'm working on a book more focused on spiritual fitness and caring for our soul. And aside from that, just a lot of time spent with my little boys out in the forest. They're unschooling and for me to be able to be home more, present with them and helping on that front has been magical. Not being on airplanes or in airports until coming down here to LA and then last week to San Jose has been absolutely wonderful. Probably fitter than I've ever been. I'm healthier than I've ever been. A big part of that is due to not having to engage in the so called dark side of hypermobility. And I feel good. How about you?

Well, it's funny, dude, before I answer that, looking at your Instagram, which I do periodically, I would never guess that you're not naturally a chef. I'm not a foodie myself. It's more of a utilitarian kind of like, man, I gotta get it done, gotta get something in there. But when I do actually sit down to a great meal at Belcampo or something like, oh my God, I should do this more often.

I went to Belcampo last night and had a greasy burger on the sidewalk at 3rd Ave. With some of the tallow fries, big smile on my face, grease and ketchup and their secret sauce dripping down my chin, and I was in heaven. I literally was just listening to music at the end of a really long day of podcasting and traveling and Ubers, just sitting there stuffing a burger into my face, watching the cars go by. And it was fantastic. You're right, they do good me. And I get what you're saying about the cooking and the food prep piece. I'm spoiled because Jessa, my wife, is a full on make everything from scratch. Not just food, but furniture and campers and anything around the house she just makes. I have been very self conscious cooking around her and trying to make recipes around her. And you know, even when I first met her and for the first few years of our marriage, you know, I was still sweeped and steeped in whey protein. Well, typically for me it was whey protein shakes, a lot of whey protein shakes, a lot of microwaving. Like I would microwave hot dogs, microwave oatmeal, microwave pop tarts. Full meal deal. But you know, very kind of old school fitness approach to cooking. Definitely an Iifym, if it fits your macros, you know, eat it. Not too selective on food, sourcing on food quality, anything like that. And she didn't really come at things from that angle just because she was so used to gardening and having fresh meat around to prepare and had a whole different perspective. But then she, because she had some pretty concerning skin issues, both acne and eczema, brought home this little tattered, you know, coiled PDF printout book from the University of Idaho library home one night and it was called the Dietary Cure for Acne by Lauren Cordain. This would have been probably 14 years ago. And she read it, she implemented a lot of the insulin controlling plant defense mechanism inhibiting type of aspects of that early version of a paleo diet, you know, long before folks like Rob Wolfe, for example, came onto the scene and heavily popularized it. And I watched her skin issues clear up literally overnight. I read the book myself and that was my first foray into beginning to understand a more ancestral approach to nutrition. But I still was microwavating hot dogs after that. Would have stuck them in a microwave. He had it. They probably had to put them out on a cave in the hot sun. And so, yeah, I've come a long way, baby, since those days. But that was kind of my initial exposure to a more ancestral approach to food preparation.

Well, it's one thing you're preparing food that is good for you and another thing entirely, cooking food that is good for you and tastes like food that you would get at a restaurant that is not good for you. It's like how do you make healthy food?

Actually, there's a one word answer to that. Salt. Really good salt. In my fanny pack I'm always wandering around with. I always have some form of really good salt in a Ziploc bag sometimes. I also, if I've remembered and thought ahead when I travel, have a little 4 ounce travel container of a really good extra virgin olive oil. And if I wander in, like I'm eating at some bistro tonight with a bunch of guys and I think they've got like, you know, wraps and kale salad, it's just kind of the usual bistro fare. I guarantee olive oil and sea salt will be coming out of my bag. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wise. So, yeah. So that's a lot of new and exciting stuff, books and all. Like, after doing the book Boundless, which those of you watching on video, you'll see the book I'm referring to. I mean, it's literally like the bible of all things health, biohacking, better living through science and nature. After writing that book, I would have like taken a 10 year hiatus. After writing.

You always think that. Have you written a book?

I'm in the process of it, yeah.

Tell me more.

Well, you know, I don't want to give away the title of the book because for some reason it just feels like I shouldn't.

But plus it can get stolen until you actually copyright it.

This is true. This is true. So, you know, holding that one close to the chest. But essentially, you know, Ben, it's been God now 24 years that I've been on this journey of spirituality and what we now call biohacking, which used to be just called being a health matter.

Into anti aging and stuff.

And, you know, along the way I have picked up a lot. But I think because I'm always learning from other people and especially having this podcast, sometimes I sort of discount the progress that I've made because when I started making content, as you know, I was coming out of the fashion industry, where all of the things I was doing in meditation and yoga and health and healing were all just kind of part of my private life. So I just consider myself a perpetual student and had neglected the fact that I'd actually learned a lot along the way. Having now been on a lot of other people's podcasts and spoken on a lot of stages over the past four years, I've realized, wow, shit, I actually know a few things myself. And so figuring out what the first book would be was a bit of a challenge because I think a lot of what makes my perspective compelling is that I have a really crazy past and the arc of the hero's journey is pretty insane. From where it came to starting in childhood into 20s and just living through mostly self inflicted hell and surviving to tell the tale. Not only surviving, but now thriving and you know, carrying that to so many people. So the initial thought was, well, I guess it should be a memoir. This tale of triumph over one's difficulties and follies and that felt just too self indulgent. And frankly, I didn't think I'm famous enough to like pull off a memoir like, okay, this dude writes a memoir. Yeah, everyone's had a rough life. Who cares?

Yeah.

Kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And that just, it just feels too like, I don't know, self important or something, you know. So I struggle with that a little bit. But also just having a book that omits the story and it's just like, here's lessons of life. Well, whose life and why? So far the book is shaping up to be kind of part memoir and part some tales, but also teachings along the way. So childhood trauma.

Yeah. The storytelling is smart and I try to deal with balance. I lead in every chapter, if the astute reader might note, with a personal anecdote, a personal story that is related to the topic of that chapter, whether it be about to head with MRSA or giardia for the immune chapter or you know, hefty periods of stress that I went through that I eventually tackled with breathwork practices and the stress chapter, etc. But the storytelling is important. I even tell my kids this when they're working on a book report. You know, at home every week I let them select a book or I help them select a book that they write a book report on. With the general overview of that being that I figure if they have the mentality growing up that they can easily go through and assimilate one book a week, that's going to really train those muscles for them going into life just being able to digest information at a reasonable pace and then be able to teach others that information.

Yeah.

And I always tell them to weave their own personal anecdotes and stories into each book report because people don't want to read facts. What people resonate and connect with are stories. But I'll tell you, as you work on your book, probably the most difficult aspects, at least for me, of writing that you may find is a. It's hard to write an entire book while keeping everything that you're writing held, as you noted earlier, including the title, close to your chest. That is very difficult for me, which is why often when I am writing a book, I will take pieces and snippets and put them out as tweets or blog posts. Something that's just too good to wait for two years until it hits the bookshelves. I got to get this information out to the world. Now, giving yourself permission to do that, rather than thinking, oh, if it's been out there and then the book gets published and it's already been out there, people aren't going to like the book. But taking some of the really important stuff and just giving yourself permission along the way as you write, to put something as a blog post or an early draft of a chapter out, as a few paragraphs on Instagram, etc. I find that kind of fuels my fire, giving people an insider sneak peek of the book as I'm writing it. So that's one thing that I found to be helpful. And then another is there's probably two other things. One is the organization component, meaning that as you gather data, as you research, as you find articles, books, interviews, podcasts, et cetera that are related to a chapter that you're working on or a chapter that you're creating a skeleton for. Because every chapter you must skeleton before you. You don't just sit down, write a chapter, start to finish, right? You're always bouncing around, typically laying up the framework, laying out the foundation for that chapter. But figuring out a way to assimilate all the data, all the research can be very daunting. And so many authors will use platform called Scrivener for that. And while that software is very useful for being able to organize what you're writing, the problem is it's not designed for cloud based interaction around anything that you're writing. If you have a scientific editor, if you have a research assistant, if you have a publishing editor, etc. Then they can't be seeing and editing chapters as you go. You can't just share a chapter in the cloud. So what I do when I write now is I start a separate Google Drive folder for each book, and that Google Drive folder has a folder for each chapter, and that folder for each chapter has all the links to research, all the links to interviews, the chapter itself, any revisions of the chapter as they're ongoing, so the previous versions of the chapter don't disappear and get deleted forever. And so I found, I found Google with as much heat as they're getting today, right now. Alternative health community based on selective censorship. I haven't found A more convenient solution than that yet. So organization, and specifically cloud based organization for collaboration and writing, I found that to be very important. And then finally the last is that at some point, especially when you're writing a book about science or a book that might incorporate a lot of advances in, say, biohacking technologies or new research on things that might assist with supporting healthy immune system, or, you know, new compounds that have been discovered that might heal the gut, you get to a point where you simply have to say stop. You get to a point where, you know, even for your, for your editors and your publishers, sanity, if you're going through a traditional publisher, which is not necessary these days, but can be convenient for bookshelf space, you have to get to a point where you just say, okay, that's good enough. This needs to go in the sequel, or this is going to get added to the ebook or the Kindle version, which is far easier to edit, or this is going to go in the special bonus chapter of the website. But that's the tricky part too, is just fricking stopping and saying, okay, I'm done now hit publish and send.

