The Ultimate Workout Set For Travelers, Energizing Anti-Aging Biohacks & How To Build a Healthy Home

Kids need time and presence. And it's something that I think I was lucky enough to learn early on as a father because the way that I grew up, I was raised in a very entrepreneurial family where my father and my grandfather worked really hard, but they worked really hard to the detriment of the actual time that they spent with their family, justifying that they were making money that they were providing. But you know, I would just rather live dirt, pour in a trailer and have a bunch of time with my kids. And I know they would want that also because it's time and it's presence and it's giving them that desire that they have from the moment they were born to be seen and loved and heard. So as a father, the very best thing that you can do is deny that urge to go out and just make money and build your business and make it for yourself. And do that more slowly than you might normally be able to because you're carving out that time to be there with your children.

All right, folks, I got a friend. He's one of the world's top personal trainers. Amazing guy. His name is Chris Gethin. Chris Gethin and Chris and I were in India recently together. A little bit of a fitness and a biohacking and a speaking tour of India. We had a chance to sit down in front of hot mics and churn out some really helpful content for you. So this is a very special podcast because it's basically kind of a two parter. Chris and I had a great chat at his gym right after I put him through a metabolically crushing workout. And then later on we sat down in my hotel room and took some additional questions from listeners and members of Chris's group and we put it all together for you in today's wide ranging show. So if you want the show notes which are going to be pretty helpful, I think for this show, you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Gethin Chris's last name BenGreenfieldLife.com gethin G E T A.

Enjoy this chat and this follow up Q and A with Chris Gethin.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Chris Gethin podcast which is actually being hosted in Delhi. The last time we did an interview, I think it was in Mumbai.

Maybe it's all a blur, I don't know.

That was before the C word. But here we are in Delhi. This is our post workout podcast. We just had a phenomenal workout.

That was a workout.

Oh, maybe it's a warm up. A full on workout. I only threw up three times.

Well, I mean, we planned it out in the car last night late, when it's easy to just write stuff down and feel like you can just go crush whatever you wrote down. And then we. We. We kind of painted ourselves into the corner of having to do what we said we would do. We did, though.

Yeah, we did it. I tell you what was a struggle for me, which was quite surprising, was because I think I'm relatively strong, you know, and when we were doing those shoulder presses with the kettlebells, I was just destroyed. I had to go down anyway. I had to go down to the 16s.

But core.

Yeah, yeah, my core was given away.

Yeah, that's the trick. The unilateral loading and the asymmetrical nature of the kettlebell is one of the reasons it's a staple in my protocol, because you get strong so fast.

The idea, though, behind that concurrent style of training that we did is that it's very similar to the type of workouts that I like to do, especially when I travel, when time is tight, because you get everything in at once. Typically, I go superset, two exercises, then you go to cardio. We did four minutes today because we were targeting VO2 max. And that's the sweet spot for VO2 max is four minutes up to six minutes, and then you go back to another superset. So today we did swings to push ups to four minutes on the bike. Then we did kettlebell alternating overhead press with goblet squats to four minutes on the bike. And then we had the pull ups to the dips to four minutes on the bike. And then finally the seated rows with the low back extensions to four minutes on the bike with a little bit of dessert. 30 burpee finisher. And when you finish, I mean, you've checked off everything. If we were trying to get, you know, massively swole, that'd obviously be a little bit paradoxical. But I mean, for getting a fantastic workout in.

Did you mention the planks in there as well?

Oh, that was okay. That was recovery. So that's the other trick is when you recover, you know, you can sit and watch the gym TV or read a magazine or, you know, check out the peoples. But my philosophy with recovery is choose something that's like a mobility exercise, or in our case, we did a front planking exercise, because, again, you're constantly moving, you're constantly making your body better, no matter what you're doing. So we worked out for an hour, and we squeezed a massive amount of work into that one hour.

Felt more like two hours. And there's no way that you're gonna finish one of those workouts and go, hey, now I'll do some steady state. Forget it. You're very metabolically flexible or active, I should say post workout I can still feel myself kind of, you know, burning those calves. Yeah, but it's good, it's intense, it's enjoyable. What I love about those workouts and training with somebody that's really challenging me is that it ups your game, you know what is possible. So you're going to push it yourself that little bit extra the next time that you go into the gym.

It's a catch 22 though, because like I, I rarely listen to music when I work out. I rarely work out in a public gym. You know, I'm usually at home because I'm so competitive that I will turn it up to such a high notch that I would over train if I worked out with music and with people and in a public gym all the time. So for me I'm usually listening to frickin, you know, like the last book was Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People while I'm tooling around the gym at home without the driving music. And then I use music as a sometimes drug, you know, the same way they use sugar as a sometimes drug. You pull that out when you gotta go hard and dig deep and that's when the magic really happens. But yeah, like I use workouts most of the time. It's kind of like a university, you know, I learn, I move slowly, I breathe. And then occasionally I'll get stuck in a gym with you and crush it.

Yeah, and when you're training at home, obviously like I see that you've been following a workout that the Mind Pump guys, Sal and whatever kind of put together. Great guys by the way. So shout out to Mind pump Now. You'll follow that protocol for a certain amount of time. And I know that you do all sorts. You do the arx, you do the EMS sort of training. How long are your blocks usually? Or is it kind of instinctive?

It's instinctive. Most of the time I'll go seasonally, which typically means if you've got three to four months of a season, you know, spring, summer, winter, fall, I'll be in there for 12 to 16 weeks choosing a certain protocol and then moving on to the next. And it's always based on my general philosophy that a few times a year you should have some big hairy, audacious goal on your calendar that scares you a little bit and keeps you alive. Right. So you mentioned Mind Pump, and my sons and I were reading up on all these old timey strength circus guys, you know, like Adam Bergstrom and Hackenschmidt and Eugene Sandow. And it turns out that our friends at Mind Pump actually studied up on these same guys and put together a workout plan with like overhead windmills where you're picking up a weight from the ground while you have a weight over your head, or single arm deadlifts, unbalanced exercises, Turkish get ups. So this last block that I went through with my sons, who I now try and include in my workouts, but was all based on strength. And now we're moving into. Do you know who Pavel Zatzolin is?

