Speaker 1: I realize, oh crap, I'm fit on the outside, but
Speaker 1: I'm dying on the inside. High inflammation, low testosterone, disregulated thyroid,
Speaker 1: gut inflammation and gut issues and constipation, all these issues
Speaker 1: that technically somebody with like low body fat and muscles
Speaker 1: who can run and lift weights you wouldn't expect to have.
Speaker 1: But really, true fitness is not about going to a
Speaker 1: little fake box at the beginning of the day and
Speaker 1: pushing fake heavy things around for an hour and then
Speaker 1: walking out and assuming that you're good to go. Hey, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome back to you on Purpose, the number one health
Speaker 1: podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single
Speaker 1: one of you who come back every week to listen,
Speaker 1: learn and grow. I am so deeply grateful for our trusted,
Speaker 1: committed community that shows up every week. And today's guest
Speaker 1: is someone that I met a few years ago. Now.
Speaker 1: We've been going back and forth trying to make this
Speaker 1: happen with both of our schedules, with the pandem, with COVID,
Speaker 1: with everything else that's been going on, and I have
Speaker 1: to say that I'm pumped and I'm so excited that
Speaker 1: we're finally in the same room together. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: none other than human performance consultant, New York Times best
Speaker 1: selling author, self experimenter, and one of the most wild, crazy, interesting,
Speaker 1: curious people that I know, Ben Greenfield. Ben, thank you
Speaker 1: for being here, Thank you for showing up, and even
Speaker 1: just a few moments we spent together. I'm already looking forward.
Speaker 1: It's kind of bittersweet, though, because like last time we
Speaker 1: hung out, we were eating wonderful Italian buffet style five
Speaker 1: star resorts, Sardinian food, surrounded by amazing people at music
Speaker 1: that that whole was it Mind Valley a Mind Valley University.
Speaker 1: It was, Yeah, it was. It was awesome this fest Fest.
Speaker 1: I don't think they even call it awesome This's fest
Speaker 1: anymore because that words dated. But yeah, they had like
Speaker 1: it was almost like a Disneyland in Sardinia, some giant resort.
Speaker 1: I remember. The food was amazing, great parties. And then
Speaker 1: I met you. We were sitting at a table at
Speaker 1: dinner and you and I had never met before, and
Speaker 1: Vision Lakhani was there and he introduced us, and then
Speaker 1: we thought about doing a podcast, and that was like
Speaker 1: two years ago. Finally the other side of the world,
Speaker 1: we finally hook up. But yes, Sardinia, you know, what
Speaker 1: was interesting about that, Like Sardinia is well known as
Speaker 1: being a longevity hotspot, or like Nikoiza and Loma Linda
Speaker 1: and Okanawa, you know, one of these so called blue zones,
Speaker 1: even though there's some controversy about the whole Blue zones
Speaker 1: and whether or not the demographic data was accurate or whatever.
Speaker 1: But either way, like people live a long time, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: But when you look at the populations that they studied
Speaker 1: in Sardinia, it was a lot of the old people
Speaker 1: up in the Dolomites, right, who were you know, hiking
Speaker 1: up pills with their goats milk and their wine and
Speaker 1: eating you know, small cold water fish and herbs and
Speaker 1: spices and teas and living this like outdoor lifestyle combined
Speaker 1: with social relationships and love and all these things that
Speaker 1: we know now feed a good not just health span
Speaker 1: but lifespan. And then we got to Sardinia. So that
Speaker 1: was like the picture I had painted in my mind.
Speaker 1: But then when we got to Sardinia, we weren't like
Speaker 1: up in the craggy hills with like old Italian people
Speaker 1: drinking table wine over small you know, fish and tea
Speaker 1: up in the mountain somewhere This was like a full on,
Speaker 1: like five star resort with like golf carts and like
Speaker 1: man made beaches inside giant walls, and so it was
Speaker 1: interesting for me. I kept wanting to slip away, like
Speaker 1: up into the Dolomites and be like, Okay, well this
Speaker 1: is interesting, but what's kind of like the non touristy
Speaker 1: side light. Yeah. Regardless, though, the food I think was
Speaker 1: amazing and probably probably something the the longevity enthusiasts up
Speaker 1: in the mountains would have killed take. Yeah. Absolutely, were
Speaker 1: I think we were. I hope we were eating seasonally.
Speaker 1: I think we kind of sort of I think it
Speaker 1: was seasonally slash what the locals there thought would kind
Speaker 1: of impress. Yeah. Yeah, but but I mean, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I've eaten in Italy before. I guess more like the locals. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: my wife and I early on in our marriage, we
Speaker 1: flew into Rome and didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 1: It was either senior year of college or right after
Speaker 1: we both graduated, and so this was back in the
Speaker 1: day when I had to like fact all my reservations
Speaker 1: in and my credit card number to the to the
Speaker 1: different places that we wanted to stay and stuff. But
Speaker 1: our our hair brained ideas we wanted to rent bikes
Speaker 1: in Rome and just like zig zag ride them all
Speaker 1: the way up to Florence. And that's what we did.
Speaker 1: We rented bikes, but I planned ahead and mapped out
Speaker 1: the whole route, and so I would fact my reservations
Speaker 1: into these agricolas, you know, which are like farm stays
Speaker 1: where you stay with these Italian families out of their farm,
Speaker 1: or like little hostels or beds and breakfast, because that's
Speaker 1: basically we had the money to afford. And so we
Speaker 1: got into Rome, we start riding, and basically, because I'd
Speaker 1: already prepaid for all these reservations by faxing them in,
Speaker 1: it was come hell or high water. We had to
Speaker 1: get to where we were going that day. And most
Speaker 1: days were like the thirty five to fifty miles of riding,
Speaker 1: which isn't a whole lot, but these are like heavy
Speaker 1: touring bikes with panniers on either side, these bags where
Speaker 1: you keep all of your belongings, your clothing, your toilet trees, whatever.
Speaker 1: And inevitably, as the trip goes on and we'd like
Speaker 1: buy wine and buy cheese and buy souvenirs, these bikes
Speaker 1: would get heavier and heavier as we'd go. Every city
Speaker 1: there is built on top of a hill, you know,
Speaker 1: like an old medieval village with walls, and you got
Speaker 1: to climb a hill. So every day, at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, the very last thing we'd do, when
Speaker 1: our legs were already toasts, was just climb, climb, climb
Speaker 1: to the top of these hills and then hunt down,
Speaker 1: you know, wherever. We'd actually put in a reservation to
Speaker 1: stay at. But I remember the most special thing was
Speaker 1: it was every single day you'd finished, you were sweaty,
Speaker 1: you were tired, your legs were aching, and you knew
Speaker 1: that there was a homemade Italian meal with some table
Speaker 1: wine that rivals, you know, a fifty dollar or glass
Speaker 1: of wine you'll buy here in the US, and wonderful
Speaker 1: people and smiles and um and and a bed to
Speaker 1: stay in. And I just remember every single day riding
Speaker 1: up those hills thinking, gelato, homemade revue, red wine. You
Speaker 1: got this ben you could do this, and it was
Speaker 1: it was a cool trip. We got all over to Florence,
Speaker 1: we put our bikes on a train and then just
Speaker 1: took the train back down to Rome and flew home.