Yeah, that's really good advice. And I'm seeing that come to fruition now as I'm pulling together all these different elements. You know, there is sort of a narrative of a story that's coming together and then there's punctuation points throughout the story where huge insights or lessons have been learned. But it's almost as if each chapter could be its own book. You know, as I start to really dive in there, I'm like, oh, shit, I'm 49 years old, man. So it's like, you know, even if I just went from the past 24 years since my awakening and think, you know, things really change and have this pivotal spiritual experience that just transformed everything. It was like I was born again at 26 years old. Even from 26 to 49 is a lot. So I think what I'm doing now is it's fun because I'm really, I'm in this sort of archaeological dig where I'm just pulling everything out and just putting it where it needs to go. And then I think that what's going to happen is there's just going to be a lot of fat trimmed.

Definitely find that and it will feel like kissing your babies goodbye. The way I kept myself sane was I actually retained a full and complete version of each chapter in Boundless with everything that the editor cut, right? And I simply made a special hidden resources website. You know, you Go there and you type in your receipt number, your Amazon number or whatever, and then it unlocks all. You know, there's over 600 pages that I. That I cut from the book that's still live on or could be turned into additional books, etc. But, you know, I don't know if you fancy yourself as this, but I think I do. We are storytellers. There's probably a reason that we are drawn to podcasting, that I'm drawn to books, and that you're now in the process of writing a book. We perhaps would have been in ancestral times, the people who passed on either wisdom or stories or advice to future generations. I don't feel as though I would have been a gladiator or a warrior or up at night protecting the camp. I know I wouldn't have been doing that because I love to sleep. But, you know, sitting around the campfire sharing stories and finding out cool things and passing on wisdom, you know, I think that being a storyteller is a fun thing to do, and I just feel incredibly blessed to be able to do that, whether it be a podcasting or writing or producing books or whatever the case may be. You know, I think this ability to be able to pass on wisdom to future generations and to current generations. If you want to call what I do wisdom, you might just call it random, random pieces of crazy biohacking knowledge. But I think it's. I think it's a really cool thing to do. I don't know about you, but I feel blessed just to be able to be in a position where I can, you know, in a very amateurish way of phrasing it, find out cool shit and tell people about it.

Absolutely. I'm shocked continually at the fact that this is actually my job. Parlayed my passion into a career.

Me too. I mean, when I tell my boys, you know, dad's going for a three hour hike, I have an audiobook I need to listen to because I need to interview this person on my podcast in two days. He's a really smart doctor who would probably not give me the time of day at all otherwise if I didn't have a podcast for him to come on to talk about. So my job is to go hike, learn, come back and talk to a really cool person and then press, publish, and tell the world about it. I mean, it's a fun job.

Yeah, it is. It is. And to be able to continue to work on oneself and, you know, discover what works, what doesn't, and then share it with people and Then I realize, like, not everyone is like us, where they want to research and try everything. That's what I'm discovering. The feedback I get from people that follow the stuff that I'm doing is like, thank God your people, like you are doing all this. Because I just want the results. I just want to know what the net, you know, the net value is and like what I can skip and just get to the point. And I understand that. I'm just not that way. I want to try everything and really dive into how everything. And I think it's just part of that innate curiosity.

Yeah, it's a consequence of being supremely curious. And I think you're right. Some people want the convenience of getting all the best information that's already been filtered. Right now I like to dig into 100 research studies on carnosine and whether transdermal versus oral administration is best and which different supplements have the best versions and what form of exercise, at what intensity for what duration is. Is it actually going to help you reduce the burn or whatever the case may be and then say, okay, here's what I've found. And I think the world needs people like that. And the world needs people who are out doing other things like say whatever, protecting our country's borders or making food or being in any other position in society and they can simply take what we produce and have access to, to good stuff in a short period of time.

Well, I want to talk about, well, you know, you kind of alluded to it in that you're writing a book about spirituality. And I think for people like you and me to some degree, people get caught up in kind of the low hanging fruit of. If I just get healthy enough, fit enough, have good enough sleep, lose that weight, find the newest biohack, the newest supplement, the newest gadget, then I'll feel this sense of completion and wholeness, you know, and it's like I go to these health conferences sometimes and I look at the crowd and I think, what's the, what's the why here? You know, is the why, like, so you're fit, then what? So you optimize your brain function. Then what? There's then what, then what? What's the end goal? And ultimately the end goal is, I think for most people, a feeling of purpose and a feeling of or.

So you're 160 now, then what?

Yeah, so you're 160.

You made it, you made it longer than other people. You hacked that. Then what? And the way that C.S. lewis described this was a God shaped hole, an abyss deep down inside each of us that no matter how many fancy cars and how many bank accounts and how many houses and how many attractive partners and how many noble and laudable things like children or good relationships that we pour into that hole, it will never be full and it will never feel fulfilling because it's a God shaped hole. And deep down inside of every one of us there is a yearning for something bigger that goes beyond us. And I think that that is a relationship with Creator God. Augustine wrote about this. He also described it as something like a hole, something like an abyss. He actually called it a never ending yearning that would not go away until the day that you die. And if you recognize that Blaise Pascal, a long time ago in the 1600s, he wrote a book called Pensies. It's actually a collection of writings that are largely, they're kind of a defense of the Christian doctrines. But he has a lot of wise sayings in there and I don't have the quote memorized, but you could find it. If you were to Google Blaise Pascal Pence's P N S E S God shaped hole, you probably find something like that. And he noted the same thing. People are searching, people are striving, People get to the end of their lives and still feel as though they never reached that peak of fulfillment, never filled that hole. And the people who actually do, the people who actually find that vibratory frequency that David Hawkins would refer to as peace or even enlightenment, are the people who have discovered that that hole can be filled by a deep spiritual connectedness to God and a practice of the spiritual disciplines just as much as the physical disciplines or the mental disciplines. Caring for one's soul just as much as one would care for one's bank account or fitness. And really I think that that is the key. That is a God shaped hole that will never be filled until you figure out a path to God to fill it.

Yeah, well said. I know in my own experience it's been early in life due to childhood experiences that were traumatic and painful that caused a further separation from that relationship with God. Even though I wasn't conscious of it. I think that all babies are born connected, right? And then we have experiences, I mean even circumcision and traumas that happen at birth. I was put in an incubator.

Seriously, birth is fun. You get slapped in the face, put your penis cut off and then your lifeblood cord tied off and tied a knot and you know, and then a tit shove in your face.

Yeah.

One of those things is okay, if you're lucky.

Yeah, I was thrown in the incubator for the first week of my life and cut off from all human contact. You know, it seems like, oh poor me. But looking back at different patterns that have manifested in my life, there was a real disconnection there. And then, you know, things that happened that shouldn't happen to kids happened. And you know, my refuge from that was seeking some kind of connection. And I was able to find a facsimile of a connection to myself through drug abuse and started that when I was really young. And people like me in recovery that have made it out the other side of that knowledge, or at least at some point we'll learn that we were trying to fill that God shaped hole with that feeling of being satiated or soothed, self soothed by changing our chemistry. And then you, at least I, I won't project on any other former addicts and alcoholics listening, but you, if you're so lucky you don't end up in prison or a cemetery, you realize, oh shit. What was missing was this relationship with God. And then there's a lot of missteps typically in trying to fulfill that with the partner, the supplement, the job, the money, when losing the weight, gaining the weight, you know, all of the things that are, you're still like, you might not be doing something so self destructive destructive in that escapist way, but you're still looking for something that seems to be elusive and it's that connection to one's true or higher self which is at one consciousness speaking with God. It's like the God within you kind of gets lost in the chase after that feeling of existential loneliness or separation.

