Unschooling, Plant Medicine, Anti-Aging, Veganism vs. Carnivore & More With The Mindpump Guys!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, I can't say that about a lot of other people that are talking about the same things that you're talking about right now, because when I see what they're doing, I go, it looks like just a big party.

Long term relationships with children in a stable nuclear family home seem to allow for some amount of societal stability that can't be replicated when a village is raising a child and the boys fall asleep reading and mom and I go in and we integrate and face each other and chat and that's how we end our day. And, you know, I just can't do that in front of a sheep. Testicle Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, I know you have been waiting with bated breath for my reunion with my friends Adam, Sal and Justin from Mind Pump. And today I deliver. I went down to San Jose and I sat with these cats for about an hour and a half and we dove into unschooling plant medicine, anti aging and longevity. Veganism versus carnivore. We covered a ton. So you're going to love this episode with these guys. I have all the show notes for you as well as links to the previous four podcast episodes that I've done with these guys. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com mindpump5 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com MindPump the number 5. I'm gonna also link over there because these guys develop amazing fitness programs and they do like everything from strongman training to travel workouts to blood flow restriction band training guides. They specialize in producing these really easy to use fitness programs that are just like downloadable PDFs that you can take on the road. They've got stuff for aesthetics, for high intensity interval training, for performance. They have this one called Maps. Anywhere that you can do in a hotel, backyard, basement, back your pickup truck, you name it. So BenGreenfieldFitness.com MindPump the number five. I'll link to everything that you hear us talk about in today's show and also all of these guys fitness programs and fitness products because I've used some of their stuff and they're developing some really cool things. They even have an obstacle course one.

So I want a nanny and, or a manny, whatever, right? I just want, I want another human in the house that's just kind of helping support.

It's so nice.

We've had like, so my sister right now she comes down, and she spends a whole week with us, and it's amazing because she comes right behind us. Like, she walks the dogs if I need her to. She does the dishes. She kind of prepares meals for us. She'll take the baby for a little bit if Katrina needs a nap. And it's just the relief that, you know, each of us need. And then it also takes the pressure off of me. If I've had a crazy, long day, and I know she's had a long day, and I. And I'm not there, I don't want to relieve her. She doesn't. She just needs some relief. So I've been trying to push it, but she's kind of stubborn right now. She really is. I want to try and figure this out. She's got that going on right now where she feels like she wants to try and figure it out for herself before she decides, like, almost like she's giving up. And I'm like, you're not giving up. Yeah. It's not like you're like, I know you can do it, but it's like, why not? If we're in a position where we can do something like that, why not?

You know, I think the ideal feeling that a woman should have in the home is that she's just the freaking queen, like, the matriarch. And if, and ideally, she doesn't have to lift a finger to do the dishes and to clean up after the boys or do the laundry. I mean, I realize that some people might be sitting there thinking, dude, what a bunch of rich efforts, talking about the woman of the household just sitting around in a bathtub drinking wine.

Hey, it's all about what you spend your money on. You're not a guy that's rolling around in $150,000 whip. You're not out making it rain at places like that. You'd rather invest money and things like that. I think there's nothing wrong with that.

I want somebody to walk down the driveway a quarter mile and get the packages and come back up while I'm downstairs podcasting. That's not too much to ask. And I don't want my wife to have to work so hard that she's stressed out at the end of the day. Yeah. No.

Well, you guys have a lot of.

Don't hire father.

I don't want to be married to an alcoholic.

Yeah, well, you guys. I mean, you also. Your. Your home takes a lot of things to. Takes a lot of effort to take care of. You have a lot of animals and.

There'S a lot of things. Yeah, there's a lot of, like, fitness equipment that's got to be upkept and little hydrogen water generating machines that have to be cleaned out that all come with their little instructions. And every time a new toy comes, it's like the IKEA for fitness. Somebody's got to put all that shit together. And I kind of like doing some of that stuff myself, but it's not my best purpose to be dinking around with a screwdriver on some infrared light panel.

Are you guys still foraging around your property and getting plants and stuff to cook with and.

Yeah. Yes. I found an amazing recipe because I like to make pesto. I'm on a pesto kick salad, probably digest. Oh, it's so good. Like a ribeye steak, like, slathered with pesto.

Pesto goes good on everything.

Oh, my gosh, it's so good. And the. The thing is, like, a lot of these wild plants, you can make a really nice pesto out of, like, like, you know, dandelion, which is wonderful for. For the liver and nettle. All the deer on our property feed on nettle, and it grows these deer into huge whitetails because it's so high in amino acids and fatty acids. So we've got this stinging nettle, and we have wild mint, so you get some of that minty flavor. And then, you know, we grow little, little herbs in our garden, like rosemary and thyme. Another one that I harvest is plantain, which actually grows near the nettle, which is kind of cool because a lot of times things that hurt you in nature have something that grow nearby them to fix that hurt.

I've heard of this. And this is true. It's not a myth that this actually happens. No.

Like in the case of stinging nettle, right, because your hands kind of get stung by the backside of the nettle. It's got these little thorns on it. But you rub some of that plantain leaf on your hand and it just goes away. But the plantain is also very soothing to the stomach, so I put a little bit of that in there, too. So I'll come back home with this big bag of all these wild greens just from around our property. And then what I was doing was I put them in the food processor. And then, of course, use your pine nuts or walnuts work very well. Just a shit ton of olive oil, like a really good, spicy, dark, rich olive oil. Little bit of salt, little bit of pepper. And then you just hit blend on the food processor. It's crazy easy. 90 seconds, you have pesto. And normally you'd add Parmesan cheese to that as well. And even though Parmesan cheese doesn't have the lactose sugars in it, I still don't do that well with dairy. But the Parmesan cheese is what gives it that nice umami, you know, kind of salty flavor. And so it's lacking something. Pesto without the Parmesan. So what I figured out is that you can actually ferment the nettle. So if you have like some old pickles and you know, like an old pickle jar in your fridge, you save that brine and you go and harvest all your plants and everything and you just shove them into a glass mason jar and then you dump the brine over that, you put a lid on it, and then you just set it on the kitchen counter for about two weeks and it actually ferments and it gives you the same nice rich umami flavor as if you had a Parmesan cheese.

Interesting.

Then you put that in the food processor with your nuts and your olive oil and everything. And dude, it's next level shit.

Now, are you incorporating a lot of this in the way you're teaching your boys? Because I know now that you've pulled the boys completely out of school, you're 100% homeschooling them right? Now, are you incorporating stuff like this?

No.

Mostly they're responsible for killing animals. They kill and fill dress animals, just wander around with little knives. They're like, Captain Fantastic. I get that comment a lot. People are like, oh, you guys live out on the sticks. Like Captain Fantastic. Kids are covered in mud with daggers in their teeth jumping out, slitting the necks of the lower the flies out there, huh? No, they do a lot of this stuff with me for two reasons. Number one, it's a very good way for them to, to go out and learn and immerse themselves in nature. And of course, as you guys know, there's tons of benefits of that for kids from their biome to free play to nature immersion. But they also, of course, have podcasts themselves. They have a food podcast.

I didn't know this.

Anytime. Yeah, they've had it for a year and a half. Anytime I'm prepping food, I'm including them. And then they have like, they have chefs visiting the house now and taking them through these complex Italian multi course meals. They go out to different restaurants in town and do reviews. They have all these different recipes that they create. They do two podcasts a month. They have a VA. They pay $400 a month to their brand manager, so she takes care of all their social media accounts, the editing, the publishing, and then they. They go find the recipes they want to create or the chefs they want to interview. And they started as an audio podcast, now it's a video podcast. They've got five sponsors, like Wild Planet, Sardines and Butcherbox, and a lot of these food sponsors.

How much of this did you orchestrate and how much of this have they done on their own?