Speaker 1: So now I have you know, years and years later,
Speaker 1: I have twin thirteen year old sons and when they're fifteen,
Speaker 1: so a year and a half or two from now,
Speaker 1: we're going to replicate that trip. We're gonna take them back.
Speaker 1: So now I've got them kind of starting to train
Speaker 1: and learn how to be comfortable on the roads, you know,
Speaker 1: like the Italian roads, have no shoulders, you got no
Speaker 1: to hand to your bike on roads, and know how
Speaker 1: to ride a big fat touring bike instead of a
Speaker 1: road bike. And so that's going to be really I'm
Speaker 1: super looking forward to that as the next trip to
Speaker 1: Italy with my boys, riding through the through the Italian
Speaker 1: fields and hunting down Florence again. That's a beautiful and
Speaker 1: I love hearing them and they're lucky boys. And I
Speaker 1: remember that as a young man, my parents would drive
Speaker 1: us to Italy. That was their favorite places in Europe.
Speaker 1: So we would drive from London, would get the ferry
Speaker 1: into France, and then from France we would drive again
Speaker 1: to Italy. So we drive to Venice, we drift to Naples,
Speaker 1: we drive to Rome. We just drive to a different
Speaker 1: place and we drive across Italy because we didn't have
Speaker 1: the money to fly there and my parents preferred doing
Speaker 1: a road trip and we didn't get on any bikes
Speaker 1: or anything like that. But even what you were saying that,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, week weak family. If you guys
Speaker 1: were real, you would have taken bicycles. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you would have taken a bike from London. Bike from
Speaker 1: London to Italy. Yeah. No, we were like eight years old,
Speaker 1: and but I have good memories of visiting Italy with
Speaker 1: my parents as well, so I can only imagine how
Speaker 1: your boys are gonna do when they goin. My only
Speaker 1: concern is the girls, because I got like two thirteen
Speaker 1: year old to be fifteen by then, like blonde haired,
Speaker 1: blue eyed American boys, and just having taken my wife
Speaker 1: there and seeing the reaction to you know, my wife's
Speaker 1: blonde hair, blue eyed, and you know, the men that
Speaker 1: are very very forward cat calling as she walks down
Speaker 1: the street. Then when I took my sons to Thailand
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, the same thing, like all
Speaker 1: the Thai people just flock around them, and then the
Speaker 1: women are practically swooning as these little blonde haired boys
Speaker 1: walked through the streets. So we may have to bring
Speaker 1: bring some fly swatters to keep them, keep witing off
Speaker 1: of them. I love it. I love it. My first
Speaker 1: memory of you actually was inside, didn't you. I knew
Speaker 1: you were going to be there. We were, we were
Speaker 1: both speaking at the conference, and you know, I was
Speaker 1: learning about you and learning about your world. I was,
Speaker 1: I'm you know, I'm not a biohacker, that's not my
Speaker 1: background in the same sense as you are. And so
Speaker 1: I was intrigued and I loved your sessions that you did.
Speaker 1: But my first experience of view was we had an
Speaker 1: evening party and it was like this. We were on
Speaker 1: this bridge if you remember, at the hotel, and you
Speaker 1: literally jumped in to like the hotel lake slash pool
Speaker 1: it was. And the reason why I say lake is
Speaker 1: because it wasn't like a swimming pool. We have to
Speaker 1: I've got to give Ben credit. It was and it
Speaker 1: was evening, so it was it was cooler, and you
Speaker 1: dived in and you swam and you got out and
Speaker 1: you made your and we were just we were all like, wow,
Speaker 1: that is that is the way to enter it. So
Speaker 1: I always remember this. You remember it, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that was that was early on in the trip. Honestly, dude,
Speaker 1: I love water. I know you do. I'm at home
Speaker 1: in water. You know. I competed for years in open
Speaker 1: water swimming and iron Man triathlon and the biking in
Speaker 1: the running was okay, but I did and I still do.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, you could see that I love the water,
Speaker 1: love the ocean of spearfishing. I'm not a big waterman
Speaker 1: in terms of like surfing and kiteboarding and things like that,
Speaker 1: because I don't really have that up in Washington State,
Speaker 1: so I can't practice it. And I tend not to
Speaker 1: really be passionate about the things I suck at because
Speaker 1: I can't practice them. Um. But but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: water is almost like woven into my DNA somehow, because
Speaker 1: my dad, you know, all of his side comes from Australia,
Speaker 1: and I'm a big believer in the fact that that
Speaker 1: we do carry a lot of things epigenetically in our DNA,
Speaker 1: not only trauma, but also the things that our ancestors
Speaker 1: are good at or love to do. You know, my
Speaker 1: son River dreams a lot about snow and ice and
Speaker 1: Finland and trekking up snowy mountains and the cold. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because my wife, Jess's whole side is like
Speaker 1: Northern European. You know up in the area around Finland
Speaker 1: and Estonia and um and Switzerland, you know, and some
Speaker 1: of these more like snowy white places. And it's funny
Speaker 1: that that's like a repeating dream that he has, and
Speaker 1: I suspect that it's just it's woven into his DNA
Speaker 1: in the same way that a love for water is
Speaker 1: woven into my DNA. And I'm actually super excited because
Speaker 1: right before I left to come down here to La
Speaker 1: rceived the package in the mail. This company called a
Speaker 1: Phinise sent me these headphones that you can attach to
Speaker 1: your goggles, and their bone conducting headphones mean that you
Speaker 1: can listen to stuff while you're swimming or while you're
Speaker 1: under the water, while you're spearfishing or whatever. So they
Speaker 1: conduct the sound through the bones on either side of
Speaker 1: your head rather than your ears right, so you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about like the wires and everything. And
Speaker 1: then they sent me these goggles that have like an
Speaker 1: in screen display as you're swimming that show you how
Speaker 1: many strokes you've taken and how far you've gone, so
Speaker 1: you know, perhaps it will just suck all the enjoyment
Speaker 1: of swimming out of me, because sometimes excess technology can
Speaker 1: do that. But you know, just water toys like that
Speaker 1: that absolutely love. And we live we don't live near
Speaker 1: water where we live on about ten acres of isolated
Speaker 1: forest land up in Washington State, which is great. You know.