Right. And I don't mean to vilify nice cars, a great wonderful family, a lot of money in your bank account, drugs, supplements, gyms, gold spandex, leotards and bench pressing. Whatever it is that you derive joy from. Different people are wired up in different ways. But like we were discussing in the kitchen before we came in here and I was telling you, I recently had this Dr. John Laurence on my show and he sent me up some of his zen spray, this nicotine based hop a extract from the Amazon. I just took a couple sprays up my nose. It kind of clears the head after you do your maybe a bloat, all the snot it induces and it can be addictive. As we were discussing. Nicotine can be addictive. Ayahuasca retreats can become an escape rather than a connection to yourself. Or to God. Cars can become something that you define yourself as being attached to rather than a passing pleasure in life. And even when we were in the kitchen, I mentioned this. As Anthony Demello says in his book Awareness, we should be able to look at all of these things, all of these things that surround us in creation, whether things that humans made in God's image have created or whether God has created, whether a plant extract of psilocybin or LSD produced in a laboratory, whether a fancy Ferrari or a big oak tree providing shade in the backyard. We should be able to look at each of these things and recognize them as pleasures, things that cause this dopaminergic response. It's built into us. It's a fantastic response. And you and I were talking briefly about this. We, we call it addiction in many cases when we like to do something repeatedly over and over again. But honestly, human beings from a biochemical standpoint were created to take a great deal of pleasure in many things that we come back to over and over again for another hit of pleasure. Coffee, exercise, nicotine, sex, you name it. And that doesn't mean the thing that produces dopamine is bad. That doesn't mean coming back to it repeatedly is an addiction, or at least should not be vilified if it is an addiction. But you should be able to take anything in your life that you're throwing into that God shaped hole and say you are Again, as Anthony DeMello would say, you are something I derive pleasure from. But I am not attached to you. I do not depend upon you for my happiness. If you can't say that to all of these fancy tools and toys and gadgets and supplements and drugs and medicines that surround you, or any of them, or there's a certain one that you can't say that to without cringing or feeling a little pit in your stomach, then that is a sign that you do have an unhealthy attachment, that you do have potential for an addiction to something. And, you know, I just like to paint it in the I'm going camping now with my backpack scenario. You know, you should be able to just go off and camp for three to five days without any of these things in sight, extract yourself from them and not feel as though you're supremely unhappy because they no longer exist in your life temporarily. And you would be surprised. We were talking about this with nicotine, how sometimes it's not the fact that you're severely addicted to a substance as much as the fact that because it's constantly around you It's a cue to partake in it. And I found that if I simply remove myself from an environment where I might have access to something, you know, like food or a kettlebell or caffeine or whatnot, and it's no longer around, it's not that hard to become detached from it.

Yeah, well, it's funny you frame it like that because I think, you know, my view of all human pathology is really a deviation from nature and natural human ways, right? So the hunter gatherer, connectivity and intimacy and human support and love and affection, physical touch, all those things combined with the loss of our connection to the land, I think that's at the root of all pathology, both emotional, spiritual, and physical. And so a good experiment would be to actually go immerse yourself in nature with no props, you know, alone, I guess, would be, you know, the real warrior's way to do it, but with a couple loved ones, you know, like, you have family, kids and whatnot. To go out there and really experience what it's like to be in true wholeness and completion in the way that we were designed, you know, it seems like as we've deviated further from that, then all these props become necessary. Like, you wouldn't. I always say to people when they write, because people write in are like, you know, people that have this scarcity mindset, often that are like, well, I can't be healthy because I can't afford the biocharger or the, you know, the infrared sauna or whatever. And, you know, the first thing I say is, like, know you. Yes, you can. Like, if my ass can figure this out, like, I didn't graduate high school and I'm doing it. So it's just a mentality thing more than anything. But more than that, I always say, you really don't need any of that shit if you have the discipline to align yourself with nature. Sun, gaze at dawn. Sun, gaze at dusk. Get in some cold water, get hot, move your body a bit, do some breath, work, meditate. Most of the things that really move the needle are. But people don't want to do those because they want the quick fix. It takes more discipline to do that than, like, pop some Modafinil and, yeah, you know, all the other things.

I would never freaking want to be a caveman, nor would I want to live in a tent. Like, if I had to choose, I would not want those things. Because our modern life is pretty freaking magical. We live like kings, and then sometimes we find in our hole, especially, you know, if you're steeped in the Paleo, the ancestral community. Oh, ancestral man or woman wouldn't have done this. They wouldn't have done that. They wouldn't have gotten on an airplane. You know, they would have traveled by covered wagon across the US and half the family would have died as they traveled 3,000 miles to go see Grandma. But I'm not going to get on an airplane because that's unhealthy and subjects me to radiation or, you know, I have an entire emperor's worth of library at my fingertips, but I'm not going to access it that much because I don't want to get irradiated by WI fi. You have to draw a line somewhere and accept the fact that a lot of the conveniences of modern life, despite having a few biological downfalls in terms of them being evolutionary mismatches, that perhaps our cell membranes and other parts of our body have not yet been able to fully adapt to present a wide range of blessings and conveniences, that I think sometimes because we have this nostalgic view of how good ancient life must have been, we neglect to appreciate. And, you know, I've certainly been guilty of that, you know, on my own show, you know, and in teachings or speaking, you know, saying that we need to be as close to. As close to Earth as possible and as ancestral as possible. When in fact, I think that you can, to a certain extent, have the best of both worlds. Right. You can marry ancestral living to modern science, make some good educated decisions. Yes. Don't strap a WI FI enabled meditation neural feedback device to your head and sit there for an hour with rampant levels of EMF floating around your brain. But, you know, if you got some Bluetooth enabled Muse headband or something like that that you're putting on for 10 minutes a day, because it's assisting you with steepening the curve or lowering the steepness of the curve of your meditation practice or something like that. Then go for it. Embrace technology. Embrace something that our caveman ancestors wouldn't have done. And I think that many of us would be healthier and better off because of that.

That's. That's a really keen observation. Someone was asking me yesterday if I go, if I do, you know, like, backpacking legit. Not like put on a backpack and hike a mile up a hill, but like, go out for nine days.

Yeah.

With your backpack. I'm like, that is the. I would rather do anything other than that. You know, it's like, well, where's my chilipad? I mean, what if the ground, you know, what if it's too hot or too cold. What if I'm uncomfortable for just a few minutes? So I am absolutely guilty of excursions.

Like that do help you appreciate the chilly pattern.

Yeah, it's just, you know, like the ground's too hard. Are you kidding me? I value my sleep, but it is about for me also a balance, but also acknowledging that the reason that so much of these props and things like that are needed in order to just sustain and evolve in a new way is because the deviation from our natural life way is so far off. But there's also no going back. And if you become domesticated like I absolutely have, I'm not going to live in the woods in a cabin with no electricity. This ain't gonna happen. It would be like the life of the renunciate. You know, the monk who just drops everything. I spoke of David Hawkins, he did that. He left a huge practice in New York City as a psychiatrist of 50 years and just abandoned all his finances and everything and just move to Sedona with the pickup truck. Yeah, you know, that's one path. But then eventually you're gonna have to start building a life back up probably and re entering the world in order to carry whatever it is that you learn.

You know, many people have that all or nothing approach. You know, they, they say, oh well, you know, I need to go live in a cabin in the woods forever or you know, sell all my belongings and become a monk forever. And I do think that brief excursions here and there into those uncomfortable scenarios are very developmental for character and do really help you to appreciate the pleasures in life that you might have lost your full mindfulness around in terms of appreciating and being present with them. That piping hot cup of coffee in the morning that you grab and suck down while you're hunched over emails on your computer that you barely appreciate anymore, even though it arrived to you from freaking South America, you know, selectively roasted and hand picked and all the jet fuel that got burnt to bring it up to you and you just suck it down morning after morning after morning without being aware of it. You go camping without any coffee for a week, you come back and you might be a little bit more appreciative of that cup of coffee. And so I think that for self awareness and for appreciating a lot of these modern pleasures in life, that extracting yourself on a regular basis, having, you know, there's a wonderful book that I'm taking my family to through right now called the Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. And every Two weeks we visit a different topic within that book. The topic last week was teachability. The topic this week, fittingly enough is unplugging. You know, there was everything from charity and service to worship to self examination and a host of other topics to that came before that. But one was retreat the value, and we see this over and over again in great philosophers and thinkers and authors of having some structured scheduled retreat each year in which you do escape a lot of the modern conveniences of life. And in many cases it is accompanied with things that go quite well that pair quite well with the retreat, particularly fasting, prayer, silence, solitude, study. These things that a retreat better enables us to do when we are free of distractions. I especially think that anybody who is attracted to this new sexy world of plant medicine and fast tracking the self discovery process through ayahuasca or through complete ego dissolution via whatever psilocybin or MDMA or anything else needs to take that route first, needs to go off by themselves and experience what a plant medicine or a drug free journey of self discovery is like. In other words, do the hard shit first before you pop the pill.

Or that pill popping could be a lot harder than it needs to be because all the shit that you've been suppressing and repressing by not wanting to go just face silence and face yourself is going to be shoved into your face like a giant funhouse.

I know many people who have gone off on implant medicine immersions and couldn't even handle a week long dieta going in, couldn't handle restricting meat, restricting alcohol, restricting the use of other compounds that they've become attached to doing at least a 12 to 24 hour fast beforehand because they really had never put themselves into that scenario. If a week before going into a ceremony like that, you can't even do that, it's a pretty good sign you're not prepared to do it.