No.

Okay. He runs the strong first kettlebell training program.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Very kind of like Russian influenced. Very. He wrote the book. He would have been very upset watching our workout today. He wrote a book called the Quick and the Dead, based on the idea that quick, powerful, explosive, fast, twitch based muscle exercises result in less metabolic acidosis because most of the moves are snappy and explosive and most of the sets don't last much longer than 30 seconds. And it's obviously a style of training that's great for power, explosiveness, fast twitch muscle. It's not really a hypertrophy based workout. It's more like a powerlifting, you know, short, wiry, quick, explosive muscles. But he has a few amazing books. I went and took his strong first kettlebell certification, and so my sons and I moved just now into a combination of what's called simple and sinister and quick and the dead. So an example of that would be the Quick and the Dead workout is an emom where it's just 10 swings, 10 push ups every 90 seconds. So it's really just like 10 swings and then you're just recovering for 45 seconds with a pretty heavy kettlebell. I'll use like a 36 kilogram kettlebell for the swings and then 10 push ups, similar to what we did today with almost like a Russian systema style breathing with each pushup, where you're inhaling as you drop slowly, and then explosively exhaling and popping up. So Pavel's programs are really good for just general strength and explosiveness. So we'll do that for about 12 weeks. And then we signed up for one of these spots, Spartan decafit races, which is like a fitness race. Those are all the raids these days. Hyrox Spartan. They're basically kind of like indoor stadium Spartan races where You've got a fitness station like a burpee to an overhead sandbag press. And then you've got a fitness station like a 500 meter row or a skierg or a series of weighted lunges. And there's about a 500 meter run in between each. So you're doing 10500 meter runs, 10 fitness stations. But that's based on the concept that we signed up for a DEKA fit. Right. I'm signing my sons up for the strong first kettlebell certification. So there's always something on the calendar that you're looking forward to, because I need that. I have to have something kind of ahead of me, some kind of like extrinsic. I'm going to be embarrassed if I can't do this. Motivation to go in and choose a specific block.

Yeah, that sense of urgency. You have these long term goals, but it's essential that you break them down into the shorter term. Now, when you talk about the explosiveness, do you think that is effective for pulling muscles as like pushing? Because I think of like chest, tricep, front delts, you know, like explosive muscles. Your glutes, your hamstrings, your quads. What about your pulling muscles like your biceps, your back muscles? Do you feel that they collate in a positive response to explosiveness too?

From a biomechanical standard standpoint, you're looking at a longer moment arm that you're having to deal with. And the result of that means that it's more difficult to move away when you're doing a bicep curl or a pull up through a range of motion explosively. So they're more difficult to do explosively. You can do them, but you're never going to be as fast switch on those as you are the pushing exercise. And that kind of makes sense from a human primal standpoint. Right. Like if we, we were brachiating and whatever, hanging from trees, for example, or pulling an object like a sled or a plow, we'd be pulling it very slowly. But if we were hurling a rock or a spear or something like that, we'd be releasing it very quickly. Even I bow hunt, you're pulling the bow back slowly and you're not pushing it forward, you're just pulling slowly and then triggering and releasing. But if I was going to throw a spear, you know, that's more of that pushing, explosive exercise. So I think, you know, our bodies are just accustomed to pushing explosively and pulling under control.

Right? Okay.

Yeah.

Now, the one thing that we did a seminar last Night. And the one thing that you spoke about was our battery, our mitochondria.

Yeah.

And like a lot of people come to me today, especially as environment has changed over the years, that they're lacking in energy. They don't have the enthusiasm to wake up in the morning early and get that workout or start their day with something odd. Yeah, they're procrastinating. They just don't have that motivation. And, you know, our environment definitely has changed. Of course we're eating bad food or having vegetables, vegetable oils, sugars, staying up later, artificial light, EMFS, etc. You know, what, what can people do? Because people say, I know I should eat healthy, I know I should exercise, but I just don't have the batteries in order to go do that. What can people do to energize their mitochondria?