Speaker 1: We have we have goats and these cute little Nigerian
Speaker 1: dwarf goats and Icelandic chickens and a bunch of garden
Speaker 1: beds and all sorts of like old growth forest where
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of wild plant edibles like you know,
Speaker 1: mint and plantain and nettle and white tailed deer and
Speaker 1: turkey coyote, and it's it's a great place. But there's
Speaker 1: no there's no water right there. So now I'm building
Speaker 1: this this natural pond. And then just to to scratch
Speaker 1: my swimming itch, I got one of those those swim
Speaker 1: pools that's like it's like twenty feet long, but it
Speaker 1: has a super hard jets and you attach like a
Speaker 1: it's like an elastic band and you can swim against
Speaker 1: those pots. Mine one's called an aqua Fitness, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the ones you see Michael Phelps advertising in the
Speaker 1: back of airplane make that kind of thing. But then
Speaker 1: I keep mine because I'm a huge fan of like
Speaker 1: the power of cold thermogenesis and cryotherapy for just for
Speaker 1: fat loss and your nervous system health and your cellular resilience.
Speaker 1: I think most people live in the comfort of temperature
Speaker 1: too much. And when we look at longevity data, when
Speaker 1: we look at health data, when we look at nervous
Speaker 1: system and cellular resilience, constant exposure or regular exposure to
Speaker 1: stresses of heat and stresses of cold is so good
Speaker 1: for the human body. So I have a sauna and
Speaker 1: then I have this pool, but I keep it cold.
Speaker 1: What I mean by that is I don't heat it right.
Speaker 1: So in the summer, yeah, I'll swim at like sixty
Speaker 1: degrees or whatever gets up to. Then the winter, I'll
Speaker 1: go out there and swim and it will be like
Speaker 1: almost break through the ice temperatures. But I get in
Speaker 1: that thing almost every day and swim, and that's and
Speaker 1: it just puts a big smile on my face. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've been going to this place called Pause in West Hollywood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I've been going there every week with my wife. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we go there every Saturday and we do the
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation tanks for about an hour and then we'll
Speaker 1: both go and do three cycles of the sauna and
Speaker 1: cold plants together for another hour. Just we do every
Speaker 1: Saturday morning. It's become our morning routine ritue. On Saturday.
Speaker 1: We wake up once you've done our meditation, ten am
Speaker 1: we head over and then ten am to noon we're
Speaker 1: there and it's just been And you know, I've I've
Speaker 1: heard that for a long time, and as monks, we
Speaker 1: took cold showers. We you know, we were in India,
Speaker 1: so it was it was hot plenty of the time,
Speaker 1: so you always experienced uncomfortable amounts of heat. But doing that,
Speaker 1: since I've been back where my body has a climate
Speaker 1: tie acclimatized to wanting a more comfortable temperature, and the
Speaker 1: temperature home is always perfect. But also I've started sleeping
Speaker 1: at like sixty six sixty seven fahrenheit, and that even
Speaker 1: though it was cooler in the beginning, that kind of
Speaker 1: sleep temperature has really helped. And you wake up sometimes
Speaker 1: feeling cold, but I can notice that that's doing some
Speaker 1: good for my body to sleep sleeping in the cold.
Speaker 1: The effects of that on the positive effects on sleep
Speaker 1: architecture have always been surprising to me because it's such simple,
Speaker 1: low hanging fruit. When you look at sleep hygiene, right,
Speaker 1: we have light as being one component of sleep hygiene.
Speaker 1: So what I mean by that is your sleep cycle
Speaker 1: begins in the morning, meaning that the more sunlight, the
Speaker 1: more of these like you know, if you look at
Speaker 1: this from more of a biohacking standpoint, like the infrared
Speaker 1: light panels that you can use to simulate sun eyes
Speaker 1: in your office that you can shine on your whole body,
Speaker 1: or an infrared sauna, or these these blue light boxes
Speaker 1: that they self for desktops that are used for seasonal
Speaker 1: effective disorders, you know, or of course sunlight being you know,
Speaker 1: the top of the totem pull for any of this
Speaker 1: stuff like blasting yourself with light in the morning combined
Speaker 1: with turning your room into a just a light cave
Speaker 1: at night. Like I've replaced all the cans in our
Speaker 1: bedroom with red incandescent bulbs instead of LED or modern
Speaker 1: fluorescent lighting. So that's the late evening before. That's so
Speaker 1: my master bedroom, my sun's bedroom, and ours and our
Speaker 1: master bathroom are all red incandescent bulbs. No no regular
Speaker 1: day whenever. Yeah, all read no dimmers because dimmers and
Speaker 1: what we're kind of getting into the weeds a little
Speaker 1: bit here, but dimmer switches on lights they cause a
Speaker 1: lot more what is called dirty EMF or a high
Speaker 1: amount of non native electricity that doesn't jive well with
Speaker 1: with human cellular function, and so we don't use dimmers.
Speaker 1: But we just replaced all the cans with red incandescent.
Speaker 1: The reason for incandescent being that even though there's slightly
Speaker 1: bigger power hogs on the electrical supply, it's not that
Speaker 1: big of there might be an extra ten fifteen bucks
Speaker 1: in the electrical bill everyone, so it's nothing too big
Speaker 1: to worry about. But they also um they simulate the
Speaker 1: natural red spectrum of sunlight and the same as our
Speaker 1: ancestors might have experienced during torchlight or firelight at night.
Speaker 1: So all of the all of the bedrooms, anywhere where
Speaker 1: there'd be a sleeping place or a place where you
Speaker 1: might get up to p at night, it's all red incandescent.
Speaker 1: And then all of the computers, like my son's computer,
Speaker 1: my wife's computer, my computer, we have a program installed
Speaker 1: on that called Iris, and IRIS just kind of sucks
Speaker 1: all the all the high temperature light out of the
Speaker 1: computer screen at a specific time of day, so it's
Speaker 1: very eye friendly. As the night can you can have
Speaker 1: on your phone as well. Uh No, but for the
Speaker 1: for the phone, so I do IRIS on the computer,
Speaker 1: and then for the television, even though we don't watch
Speaker 1: much television, I have a box installed on that called
Speaker 1: a drift box that decreases all the blue light from
Speaker 1: the television. And then for the phone, obviously a lot
Speaker 1: of phones have built in native night mode, but for
Speaker 1: the iPhone in particular, which is what I use. You
Speaker 1: can google iPhone red Light trick, and you can actually
Speaker 1: set your iPhone so it literally just like sucks all
Speaker 1: of the blue light out of the phone and turns
Speaker 1: it dark red, kind of like how a lot of
Speaker 1: people who will do a dopamine fast we'll switch their
Speaker 1: phone to black and white for a week, which I
Speaker 1: think is a great idea that this will switch it
Speaker 1: to red. And so you combine all those factors along
Speaker 1: with preferably and I'll do this a lot of time
Speaker 1: when I travel, because I just don't have as much,
Speaker 1: say or the light bulbs in the hotel room or whatever.