They have their Amazon affiliate account linked to their bank account. I mean, that like every two seconds, just dropping. Yeah, yeah, love it. And plus, Washington state and most states require that any children who are homeschooled or unschooled take a core curriculum. In Washington State, there's 12 subjects. You know, math, history, reading, writing. One of those subjects is occupational studies. Right. So anytime they're doing the podcast, we can. They keep a diary every day of what they've done. So that should we ever be audited about their curriculum, we can turn around and say, yo, they were cooking. Right? That's chemistry, that's science. They have been building a tree fort for the past three months. I hired a contractor to come up and work with them on this tree fort design they drew up. And that's their math curriculum for the summer. Just building this massive tree fort. And then they're of course doing their podcast. That's of course science and chemistry of food. But then it's also occupational studies, it's math. As they're doing their banking and learning about how the affiliate sponsorships work.

Now, what are your theories on doing it this way versus a traditional way? Let your kid go through school. Like, what are your theories and what do you see already happening and what do you expect to happen by schooling them this way?

Well, in the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval, was it Yuval Nohan Harari probably just butchered his name. You guys know the cat I'm talking about? I don't. Yeah, okay. It's a good book, but the author's name is difficult to pronounce or remember. He dictates that the employee or the worker of the future is not going to be the factory worker that the post industrial era and the agricultural revolution kind of centered education around. Right. We want people to be able to work in factories. We want people to be able to put square pegs and square holes. We want people to be able to think inside the box and follow the rules. Yes. Doug just pulled it up. You all Know a harare, you all know a harare. And instead we need free thinking, resilient, creative workers who are able to adapt to new jobs on the fly. Is things like artificial intelligence and automation replace certain positions. And because of that, if a child is learning in a classroom situation at the same pace as everyone else, taking the subjects that the states or the government has dictated is going to be the exact subjects that they should choose, whether or not they're passionate about those subjects. If they're not allowed to engage in a great deal of creativity and free play, similar to the way that the Finland school system is built, with plenty of time outdoors, with plenty of time in unpredictable situations, then they're likely not going to be positioned to adapt to this rapidly changing work structure that we're now immersed in.

And it's changing faster and faster.

Yeah, exactly. Truckers are a perfect example, right? We're going through that right now with artificial intelligence and automation potentially disrupting the trucking industry. And in an ideal situation, the people who are most positioned to not be affected by that are the people who can go out and do something even more creative. A better example might be a surgeon who is likely going to be replaced by a robot in the next decade. Right. Robotic surgery can be far more precise and less erroneous than a human physician doing surgery. And a human physician who has been educated to think outside the box and move on and be creative might go on to find the cure for cancer, or might go on on to develop an even better robotic surgery tool. Right. So the idea is that by unschooling, which is essentially self directed education, it involves identifying what a child is passionate about, what it is that really turns them on. And that's going to change from year to year and even from month to month, and then surrounding them with as many toys, books, items, technologies, tools, people, et cetera, that allow them to pursue that passion and take a deep dive into that passion. And then you just step back and let entropy emerge. Right? Let the children do what they want, and your only job is to surround them with what they need to get that done.

So tell me how this has unfolded for you then when you first decided to unschool them, did you go right into it with a curriculum idea or did you, like, let them almost guide and direct where you were going to go, like, how did that look?

No curriculum. We started off with about two weeks of almost like a storyboarding where they had these giant posters and they were writing down all the things they're interested, all the places they Want to visit all the cultures they want to explore, the cuisines that they want to learn, to cook. The subjects, like American history, for example, is one subject that they're just very interested in. And then I go out and I go to Amazon and I buy all the books and all the LEGO toys and all the kits and, you know, so a few examples would be they were interested in drones, right? So I got them access to a drone course online. I bought them a drone to build. I bought them all the accessories for the drone, and the drone just went down into the closet. And, you know, once they finished fifth grade, you know, and were just done with school, they started to delve into the closet and go and pull out all these different items and just begin on their own volition to play with and to build these, you know, And I came home one day and they'd built a drone, and another day they programmed a LEGO robot. Like I mentioned, they've built an entire tree fort over the summer, you know, just with wood. And I have a guy coming over a couple times a week to teach him some things. And they have a tree fort now. But the idea is there is no structured curriculum, right? It's simply get the things that they need to be able to delve into their passions and step back and let them play with it.

Now, what are the biggest challenges with this strategy? Because I can imagine parents right now are like, my kid just wants to play video games and watch TV all day, or my kid doesn't know what they like or whatever. Like what? What are some of the challenges you've encountered with this?

Well, I think we've talked about this before on previous podcasts that there's no rules in the Greenfield household, right? There's no, like, you can't have gluten. There's no screen time rules there. There's no, you know, this is a good snack. This is the bad snack rules. You can't have that. Like, there are no forbidden fruits in our home. Instead, we educate them about the consequences of a decision, such as neural inflammation or gut inflammation from gluten consumption, or the effects on their sleep cycles from watching TV late into the night. And then we let them sit with the consequences of any decision that they might make, like stomach upset or, you know, not being able to get through the day because of poor sleep, et cetera. But I think the biggest thing when it comes to, you know, is my child going to sit around and play video games all day? Are they going to be tied to their screen all day? Is that the adults that they're surrounded with must provide the example. Or like in our house, if there's downtime, dad is reading or playing the guitar, right? That TV is rarely on. It's just not a thing. It's not the norm in our house for if there's downtime to go and turn on the tv. There aren't any video games in our house. It's just not something we do. We don't play video games. And they downloaded like a chess program to their computer. But it's more fun for them to sit with dad for 45 minutes before dinner and play chess across the table while we're joking and listening to music. And so a big thing is that if you structure your house and the parents are a living, breathing example of the way that things like video games and food and snacks and however else you spend your downtime should be treated, then generally the kids will move towards that, even with supplementation. I've had the kids genomes sequenced and have identified. They don't have the gene that can assist them with making vitamin D from sunlight. They only have 50% of the glutathione genesis and they have lower levels of BDNF and a variety of factors that dictate that they could engage in better living through science and supplement. So I've bought all those supplements. They're all in the fridge. I don't tell my kids, go take your supplements. But when I go to the fridge and I take whatever glutathione, I'll be like, I'm going to take my glutathione. Now.

This is.

Mmm, that's damn good glutathione. Hey, guys, this is good glutathione. And then a lot of times they'll rush down and they'll grab their supplements because they remember because dad's taking his. And so it's all about being an example and also making sure that the living environment is equipped with things that allow them to engage in productivity and support. That versus the house just being littered with screens and video games.

Now. Have you encountered any challenges that you could tell us? Have there been any situations where you've had some sticking points and kind of had to figure out your way around them or help, you know, navigate them?

You know, it's been really smooth. It's been really smooth so far. I, I think the only thing, it.

Seems like you've, you've been setting the table for many years for this to be smooth. Like, I would imagine, if you try to make this Transition. And you were a household where mom and dad stared at the TV for four hours a night, like that would be a challenge. But because you've kind of already set the table for this way of living, it seems kind of already natural.

Right. Right. The only. The only thing I've run into is that let's say they do want to be a physician or an astron. Not and go to college. While they need to know how to take a standardized test, they need to take a yearly standardized test through the state of Washington.

Oh. So they're required to take that.

They'll need to take their college entrance exams. And so just that idea of going from unschooling to actually needing to whip out a book and sit at the kitchen table to prepare for a standardized test, that I think is going to be the hardest thing. We've still got four more months till we'll start digging into how we'll tackle that piece. But that's really the thing I'm most apprehensive about is, you know, going from just pure, creative free play in a child's dream situation to being required to.

Test, you know, take a test by the government. How are you going to discuss that with them?

Come on inside. Put down your bows and arrows. You guys gotta learn pre calc now at the kitchen table. And the only reason why is because you have to take a test. Yeah, right.

Like, why?

That's rough.

Yeah. Why, dad? Why am I being forced?

Right. Well, honestly, what I tell them is you guys might think differently when you're 17 or 18. You might want to go to college. You don't want to go to college now. But if that changes, the last thing I want is for my kids to think, dude, dad totally screwed me over, and I'm effed up now because I can't go to university because I had no idea when I was 12 that I need to be taking these tests. And dad didn't tell me, and dad didn't encourage me to. So now I can't go to college. I don't want that scenario.