You just reminded me of one element of that is the character building and discovery of one's self reliance. Also there is a lot of value in that. I'm thinking about where you live in Spokane. I think I've told you this before, but I went to a boarding school there that was like this quasi reform school sort of very cult like bizarre place in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. Yeah, it's not a stretch you can imagine, you know, it's like 30 miles south of Canada or so. But I remember telling you, I was like, oh, Spokane, that was the big city for us. Every once in a while they would set us loose in our Little, you know, short bus and take us to Spokane.

Oh yeah.

It was like being in Manhattan.

The moms are all, they're not driving minivans, they're driving pickup trucks with, with 44s, you know, holstered to their hip. Yeah, yeah.

But at this school, it's called Rocky Mountain Academy. One of the beautiful things that they did for us is they sent us out on a vision quest. So they give you like a 50, 60 pound pack. I'm 14 years old at the time. God knows how much I weighed, but it was probably double the pack at that. And for you, hike up into the mountains, you know, three feet of snow, snowshoes, the whole deal. And then they give you a tarp and teach you how to build a little ice shelter or snow shelter. And they're just, just like, here's your journal and a can of Sterno and some beans. Bye.

Well, I gave you beans at least.

You'D have to go out and find your own food. Yeah, and it was, you know, of course it was extremely challenging and scary. You hear noises at night. I'm 14, I'm from California. Like I miss my skateboard and my walkman and my Black Sabbath tape, you know, and here I am. And it was challenging. But man, coming down that mountain, I was a different person. It really was like a coming of age write a passage kind of thing. And I was like, holy shit, I did that. You know, and it gave me a lot of confidence as coming out of that, you know, afraid little boy that's kind of afraid of the dark of that man. I hung out here for three days and nights with just myself and a pen and a journal and lived to tell the tale.

Yeah, well, you had very irresponsible parents to allow you to do something like that. People jumping through the radio waves right now.

No, this was under supervision.

Yes. No, I'm, I'm joking actually, that more boys especially should go through a rite of passage like that. You know, my boys will have their, well, they'll have kind of a four day group wilderness survival next spring. They've been doing camps with this same facilitator for the past six years. So they've already built up their spear making and their bow drill and their, their sheltering and their plant foraging and their general survival tactics. And then that four day immersion will be finished with a 24 hour solo. Right. River will be cut off from his twin Terran, Terran from his twin River. They'll similar to you have a backpack, a journal, a wool blanket, a knife and be forced to fend for themselves.

For 24 hours with no sternum.

When I say force, this is not like dad's favorite, but, you know, it's one of those things where I'm setting it up and should they choose to swallow that pill, that's all there for them when they're 13. The following year when they are 14, they will go through from that rite of passage into adolescence through another rite of passage into adulthood where it will be four days solo. And during those experiences, they will experience loneliness, they will experience ego dissolution, they will experience greater connectedness to God, because there isn't a whole lot aside from that to connect with once you've been inside your head for that long, out by yourself, usually hungry and undergoing some element of hardship and fasting and thirst. And I truly wish that I had done something like that when I was 13 or 14, because my rite of passage was about 20 years of Ironman triathlon and Spartan racing and death racing and adventure racing and bodybuilding and kettlebell swing, everything else to prove to the world that I was a man. And I think that had my passage to manhood been more clearly recognized as an adolescent, and I think this would be the case for many men out there who are still searching and who still deep down inside, are boys, right? They're not fathers, they're not leaders, they're not kings. They're still boys deep down inside.

You talking about antifa? Sorry, couldn't resist. Totally off topic. Inside joke.

They need that. And I think that culture would be better off for it. We would have stronger fathers and leaders and kings if rite of passage was built into our westernized culture in the same way that it's still built into many indigenous hunter gatherer cultures. It doesn't have to be evil and wicked and vehement and, you know, overseen by elders who lack humbleness and meekness. It doesn't have to be, you know, like the wild Wild west story book I was reading to my boys last year, where they take the youth and they put holes in their skin and hang them from hooks from a ceiling and twist them in circles. Well, they attach buffalo skulls to the chains that hang off the hook so they get heavier and heavier. And then once they drop down, they have to run those buffalo skulls through the, through the tribe while they're getting kicked and punched and scraped. And then those who still have the buffalo skulls attached to their hide after all of that, they then have to drag them out to a field and just live out in the field until the skin Rots and the skulls eventually get detached because the rotting skin has allowed the, the cable hooks to come free. And then they can. Whether you go through that long route or whether you go through the route where you're dragging your buffalo skulls through the village and all of them eventually just become detached from the skin, you then return back, you get one of your fingers cut off to signify that you have made it to warrior status. And then you are a man. I don't want my boys to do that. Right.

Damn, who is this?

Maybe they can carry a buffalo skull up a steep hill. I forget the tribe. It's a wild Wild west storybook. I was reading to my kids.

Oh my God. So they made it American tribe.

Yeah.

And this is real American tribe.

Oh, yeah. This is all for real. That's a little extreme.

Yeah.

But we do need our adolescents to have a little bit more of a remarkable recognition of their passage into adulthood and a recognition of their increasing responsibility in society and contribution or potential for contribution to society recognized. And I think that's wonderful that you did something like that in Bonner's Ferry.

I mean, it was part of the journey and I think the whole two year stint there really was the pivotal experience that changed the trajectory. Even though I came out of there and still became an incorrigible drug addict, it did stop me from committing crimes against other people, which is the pattern that had developed up until the time I was 14. And so after that I, you know, not that I've ever committed any crimes, but they were just crimes around breaking drug laws, basically, not breaking into people's houses and all kinds of things that I was getting into when I was really young. So, yeah, definitely. You know, that sense of self worth and of self empowerment was huge. And there was a of lot of stuff like that there, you know, that just made you tougher. You know, you mentioned indigenous peoples, and I think it's been really interesting over the years, past two years, specifically, of going into different ceremonies with people of different traditions. And I'm just being curious, as guys like us are, and asking them questions and in some cases interviewing them. But what was it like for you growing up and you know, tell me about your, your lineage and when you came into this life and started doing medicine, I was actually shocked to find that many of these indigenous peoples that practice the use of plant medicines start really young and their initiations often include the use of plant medicines with their kids. Now that's obviously in our culture, that's not something that would be kosher. In most cases, well, it's due to the technicality of the.

It's not legal, of course, in most situations with most compounds, unless you're kids getting their first glass of wine or something like that, they've been ceremonially inducted. But I actually am not opposed to the use of plant medicines, especially in a ceremony that's taking place during the rite of passage or after. I think that that's something that just further allows for a dissolution of the ego and a greater connectedness to self and to God. And I'm certainly not tabling the idea of that for my own voice again, although at that point, we have to be careful with anything we say, because I don't want social workers showing up at my door digging under their beds for their cup of ayahuasca or something like that.

Hypothetically speaking.

Hypothetically speaking.

That is an.

Hypothetically speaking. My boys will have a very responsible attitude towards and use of plant medicine probably by the time they're 15.

Speaking of plant medicines, what was the first experience that you had and what different experiences have you had? What different compounds have really moved the needle for you or had an impact?

Well, as with many of the forays that I take before, I fully understand the power of something. I cowboyed a lot in the early days of my use with some of those compounds. And by early days, not very early, I didn't really touch anything except alcohol until I was 31 and I am 38 now. Had smoked half a joint in a parking lot once. And I certainly drank a lot of Everclear and beer and wine in college and went through a stint where I was a bit of a wine aficionado. Went everywhere with my wine bible and did wine tastings and. But for me, it was pretty much all alcohol and the occasional cigar, a little bit of a joint here and there. I started to look into a lot of these compounds that are so called lysergamides or variants of LSA or LSD for enhancing cognition or to be used as a microdose for left and right brain. Brain hemispheric activity. Started to look into psilocybin just based on a basic STANIS protocol, you know, psilocybin and niacin and lion's mane, again for nature immersion or for, you know, a day of creative thinking. Did a little bit of microdosing with MDMA and with ketamine.

Mdma? Really?

Sexual experience.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, yeah. A little, you know, oxytocin, usually along with that connectedness piece. And did my first ayahuasca ceremony here in the US with a very good facilitator who a lot of people are probably familiar with. And that was paired with dmt and, you know, went through that for a few days. And that was my first realization of how deep.

So you're smoking DMT wall on ayahuasca?

Yeah. How deep you could go in terms of crazy. In terms of what I would consider to be a very intense journey into, you know, pure light and love and a connectedness with God. And I've. I've never had that much baggage in my life emotionally or even from a relationship standpoint. I lived a pretty clean life as a young Christian kid. I never went through a whole lot of trauma. I haven't had a lot of baggage out of me to deal with. So I never really approached plant medicine from that perspective. Thus most of my experiences have been pretty dang pleasant and full of just light and love and bliss. And from that, the ayahuasca and DMT ceremony did a few other ayahuasca and DMT experiences.

Are you doing the bufo toad or the synthetic dmt?