Speaker 1: We're the blue light blocking glasses right at night especially,
Speaker 1: and so basically you're just blasting yourself with natural and
Speaker 1: blue light in the morning and then complete absence of
Speaker 1: that same light at night. You want to get as
Speaker 1: close to just what would looking at fire look like
Speaker 1: at night. So light is one. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: light can also be used to shift your circadian rhythm
Speaker 1: backwards or forwards. So let's say we weren't sitting here
Speaker 1: in LA Let's say we were in New York, right,
Speaker 1: And so my wake time in New York being you know,
Speaker 1: let's say six am, would dictate that if I were
Speaker 1: back home on Pacific time, that's like three am. And
Speaker 1: if I'm in New York for a week, when I
Speaker 1: get back home to Pacific time, my body's all of
Speaker 1: a sudden waking up at three am, which is annoying
Speaker 1: and problematic. And I don't want to get up at
Speaker 1: three am because there's not a lot, a whole lot
Speaker 1: going on. And I'm I'm a total fan, like I'm
Speaker 1: an early morning guy, like I usually get up four
Speaker 1: thirty or five. But three is pushing the envelope. Three
Speaker 1: is like you're dead by eleven am. YEH want to
Speaker 1: talk to people and you didn't happen. So anyways, the
Speaker 1: trick there is when you're waking up at three am,
Speaker 1: if you do wake up and you have to get
Speaker 1: out of bed, and you just you just you're gonna
Speaker 1: get up. You're gonnab whatever, go do some yoga or
Speaker 1: read a book or whatever. You trick your body into
Speaker 1: thinking it's still nighttime by keeping your phone in night mode,
Speaker 1: by not turning on any lights in the house, by
Speaker 1: putting those blue light blocking glasses that most people wear
Speaker 1: at night on in the morning instead, and when the
Speaker 1: time rolls around, when you actually want to send a
Speaker 1: message to your body that this is the new time
Speaker 1: to wake up, like let's say that six am, then
Speaker 1: you flip on all the lights and blast the body
Speaker 1: with light. And after two to three days of doing that,
Speaker 1: it's remarkable at how quickly you can shift your circadian
Speaker 1: rhythm backwards or forwards using light and again, kind of
Speaker 1: like back to the whole biohacking realm. There are even
Speaker 1: in addition to those light producing boxes that you can
Speaker 1: put on top of your desk, they make ones that
Speaker 1: you can put in your ears. They look like headphones.
Speaker 1: They're called the human Charger, and they blast you your
Speaker 1: head with this blue light in either ear. And then
Speaker 1: there's also a pair of glasses that you can use
Speaker 1: you don't even need to. Your entire body is a
Speaker 1: light receptor machine. And that's interesting because you could wear
Speaker 1: a sleep mask at night. But if your room's really light,
Speaker 1: like if you don't have a black curtains or just
Speaker 1: there's lots of blinking things in the room, or you
Speaker 1: walk into a hotel and you're try off the lights
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden looks like a spaceship because
Speaker 1: the TV and the Wi Fi and everything, Like, even
Speaker 1: if your eyes are covered, all that stuff hits your skin.
Speaker 1: So when I say dark in the room, like I
Speaker 1: make sure it's really super dark. But you were talking
Speaker 1: about temperature too, obviously temperature is that's like the second
Speaker 1: component of sleep hygiene. So with temperature, I think you
Speaker 1: said you're doing what like sixty five sixty Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I find because I you know, I coach some people
Speaker 1: still for their health and for their sleep and everything.
Speaker 1: So I get to look at a lot of data
Speaker 1: from from an aura ring or from a whoop or
Speaker 1: whatever wearable somebody is using, and I've identified that about
Speaker 1: sixty three to sixty five fahrenheit is even better. Like
Speaker 1: if you yeah, my metric is if you're one of
Speaker 1: those people who I think this is a good idea
Speaker 1: for staying cold. Who likes to take off all their
Speaker 1: clothes before they get into bed at night or sleep
Speaker 1: in your underwear if you have mild cognitive resistance to
Speaker 1: taking off your at night before you get into bed.
Speaker 1: Because it's a little chili, that's a pretty good sleep tump, right.
Speaker 1: So for me, it's like it's a little chili when
Speaker 1: I take my clothes off. That's perfect. And then um,
Speaker 1: in addition to that, I actually have this this um
Speaker 1: pad underneath the top sheet of my bed is called
Speaker 1: a chili pad, and it circulates like fifty five degree
Speaker 1: cold water under my body while I'm sleeping. My wife
Speaker 1: doesn't do most of the stuff that Yeah, the shoemaker's
Speaker 1: wife wears no shoes, dude. So I just don't bugger about.
Speaker 1: I let her do her thing. She likes to garden
Speaker 1: and hang up with the goats and chickens and go
Speaker 1: on walks and so she just does her thing. And
Speaker 1: I don't force anything on her because I know what
Speaker 1: what'll happen if I If I want to give my
Speaker 1: wife health advice, I'll tell one of my friends who's
Speaker 1: a doctor. I'll be like text this to Jessa and
Speaker 1: then they text it too of her because because I
Speaker 1: just I just know no, because that's the thing is
Speaker 1: she also does. She wouldn't even know how to download
Speaker 1: a podcast, so that's that's just who she is. So anyways, though,
Speaker 1: so I have the chili pad on my side and
Speaker 1: I can and and my sons both have one too,
Speaker 1: and they love it. We all like so we have
Speaker 1: these big, glorious family dinners at night, and like right
Speaker 1: before dinner, all of us boys run upstairs and turn
Speaker 1: on our chili pads so we can sleep better. So
Speaker 1: the bed's already cold when we get into it. Another
Speaker 1: thing that you can do, and it's a little bit paradoxical,
Speaker 1: but it actually works, is you can pull on wool
Speaker 1: socks before you go to bed at night, and when
Speaker 1: your feet are warm, there's these little vessels are called
Speaker 1: anastomosis or something like that, but but it actually allows
Speaker 1: the rest of your body to stay cool when you
Speaker 1: warm some of those tiny vessels in the hands and
Speaker 1: the leg. So you think wearing wool socks to bed
Speaker 1: keep you warm, but just like wear wool socks and
Speaker 1: little else and you can actually cool the body with
Speaker 1: that method. Too. Um. And then finally regarding cold, you
Speaker 1: don't mind me just s geeking out at all. No,
Speaker 1: it's beautiful. I love I was going non sleep. Sleep
Speaker 1: is gonna be everybody everyone's sleep. Everyone's gonna try this out, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know, sleep something that everyone's struggling.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's I'm very happy to please geek out.