Yeah, it's a vicious feedback loop because you don't have the energy and then you don't do it. And that results in even lower amounts of energy as you build obesity and inflammation and the like. So let's get the big, hairy, audacious elephant out of the room first. And this is a little bit esoteric, but you must have a life's purpose. And I've taught my sons this from a very early age. One of the first little programs that I brought them through, because we go through a book every two weeks at the Greenfield house. So my sons and I will read a book, we talk about it at about 7pm before we gather for dinner. We go through a chapter or two a day, and then we move on to the next book. And it's a way for me to, like, pass wisdom on to my sons. I'll usually read a book and decide if that's the one that I'm going to take my sons through next. And I bounce from finance to philosophy to self improvement to physical health. And so it's kind of this idea that there are certain things that your kids, even if they're homeschooled like mine are, are not necessarily going to learn at school, that your job as a parent is to teach them elsewhere. And we find that books, and having a cadence of books that we go through on a regular basis is incredible because I'll go through a book, I'll highlight it, I'll fold over pages. I'm very old school. Most of my books are physical books and they look like ragged newspapers by the time I finish them. But any of those ones with a lot of folded over pages and highlighted sections, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna read this again, but the second time I'm taking my sons through it. So I'll take them through that book and it's cool because I give them my physical book and and then I'll just buy another one for me to go through. So as they read it, they're reading it through dad's eyes. They're seeing the things that I found important and the things that I underlined, the things I would really like for them to see. And even now when I read books, I read books thinking, what's a 15 year old boy going to see when I hand them this book in terms of the things that I found important. So the idea here is that one of the first books that I took them through in the self improvement sector was a tiny little ebook that's still available called IKIGAI 2.0. IKIGAI is the Japanese term for life purpose, similar to how the Italians have the Plan de vita. And it goes into the idea of what is it that you're naturally good at? What makes time go by quickly for you? As Mark Manson, the author says, what makes you forget to eat and poop. And as you go through that book, you hone down your life skills, the things that come easy to you, the things that you're called to, and in some cases even the potential for commercialization or monetization of that skill to the world all down into one single succinct purpose for life. And that can change from season to season. Like my purpose in life right now is to be a wise teacher or I'm sorry, a wise human, a wise gracious teacher and a humble leader. Because I am in a season of life where I want to do a better job listening to my gut and having a certain amount of discernment and wisdom. So wise human, I want to learn how to teach concepts without trying to make myself sound too smart and use big words because that's a weakness of mine. I almost slip into this scenario where I think the way to impress people as a teacher is to say a bunch of things that make me smart. Impressive, but at the end of the day that sometimes just makes people's heads spin. So gracious teacher and then humble leader, I want to do a much better job leading my family and leading my team with humility and empathy and being able to relate to people and being able to say when I'm wrong and say sorry when I'm not. So if you have a single succinct purpose statement for your life and you wake up in the Morning. That, in my opinion, beats everything for ripping you out of bed. When motivation is low, you have to know why you're getting up in the first place. Physical parameters aside. So that's the biggest variable. But then you get into, of course, the biological component, which we can't deny the body and the brain. There's the catch all term in medicine, kind of similar to the catch all term for fibromyalgia, right? My body hurts. I don't know why. It could be collagen and elastin degradation. It could be rheumatoid arthritis. It could be sensitivity to the nightshades that I'm eating. Who knows? And a lot of physicians will say, I don't know. You have fibromyalgia, which doesn't really solve your problems. Similar scenario for chronic fatigue syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome is just feeling tired and sluggish and demotivated during the day. But it could be a sluggish thyroid hormone because maybe you're not eating enough calories or enough carbohydrates, or you've got too much exposure to fluoride and chlorine and the type of things that are keeping your thyroid from operating properly. It could be a neurotransmitter deficit because you might not be consuming enough amino acids or vitamin D. It could be an issue with the actual lining of the nerves, the myelin sheaves, where nerve signals propagate. Which typically means that you need two different fats for that to work properly, because these two different fats actually make up the myelin sheath. And those two fats are DHA and oleic acid. DHA from things like fish oil and Mediterranean fats, and oleic acid from olive oil, as the name kind of implies, avocado oil, etc.

You could go on and on. Mold sensitivity, Epstein Barr, Lyme. So you have to dig a little bit when it comes to some of the biological reasons that one would feel demotivated or fatigued or so sluggish that they can't accomplish their purpose in life. Even if they haven't. You know, they're just. They're dead by 2pm or they have a difficult time getting out of bed. Obviously, part of this involves testing, you know, lab testing, quantification, actually figuring out what are your thyroid parameters. You know, do you have mycotoxins in your urine if you do a urinary mycotoxin test? Do you have hormone deficits if you do a urinary test like the Dutch hormone test? So obviously a lot of digging, which might Sound a little bit intimidating to folks, but that's why guys like you and me exist, to actually help walk people through this type of stuff. I would say, though, that the number one thing to think about and this relates to, to you bringing up last night, is the concept that our bodies are a battery, right? Your body actually operates with a very precise electrochemical gradient within the cell membrane. It should have a slightly negative charge on the inside and a slightly positive charge on the outside. And there are certain things that can charge the body's battery, and there are certain things that can drain the body's battery. We live in an era, as you just alluded to, that I will call an ancestral mismatch, or other people might refer to it as an evolutionary mismatch, this idea that human beings for thousands of years had access to sunlight and the planet earth and moving and gardening and hunting and building fences and hauling rocks. And now we are living in boxes, sitting in boxes, working in boxes, traveling in boxes, flying in boxes. We have access to a host of highly palatable foods, and we don't move as much as we're really meant to move. All of these parameters tend to drain the body's battery, with probably the most significant being the electrical soup that we live in. I flipped on my WI fi in the office over there, and I had to ask how to get on the WI fi and which one it was, because there was at least 30 different signals within the room that I had to choose from from the WI fi. Most people live in that soup. Many people have and almost pride themselves upon owning smart appliances. You know, anything from your air filter to your refrigerator to your washer to your dryer, to your lighting system. Many of these things come with WI fi, often that can't be disabled. We're plugged in. We have our phones often, you know, just blasting us with radio frequencies during the day. All of these result in an inflow of calcium into the cell, which is positive. You remember back to high school chemistry, and that's one of the reasons that they gradually make you feel sluggish during the day, is you're simply de charging the body's battery. So the idea is you want to recharge the body's battery. You don't have to be a Luddite and completely avoid electricity, but you need to do things that allow the body to recharge. So a few simple examples. Photons of sunlight, right? We know that the red and infrared and near infrared spectrum of sunlight penetrates the cells and results in the electron transport chain within the cell being able to produce more ATP. ATP being the body's energy currency that gives you more energy, that allows you to feel less sluggish. We know that the earth, every time it's struck by lightning or every time solar radiation bombards the surface surface of the planet, it collects and stores negative ions. And when you touch the earth, when you walk on the beach, when you swim in the ocean, when you get in a body of water, you recharge the body by absorbing those negative ions. We even know that despite.

Poor farming practices and agricultural practices and poor access to good food, that a lot of the foods that we eat are relatively strict of, of electrolytes and minerals. But, you know, I handed you some really good salt when we had our smoothie bowls over there in the other room. Because I salt profusely. I use electrolytes all the time. You know, not crappy sodium chloride like you find in table salt at a restaurant, but good rich, mineral rich salts and electrolytes, because those also help to carry a charge through the body. So the idea, I think, is that even though there are all these different tests that you can get for chronic fatigue and some of the things that I talked about earlier, the number one thing to think about is how can I somehow address an evolutionary mismatch or an ancestral mismatch while living in a post industrial environment. That doesn't mean that you got to quit your job and go outside in the sunshine half naked every day and, you know, go move to the beach where you can walk in the sand or.