Both, both. I made a few orders from Sigma Laboratories, I think. I think it was Lysergy at the time. And these are like synthetic variants of DMT, synthetic extracts of psilocybin, etc.

And.

Just kind of cowboyed around with it for a little while, but even still didn't have until I was 36 years old a great deal of intentionality, a great deal of set and setting built up around some of these immersions. It was more just sheer curiosity. What's this one do? What's it make me feel like? What different things do I see when I use this? How does that make me feel? Which one makes you feel? You get run over train the next day versus having a super clear head and having clappy the next day. And I a couple years ago began to work with a facilitator who uses about 60 different Amazonian plant medicines and decided that after having seen my father go through what I would consider a midlife crisis, he became a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. And he and I love my dad. I don't want to talk down on him on the podcast, but he seemed to go off on his own journey of self discovery. He moved to Vashon island to live with some monks for a while. He traveled to the east to study Eastern Orthodoxy. There he began to have his own private prayer practices and icons and began to go to a different church and eventually divorced my mom and left the family And I think that a great deal of the journey that he went on actually made him, to a certain extent, a wiser, more enlightened individual. He did change. He released a lot of judgment, a lot of shame, a lot of ego. But at the same time, the journey also left his family in the wake, left the whole family behind. And that in and of itself can create a lot of trauma, especially for my younger brothers and sisters who were still in the house at the time and had to deal with all of that. You never want to see your parents split up, and, of course, you never want to hear them blaming each other or shoving each other under the bus. And all that happens as parents are going through divorce inevitably, at least. I've run into very few people who still don't badmouth someone they had a divorce with or claim it was someone else's fault or whatnot. And that's hard on kids. I did not want to begin delving because I found my consciousness expanding. I found my ego was somewhat dissolving. I found myself becoming a different person. When it came to the way that I approach my spiritual practice, enhancing my own breath work, my meditation, my yoga, my journaling, my delving into scriptures, everything began to change. It was as though my consciousness was expanding to a certain extent, which I think is one of the beneficial effects of these type of compounds. But my wife, Jessa, had no clue about any of this or how. All she knew was, you know, Ben's getting a little different. You know, he's not as into, like, riding his bike down the highway super fast in spandex anymore. He's getting a little bit more into meditation and journaling and these weird forms of breath work down in the basement in the sauna. And I could see that it was taking us in two different directions. So two years ago, I began to work with this facilitator who primarily works with cobbler. You're doing a ceremony together. You're in the same place after you've gone through a series of different medicines and soundtracks, etcetera, that he chooses for you. You then face each other in bed for a good five to seven hours, talking about life, about family, about relationship, you know, still in the medicine space, but looking deep into each other's eyes. We have done that six times just in the past two years. And it's been transformative for our relationship in terms of journeying together rather than me going off on my own journey. And I have to tell you, for legal reasons, my facilitator will not even tell me what he is using, I can tell you, it's both synthetics and plant medicines. Having experienced all that stuff kind of individually on my own, lsd, ketamine, mdma, Ayahuasca, dmt, iboga, all this, I can kind of tell, I'm like, oh, he just, I think he just injected this into my shoulder. I'm pretty sure that last capsule I took was, was this or that. And there's even a microdosing protocol that he puts me on in between our sessions where I'm taking, you know, these little pills on one day. You know, one's called Creativity, another is called Focus, another is called Compassion. And you kind of weave these into the month on a certain scheduling basis to kind of keep you in the space to a very small extent, so to speak. So you continue to get downloads and continue to merge left and right hemispheres and continue to be in kind of an ego dissolved state. So it's a really, really interesting approach. And that's pretty much for me. I'm good with that. Quarterly plant medicine retreat with my wife overseen by a facilitator with a little bit of a microdosing in between. It's working extremely, extremely well for me. With the only exception being that early on in the process, process, I was always the physiologist in me, was always aware, just like I just described, you know, what's that? Or could you change the soundtrack? Or hey, I think I'm too lucid, you know, I don't pay attention to sounds in the room and kind of self analyzing and my ego is just so big it would not turn off. And so I did go through. This was a year and a half ago. I've had a lot of comments from people actually since I did this, that even my personality changed and my writing changed and, and the things I would say on stage or on podcasts began to change. But I went through about a 27 hour, very, very unpleasant experience that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy with vomiting and urination, sweating through the bed sheets and crap in my pants. It's just deep, deep into very uncomfortable medicines. In order to kind of crack open the ego, to allow myself to, to release the built in belief that I've grown up with, that I am the hero, that I am God's gift to mankind, that I am the truth, that I am the Jesus, that I am the Savior. I really had that complex just spinning away at the back of my mind and that ceremony just ripped all that wide open. And since then I've realized, frankly, In a nutshell, that I don't need to be the hero, that any shame I project on people, any judgment I project on people, none of that is necessary because we are all saved by the death of Jesus. We are all therefore accepted. And at our death we can pass into eternal bliss with God the Father. And who am I to tell anyone that they are on unequal footing or that Jesus didn't die for them? Who am I to say that I'm so powerful, I can be the hero, I can save the world? That's already been done. My only job is to just tell people the good news. And that was really transformative for me.

Yeah, medicines have a way of changing one's perspective powerfully and profoundly. After I was sober 22 years and I'd heard about psychedelics and plant medicines done intentionally, whether in a therapeutic setting or in a shamanic traditional ceremony, and I thought, that's great for you people. But I can't do that because I'm not allowed to do anything mind altering as a practice of self preservation. Because historically had I thought, well, I've been off drugs for a little while, I could probably drink a couple beers. Then there I go again. It's just like the pattern is so obvious every time. Going back into my 20s and stuff. But after I started to explore a bit a couple years ago, I started to remember that even before I got sober, when I was just using psychedelics to escape a couple times, I did have experiences similar to what you described that helped me to see myself in a way, objectively that would have been impossible had I not had the assistance of that change of consciousness. And in one particular situation, I've totally forgotten about this. I took a bunch of mushrooms because I used to sell mushrooms as for a living back in the day here in Hollywood and these big, this big five gallon buckets, you know, and I used to buy like, that's funny, you know, five pounds of shrooms.

My mom actually, she sold a lot of shrooms. Oh really? Before she moved from, from Detroit to Moscow. Like she, she was deep in shroom. Yeah, I mean, she was pretty much on shrooms. She told me this last year, pretty much every day.

Really? Yeah, I mean, they're a good business because the markup, you know, your margins are good, but you can still offer value. You can basically double, you know, your wholesale to retail price and still be solid with your customer. So I liked it. But anyway, I digress. You know, one time, I don't know, I probably took 5, 7 grams of mushrooms or Something just because I was depressed and sad and anxious and suicidal. And I thought, well, if I just pour mushrooms on this, I'll feel better. And that didn't happen. What happened was I had this experience in which I was able to see what a train wreck my life had become. Maybe 25 years old. And, you know, it was just the clarity that I was given. Even though I was drinking with him and stuff like that, I was trying to party. I had this basically a nervous breakdown. It was just sobbing. And my buddy, Repo is his name. He's the drummer of my band. He's like, dude, you're a bummer. Like, you're the worst guy to shrimp with, because I was just melting down. But what happened was I just realized, like, man, I think I identified there was this seed of potential in me, and the mushrooms helped me to see that. That if I could just get sober, ironic as that might sound, that I could have a life then, could actually contribute something to the world, and that I could make something of myself. And I forgot about that for a very long time. And then shortly after that, I did. I checked myself into rehab and I, for the first time in my life, started praying to God. Just in a nebulous, vague kind of way, just, creator, whatever you are, I mean, I don't care if you told me to be a Hare Krishna, to become a Christian Judaism, whatever, I would have done it. But I didn't really have any specific path. It was just like, God, help me, because I can't help myself, you know? And it came and it happened and it did.

But then it was.

It took 22 years of just doing things on the natch and just looking at myself in the mirror every day and doing all of the meditation, all the work, going to India and all that before I finally did the medicines again. And I have to say, man, it's like the rewiring of my brain that has taken place through the experiences I've had. You know, a few with peyote, a few ayahuasca, one ufo, handful of mushroom journeys. I mean, I was thinking about it yesterday. I'm just doing. I don't get triggered anymore by the shit that I used to get triggered for. It's like, even after 22 years of just digging and digging and working and working and growing and surrendering and surrendering and all of that, there were some still just pathways, I think, in the mind that just couldn't be reached, you know, where a certain experience or especially in romantic relationships, just things that would happen and Patterns that I was acting out that weren't productive in various ways that I could see, but I still couldn't really stop. I'd be like, wow, I'm never doing that again. That neural connection would draw me back into that felt sense of experience or the pattern that results from it. And I swear those medicines, man, have just like gone into my psyche and rearranged things in a way by me just voluntarily letting go and trusting that process and trusting God and God's creation and working through those medicines and the various very talented facilitators and therapists that I've worked with. It's like I can't imagine where I would be right now if I hadn't made that decision and followed my intuition. Two years ago to Costa Rica, did my first series of four ayahuasca ceremonies. It's just a completely different world. The thing is, though, and you mentioned this earlier, is that I made very sure I did my research that none of the things I was taking had any potential for addiction. And still to this day I never heard of someone like smoking bufo toad and be like, I'm going to do that in a couple hours.