Speaker 1: So the um, the thing with the the cold is
Speaker 1: that if you do kind of like break the rules,
Speaker 1: because there's all these rules now that all the scientists
Speaker 1: in their institutions have come up with that are annoying us,
Speaker 1: Like you're not supposed to work out hard within three
Speaker 1: hours of bedtime, and you're not supposed to eat a
Speaker 1: heavy meal within three hours prior to bedtime, which for
Speaker 1: me can be socially problematic because I love to have big,
Speaker 1: glorious family dinners with people and go out on the
Speaker 1: town and visit new restaurants. And I mean, how often,
Speaker 1: let's say you're going to bed ten, how often are
Speaker 1: really going to be done with all that, like seven,
Speaker 1: unless you're just like a total I don't know, just
Speaker 1: boring social outcast. Sorry to all the people who aren't
Speaker 1: eating dinner, but basically it's not that hard. You just
Speaker 1: get the body'squartent back down. So if it's the winter
Speaker 1: and I finish a dinner, I'll go for a brisk
Speaker 1: walk outside in the cold weather. And if it is
Speaker 1: the summer or a warmer season, just like a lukewarm
Speaker 1: or a cold shower before you go to bed. Like
Speaker 1: my sons and I just went down and watch the
Speaker 1: fights down in Vegas when it was like one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen degrees on the strip and walk every nine
Speaker 1: and we walk home from the fights and the shows
Speaker 1: and everywhere we went, and every night before I get
Speaker 1: into bed. You know, there's a little bit of resistance
Speaker 1: to this, but that's okay. You can you can you
Speaker 1: can overcome the resistance. But just take a cold shower
Speaker 1: before you get into bed, and that helps to lower
Speaker 1: the core temp if you have had to exercise or
Speaker 1: you've had a heavy meal in those three hours prior
Speaker 1: to bedtime. So you've got the light and you've got
Speaker 1: the cold, both the ambient temperature and then your sleep
Speaker 1: surface and then your body itself that you keep cold.
Speaker 1: The other two that you want to think about for sleep,
Speaker 1: in addition to light and cold. The first is noise,
Speaker 1: and in the city this is a bigger issue. But
Speaker 1: I mean even I've got roosters that like to get
Speaker 1: up kind of early because they're naturally programmed to wake
Speaker 1: you up. And I've got um I live out in
Speaker 1: the forest, but there's a road nearby that sometimes semis
Speaker 1: go down and I can hear off in the distance,
Speaker 1: the like the breaking, like the you know, when semis
Speaker 1: go downhill. So I wear ear plugs, like just soft
Speaker 1: wax earplugs to bed. But then they've actually done studies
Speaker 1: on the different forms of ambient noise that help you
Speaker 1: to sleep at night. You know, they make like sleep
Speaker 1: machines that will make white noise and brown noise, and
Speaker 1: one of the forms of noise that they make is
Speaker 1: pink noise, and pink noise, it appears, is the best
Speaker 1: background noise to have playing in the background. It's just like,
Speaker 1: I don't know why they give colors to certain noises,
Speaker 1: but it's the frequency in the pitch of that noise.
Speaker 1: So I've got an app on my phone called sleep stream.
Speaker 1: I think it was free or the cost was incidental,
Speaker 1: but it's got all these different like sleep tracks on it,
Speaker 1: and don't I don't use anything on it except the
Speaker 1: pink noise function. So my phone goes in airplane mode
Speaker 1: next to my bed and then I push pink noise on,
Speaker 1: and I put the ear plugs in, and then I'm
Speaker 1: covering up all those ambient sounds. That technique works a
Speaker 1: lot better when I'm traveling, when I'm staying in a
Speaker 1: hotel in their busy roads, when I'm when I have
Speaker 1: a roommate or something like that, I'm not a conference,
Speaker 1: I'm sharing room with somebody and they're getting up earlier,
Speaker 1: they're going to bed late. So the sound is another component,
Speaker 1: especially if you're a light sleeper. And then the final
Speaker 1: component is safety, and a lot of people don't think
Speaker 1: about the safety component. So your bed should be a
Speaker 1: place where from a nervous system standpoint, you're not wired
Speaker 1: up in work mode. Your sympathetic nervous system is not activated.
Speaker 1: If anything, the bed is almost like an anchor that
Speaker 1: activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, if you are one
Speaker 1: of those people who has business books on your nightstand,
Speaker 1: or maybe you open your laptop up at night or
Speaker 1: really any other time during the day, that would give
Speaker 1: your body the impression that the bedroom or the bed
Speaker 1: particularly is an appropriate place to work. I would say
Speaker 1: even that television just because psychologically, you know, we as
Speaker 1: humans are still hardwired to see that television and it's
Speaker 1: as though a whole bunch of other people and other
Speaker 1: experiences are in your bedroom, not to mention the fact
Speaker 1: that there's some really interesting data that television can replace dreaming. Right,
Speaker 1: So essentially we live now in an era for the
Speaker 1: past several decades where all of the colors and imagery
Speaker 1: and imagination and visualization and creativity that your brain should
Speaker 1: be churning out during sleep at night to process memories
Speaker 1: and to process trauma and to process creativity, a lot
Speaker 1: of that can be replaced by staring at a television
Speaker 1: before you go to bed at night. So I don't
Speaker 1: have a TV in the bedroom for those reasons, and
Speaker 1: also for the light reasons, and also for the reason
Speaker 1: that I want my body to associate the bed with
Speaker 1: pretty much nothing but sleep and sex. And then I'll
Speaker 1: keep a boring book or a work of fiction next
Speaker 1: to the bedside. Now, I used to when I'd get
Speaker 1: to a hotel room, I would just like you know,
Speaker 1: PLoP on, especially a small hotel room like a suite.
Speaker 1: Usually you've got more than enough room. But you know,
Speaker 1: the small hotel is a little crappy workstation in the
Speaker 1: corner or whatever. If that, I'd just like PLoP on
Speaker 1: my stomach on the bed and open up my laptop.
Speaker 1: You know, I think a lot of people know I'm
Speaker 1: talking about lay there on your belly and work on
Speaker 1: the laptop because it's a comfortable spot to do that.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that sends your body this cognitive
Speaker 1: signal that the bed is the place where you work.
Speaker 1: So now I always make sure my laptop, even in
Speaker 1: a single room hotel room, is not in the bed,
Speaker 1: and that sends the body a message that the bed
Speaker 1: is a safe place, not a workplace, not a stressful place,
Speaker 1: not an email jumping out from your computer place. And
Speaker 1: if you really want to take that safety thing one
Speaker 1: step further, this has become quite popular now, this idea
Speaker 1: of gravity blankets, meaning folks will sell like these ten, fifteen,
Speaker 1: twenty or twenty five pound gravity blankets. And it sounds
Speaker 1: like it would be totally paradoxical to what I was
Speaker 1: saying about staying cool because it sounds heavy. But a
Speaker 1: lot of folks are doing a good job making like
Speaker 1: a gravity blanket that will stay cool. That one company
Speaker 1: I was talking about, Chili Pad, They even sell a
Speaker 1: gravity blanket that will like circulate cold water through the blanket.
Speaker 1: But there's something about very similar to like how when
Speaker 1: you were swaddled as a baby, you felt protected and
Speaker 1: you felt like you were in this this quiet cave.
Speaker 1: It's that feeling when you pull on the gravity blanket.