That's smart. You're thinking about that already. What about socializing the kids? What do you do right now for them to interact with other kids?

Yeah, that's a common question in homeschooling and unschooling. And it's a complete moot point because they're in jiu jitsu, they're in theater. I mean, think about summer camp, right? When you got to summer and you had, like, you could go to theater camp and you could Go to horseback riding camp, and you could go to some nature camp, wilderness survival, basketball camp, soccer camp, whatever. It's like that. But all year long, like, they're. They're in so many camps and classes and clinics and off with other kids. They're constantly interacting with other kids. Yeah, exactly. So it is. I mean, there's not a day that goes by that they're not competing against or with, or in the same room as, or socializing with other kids.

So do they find time away from each other? Like, dude, is there, like, when they do hang out with other kids, do they separate or they stay close together?

They stay very close together. They're very close. And I think that's going to be kind of difficult for them when they need to cut ties with one another, because they're very close. As a matter of fact, one of my biggest fears, and this is a nightmare I've had a few times, is that one of them dies. That one of them dies because they're just like, they're joined at the hip. And I will. When they're 13, and that's only two years away, they'll go through a rite of passage. They've been training with the wilderness survival instructor for years now. Like, same camp for four years in a row, going and learning their bow drill and wilderness tracking and fire making and learning how to survive, primitive weaponry, everything like that, so that they're resilient enough to be able to survive in the wilderness. And so when they're 13, they'll have a week with a wool blanket and a backpack and a knife out in the wilderness, but each on their own, not together. And then they'll come out of that, and then we'll have their coming of age ceremony. They'll go through their first foray into plant medicine. They'll journey, they'll dissolve their ego, then they'll pass into manhood, and we'll have like an official kind of cutting of the cord ceremony where they're responsible to help pitch in for food for the Greenfield household. You know, help, help to, to, to support themselves, use more of the money that they're making from this podcast to buy their own things. But they'll, they'll be identified as men at that point, that crossing of the threshold, but that will be done with them alone, not together.

Oh, that's gonna be tough one. That's gonna be a tough one. You said dissolve their ego. How?

Plant medicine.

Oh, wow. And how does that, how does that work with a 13 year old?

There are people doing it and There are many cultures that do this as well, but it is. It's not dissimilar to what you'd experience as an adult. Right. Ego, disillusion, the ability to be able to see yourself in a different light, to embrace greatness or to embrace perhaps something different about yourself than you would have perceived had your ego been on full alert. And, you know, typically those are with things like psilocybin or ayahuasca or other Amazonian plant medicines. And I. I've already identified a very responsible facilitator who will oversee that whole thing.

Interesting. Now, this is something that's relatively new to you even, right? Because I think when we first met you, you didn't. You hadn't done any plant medicine. You hadn't gone into that, and that was, what, three years ago?

No, when you met me, I had.

You had.

Okay, he just lied to you. I had journeyed with.

You weren't on that level yet.

I journeyed with psilocybin and with ayahuasca and with fight meo. And now that's something that I'm doing on a quarterly basis. And my wife has joined me with that, as well as a sort of like, couple's journey. And I think that, as Steven Kotler and Jamie wheel outline in Stealing Fire, it certainly is something relatively hedonistic. We know that depletes 5 HTP and you get some pretty significant serotonin imbalances. And there's just some neurochemical reasons not to do something like that frequently, in addition to the idea that it can become an escape. Many people don't integrate afterwards. Many people don't journal afterwards. Many people don't.

This is what I see a lot of. I see that's more common right now is that it's. Especially in our space. The 20 years that I've been in fitness, I've never seen so many people in the fitness space talk about ayahuasca. Dmt, psilocybin, lsd. All this stuff is coming, surfacing like no other. And I feel like very few people are like you. And I always get asked about you every time you come into town, like, what is he been fucking weird? That guy's crazy this night. Honestly, if there was anybody that I would want to talk to about all these fringe ideas and things, it's you. Because I feel like you. You have learned to discipline yourself really? Well, I can't say that about a lot of other people that are talking about the same things that you're talking about right now, because when I see what they're doing. I go, it looks like just a big party to me.

It is in many cases, because, let's face it, it is kind of fun to lay back and just let your mind wander and forget life and go to a happy place full of sparkles and rainbows and kaleidoscope imagery. And you wake up and you're like, I found myself. I saw God. And then a week later, you're just back at the grind, stressed out, you know, existential angst and lost because you don't have an intention going in and. Or you don't actually have some type of integration practice planned coming out. I mean, my wife and I have. We have those, those backjack chairs in our bedroom now. And we sit facing each other, gazing into each other's eyes for 15 minutes every night. I mean, 9:15, the kids are in bed. By 9:30, we're sitting in bed, legs intertwined, facing each other, just in silence. No talking.

Oh, talking.

You know, it's a. It's. It's a.

And is this a practice that came from one of your journeys? Okay, yes.

And we've journeyed like that, too, completely, you know, complete, no judgment zone. When you journey, you're sitting there for four or five hours facing each other. Right. Which is a crazy, crazy experience to be with your partner, your lover, both of you, egos fully dissolved, staring each other's. Staring into each other's eyes, you know, seeing each other as spirits.

What is a lost art, man?

Yeah.

What are some of the things that you notice about that?

I've experienced.

Experienced this myself too, so. But I want to hear you talk about it. You know, what, what is it about that with your partner? And we're seeing that. This, this is what I think. Was it Colorado that already legal right now, decriminalized?

I'm not sure where it was. It might have been Colorado decriminalized.

And it's probably going to be in Oakland, too.

Johns Hopkins just launched their new research arm, which Tim Ferriss kind of popularized that entire press release and was one of the benefactors for that entire arm. I had dinner last night with Dr. Victoria Hale, who is working with Maps foundation and is responsible for a lot of the additional research into ayahuasca and also psilocybin in Canada. They're going to be rolling out a series of different medical clinics designed for therapeutic administration of these. There are folks like Dr. Dan Engel, who has a clinic in Boulder and will be opening up another clinic in Austin with the use of plant medicines for Concussion, for tbi, for trauma based therapy. There are people, although it's not legal currently, but there are still many facilitators overseeing things like high dose MDMA sessions within the US for therapy. And this is something that people are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of these type of medicines when used in a therapeutic, responsible manner.

I'm glad you said that because I see a lot of frivolous use and these are powerful, powerful substances. Just as they can benefit you, they can also cause a lot of problems.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I mean, fucking take 300 milligrams of like iboga South African bush extract before a workout and you're like one of those African warriors. You know, when you're at the gym and you microdose with little psilocybin and niacin and lion's mane before a hard cognitive day of work. And I mean like it's, that's one of the best nootropic stacks ever. And so in small amounts these things can be amazing just for general productivity and making life better. I think it's, it's, you know, when you get to the larger amounts, you know, that we'll see, you know, we'll see psilocybin rinsed, washed and repeated in the same way that CBD and THC were recreational use. You know, people flying off the wheels, you know, going on crazy trips. I think it's, it's going to be a little bit weird and kind of wild, wild Westy over the next five to ten years. I agree. And mark my words, there's going to be some, some people making serious money. There's going to be some pharmaceutical companies making some serious money off of these compounds, including replications of like Ayahuasca and DMT and psilocybin, like synthetic versions of them.

Yeah, I think the psychiatric applications are going to be, in my opinion, I think we're going to see breakthroughs in psychiatry that we can't even comprehend. Curing mental disorders and ailments that were before incurable and just treatable with numbing agents. It's my personal belief, but I also see the potential negatives of people abusing these things. One thing that seems to go hand in hand, and maybe this is just what I see in social media, it seems like people, the use of these substances goes hand in hand with the adoption of an open relationship lifestyle. Do you think there's any connection or do you think that's just part of the whole frivolous, like, oh, we're partying and this is just kind of part of it.