You know, buy expensive electrolyte supplements or something like that. It can be as simple as using grounding mats or earthing mats indoors, which are special mats that you can stand on and sleep on that allow you to be in touch with the surface of the planet. Even if you can't be outside. You can use, and this is getting into biohacking now, or like infrared lighting technologies, an infrared sauna, or a red light panel, or when we were driving the car to the workout, I even pulled out of my bag this wraparound light device that we put on your neck like a necklace that charged your blood up with infrared light. In addition to that, you can just get a basic salt. For example, in the US you can find one of the most mineral rich, low toxin, low microplastic, low metal salts at just about any grocery store. You know, Rosar's, Zilbertson, Safeway, whatever. It's Celtic salt, that little blue bag of salt that's super rich in minerals. You can just Put sprinkles, sprinkles of that into water on food. Makes food taste better as well, which is fantastic. And so the basic idea here is that you need to think of your body as a battery and keep the body's battery charged. Finally, the number one time in your life when you can give your body a chance to recharge the battery and be away from that electrical soup is when you're sleeping at night. That's when your cells can repair and recover from all the electrical draining that occurs during the day. This is why I think it's important to go through your bedroom. Do you need a TV in there? If not, get rid of it. Do you need your phone off of airplane mode while you sleep? If not, put it in airplane mode. Do you need certain devices in the bedroom running and turned on, including something like a WI fi router during the night while you're asleep? If not, get, turn it off. I think you should go through steps to make your bedroom like a dark ancestral cave because that's when your body is going to repair before you step out at 7am in the morning to go to work with those 30 Wi Fi signals. So if you're going to start anywhere, start in the bedroom. And there's actually a whole field of science around this called building biology. And you can, I mean, I realize this might sound, you know, fancy or expensive, but it's actually, it's not that expensive to go through the bedroom with an electrical meter or have a building biologist do that. And you can test your bedroom and get rid of things that produce a lot of electricity. And it's a fantastic way to optimize your sleep as well. Most people who do that just begin to sleep like a baby.

Yeah, I actually do that while we're traveling. I'll have like a reader to see where all the wifi is or you know, the non native emf. And I'll unplug dirty electricity, unplug everything in the room. And you know, we've had Brian Hoyer come and stay at our house and do the same sort of thing.

Shielded healing.

Shielded healing, yeah.

Fantastic.

And the unfortunate thing is our bedroom was the worst in the entire house. Yeah, you know, it's usually on a second floor. It's going to be a little bit worse as well. That's why we do try to, you know, when we stay in a hotel, try to go on one of the lower floors if possible. And you know, of course you can control your environment to a certain degree. And like I said in your Bedroom. You definitely can, but a lot of people don't. Now on that note, I know obviously we'll soon be living in the same state. In Idaho. You're building a home there.

I am, yeah.

The majority of the people are spending time either in the office or at home. I'm assuming this is one of the reasons why you homeschool your kids as well. Because they're not going to school where they're going to be in, you know, exposed to artificial light all day. They're going to be, you know, a form of grounding. They're not going to be penetrated by WI fi and non native EMFs. But what steps are you taking in building your house now to ensure that you are protected and you're as close to our ancestors of living in a cave as much as possible?

Yeah, it's a great question. First of all, I homeschool my kids because.

When I looked into the research, because I do like to study education quite a bit, you know, parenting education, teaching is kind of a side passion of mine. It turns out that the enjoyment and the social life and, and the excitement of going to school begins to be outweighed by the pressures of homework, tests, late night stress, finals, et cetera. At about age 13. And so my sons went to a private school from second to fifth grade. And one night when they were out of fifth grade and we were preparing for the next school year, I took them out to dinner and I said, look you guys, if you want to stay at home and study and tell dad all of your passions and your interests and your desires and your dreams and the things that you really want to learn about, I will ensure that you have books and games and programs and tutors and excursions and visits to the museum and even friend groups like homeschool co ops to hang out with to be able to study those things and learn them. And the number one thing they were concerned about was whether or not they'd see their friends. And frankly they're, they're with friends every day in tennis and jiu jitsu and in co ops and even online groups that they're a part of. And that's interesting because they were actually going to a school where I funded the entire classroom for stand up desks. And the school has this entire natural campus. It's the nice school, whatever the wealthy Microsoft kids, employees go to. And I actually thought for a little while that I was doing right thing by just putting them in the best school possible. But even in that scenario, you still can't override the fact that the modern education system is based on this idea of everybody jumping through the same hoops, putting a square peg in a square hole, a round peg in a round hole, learning at the same pace as the rest of the classroom and not studying what it is that they're truly passionate about. There actually is at one academy or school that's very forward thinking that anyone listening in who is able to speak to their school superintendent or has some form of communication with their school should look into is called Centner Academy. Have you heard of it before?

No.

I was speaking at an event in Florida last month, and the gal who runs Centner Academy, she gave a talk. And I mean, the entire school is no WI fi, no emf, air, light, water, electricity, everything optimized. And that's what I'm doing with this new home that I'm building in Idaho.

So when you look at the things that you want to think about in your home, whether it's a new home build or whether it's an existing home, there are certain almost like invisible variables to consider. And this kind of throws a lot of architects and builders for loop, including the ones in Idaho, up by Moscow that I was working with because I told them that I wanted a home that was biologically friendly and I wanted to weave in a lot of these building biology concepts into the home. And they thought that was synonymous with green building, with LEED building, with basically this idea that you build a home that's healthy for the environment and that's great to build a home that's healthy for the environment and energy efficient. But it does not mean that that home is healthy for the human body. And so I've literally been like burning, buying the architect and the builder books, like probably the best one. It's a relatively new book. I think it's the best book to read if you want to know how to make your home a more biologically friendly place. It's called Prescription for a Healthy Home by Paula laporte. And it came out about a year ago. And it goes through how to choose wood and flooring and finish and roofing that's low chemical, doesn't produce a lot of volatile organic compounds, and doesn't turn your house house into a toxic soup. It goes into the idea of mitigating the amount of dirty electricity that you're exposed to by doing things like hardwiring the home with ethernet cables, or at least having the option to plug computers into the ethernet, making sure all the outlets are properly grounded. Back to what we were talking about. Earlier, so you're kind of in touch with the natural surface of the earth. Even if you're on the second floor of the home, looking into where appliances are located and how close those are to sleeping spaces, especially, you know, like you were talking about with your bedroom. Like, is the head of your bed close to where a lot of wires are going through the wall? And if so, the bed needs to be oriented in a different direction. The air quality, right? Not just something like HEPA air filtration, but air quality that allows air to naturally move through the home, stay humidified, stay, stay clean, but also.