Speaker 1: And so when you combine all that stuff, the light,
Speaker 1: the cold, management of sound, and then presence of safety
Speaker 1: in the bedroom, you create a a real, real nice
Speaker 1: nest for getting those hours that are arguably the only
Speaker 1: hours during your life, you know, arguably that third of
Speaker 1: your life that your nervous system should be repairing. That
Speaker 1: your body should not be wired up to have everything activated,
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't be exposed to, like lots of electrical signals.
Speaker 1: And I'm not one of those guys who's like like
Speaker 1: go full on, move up to the mountains, don't use internet,
Speaker 1: cut yourself off from everything. But it appears that the
Speaker 1: issue with constant exposure to all these electrical signals that
Speaker 1: are bodies from an ancestral standpoint, haven't been exposed to
Speaker 1: for thousands of years is the fact that the cells
Speaker 1: don't get a break, right. So when we're looking at
Speaker 1: Wi Fi and Bluetooth and the constant open of what
Speaker 1: are called calcium channels in the cell that allow a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of ions to spill into the cell that
Speaker 1: disrupt metabolism, or they give you brain fog later on
Speaker 1: in the day, that's actually all pretty reparable. The body's
Speaker 1: actually pretty impressive and magical in terms of how quickly
Speaker 1: can bounce back from certain things. Just in the same
Speaker 1: way they could recover from a hard exercise session and
Speaker 1: remove all those muscle fibers or repair all those muscle
Speaker 1: fibers if you give it rest, if you give a recovery.
Speaker 1: The thing is, it's the same thing with electrical explorers.
Speaker 1: Like if you can turn your bedroom into a safe, quiet,
Speaker 1: cool place that also doesn't have a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: plugged in like Wi Fi, routers and phones, etc. You're
Speaker 1: all of a sudden giving your chance, your cells a
Speaker 1: chance to just go. It's like when people camp, you know,
Speaker 1: you just cut off from a lot of stuff. They
Speaker 1: feel great when they come back. So it's not as
Speaker 1: though you have to live like a luddite. It's that
Speaker 1: sometimes you have to press the pause button, give your
Speaker 1: body a chance to step away from all that electricity
Speaker 1: for just you know that those seven or eight hours
Speaker 1: or however long you're in there and then emerge back
Speaker 1: out repair and ready to tackle the day again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. You just taught everyone how to make that
Speaker 1: bedroom into a sanctuary. That was a sanctuary. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what it sounded like, what you were describing you. I
Speaker 1: was just like, and that's what it has to be.
Speaker 1: A sanctuary is safe. A sanctuary it has to be.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of people beat themselves up too,
Speaker 1: because you know, there's a lot of really great sleep
Speaker 1: researchers out there. Now. You know, you've got guys like
Speaker 1: Matthew Walker and Nick little Hales and um gosho who
Speaker 1: there's another another person who's been doing a lot of
Speaker 1: work on sleep. Michael Bruce is another guy. But over
Speaker 1: and over again, what you see is you're supposed to
Speaker 1: sleep seven to nine hours a night, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people feel bad because they don't. And I felt
Speaker 1: bad for the longest time because I didn't. And I'm like, what,
Speaker 1: am I gonna like die of cancer early? Or am
Speaker 1: I gonna you know, is my body gonna fall apart?
Speaker 1: Am I gonna like accelerate aging because I just I've
Speaker 1: got too much going on, or my body just like
Speaker 1: my eyes open wide at like four thirty and I
Speaker 1: just want to go crush the day, right, which which
Speaker 1: I think many people who are dialed into perhaps some
Speaker 1: of the things that you talk about, like your ekey guy,
Speaker 1: your life's purpose, your plan da vita, you know, speaking
Speaker 1: of Sardinia, this idea of your purpose for life. Well,
Speaker 1: if you have a really strong purpose for life, sometimes
Speaker 1: you wake up in the morning and you're just like, baby,
Speaker 1: let's go bring it on. And for me, you know,
Speaker 1: with our big, glorious family dinners and I read my
Speaker 1: son's stories at night, and I play the music on
Speaker 1: the guitar and I'll make love to my wife and
Speaker 1: read some fiction. So you know, even with all that,
Speaker 1: I can usually do a pretty good job being close
Speaker 1: to a sleep by ten. Yeah, but getting up at
Speaker 1: four four thirty that's six to six and a half hours.
Speaker 1: So the thing is that if you do that, but
Speaker 1: also you take a nap like a post lunched siesta
Speaker 1: for example, the siesta even if it's like twenty to
Speaker 1: forty five minutes long can simulate what you get out
Speaker 1: of a full ninety minute ish sleep cycle. So the
Speaker 1: way that I live my life is I sleep six
Speaker 1: to six and a half hours a night, and then
Speaker 1: like clockwork after lunch every day, or if I have
Speaker 1: a meeting after lunch. Sometimes it's slightly later in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: I try to push it too close to bedtime because
Speaker 1: you want some sleep drive going into the night. I
Speaker 1: take a nap. It's a siesta for me. It's twenty
Speaker 1: to forty five minutes. I do kind of This is
Speaker 1: where some of the biohacking comes in. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: I goes. I want to make this effective. So what
Speaker 1: I do is a I have something similar to like
Speaker 1: that sensory deprivation float tank that you use down at pause.
Speaker 1: I actually had a float tank for a while, but
Speaker 1: it was too much upkeep for me. Yeah, it's my
Speaker 1: whole basement looked like a freaking poolhouse. So I have
Speaker 1: what's called a hyperbaric chamber, which is like this chamber
Speaker 1: that they use in hospitals for repairing wounds and um
Speaker 1: and they'll use it for like cardiovascular problems and increasing
Speaker 1: red blood cells and It pressurizes you at about what's
Speaker 1: called one point four atmosphere, so it's like you're twenty
Speaker 1: three twenty five feet under the ocean with a pressure,
Speaker 1: but then you're breathing pure oxygen, and so the combination
Speaker 1: of the pure oxygen plus the pressure drives that oxygen
Speaker 1: into the tissue accelerates repair, you know, clears the brain.
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you weren't napping in it, you
Speaker 1: feel amazing when you get out. And so I climb
Speaker 1: in that, and I like it too because I have
Speaker 1: to zip myself up and it's kind of like nobody
Speaker 1: can get to me. It even takes like three minutes
Speaker 1: to decompress me. So if the house caught on fire,
Speaker 1: I'd be kind of screwed. But I climb into that,
Speaker 1: so I'm just like I'm locked off from the world, right.
Speaker 1: And then I have a couple of technologies that I use.