I think that, that a big part of that is the disinhibition that some of this stuff can create. I mean, you know, very, very simple example, but my wife and I use ketamine and oxytocin for sex. And it's amazing. I mean like intranasal ketamine and oxytocin. That makes for a fantastic date night and it removes a lot of inhibitions and you have a crazy good time. It's a lot of fun. Guys sometimes get a little droopy dick from the ketamine, but that's nothing a little, you know, microdose of sildenafil or whatever else can't fix. But then you put other people into a scenario like that and you've got almost like a Burning man esque scenario, right, where there's like orgies and couples surfing. And I think that part of it is the disinhibition that occurs. I think part of it is just the kind of like the free love type of personality. You know, the 60s hippies type of mentality. That's still the type of person that's largely associated with a lot of these plant medicines. Like the person who's just willing to do that tends to be a little bit more.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Free spirited and independent.

Little bit of a self selection bias.

Yeah, yeah. And we talked about this when we podcasted in Austin from PaleoFX, I think about a year and a half ago. And I'm sure we can link to this in the show notes, but we talked a lot about how. I mean, that stuff is just so fucking attractive and fun and tempting. But you have to choose whether your goal is short term pleasure or long term legacy. There's very few societies that I know of that have been built successfully upon a polygamous, open relationship type of culture because, you know, monogamy, contractual relationships, if you want to call them that. Long term relationships with children in a stable nuclear family home seem to allow for some amount of societal stability that can't be replicated when a village is raising a child or when there is no clear man or clear woman as a head or a leader of a household. And so I feel like I just couldn't build a Greenfield legacy. I couldn't have my children feel stable and I couldn't just manage the household logistically if I had multiple partners or open relationships. I just feel like long term it wouldn't allow for me to be able to affect the impact and the Change that. I want the Greenfield family to go on.

I feel like it's a base way to act and as you elevate, you start to figure out what really works. And committing to one person, I think, is a more evolved way. It requires more growth and development. It really does. No different than committing to a life of, you know, surrounded by cupcakes and candy and saying, I'm going to eat the stuff that's healthy for me and good for me. What about the mind molding effects in the sense of. Do you think that these substances can be used to brainwash people or to change them? There's a lot of conspiracies around the CAA experimenting with these substances to control people's minds. Or what's his name, Manson. How he used LSD to turn a bunch of suburban kids into murderers. Do you think there's some things we need to fear in that sense?

I have no idea. But they say the same thing about fluoride. Right. And calcification of the pineal gland. And once you. But that would be the opposite. Opposite. Right. Because if you calcify the pineal gland and are no longer producing dmt, what they're saying is that you are more. What was the word you used?

Moldable.

Yeah. You're more manipulable.

Sure. Manipulatable.

Manipulate you. So I don't know. I'm not quite sure what would affect the neurochemistry manipulation. More. Less DMT or more dmt. But that is one conspiracy theory. Right. That's why we have fluoride in the water. Is. So that were good little things, factory workers and lemmings. I don't know if that's true. But the one last thing that comes to mind for me with this whole open relationship and plant medicine type of thing is that I think it can be used in the opposite manner, too. And this is what I've experienced. My wife and I for 14 years were very emotionally and sexually connected, but not spiritually connected, not intertwined as spirits and souls, not looking into each other's eyes as unique sparks meant to be for each other from the beginning of the universe as these two angelic beings who have this very special spiritual relationship. And now that we've connected spiritually on that deep, deep level, I mean, we can feel each other from afar. We know when we're dreaming about each other. We know when we're thinking about each other. It's freaky. And I'm sure that comes down to kind of like a quantum physics proton particle type of thing. Where I'm a believer that there is this fourth dimension that we've had yet to fully uncover and that we actually are pretty deep when it comes to being spirits and souls. And really that's the most special part of us that nobody can take away. But then when you connect with your lover on that level and you see them as this incredibly unique spirit, it's, it's cool for two reasons. Number one, you're just so connected. You look into your lover's eyes and you see them as, as, as, as literally like, you know, something like, like a goddess or an angel. And then, you know, the, the other part of it is that you, you, you just, you treat everybody differently. I, I feel like, like it, like that love and relationship that you experience with one person. You begin to see everybody as a spirit or a soul or a very unique being. So it kind of changes the way that you judge people or the way you treat other people, too.

Now, how do you wrap, you know, using plant medicines and going on these journeys and with that rigid sort of structure of your spiritual beliefs and how does that all intertwine and sort of help either to explain, you know, a deeper meaning that you're getting from, you know, let's say the Bible as you're a Christian, or how to kind of explain, you know, how that could enhance the experience even more.

You know, I, I think that everything was put on the planet. You know, for me, as a creationist, as, as a believer, that, that a higher power created everything around us. I think everything was put, put there for a purpose, from wine and weed to ayahuasca and psilocybin and the hundreds of plant medicines we have yet to even discover in South America or the Amazon, for example. And I think that because of that, anything can be used for good or for evil, right? I mean, something as simple as wheat, right? You can go out into a wheat field and pick wheat and just chew it right there off of the. With the chaff and the bran and the kernel and everything else and all that concentrated gluten and fuck up your gut and you can grab a wonderful, lovely biodynamic wine and drink to excess and develop liver psoriasis, right? And you can smoke yourself into oblivion, or you can have a glass of wine at the end of the day or at a wedding and, you know, go dancing and just feel that slight release of gaba, that inhibitory neurotransmitter, and feel wonderful. And you can use a little bit of weed to relax at the end of the day. Or a little bit of CBD to enhance your sleep. You can use a little bit of psilocybin to increase your cognition, or you can use a lot of it to dissolve the ego and to actually grow closer to God and experience God in a completely different way when your ego is dissolved. And I think that many people use this stuff irresponsibly or they don't understand or go in with the right kind of intention. But I think that everything that is on this planet can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you use it. And so I have no issues as a Christian with saying that everything on this planet is a blessing. It just depends on how you use it.

Why do you think it hasn't traditionally been a part of that tradition, do you think? Because of the fears of abuse and people not using things.

Did Moses really see a burning bush or.

I don't know that it hasn't been. I don't know that it hasn't been. And I haven't delved too deeply into the history, but I think that there is evidence of plant medicine usage amongst a lot of historical Christian sects. I think that at the same time there is kind of, especially in America, the puritanical version of Christianity that dictates that you never want to lose control of your senses and dissolve your ego. And we're just hard working, blue collar, go to church every Sunday, sing your songs. But I mean, these are the. In many cases, I'm probably going to offend some people. These are the same type of people eating Twinkies and Doritos at the church potluck and letting their bodies go to crap and not really delving deeply into caring for themselves or developing a relationship with the bodies that they've been given, with the temples that they've been given. So I think a big part of it is just kind of like this puritanical form of Christianity that has developed, especially in America that's held a lot of Christians back from that. And also because, let's face it, there is a deep history of shamanism and satanic worship and demonic activity and all that stuff that's associated with any of these things. Because once you enter into the spirit world, there's a lot of that. But there's not just demons, right? There's also angels. There's not just Satan, there's also God, right? So there's two elements of the spirit world, right? There's light and dark. There's the good force and there's the bad force or whatever it is in Star Wars.

Justin got excited right now.

Let's change gears a little bit from the dark.

Yeah, let's change gears a little bit. You recently, you look like you put on I don't know how many pounds of muscle. What'd you do? You change your training? Was it Adam's challenge?

It was Adam's swimming challenge.

You look like you had put on like 15 pounds of muscle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I. A big part of it was, you know, I interviewed Dr. Paul Saladino, and as with anything, I like to try out a lot of the stuff that I talk about on podcasts. So I adopted a largely nose to tail carnivore based diet.

And that put the muscle on you.

I threw in some other things too. I was doing like colostrum. I was doing like a lot of kefir ton of liver organ meats. Just eating a lot more food in general.

I was gonna say you. You bumped your calories significantly.

I remember you saying, no, I was eating about 5,000, 6,000 calories a day from a lot of protein sources. Taking a lot of digestive enzymes.

Dude, 5,000 calories on a carnivore diet.

Which is what I used to do when I was bodybuilding too. Yeah.

But I tried to do that. I had a really hard time doing that.