Not be an H VAC system that tends to build up mold in the H VAC system. And so there are certain considerations for air. And there are great systems out there. The ones that I have at my current home in Washington. In the guest house, I have one called Life Breath. In the main house, I have one called Aller Air. And these are air systems that naturally clean and humidify the air, but they tend to kill mold, mycotoxins, dust, particulates, etc. Using a combination of HEPA air filtration and UV and ozone. Another thing to think about is light. Like, if you look at overhead LED fluorescent light, it's not very close to natural sunlight. It flickers. It produces this little bit of irritation that on your eyes tends to cause brain fog and tiredness and sluggishness, which is what we're talking about earlier, towards the end of the day. So there are different forms of lighting, namely incandescent, which unfortunately right now is in the process of being outlawed in the US because it's not energy efficient enough, which is ridiculous because it lasts so much longer than LED bulbs that at the end of the day, all of the waste from LED bulbs makes them technically worse for the planet than incandescent lighting, halogen lighting, or annuity newer form of LED that's low in flicker called biological LED or oled. So the lighting system in the house is important, even down to the idea of having warm, reddish orange lighting in the sleeping areas of the house versus bright overhead fluorescent lighting. And in addition to air and light and electricity, I would say another couple of things to think about. Or in addition to air and light and electricity and the toxins, right, the volatile organic compounds, what the wood is made of and what the furniture is made of, the last thing to think about is the water in the home, the water you're bathing in, right? Because your skin is a mouth, the water that you're drinking, the water that you're Using on your lawn, whatever you want to make sure that it's properly filtered. All the more so if you're on a municipal water supply. But even if you're on a well, like wells can have glyphosate in them from runoff from a nearby farm. They can have high level of iron, which can build up in the body and kind of rust the inside of the body. It can have high levels of bacteria. So when it comes to water, typically you want a really good reverse osmosis system or a really good carbon block filtration system. If you really want the water to be as natural and healthy as possible, you can also structure the water. And all that means is that after the water has been filtered by reverse osmosis or by double carbon block, it then passes through almost like a tube that's got minerals in it. And those minerals cause the water. The water kind of spirals as it goes through the tube. And these minerals charge up the water in the same way like we were talking about earlier, that minerals can charge up the human body. And it produces what is called structured water. And structured water is more hydrating. It tends to pass through, through cells a little bit more easily. A lot of the water that's produced by your cells when you burn fat, for example, is naturally structured, but you can actually drink structured water as well. So stepping back and looking at an existing home or a home build, I think the main things to think about are toxins. Air, light, water, and electricity. There are more obvious variables that you would, of course, want to build in movement, right? Do you have a gym? Do you have. You know, I even look at the home I live in now and the home I'm building, like little railings and poles and things that I can hang things from and break it like a monkey. Like, I like a home that's built a little bit like a jungle gym. I'll be shifting to a new bed system called a. I'm probably gonna go with this one called samina. Wooden slats. A little less cushioning, a little bit better. More biomechanically favorable for the body not becoming soft. You know, a sauna or some kind of a system where you can get hot, a cold tub or a cryotherapy or something where you can get cold. You know, thinking about some of these elements of movement is also important, as is food. Right? Do you have a, you know, maybe a little lettuce grow a vertical gardening system, or do you have a, you know, some raised garden beds? Or, you know, there's a great Guy in Australia right now. He's fascinating. He has a new documentary about how, how to turn your home into a growing system for food. He's growing like strawberries on the walls and he's got a rooftop growing system that looks like the freaking Garden of Eden. The documentary is called Greenhouse something something. But Zac Efron in the TV show Down to Earth interviewed this guy when he was down in Australia. I want to say his name is Jocko or Jacko or, or something like that. I'm actually trying to hunt him down to get him on my podcast. But he teaches you how to turn your home into basically like a garden. It's fascinating. You guys could probably hunt it down and put it in the show notes or we can google it later.

You've got to be my Jamie on podcast.

Yeah, but those are some of the things to think about.

Yeah, Phenomenal. I like that idea. So when we come around to visit you, we won't be going up the stairs to upstairs to check out. It'll be going up like a rock climbing wall or something like that. But.

Well, it's funny because in, in my current home, the challenge with me and my boys sometimes is how do you get upstairs without using the stairs? You have to basically like box jump or step up onto the dining room table. And then if you jump from the dining room table, you grab this slat and it's like this series of railings that go up to an upstairs hallway. You got to do a series of pull ups up the slats and throw your leg over the railing. But, you know, it's. It's like, it was kind of funny. You know, I used to, when I was a kid, I would sit in the sermons at church and I would look at the church ceiling and plot how I would technically be able to get from one side of the church to the other side without touching the floor. And I still think about that in my home. Like, how can I creatively weave through my home in different ways, almost like an obstacle course. And you know, it sounds like a childish thing to do, but I mean, really, we're all built move, not just kids.

Yeah. I bet your wife is glad that you're over here for a couple of weeks.

Yeah, give her a break. She's got a little sanity.

So you spoke about sleep being something that everybody should prioritize. You know, it kind of, you know, recovery kind of dictates your performance. And you know, I've noticed from measuring my biological age that sleep has been a major turning point for me. To prevent myself from accelerating my crop, my biological age. Now, we all know that a lot of people fail to do it, but from a, you know, that's more an ancestry, an ancestral thing. But from a biohacking perspective, is there a particular biohack that you've applied, that you have found that has been particularly good to help reverse your biological age.

Beyond just sleep beyond, which is the ultimate drug?