Speaker 1: One is called a hap bee. Oh yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you've seen this. It's super crummin. Yeah. I've been messing
Speaker 1: out with it for like five months now. It uses
Speaker 1: a magnetic signal that simulates the same molecular signal of
Speaker 1: a few choice compounds, like for simulating wakefulness. You could
Speaker 1: choose like the caffeine setting, the nicotine setting, for it's
Speaker 1: got like an alcohol setting. What's it doing? So basically,
Speaker 1: all it does is it causes your cells to respond
Speaker 1: as though that particular molecule we're attached to the cell
Speaker 1: receptor without you actually ingesting a compound or taking a
Speaker 1: supplement or consuming something that's going to stay in your
Speaker 1: system for a long period of time. So let's say
Speaker 1: I want a wakey wakey prior to going out to
Speaker 1: a to a dinner party. I could put it in
Speaker 1: coffee mode, right, put that around my neck or around
Speaker 1: my head, get that that hit wakefulness producing hit of caffeine.
Speaker 1: But then when I take it off, it's not like
Speaker 1: the caffeine still floating around in my system. Same thing
Speaker 1: with a nap. So what I like? So it's in
Speaker 1: your system only for as long as right, It's just
Speaker 1: it's as though I were blasting with the electrical signal
Speaker 1: of coffee without you actually having to drink the coffee,
Speaker 1: which has a half life of you know whatever, six
Speaker 1: or eight or ten hours, depending on how you're you're
Speaker 1: You're you're genetically wired up. So it's really cool, and
Speaker 1: I didn't really believe, you know, I'll interview a lot
Speaker 1: of people on my podcast. I'm like, yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: little woo. But then tried it and it actually works
Speaker 1: surprisingly well, So I put it in My preferred mode
Speaker 1: for NAP is the one that's it's called relax but
Speaker 1: it mimics CBD, right, which is which is nice for
Speaker 1: me because it just kind of settles down some racing thoughts,
Speaker 1: gets me down at the end of the day. So
Speaker 1: I put that on. And then I also have this
Speaker 1: other device that works kind of similarly, but instead of
Speaker 1: using a magnetic signal, it vibrates and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a tiny vibration that elicits a brainwave signal that could
Speaker 1: be like an alpha brainwave signal or a kind of
Speaker 1: like a hyped up beta brainwave signal, or a DP
Speaker 1: relaxation like data or delta brainwave signal. And that's called
Speaker 1: an apollo. And that also, similar to the hat bee,
Speaker 1: has like a wakefulness mode, a social mode. I even
Speaker 1: put that that hat be one which also has an
Speaker 1: alcohol mode on it. I gave it to my son
Speaker 1: who wanted to try it out at dinner one night,
Speaker 1: and it was in like social alcohol mode. He got
Speaker 1: like super funny and he was joke teams, really relaxed
Speaker 1: as who As I took it off of him, he
Speaker 1: was just normal again. I wasn't giving my son actual alcohol.
Speaker 1: This is just like simulating the effects. So I put
Speaker 1: the Apollo in relaxed mode. I put the hat beat
Speaker 1: in relaxed mode, and I climb into that hyperbaric chamber
Speaker 1: and then I've got like lavender essential oil in there,
Speaker 1: and I lay back and then I play this this track,
Speaker 1: and I discover a lot of things through podcasting. Half
Speaker 1: the stuff I learned from talking to people right now,
Speaker 1: super duper smart who'd normally never give me the time
Speaker 1: of day. And I get to pick the brains of
Speaker 1: these scientists for like ninety minutes twice a week. So
Speaker 1: it's way better than my college education, just talking all
Speaker 1: these people and find out what works and what doesn't.
Speaker 1: But a couple of years ago, I interviewed this guy
Speaker 1: who has a company called New Calm. Yes, and New
Speaker 1: Calm has an app that that plays special signals. And
Speaker 1: this sounds like like eight billion other apps out there
Speaker 1: that will play like relaxing signals at night. There a
Speaker 1: diamond does on the app store, But this one in particular,
Speaker 1: it just seems to work for me, most notably in
Speaker 1: the way that I can put it on like twenty
Speaker 1: minutes and I'm dead to the world within like two
Speaker 1: minutes of that thing playing. I'll wake up at the
Speaker 1: twenty minute mark and I feel like I've slept like
Speaker 1: an hour. This is something else. Yeah. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, I asked the guy when I interviewed him, well,
Speaker 1: you know, could this just replace like the pink noise
Speaker 1: that I play at night? And he said, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, don't do that, because it pushes you through
Speaker 1: a sleep cycle so well that if you put it
Speaker 1: on to sleep at night, you'd go through your sleep
Speaker 1: cycle from let's say like ten to eleven thirty. Then
Speaker 1: you'd wake up wide awake at night. Right, So this
Speaker 1: is something that's better in my opinion for naps. The
Speaker 1: other time I'll sometimes use it is if I wake up,
Speaker 1: let's say it like three thirty four, and I want
Speaker 1: to snag an extra thirty forty minutes to sleep or whatever,
Speaker 1: I'll put it on that so I do the nap
Speaker 1: of the apollo, the hat be the hyperbarrack, the oil,
Speaker 1: and then the that hat be and even though I'm
Speaker 1: sleeping six six and a half hours a night, I
Speaker 1: get up from that nap and I'm kind of groggy
Speaker 1: for like ten fifteen minutes. But what I do is
Speaker 1: I go and I jump in that cold pool, right
Speaker 1: and then I'll have some kind of stimulant like I'll
Speaker 1: just pop a piece of nicotine gum or you'll have
Speaker 1: a little leftover coffee from the night before whatever, and
Speaker 1: then boom, like it's like I have a second day.
Speaker 1: I feel amazing. I'm fully present with my family that
Speaker 1: night at dinner, whereas if I pushed through that afternoon slog,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like it's a dinner and you're
Speaker 1: just king I can't wait until bedtime. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: don't like that feeling. Person. I'm just impressed that you're
Speaker 1: charging skills, Like you must have the most organizing charging
Speaker 1: schedule for all these devices. They need to be charged,
Speaker 1: they to be like I mean, like most people can't
Speaker 1: even charge their phone. You're like here, yeah, I kind
Speaker 1: of seven devices, Like, so it's amazing, and I mean
Speaker 1: that genuinely. I'm not just yeah, I've gotten to be
Speaker 1: one charging station in the dining room that I just
Speaker 1: kind of keep everything plugged into. UM. So, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: got like four or five devices that I'm kind of
Speaker 1: charged and during the day or the reason that I
Speaker 1: plug them in is not because they have a low
Speaker 1: battery life and they need to be charged. And this
Speaker 1: is important for people to know. Yeah, any of these
Speaker 1: devices or anything I try, I have a hard and
Speaker 1: fast rule that it must be able to be placed
Speaker 1: an airplane mode for the reasons that I stated earlier.