I also had tubers. Tubers, raw honey and berries, a ton of bone broth, a lot of collagen. I also made dessert, which was like a collagen ice cream. And I made that. And this was not carnivore, but I just made this to get my calories in at night. Okay, so coconut milk with collagen, with stevia, with nut butter. Almost like one of those fat bombs that has a lot of collagen in it that you have at night. So eating a lot of food, I was lifting a lot more, Doing like four days a week, full body lifting, a lot less endurance, and put on a decent amount of muscle. And then I went to that damn, like, Swiss clinic healing retreat thing over the summer where it was like colonics and enemas every day. And like, oh, my gosh, dude, they come up for breakfast after you've had like all the poo and everything else just like sucked out of your insides and you're starved and you want to like. Yeah, like an arm, not even a salad. Like a smoothie. But like their definition of a smoothie is like the six ounce glass cup with like the spinach floating in it. No, like, my idea of a smoothie is it's like, it's like 40 grams of whey protein with some collagen and coconut milk, peanut butter, bone broth and peanut butter and. Yeah, and in like a giant big gulp, you know, 36 ouncer, but no these tiny little smoothies. So I lost. And there was no gym there and I was doing some BFR band training just to kind of try to keep a little bit of muscle on. So I lost it. So now I'm trying to put muscle back on and I'm not doing like a strict carnivore diet anymore, but it was mostly just lifting more and eating a lot more.

Now, now how do you feel when you're bigger versus when you're smaller? Which one do you like more? What are the. What are the differences for you?

I kind of like to be bigger.

Do you?

Yeah.

How come?

Yeah, I just like the way it makes me feel. Good. Feels good. My, my libido is higher. I like. Honestly, I like to lift and I like to eat right. And so that's. It's. It's fun when you can just eat and turn into muscle and. Yeah, I don't know, maybe I'm vain, but I just, I like to keep some meat on my bones. You know, I think from a longevity standpoint, the more meat you have on your bones, you know, healthy functional muscle going into your later years of life. You know, we know that there are correlations between things like grip strength and deadlift weight and longevity. So I think part of it is just, you know, being more resilient overall.

Are you measuring your hormones when you're doing this to see if there's any changes in testosterone and all that?

Yeah, and there is an increase in testosterone, increase in free testosterone. And this concerns a lot of people. Also an increase in IGF1, an increase in insulin, an increase in hemoglobin A1C, and some of those parameters that you could argue are deleterious for longevity, but I didn't see a steep rise in those, but a slight bump in some of these parameters that suggest enhanced MTOR activation, enhanced substrate availability.

Well, context matters, doesn't it? Because I think in the context of an inflammatory pro cancer state, probably bad, but in the context of a healthy body, those are just anabolic compounds. They're just making you build muscle.

I think a big part of it. And I was talking with Dr. Mercola about this, you know, the whole concept of autophagy paired with mtor, and I think that you can kind of sort of have the best of both worlds. And I was trying to do this as much as possible and still am when eating a large number of calories. 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast and then taking agents that mimic autophagy or induce autophagy at night. So while you're at sleep, you're getting a little bit less MTOR activation and a little bit more autophagy. What were you taking care meal? Garcinia, Paul D. Arco and glycine. You can buy them in like organic raw powdered bags on Amazon and you can just stir that into hot water before you go to bed at night. And all of those will induce autophagy.

Really.

So it's almost like you're pressed, pulse cycling. Right. So you wake up, you're in your 12 to 16 hour fast, you've engaged in autophagy and then you have that compressed feeding window during the day. So I'll eat until about 8pm, get a lot of food in the system, stay very anabolic, have a lifting session in that window or an exercise session in that window and then you go back into autophagy in the evening.

So the amino acid glycine, that's strange. So that induces autophagy. How is that?

I think probably because it balances out the high amounts of methionine that you're getting from a lot of the protein sources, particularly meat.

So really what it's doing is kind of nullifying the mtor.

If anything, that's one of the common complaints made against something like a, a carnivore diet that's based on just like ribeye steaks is that you're not getting enough glycine unless you're eating nose to tail and getting some organ meats and some bone broth and things like that. So just adding in a little bit more glycine in the evening.

Any changes in inflammatory markers? Because some people say, oh, there's tons more inflammation when you're eating a lot of meat.

No, no, I actually had less inflammation and I think it was probably because I was consuming a lot less. Well, it's a very basic diet really when you look at it. Tubers, berries, honey bone broth, nose to tail, organ meat. Right. And so there's a lot fewer of those plant defense compounds. There's a lot fewer things, you know, like soy or legumes or things that, that may induce an inflammatory response, even dairy, for example. So I, I didn't see an increase in inflammation.

We just watched the documentary, the one produced by Arnold. Yeah, Game changer.

I want to hear your opinion on this because I walked in here and I'm not too plugged into what's going on in the documentary scene. But you told me you already asked me if I watch this new documentary. So what's going on with Arnold?

Well, he co produced this documentary and it's really pushing this plant based and they don't even use the word vegan or vegetarian too much. They say plant based quite a bit. But they're pushing this agenda of getting people off meat. And the entire documentary did a damn good job and they produced it very, very well at demonizing the consumption of animal products. And they demonized all of it including high quality grass fed meats, organ meats. And it was very, I mean in my opinion it was very misleading. They used lots of studies that were very misleading. For example, they talked about B12 and how you can't get B12 from vegetable sources but you can't really get them great. From animals either. They said. And so therefore Everybody should take B12s. That's how they. Exactly, that's how they made that case right there. Or they used a comparison that I thought was silly where they said they talked about antioxidants and said a head of lettuce has way more antioxidants than a piece of salmon. Which is a silly comparison because salmon has lots of omega 3 fatty acids and proteins and other nutrients.

Not to mention lettuces is a bioremediant nature's filter.

Yeah.

So in a different way people say liver is nature's filter. But in the liver phase one and phase two pathways just excrete all the toxins into the urine and the stool and the sweat. Lettuce keeps it, lettuce just keeps it in there. So when you eat lettuce, unless you know the exact place that lettuce was grown, the farmer you got it from, you're essentially eating a filter that filtered out. Same is true for other toxins, herbicides.

They did of a lot, lot, they.

Did a lot of sleight of hand.

Moves where they, they present some information that was true. But then they would go left and like this is why doing this is bad. You know, it was like, well wait a second, those aren't even connected.

Yeah, so, so it was a lot of that. And it feels like there's a, especially recently there's this really strong vegan push. And for the first time as, as far as I can recall, a diet has been politicized because now it's being connected to the environment and how not eating meat is also better for the environment. And it's your Duty. And it's a good thing to do. The thing that worries me is this, Ben. In my experience as a trainer, I'd love your opinion on this. In my experience as a trainer training hundreds or maybe thousands of people by proxy, because I had trainers that work for me who train other clients, I was always, I'm always blown away by the individual variants that you see with people. I mean, metabolisms are very complex. Your microbiome is like a fingerprint. Then you have, if you throw in your psychology and your experiences with food and all that stuff to say that one diet is better for everybody. I don't care what the diet is. That's terrible advice. Because I've trained clients who genuinely were healthier on a largely vegan diet. And I've also trained clients who ate a lot of meat, mostly meat, and who also had improvements in health. So for me, that's the big problem. The big problem is that there's a, a huge individual variance there that nobody's taking account for. And this goes for all diets that talk about being the best diet ever. The second part is this, and I'd also like your opinion on this, is that when you eat mostly vegetables or vegan diets now, luckily we have modern, we live in modern times where I could go to whole foods and I have access to an incredibly wide variety of plant based foods that normally I would never have access to.

You got stuff from South America, coated in chocolate, everything and that kind of stuff, just like nature.

But I havei have like food from South America, food from stuff that's growing, you know, all the time. You would never have that nature. But it takes a lot of planning and nutrient deficiencies. Studies show this. This is not my opinion. This is real. Documented studies show that vegans tend to suffer from more nutrient deficiencies because they require, they just require more planning. And so if we're gonna talk all these people out of eating meat, what they'll end up doing is taking the one unprocessed food out of their diet, which is a steak, and replace it with processed something that's not impossible.