If you take 8 grams of so psilocybin, you don't want to see psilocybin the next day.

Actually, I, actually I do. The last time I did that, I was, the next day I was like, that was awesome, I should do that again. But point being is I did research. You know, I'm talking about cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, alcohol. I mean, those are the, that's how.

I rolled back in the day.

I'm not proud of it or ashamed of it. It's the medicine I needed to not kill myself, basically. And so I researched all this stuff, stuff to make sure that I wasn't going to like, you know, put my toe in the water and fall in the pool again, so to speak. And so after talking to so many people that had been sober or that were rendered sober even by these profound experiences, I went into it and I don't feel at all that anything has become habit forming at all. But I have noticed because I've accomplished so much spiritually in those experiences and I've overcome just such deep seated wounds and as I said, broken those patterns that, that part of me that wants to keep improving and keep merging with God and keep growing has tended to want to seek out those experiences with pretty rapid succession. And thankfully, dating a woman who's a shaman and a spiritual teacher and is wise and I trust her wisdom and she Pointed that out to me. She's like, I know you're not getting addicted to this stuff, but I don't know if you're realizing, like, you go into the ceremony pretty often with a lot of different things and that's cool, that's you, that's your path. But there's something in it to her. She communicated. It feels off to me. And I'm like, what? I'm not addicted. But what I realize is it's what you mentioned earlier is kind of like it's not addiction, but it's the attachment to those peak experiences is the potential risk there, you know, and the attachment to those peak experience, for me, I think I'm more susceptible to that because the benefits of those experiences are so profound and so obvious to me and I'm not delusional. So if I do a mushroom journey and like, you know, have some deep healing or realization, like a lot of my book came to me in the last MDMA psilocybin journey I had and it was just like, boom, this is what happened. I was gonna write a book just so I could get paid more to go do public speaking, to be like, oh, I'm an author. To put that in my bio. I mean, it was literally self serving, just 100%, just for my career. Took the mushrooms and I was like, yeah, what's up with the book? What am I supposed to do? And it's like, boom, you're supposed to do this for other people. And then the whole thing unfolded. So when I have something like that, I'm drawn like, well, shit, if that happened last weekend and it totally changed the trajectory of a huge component of my career, then what could happen this weekend? So it's, you know, it's like, it's an attachment to the experience. More so than, you know, I hate my life, so I want to escape. So I'm going to go do coke and hang out a strip bar tonight.

Yeah. I have two observations and then one question for you. My first observation is that you do need to be cautious because I view something like a plant medicine experience from a neural health standpoint as being similar to a TBI or concussion in terms of the potential for neural inflammation and neurotoxicity that it can produce. This is why many people going into and coming out of such a ceremony will use antioxidants such as glutathione, N acetylcysteine and vitamin C, will replenish the serotonin with things like 5 HTP or S adenosylmethionine or amino acids. They will often benefit from things like ketone bodies, high dose fish oil, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, you know, the laser lights that you wear on your head, those V light devices. I treat a ceremony which for me would be quarterly maximum as something that really beats up the brain. Similar to the way that I would not do an ironman triathlon six times a year without accepting the fact that it was going to damage some joints and result in some endocrine disruption over training, thyroid depletion, etc. I would be cautious with hard and heavy use of higher dose levels of these plant medicines for those reasons. I also do not want to give people the impression that this is for everyone. I think that you need to be ready. You need to have already implemented the spiritual disciplines in your life. You already need to have a fasting practice. You already need to be able to have had released your attachments from a lot of the pleasures in life that you might be addicted to. From a negative standpoint, there is a lot of preparatory work that goes into even being ready to consider something like this. And if you're not willing to do that prep work, it's probably not free because you don't do this work to enable yourself to do the prep work. You do the prep work first to then allow yourself to get the most benefit out of medicine. That's very important, 100% must do the hard work first.

One of the first chapters I wrote in my book was like a check yourself the set and setting thing. It ended up being quite a dense piece because I realized especially for people in recovery, I mean there's, I would 10x your, you know, statement of prudence and discernment there. But yeah, I've been invited to ceremonies like here in Hollywood. Oh, my friend's doing ayahuasca thing next week and I'm like, oh no, it just doesn't feel right.

You know, I've been part of a session like that a couple of times actually and it's a complete waste of time and waste of medicine in my opinion. It's kind of, it's kind of an excuse to party with something that might be considered noble and laudable, but out of context is just not something I think most folks are going to get much out of, aside from a pleasant conversation with friends in a more open hearted scenario than you might normally be in. But I just, I don't think it's worth it. And then a question for you is I know that you have your own. I guess I would say Spiritual disciplines practice, whether it be journaling or meditation. And when I did the home biohacking tour with you, we went up to your Zen den where you'll combine things like a dispenza meditation with nucalm with a biocharger. And I'm just curious for you, boots on the streets, when it comes to your spiritual disciplinary practice, what things look like for you these days? What are some things that you do that you think people could or should try themselves at home?

Well, I think I.

That don't involve some $15,000.

Yeah, I mean, I've gone through so many iterations. You know, when I first got sober, as I said, you know, wake up in rehab, 26 years old, burned my life to the ground. Not that there was a lot to be burned there in the first place, but what little there was just been decimated. Suicidal at death's door. Yellow, 135 pounds. And I said the first honest prayer of my life. And I was just, God, I don't know how to live life. You got to help me. I can't do this. And that was the beginning of my spiritual path. And it was just such a surrender moment when the arrogance and bravado and pride that I had propped up with all of this shit in my life had all crumbled. It was just me and the creator there. And in that moment, something happened to me. And for the past 24 years, but honestly, all I've been doing is just exploring with curiosity, what was that thing and who did it? Because it weren't me, you know what I'm saying? Like, I could not release myself. And for anyone that's not had that experience of acute addiction, I think some people think, like, what don't, you know, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Just self discipline, just let it go, just stop. And it just. It doesn't work like that.

The jocko approach. How do you get tough? Just be tough.

When you're 26 and you know you're addicted to heroin for five years, it's not just like, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and not do this and sneak positive, you know, it just doesn't work like that most of the time. So that was the beginning. And really, thankfully, you know, I'm so grateful that I had that experience because there was no choice but to pursue a spiritual way of life. It wasn't like, because I want to meet cute girls at the yoga class or the breathwork class. It was like, I know I'm going to die if I don't build a relationship with that thing that came into my heart and mind and released me from that bondage. And there was just no denying it. I don't care. You could have held a gun up to my head and said, you have to disavow God. It's not real. It was a fantasy. There's just no way. When you know, you know. And I'm sure you've had these experiences. And so because my pathway to a spiritual life happened to be based in addiction, my entry point was the 12 steps. And the 12 steps are loosely based on different Christian principles.

That's the aa, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, this has to do with acknowledging that you in and of yourself, can't solve your problem, that there is a power greater than you, call it what you want, that can solve your problem. I'm kind of running through the steps here. Once you've identified that you can only go so far on your own, that there is another power available to you, and you open your mind to that, then you make a decision to turn your will, what you want in your life, your desires, and the result of your desires, which is your life, the outcome over to that power that you call God. Then you go on to inventory all of the things within yourself that have blocked you from God. And that experience of wholeness and completion that you were innately born with, you make restitution to the people that you've harmed along the way. You make that a habit. You learn to pray and meditate, and you build this life of observing your character defects as they arise and having self honesty and building a life of humility and a life that is truly surrendered to higher power. And as you live that, the purpose is to remove everything that's blocking you from the relationship with God. And when that's happened to a point where you can be functional and carry that into your life, taking those spiritual principles and applying them into the fabric of your character, then you've got something to offer other people. And you come to understand that life is about serving others. And so the whole foundation of my path was so simple and grassy roots. It's just like 12 spiritual truths. You apply those to your life in earnest at first out of desperation because you're in so much pain. Then as your life starts to improve and you realize, wow, it feels pretty good to actually contribute rather than just be a deficit on my environment and the people in it, then you're driven to pursue that further. And that's in kind of deepening the relationship with prayer. And meditation. And so out of that foundation, when I realized something had happened to me and for me, and I start to build a little foundation and get a bit more solid. Then I went to India and studied meditation and something called diksha there, which is an energy transmission, and got into Kundalini Yoga. Did that for. I mean, I still do, but really devoted for about eight years. And included in the Kundalini yoga path is they don't call it breath work, but many of the kriya involve all kinds of different breathing patterns, as I'm sure you're aware. And then I learned Vedic meditation, which is. I'm going like the. No bells and whistles and I'll work my way up into the experimentation and complexity. But in Vedic meditation, it's out of the TM lineage. They kind of split off from the same teaching and took on two different brand names. But essentially your teacher gives you a mantra, which is a Sanskrit sound or word that you repeat effortlessly and silently, kind of in the back of your mind. And it has the net effect of distracting your awareness from your thoughts so that you can transcend into that kind of theta space, which I love. My favorite brain state to be in.