Yeah, there, there's a few. But I would say that some of the biggies would be peptides that either target specific organs to slow aging in those organs or cause more building of mitochondria called mitochondrial biogenesis or mitochondrial proliferation. There are peptides that do this and the main peptides to look into one would be a series of peptides called peptide bioregulators. These are very, very short chains of amino acids, even shorter than a lot of the other peptides out there that you might hear about, like BPC157 or TB500. These have been researched in Russia for about 30 years. Sadly, Dr. Kavinson, the main researcher who is the anti aging advisor to Vladimir Putin, who did the majority of this research, just passed about 10 days ago. And these bioregulators, they have names like thymolin to travel to the thymus and help with the thymus, or Pinealin for the pineal gland or testolon for the genitals, and they specifically rejuvenate those target organs. And a typical peptide bioregulator protocol is you would take a certain peptide bioregulator for a certain organ for a period of time, like 10 days, and then you'd switch to the next organ for 10 days or the next one for 10 days. There are other protocols and I'm lazy, so I do this protocol twice a year for 10 days. I use all of them. And you can either swallow a whole bunch of capsules because there's like one for each different organ and there's about 30 different ones, or there are some companies that will sell them as an injectable, like in an insulin syringe, and you can inject almost all of them at once. So peptide bioregulators, I think, think are pretty big. There are a few others that I would say. And we're mostly talking about the supplements category. Right. So cold, heat, exercise, movement, walking, a lot of those things that we would consider to be hormetic stressors, like things that are mildly stressful or like the workout that we did today, moderately stressful. These are all fantastic anti aging hacks, but we're talking about some of the sexiest, your lesser known stuff. Now, you and I were talking about how in India you can actually very easily find a compound called rapamycin, which would originally have been used as an immunosuppressant drug for something like organ transfer. But research has now shown that a much smaller dose of rapamycin than what you would use for immune suppression actually has some really fantastic, fantastic anti aging effects. The dose you and I are on the same dose, 5 milligrams once a week, which is way less than you take if you're getting organ transplant or something like that. It's expensive, but like you were telling me, you can buy it pretty inexpensively in India. There's one company in the US called Anti Aging Systems that sells a generic version of it that my wife and I take called Rapapro. And it's like 60 bucks for, I believe it's almost like a two or three month supply. So rapamycin would be a second. And if I could name a couple of others, in addition to the peptide bioregulators, there are certain peptides that specifically target the mitochondria. And I think two of the best ones, even though the FDA has been regulating peptides with increasing frequency, you can still buy them, but they're like not meant for human consumption. But there are some websites that still sell these injectable peptides. There's one called MOTS C M O T S C and another one called Epitalon E, P I T A L O N. And these are injectable peptides that very similar to peptide bioregulators. You don't have to take all year long, but I will use mot C usually about every quarter or so for around 10 days. And the same thing with epitalon to rejuvenate my mitochondria. And then the lower last thing that I would say would kind of fit into this category. And I know everybody's probably screaming, stem cells, stem cells, stem cells. But it's kind of obvious stem cells are helpful. Most people already know about them. But there is this idea that as you age, you get a buildup of cells that tend to churn out more inflammation that are essential, essentially, like useless throwaway cells called senescent cells, also known as zombie cells. And there are certain things called senolytic agents that help you get rid of these cells. You might be familiar with things like things you would get from plants like quercetin and fisetin. Those would be examples of senolytic agents. I even think NAD acts A little bit like a senolytic agent as well, or at least combines well with senolytic agents. And NAD is fantastic regardless for a host of things. Sleep deprivation and cell repair, recovery and anti aging. But taking a small dose of a senolytic agent, just a couple of days, a month, all year long, can really help with senescent cell accumulation. Now it's interesting because you don't want to start doing that at too early of an age. Your body actually needs ant anabolism and growth and frankly the buildup of senescent cells up until the time you're around 40 to 45 years old, at which point that accumulation begins to not serve you very well from an aging standpoint. So if you're younger, you don't need to focus on these senolytic agents, but as you age, you can look into taking senolytics as a strategy as well. So in a nutshell, we've got in addition to just like sleep, exercise, exercise, heat, cold, etc. Peptide bioregulators, peptides like MOTC and epitalon, rapamycin and senolytic agents as four examples of newer compounds that are pretty darn good for longevity and age reversal.

Okay, now speaking about nad, we were talking about NAD a little bit earlier. We know that our, after the age of say 40, NAD levels decline rapidly and continue to do so. But what about somebody that is maybe in their 30s, but they had very stressful life, not much sleep, they've been drinking a lot of alcohol, partying. Would you say those people should be taking NAD just based on their lifestyle choices?

Well, you know, if you, if you were anything like me, you could have a six pack or more in college and get up and run a marathon the next day. And nowadays you feel like you're relegated to your bed for a couple of days after something like that. Part of that is the decline in the pool of available NAD, which can decline remarkably by the time you're 80 years old. There's some statistics that show you got 90% of your NAD just gone. So supplementation with NAD I think is a must as you age. But in particular, if you are inflamed, if you're beat up, if you're traveling, if you're jet lagged, or I think most significantly if you're sleep deprived. NAD is a really great hack. And there's obviously different forms of nad. You can get NMN or nr. There's like, just like the dirt cheap niacinamide, even niacinamide. The problem with it is it degrades pretty quickly, and it's not in your body for very long. You and I both use a form called NAD regen by BioStack Labs. That is a specific form of NAD called NAD3. And it's formulated in such a manner that it keeps your NAD pools elevated for a longer period of time and keeps the niacinamide from breaking down as quickly. So that'd be an example of something that you can use as a daily supplement. But in particular, like today, I'm sleep deprived. We're traveling. We're in India. I took NAD this morning, and then I just took another dose before this podcast, because in my opinion, the two best things to take if you're sleep deprived beside this wonderful cup of coffee is NAD and creatine. That's like my sleep deprivation hack. And that's a really good way to use nad.

Right? Okay, got it. Now, we've got a couple more questions left, but I really wanted to talk to you about the visit that you had to Miami recently with Dr. John for your prostate, because I've had an issue with frequent urination during the evening. And of course, if you go to the doctor, you get a prostate exam, they don't really tell you everything that you. You need to know. So why did you see Dr. John? And can you talk us through this protocol that you had for your prostate? And what. What are you hoping to get out of it?