Burger.

Yeah. Or some crap like that. So I'd like your opinion on that kind of stuff. And we'll start with the individual variants. What's your opinion on that?

My opinion on the individual variants is that we could say the same thing about a ketogenic diet.

Absolutely.

There are many people with familial hypercholesterolemia or with what's called PPAR gene issues, or even gallbladder and liver like actual anatomical issues, who respond very poorly to a high fat diet, particularly a diet that's high in saturated fats versus the monounsaturates and smaller amounts of the polyunsaturates. So you can create an inflammatory firestorm in people who are not genetically adapted to a ketogenic diet. And who in that scenario, such as familial hypercholesteremia would respond much better to a diet rich in plant fibers, some amounts of coconut, large amounts of fish, and many Mediterranean fats. Or what would even be referred to as, if people want to look this up, a Kitavan Islander diet, where many of the inhabitants of that island carry the gene for familial hypercholesteremia and no cardiovascular disease manifests because their diet is structured in such a way that that cholesterol does not become atherosclerotic.

You know, pause there for a second because. And it makes perfect sense that people who evolve there would develop a genetic capability to produce tremendous amounts of cholesterol because their diets included very little saturated fats and very little dietary cholesterol. And cholesterol is essential for the body. It's why your body makes it so it makes sense for them that their bodies would produce a tremendous amount of cholesterol in that environment. That's what keeps them alive. You move them to a ketogenic diet and now it's, you know, too much. It's, you know, five times five. It's 25 now. And they've got things multiplying. And I've seen people who've gone ketogenic and have cholesterol levels hit like 400 who have hypercholestemia. So I'm glad you brought that up, doctor.

Or you move them out of their environment and in many cases, the diet that they've developed in the environment that they live in is a diet that they've developed because they have discovered over thousands of years that that's what helps to protect them against either their built in genetic propensity to a certain disease or the environment's impact on their propensity for certain conditions. So what I mean by that is you look at the Icelandic population who actually should have a very high rate of seasonal affective disorder and depression, and they do not because primarily of the rich amount of omega 3 fatty acids and DHA that are found in the traditional Icelandic diet, reindeer and fish, for example, and you uproot that person and you take them out of that dietary context and into the same dark scenario in let's Say Seattle, Washington, and you see the Icelandic population there actually manifesting circulation, seasonal affective disorder and depression. Or you look at Cameroon, Africa, where they have a gene that would normally predispose them to high rates of colon cancer, but that is an extremely fiber rich diet that they consume over there. And you take that same population and you put them in say, like southeast United States, and you have many people of African descent dying of colon cancer in southeast United States because they no longer have adopted, adopted the diet that would have protected them in their ancestral context from that disease manifesting. A final example would be Mexico, Right. The Tamamahara Indian tribe. They carry many of the genes that would predispose them to higher rates of diabetes. But the way that they cook and prepare their legumes and their corn and their squash, those are lower glycemic index foods than say like the refried beans and the flour tortillas and the chips and the soda and the sweet drinks that they'd be consuming in say like a Tex Mex diet or a Southern California scenario. And you see diabetes manifest in that population once they're in that scenario. So a big part of this, when we're looking at should I eat a plant based diet, should I eat a meat based diet, should I eat a mix thereof, Is what did my ancestors eat and what am I genetically predecessors disposed to thrive on? Right. That's one big part of it. And then another part of it is actually doing adherence. Yeah. Customization of the diet. I mean, everybody, everybody I coach, they get a Cyrex food allergy panel and we take a deep dive into their true immunoglobulin reaction to a variety of different foods to ensure that they're not eating things that they're not predisposed to be able to handle that they have a true allergic reaction towards. And everybody gets a nutrival panel, which is a micronutrient analysis, fatty acids, amino acids all down the range so that we can identify any holes that need to be filled in via supplementation. Because some people need to take vitamin D and for others they're getting vitamin D toxicity and calcification of the arteries from taking vitamin D because their levels are topped off just fine. Everybody gets a gut test for yeast, fungus, parasites, so that we know what they need to be taking or what they don't need to be taking to address their gut. So we can use a blend of ancestral wisdom by looking at what your ancestors ate and what you're genetically predisposed to do well on, combined with modern science and blood testing, urine testing, and stool testing to determine whether you need to fill in gaps with supplementation, what kind of diet you might be best predisposed towards from a food allergy, a food elimination standpoint. And then you can figure out the exact diet that's right for you.

And that' sand that's my big. That's one of my big problems is we, if we make this blanket, this is the diet that's best for everybody. And demonize, not just say this is a good diet, but also demonize an entire category of food that humans have eaten forever. We could be setting up a lot of people for some bad health and some bad times. And then on the environmental sense, nothing's worse for the environment than unhealthy humans. Unhealthy humans are terrible for the environment. Everything from the medicine that needs to be produced to their unproductivity to their attitudes about life that will poison the earth faster than almost anything I can think of. And this is the conversation that I've been having around this. There's also one other part of this, Ben, which is the psychological component of food. You talked about the genetics, their blood, you talked about their microbiome. These are all physiological aspects of a human and how they may react and respond to food. But we completely negate and we don't even talk about the psychological piece that there is to food, which in my experience as a trainer, I've trained mostly everyday regular people. And the part that I had to focus on and talk about and speak to most was the psychological component. And you know what? Sometimes foods may not necessarily necessarily work for you great physiologically, but psychologically, theythey, this is something that you enjoy. And there's a there that is a part of health. You know, studies show that, for example, people who have lots of bad relationships in their lives, that's as big of a risk factor for poor health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So if Iyou know, if my mom makes homemade pasta and I haven't seen my mom for a while, and I get this wonderful thing feeling when I eat that pasta with my family, but maybe my genes show that I probably shouldn't eat a lot of carbs because physiologically, so what, sometimes it may be, you know, you're doing a little balancing thing, and when we're making these broad general statements and, you know, thisthis huge push for eating a particular way, some people are gonna do great, A lot of people are not gonna do so great.

Yeah, I've got two thoughts about that. First There is a dangerous slippery slope when you get down to the psychological aspects of food, because you get into the scenario that I see a lot of people getting into, especially parents who grew up. And I grew up on all this, too. Comfort foods.

Oh, yeah.

Rich, creamy Kraft macaroni and cheese and Pop Tarts and peanut butter. Captain Crunch, Hot Pockets. Take and bake pizza.

I feel like I should be smoking weed right now.

What's happening exactly? Velveeta cheese. Cheese, chicken biscuit crackers. Right. And the parents say, Justin, just orgasm. Yeah, kid, you're growing up in America. You got. You got to have some of the foods that I grew up on. Right? So. So there can be a slippery slope. And. And that's actually where I think there's a great business opportunity for a lot of. Of companies in the health and fitness sector to develop, you know, similar to what Mark Sisson did with mayonnaise, healthy versions of a lot of these comfort foods. Right. And could you make a Kraft macaroni and cheese and use like a tumeric to get that nice yellow color and maybe use like a. Like a rice or a quinoa pasta that you've engineered to get that same mouthfeel, but you have the same shape of the noodles and a similar kind of box size that it comes in. And so I think that we can overcome that issue by simply creating healthy versions of a lot of these comfort foods that many of us still crave. The second part of this, I've completely forgotten. I totally derailed myself. Yeah. I now remember what I was going to say. The second part of this is, and this is an issue that I have with the carnivore diet and experience with the carnivore diet. Right. When you look at the carnivore diet, one of the proponents of it, vocal proponent of late, is Dr. Paul Saladino, bless his heart, super smart guy, very passionate about the diet, very well educated, and eats this nose to tail organ consumption. And if he's going to have a steak, it's just blanched with some salt on it, and everything's brown and red and a little bit whitish on the table in front of him. And I've invited him out to dinner and he'll show up with his little Ziploc bag with a sheep testicle and some kidney suet and tallow. And when I try to do this at home and my wife bakes the lovely slow fermented sourdough cinnamon rolls on a Saturday morning, you know, with like an organic raw dairy cream cheese frosting, you know, with coconut sugar and takes out the heirloom tomatoes with some basil and some fresh mozzarella drizzled in olive oil. And she makes her wonderful, you know, kale and bok choy and Swiss chard salad, fresh from the garden and dressed with this lovely citrus vinaigrette. And I sit down at the table and all I've got in front of me is a ribeye and a sheep testicle. Like, sure. I do agree with Paul that a lot of these plant foods are poor people's food. Right. They're survival foods that we turn to when we couldn't get access to meat and realize that, you know, we gotta figure out how to eat plants for survival and deactivate these natural built in plant defense mechanisms and, you know, and make a salad out in the wilderness. But over thousands of years, these same plant foods have progressed to be beautiful, lovely, vibrant parts of tradition and culture. You know, marinara with spaghetti and cinnamon rolls and, you know, in Japan, fermented natto with rice and seaweed. And for us to simply shove all that aside and say we're going to myopically eat just one food because all we're worried about is health, really. That's another part of the psychological aspect is, you know, we need to consider some of these myopic diets that eliminate a great deal of food foods. They're stripping us of some of the enjoyment of simply being able to gather around a Thanksgiving table and have, you know, 12 different items there and we can eat them all because it's just part of tradition and happiness.