I know you're a true TM practitioner because you didn't reveal your mantra. No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I follow tradition, you know, I do. And you know, did that for years and still sometimes do. But I think what the Vedic meditation did for me is allow me to identify when I've hit that spot, like, oh yeah, here it goes. And the nervous system just goes and just winds down and you start to watch those thoughts go by like grasshoppers on a wheat field, you know. And so once I started to be able to do that just on the nets, just by sitting there and being quiet, even in. I used to meditate in the middle of New York City in Union Square, like up 6pm Time for my daily 20 minutes, you know, the afternoon one. And I could do it there. Then I started to discover things like nucalm and the Fisher Wallace device and the Circadia. Yeah, yeah, the Circadia, the soda, the St. Sota. Sota. The little electrodes that go in your earlobes and popping in the hyperbaric chamber.

A lot of things that stimulate the vagus nerve. Yes, yeah, yeah, I have. Although I appreciate the simplicity and beauty of so called stripped down meditation, back to the better living through science piece, I have found myself able to enter into much deeper delta and theta brainwave production. Much deeper state of relaxation, Much more, much greater Feelings of refreshment afterwards, particularly with the use of the new calm device. Absolutely amazing. And people, I heard about that. People jump into the comment section and they'll say, oh, Ben's getting paid to rep some device. Or you know, this is yet another passing trend. But I use that every day. Every single day when I'm at home. I always do it in the hyperbaric chamber because as you have experienced, that shoves you even more deeply. And so for me, perfect afternoon meditation at home is essential oils like lavender or bergamot, etc. Sprinkled into that hyperbaric chamber.

Oh, that's a good idea.

And then the new color, you could.

Put them in the little, in the little cannula thing too.

I just wrote a big article about this on my website, kind of detailing the entire stack. But in essence, if you have a hyperbaric chamber, great. If you don't just find a quiet place or if you have like a, you know, grounding mat or a biomat, any surface that's different or even just going outside on a rock or under a tree, you put on the headphones, you put on the little nucalm disc right above the acupressure point on your wrist and then you put on noise blocking headphones and a mask. I will either use the mindfold mask and some good Bose wired noise phones or I've been using lately a device that is called a silent mode mask, which is a full wraparound cocoon over your face, which is absolutely stellar because it doesn't have to operate on Bluetooth. I can wire it straight into my phone. And so I'll play the Nucalm track on that. Typically just one of the 20 minute power nap settings or if I have a longer period of time to meditate, the really long brand new, that new recovery delta recovery session.

That one's insane.

I did that. So I woke up about 5 o' clock this morning, but I got out of bed at 5:50 because I ran that session and oh my gosh, it's amazing. I go off to another plan. I don't fall asleep, but I'm almost subconscious. It's very, very odd. It's hard to describe the feeling, but you just completely lose connected with your body. And I'm always waking up with drool coming out the portal.

That's what I was about to say. I'm like, if I ain't drooling, it wasn't a good meditation.

Exactly. And then on top of all that, usually something that I'll take internally to Relax. I find reishi mushroom to allow me to get through a session like that and not be groggy afterwards. So usually for me, it's just a little bit of mushroom, Reishi mushroom. And then I wear that Apollo.

That Apollo ankle band mine just broke. I'm so bummed, dude. I love that thing.

And I put that into relax and unwind mode, which I found to be the best. Even though I think they have a meditation mode, Relax and unwind seem to work best. And that is my afternoon meditation. When I travel, I do all of that, except I'm just laying on my back on the hotel bed or in the back of an Uber if it's a long Uber ride, or at a park if I'm walking to an appointment. I'll just stop off in the park, go under a tree, pull that out of my bag. You know, it's just a wristband. The headphones, the mask, the app. Boom goes. And I pair that with a morning practice in which I wake up and I do this one whole family. Gather the whole family on the back porch and we do a quick five minute meditation. The whole family. We use an app called Abide. It's a Christian meditation app that starts with scripture, brings you through prayer, and typically has some kind of lesson and a little bit of breath work. Because you go through it, they have 10 and 20 minute options. But because we're doing this all as a family, everybody's making breakfast and getting ready. Some people have half their clothing on, and it's just like, boom, go, dad. Somebody has to be the leader, right? So I'm the leader, and I just walk down and I'm super rude, and I just say, everybody, drop everything. We're ready. Here we go. And we go out on the back porch and we all sit cross legged on the back porch. We listen to that, and then we take out our journals and we write down one thing that we are grateful for and one person who we can pray for or help that day. And that, that is a foundation for the Greenfield family every single day. And then in the afternoon, that meditation. Then in the evening, we all gather in the bedroom. We sing for typically about 10 to 15 minutes, play hymns, spiritual songs. We all sing together as a family. We're starting to harmonize. I'll usually play guitar. The boys will play little bongo drums or hang drums or whatever. So I'll sing. And then we do the second part of our journaling. So the first part is gratitude and service in the morning. And then in the evening, it is Self examination. So we answer, what good have I done this day? And what could I have done better this day? So that we identify not only the things that really helped us live our life's purpose, but that also equip us with a little bit more insight into how we failed and what we could do better to improve that. And then finally, what is one way in which I lived out my life's purpose fully today? And so those are four journaling questions. What am I grateful for? Who did I pray for, help or serve in the morning? In the evening? What could have I done? What could I have done better? And how did I fully live out my purpose today? What's one way I fully lived out my purpose? The other elements are that we say a really good prayer, do a lot of breath work before every meal, that we're eating together, and then we always read psalms or a proverb or a scripture before dinner. And I have found that weaving those into the day, the morning journaling, evening journaling, the morning quick five minute meditation, my own personal 20 minute getaway in the afternoon, and then the evening songs, journaling and scripture reading, that's pretty much the Greenfield family spiritual disciplines in a nutshell. And every day is a match. Every day is magical because of that, you know, and aside from that, there are, of course, the quarterly plant medicine retreats with my wife. And, man, I'm very, very happy with the way that life is right now. I just.

Your boys won the karmic lottery. Honestly, you know, can you imagine? I mean, it sounds like your childhood was fairly stable. And I. And I too, you know, I love my parents. I always say that they know that they had their challenges. Most people I know, I think it's because I roll with people that are pretty deep and have been through some shit. Most of their parents were nuts and, you know, came from this highly dysfunctional environments and things like that. And, you know, I think that there's a certain karmic gift in that because then, you know, your ground floor gives you a lot to work with. You know, you have a lot of grist for the mill, as Ram Dass used to say. And that's a beautiful path, too. But I hear the story about that and your kids, I'm like, oh, these kids scored, man. It's like to walk into life as adolescents with that kind of a framework where you're learning universal truths, not just as a construct mentally, but how to apply them, to make them actionable and actually integrate them into your character. And that's the fiber of who a kid becomes.

I've read them like, I don't care if you are the star of the football team. I don't care if you take your little tennis career and begin to play club tennis and rise through the ranks and decide you want to go into pro tennis. I don't care if you're a famous artist or an author, which is what they want to do right now. And one wants to be an artist, one wants to be an author. And I tell them, dad would be just fine if you guys had sandals on. You were traveling around the world as prophets, spreading light and love to the universe. That's what this world needs way more than some muscly hunk thrown around a pig skin on a football field off on the ground. We are living in an era now where we need prophets, we need world changers. And the best I can do is not to live life vicariously through my kids, to go be a prophet in my stage, on my podcast, in my writings, continue to steer my direction towards deep, fulfilling and meaningful messages. But if my children can follow in my wake in whatever way that God has given them to live their purpose best, using their unique skill set. And my wife, who she doesn't like the limelight at all, her purpose statement is that I forget exactly how she phrases it, but she loves hospitality ministry. She just wants to be a hospitable and ministering godly woman and just support her men at home. And so she almost fancies herself as, as the armor bearer for one big warrior and two little ones. That just makes me incredibly happy. If my kids can go forth and spread a message of light and love throughout this world with their lives, and the best I can do is give them an example of how best to do that.