I don't know if this is true, but I've had several physicians tell me that almost every man has prostate cancer. Cancer at some point in their life. They might not die of it, but almost every man dies with prostate cancer. It just develops, you know, tumors in the. In the. In the prostate over a period of time. I don't know why that is. I don't know if that's true. But I do know that prostate enlargement occurs with age. And that's one of the reasons why men, as they age, get up to pee at night. And that might not seem like that big of a deal, but you would. And I, and probably every older man listening knows that one of the issues with that is it's also because your natural melatonin production decreases as you age. Very difficult to get back to sleep after you've gotten up to pee at night. And if you've got two or three nighttime awakenings, sometimes you can be in bed for eight hours and only log six and a half hours of sleep, because each time it takes you, like, 20 to 30 minutes to fall back asleep. It's Even worse if you, you know, breaking that lighting rule I talked about earlier, you have bright lights, I have red lights. I actually have these movement detection red lights next to my toilet that turn on when I walk into the bathroom so that I don't disrupt melatonin production.

Are they the mobile ones with magnets you can put.

They're the ones that we got at the health optimization. I don't even remember the brand.

It's a German brand, It's a Filiplocks or something like that.

Yeah, we could probably find it and put it in the show notes. So anyways, the prostate enlargement is an issue. And of course, if you have your psa, your prostate specific antigen tested and that's elevated, that is also a risk factor for prostate cancer. Finally, and this is something new that I've learned, many men have infections in their prostate similar to how women can get yeast infections. Men can have yeast fungus, bacteria and et cetera. And in addition, that can be transferred to their partner. As a matter of fact, when my wife and I began to have unprotected sex more frequently because we did use condoms for a period of time, and then we just said, well, screw it off, we're going to have more kids, we're going to have more kids. But she started getting yeast infections and there's a high probability that she was getting those from fungal infections that I was carrying in my prostate. Now, I talked at length with Dr. John about this and we even did a podcast on it. And he came up with this protocol that I did when I was in Florida to actually, in a way, clean the prostate gland, reduce risk of prostate cancer, get rid of yeast, fungus, bacteria, microbes, etc. And reduce nighttime urination. Almost like a youthfulness overhaul. For the prostate gland, it's not very pleasant protocol. It involves an injection using ultrasound guided imaging of methylene blue and ozone into the prostate gland. It's kind of the needle goes in like just a few inches above your penis. And it's kind of cool because you can look up at the screen and see your prostate right there on the screen and see the needle going in. It's not a very, very thick needle and there's a little bit of a numbing agent. And at Dr. John's clinic, he actually, if you see the video, which is on my Instagram channel and also on the show notes of the podcast that I did with him, I have a tube in my mouth because I'm breathing laughing gas because he has that there. You take a big whiff of laughing gas and kind of decreases pain as the needle goes in. Then they inject methylene blue and ozone. And your prostate just aches and is sore.

For two or three hours. Like, pretty significant. Like, I was worried. I'm like, how long is this going to last? I had an ice pack on my, you know, right. Right over my prostate after the procedure. What's even more funny because he called it the Barking Elephant protocol after I told him what happened. And this is. This is the strangest sensation ever is I felt like I had to urinate and I went to pee and all that came out was ozone. So it was like, basically like I was farting out of my dick. It's the weirdest sensation ever. And of course, you're all. You're also like, you know, your urine is blue. And it's, it's, it's. It's an uncommon protocol. Now, I will not say that there's much human clinical research behind it. There is research on methylene blue as an antimicrobial and ozone as an antifungal agent, et cetera. But the procedure itself was intriguing enough to me that I did it. And here's what's interesting, because I decided to do it at the last minute because I was think staying at his house and was kind of like, hey, you want to get your prostate injected? I was like, sure. Normally you do a test of semen and sperm parameters prior to that.

Yeah.

And he's done that in multiple patients, and you see an increase in semen and sperm quality and sperm count after having that done. So it's actually having an effect on fertility as well.

Interesting. Fascinating. Yeah. I'm speaking to their team at the moment, and I'm yet to have a couple consultation because of the time difference here. But they said the same sort of thing to go through that protocol beforehand. So I'm intrigued about doing that because of this frequent urination. Because, like you said, I may be in bed for like eight, nine hours, but an hour less of that is getting up going to be. And trying to get back to sleep.

Yeah. And I. And I should say, by the way, I'm getting up at night to pee way less. Like, I went from two to three times per night peeing to one time every few days. Meaning there's multiple nights now where I'm just sleeping through the entire night without getting up to pee, which is amazing for me, regardless of yeast and fungus and sperm and seeing whatever, that alone is a good enough reason to do it. Cause it's like I Got my sleep back.

Okay, cool. All right, I got two short questions from my wife here that have been added. What is the number one question that people ask you?

Oh, man.

Usually it's like one of those big coverall questions like what's the best supplement to take? Or what's the best diet or what's the best workout? And you and I both know, like, that's highly specific and will vary quite a bit from person to person.

So if I could, if I could choose something, this is an interesting question, but the way, if I could choose something a little bit more specific, that would be something recent that's come to mind.

It would probably be. I get a lot of questions from men who want a six pack or an eight pack or who want better abs. Like, that's a pretty frequent question. I think I've been asked that like six times already while I've been in India. Probably doesn't help that I take my shirt off. And my genetically skinny, lean ass tends to show off abs pretty easily for me. I'm naturally lean. And I tell them that the top three things, I think that besides just a good exercise protocol and core training, which means, and I'm not talking about sit ups and crunch, I'm talking about deadlifts and squats and the type of planks that we were doing and things that really put a good load on the abdomen. And by the way, the most recent EMG analysis, electromyographic analysis of muscle activation of exercises that trigger the abdominals that I saw showed that the very best or the very highest amount of muscle activation was with the ab rollout wheel.

At the beginning of the workout.