Totally, 100% agree with you.

What's, what's Paul's angle?

What is.

We haven't had him on the show. I know they've, his team has reached out to us multiple times and we've just, we got. Once we did the whole keto talk enough time and carnivore talk enough time. I was kind of like over the right.

Because we have the vitamin C deficiency. Like, how did he explain that?

You mean the lack of vitamin C that you'd have on a carnivore diet? I think that he showed data that you can get bioavailable vitamin C from meat, from organ meat, properly. Yeah, yeah. And a well structured nose to tail carnivore diet does indeed give you just about everything that you need except electrolytes, which is why he throws insult. And he's very smart and he's very well researched and he makes a wonderful case that I agree with that a well structured nose to tail Carnivore diet can indeed give you everything that you need to sustain life while not presenting your gut with a lot of the built in natural plant defense mechanisms that can screw some people over. But it can be a pretty damn restrictive and boring diet. And I think it's just an elimination diet that someone could follow for a certain period of time.

That's how I look at it.

But it's not for life. You know, the dude's a bachelor, right? He doesn't have for a reason. Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's a hard sell. It'd be very easy to do if you're just living on your own and, you know, eating whatever you want to eat. But when I gather around the table, like at the Greenfield house, this kind of returns back to structuring your environment. Like when dinner rolls around and we kind of eat late, so everything's out of the way. Right. By the time we get to dinner and we're dragging out table topics or Boggle or Quiddler or Balderdash or chess or, you know, exploding kittens or unstable unicorns, you know, any of these card games. And we sit around the table for like an hour and a half, and we laugh and we play and we eat all these foods and we drink wine and then we go upstairs and we play some guitar or ukulele or piano, and the boys fall asleep reading. And mom and I go in and we integrate and face each other and check chat, and that's how we end our day. And, you know, I just can't do that in front of a sheep testicle.

Yeah. I got a question for you, Ben. There's a heavy, heavy science side to you, but there's also a heavy spiritual side to you. And I'm looking at current research when it comes to longevity. I've read some articles saying how aging is a disease that can be cured at some point. Point. Scientifically speaking. Sounds great. Let's solve this problem. We don't have to age. We won't have any problems with that. The spiritual side of me, though, thinks that might not be such a good idea, because I think there's a lot we can learn from realizing our own mortality. Where do you stand on that?

I'm trying to live as long as I can, with the exception that I don't want to live as long as I can. Cold and libido less. And hungry and weak. Because all I'm doing is maximizing autophagy and fasting and taking a cold bath every day. But the reason that I'm trying to live a long time with good quality of life and good energy is because I believe that every single one of us was put upon this planet with a unique purpose in life, a unique change that we can affect in the world. And the longer that we're around, the greater impact that we're able to make and the greater we're able to achieve that purpose, the more we take care of our bodies and try to keep ourselves here as long as we can. Learning and building upon the learning that we've done, the more use that we can be to the world and the greater impact that we're going to make. I mean, when I look at guys like Graham Hancock and their philosophy or their theories that we at one point as society were incredibly evolved, that maybe there was some great disaster, like a flood that struck at one time, but prior to that we had freaking like computers and we weren't walking around like togas and bathrobes. Like humankind, even before we built the pyramids and everything else, that seemed to have taken a great deal of engineering. It's possible that we were very, very well advanced, having had the ability to advance for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and some would say even millions of years before some great disaster struck and we had to kind of start out again at ground zero. But there's also a lot of evidence that humans lived for a pretty long period of time too.

And it keeps popping up, right? They keep finding archaeological finds that predates all the history.

Yeah, biblically, you know, they've got like Methuselah is 969 years old, or let's even say 800 years old. Guys think about this. Like if you were ancient man or woman and you're like 50, hopefully you've figured out how to make a fire by that time. And then you have 750 frickin more years to make this world a better place and to fit. Maybe by age 100 you figure out how to make a wheel, right? And I would imagine by about 150, 175, you're thinking a little bit about electricity. And maybe by the time you're 200, you're thinking about, you know, how to get something else to do some thinking for you, like a computer chip or binary coding. By the time you're 500, you probably would invent a lot of cool shit, right? And so I think about it that way to a certain extent too. I'm like, geez, if I've learned a shit ton about health and fitness and nutrition and spirituality and happiness and longevity by the time I'm 90 and I've somehow built my life so I've still got 40 more years. that point, think about all the other cool shit I could do to help people.

Sure, sure. Yeah. The living forever part is the part that I'm like, I don't know about that.

It's almost like exponential wisdom that can build over time. If you keep yourself around for a while.

Yeah, maybe.

Now you've had people on your show that talk a lot about like longevity and living a long time. Like what have you learned from them that's like significant.

A lot that you know that, that, that is a huge topic. And there, there's a. We could talk for hours about longevity and anti aging. But I would say some of the more exciting fields right now in the anti aging front because people are talking about optimize your relationships, caloric restriction, minimize glycemic variability, minimize inflammation, Low level physical activity every day, get out in nature. A lot of the blue zones concepts. But when we dig into the more exciting science, some of the things that I think are the real frontier of anti aging medicine. One would be the use of nad. We know that NAD levels dramatically decline with age. And by keeping those levels elevated, we can really increase mitochondrial health in a very dramatic way, even with age. So the use of NAD IVs, NAD, NAD patches, which I use very frequently, or even NAD or similarly two other molecules that are similar to NAD, NR, which is nicotinamide riboside and NMN, which is nicotinamide mononucleotide. These can be used as oral supplementation to keep NAD levels elevated. NAD is one big one is nad.

Are NAD patches, are those commercially available or do you have to get them?

You can put purchase them. I buy them from the NAD clinic in San Diego.

Okay.

Yeah. And I wear one shirt.

These are to help you get off cigarettes too, is that right?

They can be used, yeah.

Oh really?

Very common treatment for addiction and opioid therapy.

No shit.

Exactly. Higher dose NAD IVs especially. That's what that clinic specializes in actually. And they successfully treat a lot of patients.

No kidding.

So nad, that's one. Peptides are another. There's a lot of Russian research and even Russian human research on decrease of all cause mortality with two 10 day cycles of a peptide called epitalon. And they've gotten similar results with the peptide called MOT C. There's another one that staves off all the immune system degradation that can occur with age called Thymosin Alpha One and there are companies like TaylorMade Compounding in Kentucky who have these amino acid sequencers. And they can precisely target any type of cellular activity, such as mitochondrial proliferation or production of killer T cells or anything like that, with peptides, which are usually administered subcutaneously with an insulin syringe, but some are topical. I'm wearing one right now. It's a GHK Cu copper peptide transdermal delivery, a little band aid right there on my abs. And that increases stem cell mobilization, so it increases the movement of stem cells from my bone marrow into my bloodstream so they can be mobilized for better recovery, healing of injuries, et cetera. So peptides are a really, really cool field right now in anti aging. Probably one of the last ones that I think is based off of research being conducted right now by Dr. David Sinclair, and he has a new book called Lifespan about this. The use of a virus that you'd actually be given at an early age that would activate your immune system, but the virus is actually deactivated. They figure out how to deliver it in a manner to where it stays in your system completely deactivated. And then when you're at a later age, like 45 or 50, you can activate the virus and it will do things. And they've studied this in road models so far, like get rid of gray hair, decrease wrinkles, reverse aging. And they measure this thing called the aging clock, which is actually not like telomere length, but it's the RNA and what's called the nucleoli of the cell. And they've shown that with this type of treatment you can almost like reverse aging with they call it cellular reprogramming.