Yeah, I like the part. They're very fortunate indeed. I like the part you were saying earlier about you having those ceremonies with your wife Jessa periodically throughout the year. And I think back to some of my prior relationships that didn't work out for whatever reason. I think God, man, if we had both been in a place to have the understanding of ourselves and also of the use of tools and support from shaman counselors, medicines, etc. To be able to use those as tools by which to understand ourselves and one another and really to use them as a bond, you know, and I've experienced that with Allison. You know, we were really brought together in a peyote ceremony. You know, we were friends and we've been friends for a few years, and that was that. And then we had gone on a couple dates and went and had an experience. And it was just like, you know, you know how it is that for the right people in the right time, again, you know, always the disclaimer there. Not a blanket recommendation, but just where I was at in my life emotionally and in terms of romantic relationships and wanting true love and longevity and intimacy and really wanting to build a life with someone. And I don't know that it would have happened in the way that it did hadn't that door just been slammed open by the peyote in our case.

Full openness. Yeah.

It just like opened my heart and allowed me to let go of some of the constructs that I had had in place to what I thought was protect myself, you know, from being hurt or from hurting other people. And that was just like. Like barn doors being blown off by a raging bull, you know, I was just like, no, Luke, your plan ain't happening. And essentially she, you know, she was seeing that there was potential there and had feelings for me. And it was just like, dude, I don't know what you're up to here, but I'm ready if you are. And if you're not, that's fine. But here I am, kind of. And I was like, oh, shit, I gotta jump.

You know, I should, I should connect you with our facilitator. I think you guys would really dig the experience with him.

Please do.

Pretty cool. Maybe later if you remind me.

Wow.

Well, there's a lot that we've dipped into.

Yeah, I'm stoked.

Is there anything else that you think that people would really like to know about your spiritual disciplinary practice? We had a whole bunch of questions that we, we wrote down. I think we fit in maybe, what, 10%, possibly 11 of the questions we wanted to ask each other. And we covered a lot in our last biohacking episode. But I would like to ask you one last question. Looking over this entire list of questions, for me, it's not really something that appears on this list, but I'm curious because I often ask myself this question. What is your vision? Where is Luke's story in five years or in 10 years, besides a world famous author having published a massive tone of spiritual awareness, or we don't know the title, you're not going to reveal it, it's held close to your chest. But where do you see yourself?

That's an interesting question. You know, and I guess if one doesn't have that answer, they're going to end up wherever the tide takes them. I think for me Ben, you know, the relationship I have with my girlfriend Allison is so solid and feels so right. And it's just. She's just amazing. And so it includes her, and it includes a unified vision of us having a home together, possibly a family. For me, the sense of having a home and having those healthy, close interpersonal relationships is huge, because it wasn't really part of my life experience up until now. It allowed me to explore other areas of life, but that has always been one that's really been missing, even as a kid. And so now that I've really found a home within myself, and I know that I'm also okay by myself, having someone else in my life that is able to be with me in a way that's mutually autonomous, if that makes sense. You know, like, she has her life, I have my life, but we also come together and share this beautiful space. And so a big part of my vision is just continuing to explore the intimacy, the closeness of the mutual, healthy dependence of that relationship and to not only grow together in a relationship, but also share some of the things that we've learned on our journey to get here together and some of the things we're learning together. I see in our future definitely some things that we can share as a couple, because she does very similar to what we do. I mean, in a different lane. But, you know, she's got a lot of wisdom and experience and shares it for a living as well. And then really, the element of just building a home, you know, I love. I haven't been to your house, but, you know, I've seen pictures and heard you talk about it so much. But really, just having a place in nature that is a true refuge for me and my family, that is closer to nature and out of a city where I can just really have some space to think and space to breathe. And then as far as career, I mean, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. And it's not even necessarily that I want to scale it per se, as in, you know, I need to be more famous or make tons more money. It's more about, like, start a series.

Of grocery stores called Tori.

It's more about, I think, where I am right now and seeing the vision is how can I really refine the systems that keep me free of stress and employ other people to be in their zone of genius.

Right.

In a way that makes sense, that keeps me in my lane and my zone of genius and having a life that is as free of frustration as possible by not doing the things that I'M not good at and don't like doing. And so right now, as we speak, I'm just in the middle of kind of rebuilding my org chart and SOPs for my team and really wanting to refine things so that I can employ the right people and have the right people in the right seat on the bus and have them doing something that they're passionate about on the mission, which is to help alleviate suffering and help people to really find a God of their understanding and to optimize their body to the point where they have the vitality and energy to go out and actually find and fulfill their dharma. But in order to do that, it requires a structure and a support. And I'm not a guy that typically gravitates towards structure. So in the vision, I see a life that is more structured in terms of my career so that I can really focus on the one thing that I'm good at, which is doing what we did here today. And that is, you know, sharing my experience and the nuggets of wisdom I'm able to pick up along the way.

And how I hope for you that someday you'll be able to write CEO on your business card. Stoked out of you. That should be, I think, every entrepreneur's role to be able to reach the day where they scratch CEO off their business card.

Yeah, I don't think. I don't. I definitely don't. I don't want to be as CEO. It's funny, you know, I have this other company called School of Style, and, well, I'm in the process of making some changes with it, but I've owned that business for 11 years, and I'm so grateful for it. It's been like a kid that's, you know, grown into an adult and taking care of me. We've helped thousands of kids that have been, you know, sort of outsiders from this elitist fashion industry. And we've helped all these kids from the inner city and stuff get into the industry. There's people that would never had a way to crack in. And that felt so good, but it only felt good when I was passionate about that particular path, which has been a very long time. And so the opportunity to kind of move on from that soon is really exciting and really focus on the thing that I'm most passionate about, which I have been all along, and having a life of simplicity. So it's like, how do you scale your mission? Also keep it lean and streamlined and not too complex. And that's really, you know, I think the challenge I See now, and when I go into my Joe Dispenza meditations and you're envisioning the future, it's like, I'm helping so many people. But it's done with simplicity and clarity, and it's a streamlined machine that's able to contribute content and information in a way. Way that keeps everyone on the team in their lane, in their zone of genius and not stressed out.

I'll drink a little coffee, MCT oil and stevia to that. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, you seem to be doing a good job too, of it, of, you know, being extremely productive in your zone of genius. And I know you have your systems in your team and stuff like that, and every time I see you, we talk about other shit and I'm always like, so how do you manage your this and you're that? You know, the. Just like, as the thing grows, when it was. I never intended it for it to become a thing so much. And it is. And I'm kind of like, oh, shit.

Wow.

This is. I am a CEO now. Oops. So, yeah.

Yeah. How about you?

What's. What's your vision moving forward?

It's very simple to become each day less of a boy and more of a man. To be the very best father that I can be. To be the very best leader for my household that I can be. To wake up each morning and do the very best that I can with whatever God has put on my plate for that day, and to never go to bed at night feeling as though I have wasted the day, feeling as though I have embarked upon 24 hours that involved wasting one's life. I live to make impact on this planet. And each day that yearning grows deeper. And I realize it's very esoteric. And, you know, we can talk about my business and Kion and the supplements company and books, but ultimately, you know that if I am a father, a leader, a king, a man of God, I can live out my life's purpose in full excellence and selfless love in full presence for every human being that I come across, then I'm happy.

So excellent.

That's the big vision. And I know that folks might wonder where they can get some of the books that we talk about and some of the devices that we've discussed and the other podcast episodes that we've done. And I know you always put together amazing shows, notes, so great media.

My team. Give them a shout out.

Yeah, so. So Luke's got got lukestory.com you can find my stuff@bengreenfieldfitness.com I will be giving you guys a handy dandy link that you can use for. For accessing the show. Most of this podcast, I would imagine you might be doing that as well.

You know what's sad? You know what's sad about that? When I listen to your podcast in the middle, you'll be like, yeah, and you can find this on Ben Greenfield's Luke story or whatever. And I'm like, I never know what my link is until it comes out. That's really smart. I've always admired that as a listener. It makes it really easy because on your iPhone, you can just be like, oh, I want those show notes right now. Bing. You know?

Yeah, I try and link to them in the whatever app that you listen to podcasts on. There should be a clickable link to the show notes there. But, man, it was cool sitting here and getting to know the other side of you. The goes back beyond subjecting your glass water bottles out in the kitchen to laser red lights and jumping up and down the trampoline, getting the ice bath. Although I might actually go jump on your trampoline.

The ice bath is nice.

I've got a dinner after this, so I'll do trampoline and ice bath time time permits. I'll hit a new calm session.

You can do a hyperbaric and go get the biocharge and do the whole thing.

I'm tempted. I'm tempted. That was fun, man.

Yeah, likewise. I'm glad we got to have a deeper conversation, and that's something I've been wanting to do with you for a while. I know you're. You know, I've watched your messaging kind of move more in this direction over the last couple years. I think I saw you Paleo FX maybe two years ago, and I stumbled into part of your talk, and you're like, you know, you guys, all this stuff's cool, but we really need to do the inner work. And I was like, right on, Ben. Cool, man. You know, so it's. It's been fun to dive into this. I appreciate you stopping by.

Awesome.

All right, brother.

Love you.

Love you too, man. Thank you.

Thanks for listening, you guys. Full show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ben and Luke, have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in 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.