Right. And I use. It doesn't make you strong or, you know, functional fit or anything like that, but it does trigger the abs pretty intensively. And I tell them that the top three things are reduce added sugar as much as possible from your diet. I'm not against alcohol consumption. I think alcohol is a mild stressor that can actually lend itself well to longevity. And if you go and check out my friend Chris masterjohn's recent article on alcohol consumption, you'll be flabbergasted at the number of health effects associated with Microsoft microdosing with alcohol on a regular basis. But it does not help with, with a man getting a six pack, it's probably because alcohol, like fructose, is burnt before anything else. So it's much, much easier to accumulate visceral fat and subcutaneous fat around the abdominals. If you're drinking alcohol, same thing could be Said for high fructose corn syrup, even fruit to a certain extent, and fructose. So limit added sugars, limit alcohol, and then get up in the morning in a fasted state, consume a thermogenic agent like caffeine or green tea, exercise aerobically for 20 to 45 minutes in an easy conversational state, and then get cold for two to five minutes. I myself do that almost every day of the year. And it's fantastic because a, the aerobic exercise and the cold are mobilizing fat stores. The thermogenic agent that you consume prior is accelerating that effect. And the fasting state that you're in is ensuring that you're burning fatty acids off of your own body before you're burning fat that you've consumed, whether it's butter in your coffee or whether it's calories from sugar in the coffee. So it's fasted state. And then probably most importantly, there's not many people who are not able to just like get up and walk their dog in the morning. I'm not telling people to like go to the gym and work out hard. I'm saying on as many days of the year as possible, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, whatever, get up, do some light aerobic movement in a fasted state after a cup of coffee or tea and get cold for two to five minutes afterwards. And that's an amazing trigger for fat loss in both men and women. But a lot of guys see the fat just strip off their waistline when they do that.

Right? Okay, got it. Tighten up, baby.

Last one. What do you wish people would ask you?

I wish that people would ask me.

How.

To be a better father and a better husband. And I realized that I may have just isolated 50% of the listening population by that being a very male specific reply. Even though I think that a lot of women, if they are married, would of course desire their man to be as good a father and husband as they can. And a lot of this would also apply to mothers and wives.

And of course, we could talk for a very long time about this. But.

There'S two really important things to understand.

Human beings have a deep desire to be seen and loved and heard. I talked about Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People as a book that I listened to at the gym recently. It's a perfect example of that.

When it comes to your children, they need time and presence. They don't care how much you're working, how much money you make, how many cool vacations to luxury locales that you took them to they want you to sit on the living room floor and play Monopoly with them for a couple hours or skip all of your Instagram checking at night because you're literally reading them and storing bed for 20 minutes. Or you're like running your hand through their hair, just eye gazing as you play their favorite song in bed before they go to bed at night. Kids need time and presence. And it's something that I think I was lucky enough to learn early on as a father because the way that I grew up, I was raised in a very entrepreneurial family where my father and my grandfather worked really hard, but they worked really hard to the detriment of the actual time that they spent with their family, justifying that they were making money that they were providing. But you know, I would just rather live dirt poor in a trailer and have a bunch of time with my kids. And I know they would want that also because it's time and it's presence and it's giving them that desire that they have from the moment they were born to be seen and loved and heard. So as a father, the very best thing that you can do is deny that urge to go out and just make money and build your business and make it for yourself. And do that more slowly than you might normally be able to because you're carving out that time to be there with your children. And trust me, it's inconvenient. And there's so many times when I'm reading a book to my kids or playing a game with them when I really want to be working, I really do. But I suppress that urge. And I think because of that, I have a really close relationship with my all the way down to workouts. I don't like, believe it or not, Kris, to work out with other people. I like to just do my own thing, get in my head. But I have inconvenient workouts with my sons where I'm stopping every five minutes to show them how to do the kettlebell swing properly or, you know, waiting for them to go upstairs and take a peek so they gotta stop for a second or whatever because I know that it's important that I spend that time with them. And then as far as being a better husband, the three main things to know about first.

Wives or husbands, the same as children. They need time and they need presence, not necessarily money and you going off and making a living, they just want you to be there and lend an ear.

The main relationship tip that I could give you for your relationship with your spouse, even though there Are, of course, many. I'll give you two. The first is study the five love languages and know your spouse's love language. Right? So for my wife, it's time spent together.

Right?

It's not gifts. It's not what mine is, which is words of affirmation. Hey, babe, you're doing a great job today. Keep it up.

It's not physical touch. Even though all those things are important, everybody has a little bit of each of the five love languages in them. But my wife wants to. She wants us to sit in bed and just, like, talk for 20 minutes before we go to bed at night. And she wants to go on a walk and just be holding my hand and talk. And she wants to have those regularly scheduled date nights where it's just me and her and none of the other people or the podcast or the business. It's just me and her. So we know each other's love languages. She knows mine is words of affirmation. I know hers is time spent. And then the second thing is every single night before we go to bed, we lay our heads on the pillow before I mouth tape, and we pray together. And I think that that idea of connection to a sacred spiritual higher power that you're going to together every night kind of reverse engineers this process, that it's difficult to do that if you've had arguments or if there's something between you or if there's something hidden that you need to talk your partner. It's just this idea that I consider to be prayer, a very sacred activity. And my wife and I, the very last thing that we do every single night, we've done for years and years. We've been married for 21 years. Is last thing when our heads hit the pillow is we both pray together. We pray for our kids, we pray for our relationship. We pray for whatever upcoming home move problems, challenges, blockers. We thank God for blessings and gifts, and we just have this sacred moment together every night before we go to bed. And it's quick. I mean, it's sometimes two minutes, sometimes five minutes. But know your partner's love language. Have some type of a religious or sacred experience that you go through with them. Give your kids time and presence. And those are the things that I wish people would ask me about more often.

That's beautiful. I love that. Well, thank you very much. I wish I could thank you for the workout, but I'll thank you for the podcast instead.

Well, thank you for the work. Thank you for this amazing gym.

Yes, it's a good facility. Here we opened this one up last year and we'll be opening another one up next month here in Delhi. But thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'll be seeing you in Mumbai next weekend, but great interview. And should people come and find you, Ben, where can they?

BenGreenfieldLife.com It's a pretty good spot.

There you go. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more? Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.