Or turn into a zombie. I feel like every zombie movie starts off like.

Exactly. They're studying that in rodent models right now and they've achieved something similar. A new study came out two weeks ago and all they did was stack. They're using a lot of off label pharmaceuticals now for anti aging. But in this particular study they showed a two and a half year reversal of aging by measuring a lot of these DNA markers of aging with the use of metformin, which is an off label drug that's commonly used for diabetes. I don't like it. I think there's better alternatives, DHEA and growth hormone. And so they used those three and saw profound results from an anti aging standpoint.

Now of all these things that you're listing off, how many of them actually havecarry a lot of weight in comparison to things that we know, like good relationships, lowering Stress, strength, exercise, the big rocks. I mean, if you're missing, if you're sleeping, working two, three hours a night, you have a high stress job and then you're using all these things, is it worth anything, really?

Therein lies the rub. And I'm going to have him on my podcast because I want to throw this question at him. But like David Sinclair, that researcher that I mentioned, he's on metformin and statins and he's not exercising and he's traveling all over the globe and I don't think he's sleeping that well. And I don't want to put words in his mouth or paint him in a poor light, but I think that many of these anti aging researchers or biohackers or whatever, they don't have the basic foundational principles, dialogue.

It's the way I defend you always. Because everybody that harks on biohacking people, and if they try and lump you in that category, I'm like, you know, Ben really is somebody who I personally can say does all the big things first, you know what I'm saying? It's not like you're doing all these.

You must have the foundation. And a reporter asked me this question last week. He said, so what are the best biohacks? Where do I start? And I said, I don't know. You. I don't know if you need to increase your deep sleep versus your REM sleep. I don't know if for you it's hormonal optimization or if the hormones are just fine and we need to address white blood cell count. I don't know if you've got rampant inflammation or if inflammation is just fine and we instead need to focus on physical activity. But I did tell him that other than what we already know, that you've alluded to from the blue zones, Adam, like relationships and not smoking and properly structured diet and some elements of fasting, et cetera. I always start with the foundation of mitochondria. I think mitochondria are the most important thing to take care of if you want to be healthy or live a long time. And there are six things that I address with everybody I work with, everybody I work with. There's six variables for mitochondria. Number one is earthing or grounding, actually getting in touch with the planet. Walking outside, barefoot, camping, swimming in the ocean, jumping in the sea, walking on the beach, getting exposed to all these negative ions that the planet emits. Because when we're up on jets, when we're getting bombarded by Wi Fi EMF, etc. The electrochemical gradient across a cell drops to about negative 20 millivolts and it should be closer to about negative 60 or so and getting absorbed or getting negative ions absorbed by the planet. There's a whole book about this called Earthing by Clint Ober that goes into the profound impact just being in touch with our planet has on our body. Not to mention the beneficial effects of nature in general. That's one. Number two is light. Uva, uvb, infrared, near infrared and red light, preferably from sunlight being out in the sun every single day. And if you can't get out in the sun, you buy these fancy movies, biohacking red light panels or red light producing devices and you simulate that. But ideally.

Sorry to interrupt you to that point. I predict that to be a huge market in the future just because we seem to be more indoors today than we ever were before and on computers.

And this is getting worse.

Yeah, do you think so too? Do you think red light's going to continue just to explode?

Yeah, I think not only red light, but full spectrum light light that will produce uva, uvb, near red, far like lights that get as close to simulating what the sun does as possible. Number three would be. Number three and four would be heat and cold.

Right.

Like actual mild amounts of hormesis, which also stimulate mitochondria. So like a regular sauna practice and a regular cold practice and exercising and getting hot counts as heat as well. But you know, we know from Finland that regular sauna practice has massive impact on longevity. And we know that jumping in a cold bath, cold lake, taking cold showers, we know that that's also very helpful for mitochondria. And then the last two, if we're thinking of the human body as a battery and we're thinking about this millivolt potential, which heat, cold, earthing, grounding and light all affect water and minerals. Good clean water. And there's a lot going on in the water sector right now like hydrogen water and deuterium, depleted water and structured water. And if you find all that confusing, just start with pure filtered spring water, as close as you can get to nature. And minerals like putting a pitch of sea salt, taking some electrolytes, using any of these type of full spectrum minerals that you can get. But I start with those six bases. Earthing, grounding, light, heat, cold water and minerals. And screw the fancy peptides and stem cells and injectable viruses if you start with, with that stuff. And then you throw in what you were talking about, all the blue Zones, practices. You've got a really solid foundation.

Yeah. Of all the things that you've. Because you've tried so many different things, you've experimented on yourself quite a bit. You ever have it. Something go wrong where you. You try something out? You're like, oh, this. This me up a little bit.

Why the. I always get asked that question? People always want to know. It's fun, Ben. We want to know. I always get disappointed. I don't. Well, that's.

Because I feel like he.

He's such a nerd. He does all the research. What about when you went to go.

Forage plants and then you had a negative reaction? I remember your wife telling me that story.

Yeah, but that's not biohacking. That's like, all right, that's like messing up when you're cooking. Yeah. That's another thing that gets me. Like putting butter in your tea or coffee or whatever. That's not biohacking.

I feel like you're very. I feel like you approach most things pretty skeptical and do a lot of research before you decide to shove it in your own dick. I mean, I don't think you're the type of person that would do something like that.

Hope so.

Until you already have.

Yeah. I mean, there's times when I thought maybe, you know, something was gonna happen. Like when I got the stem cells injected in my dick, like, it turned black and blue for a couple days, and I wondered if I actually had, like, you know, what's it called? Tissue necrosis. I got word for you, Adam. It's not a bone. You can't break it.

I don't know if anybody told you.

That, but I wondered if I got, like, tissue necrosis.

Well, if it doesn't work, bro, it's broken. I don't give a.

How you. How you worded it. So, yeah, I thought that that might. Might do something, but it was. It was fine. And no, like, I don't have any sexy thing that's happened to me. Like, honestly, no, I've done stupider, stupider shit and messed myself up more. Like, you know, training for Iron man or.

Sure.

You know, or doing this. The Death Race or whatever than I have, you know, with.

With.

With biohacking.

Are you running Tahoe this year? Are you going out? Tahoe?

Yeah.

You are?

I'll be right. Racing?

You're gonna race?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm still training pretty hard, and then I'm thinking about hanging up the hat after that and just. Oh, are you? Yeah, just kind of.

You think you're gonna move away from.

A lot of the endurance stuff, I think, big time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are you gonna move more towards? What?

I'm losing the fire in my belly, really. Just playing mixed doubles tennis with my wife, and, you know, I'm strength training, starting a little bit more jiu jitsu.

Rolling with my kids, and filling out those medium shirts.

You know what? Like, I. I love. I love to crush it at the gym. Like, I just love. I love to go out and work out hard. And I'm to the point now where I. I cannot be signed up for any race or any competition, and I just still crave just going out and crushing it.

Hell, yeah.

Like, something. I just feel great when I'm doing that. So I don't really need. You know, I used to think I needed that motivation of being signed up for a race or whatever, bodybuilding competition or some type of event, but I've realized as I've grown older, like, I'm just wired to move. Absolutely. And as long as I'm moving, I'm happy I don't have to be your toe in the starting line of a race.

Excellent. Well, it's always a good time with you, Ben.

You guys too.

Good to see you again.

Yep.

I love you guys.

Same here.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfield Fitness.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, 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.