Speaker 1: So if somebody's like trying to trying to like sell
Speaker 1: me or have me try like some crazy new sleep system,
Speaker 1: you know, mattress self quantification device or whatever, one of
Speaker 1: the first questions I ask is, well, can I disable
Speaker 1: to WiFi or can I put it in airplane mode
Speaker 1: so that during the time I'm using it, especially for rest,
Speaker 1: I'm not getting bombarded by signals? I'm yeah, and so
Speaker 1: most of them can. But the problem is when you
Speaker 1: place the device in airplane mode, typically to reconnect it
Speaker 1: to your phone, because most of these are run via
Speaker 1: some kind of app on your phone, you have to
Speaker 1: plug it back into a charger, and that, like I'm
Speaker 1: not an engineer, it takes. It takes that airplane mode basically,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of times I do have to
Speaker 1: like plug things in, you know, get up from my nap,
Speaker 1: plug the hat bee and the Apollo in so they're
Speaker 1: ready for the next day. But but yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: there there are ways, especially in our day and age,
Speaker 1: that you can definitely get by without just swallowing hook
Speaker 1: client and sinker. You know that the eight to nine
Speaker 1: hours of sleep a night message like, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of ways around it. Yeah, tell me about the time, Ben,
Speaker 1: when like for you this you know, you've always been athletic.
Speaker 1: You you you are an athlete. You've been an athlete.
Speaker 1: You spoke about the before, but you also mentioned that
Speaker 1: you know, there there have been times when you didn't
Speaker 1: feel this way, and I want to hear a bit
Speaker 1: about that, about how your life was before you really
Speaker 1: understood the body as deeply as you do today, because
Speaker 1: because I feel like for a lot of people when
Speaker 1: they see you like to me as well, and I
Speaker 1: really mean this in a genuine way, I see you
Speaker 1: as like, Wow, this guy's like just you know, really
Speaker 1: understands the body, really understands the mind. And you're an expert,
Speaker 1: so you sound like an expert. But I know for
Speaker 1: a fact that you weren't born that way and and
Speaker 1: that's not how you've always been. And I'd love for
Speaker 1: people to hear about that journey around. Tell me about
Speaker 1: a time when you didn't feel boundless, when you didn't
Speaker 1: feel as like now it's like you know how to
Speaker 1: turn this and you play with this, and now it's
Speaker 1: an experiment and it's fun and you enjoy it. Tell
Speaker 1: us about when you kind of were like, did you
Speaker 1: ever feel broken health wise? Did you ever feel like
Speaker 1: everything was just a mess? Were you ever in the
Speaker 1: place that most of my audience maybe feeling like they're
Speaker 1: just like Jay, I'm just struggling to get out of
Speaker 1: bed in the morning, Like I don't sleep, I've got
Speaker 1: like bloated, I'm feeling ghassy. Like, tell me about when
Speaker 1: you felt like you were at your worst as opposed
Speaker 1: to what we see now. There's three things that I
Speaker 1: want to tell you right now. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I was homeschooled K through twelve. The emphasis of my
Speaker 1: homeschooling was really more on a classical education centered around
Speaker 1: Latin and logic and rhetoric and the great books and
Speaker 1: tons of reading, which I loved. I would happy place
Speaker 1: was the library, and my parents would have to take
Speaker 1: me out of the bedroom and almost like threaten me
Speaker 1: with punishment if I wouldn't come out and socialize with people,
Speaker 1: because I just wanted to be in there with my books.
Speaker 1: I played the violin for thirteen years. I was president
Speaker 1: of the chess club. I loved to take about part
Speaker 1: computers right, and design video games and and you know,
Speaker 1: and figure out how my hard drive worked, and was
Speaker 1: an early adopter of a lot of these technologies in
Speaker 1: a very geeky way, you know, prior to the advent
Speaker 1: of social media, et cetera. You know, when it was
Speaker 1: you actually had to kind of have a working knowledge
Speaker 1: of some of these technologies. And I was. I was
Speaker 1: pretty much like a geeky little Christian homeschooled kid. I
Speaker 1: remember the stuff I got mad about when I was
Speaker 1: a kid was like when some kid would like quilted
Speaker 1: Doiley at the at our homeschool talent competition and beat
Speaker 1: out my watercolor painting right like, and so was it
Speaker 1: your mother and father that were both oh with the homeschool,
Speaker 1: Like there was a group of kids and teachings both.
Speaker 1: We had a pretty good homeschool collective. So I didn't
Speaker 1: come pletely miss out on social life. I was a
Speaker 1: weird kid in that I was very independently driven to learn,
Speaker 1: and I am still that way now. My parents would
Speaker 1: literally just give me books and walk away. They would
Speaker 1: literally give me the whole year's math curriculum and then
Speaker 1: just like make sure I took the tests. My siblings
Speaker 1: were not the same and needed a lot more kind
Speaker 1: of handholding. But I've always been curious and driven from
Speaker 1: an independent learning standpoint, and it really wasn't until I
Speaker 1: discovered the sport of tennis that I became interested in
Speaker 1: physical culture at all. When my parents wanted to create
Speaker 1: a really cool environment for all of us to grow
Speaker 1: up in, so one day they announced that they were
Speaker 1: going to bring in some folks and we're all going
Speaker 1: to pitch in and learn a little bit of construction
Speaker 1: and lay asphalt and build a tennis court. So we
Speaker 1: built a tennis court, and they hired a tennis instructor
Speaker 1: and her name was Michelle, and I had a big
Speaker 1: crush on her, which helped with my motivation to play
Speaker 1: more tennis. But I also loved tennis and I got
Speaker 1: really good at it, and it came really natural to me,
Speaker 1: and I started to run up the hills behind my house,
Speaker 1: and my dad took me down to the local sporting
Speaker 1: goods store to buy a little ten pound dumbells, and
Speaker 1: I started to figure out, like, you know, how to
Speaker 1: drink milk to get strong, and the kind of things
Speaker 1: that made me faster, and you know, how to stay
Speaker 1: hydrated in water and minerals. And I had a couple
Speaker 1: of mentors. A guy who was my younger brother's best
Speaker 1: friend's dad was a bodybuilder, so all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm learning about nutrition and working out from him. Another
Speaker 1: friend is a powerlifter. So by the time I'm like fifteen,
Speaker 1: I was done with high school. So I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to go program computers or paint watercolor,
Speaker 1: like I want to go learn more about this body
Speaker 1: and tennis. So I walked onto the local college tennis
Speaker 1: team when I was fifteen and started playing tennis, started
Speaker 1: studying exercise science, got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics,
Speaker 1: and wound up opening a whole bunch of personal training
Speaker 1: studios and gyms in Washington and Idaho, and just have
Speaker 1: been hardcore and the health and fitness and nutrition scene
Speaker 1: ever since then. So initially I really wasn't interested in
Speaker 1: much of this stuff at all. But at that point
Speaker 1: I spent like twenty years competing in all these crazy
Speaker 1: hardcore you know, obstacle course races and Ironman triathlons and
Speaker 1: open water swims and adventure races. That was my life
Speaker 1: for like twenty years, was using my body as a
Speaker 1: guinea pig, using all these races and events as like
Speaker 1: a battlefield to test stuff out. I was coaching, I
Speaker 1: was competing, I was traveling, and I thought I was
Speaker 1: the bees knees when it came to fitness. I would
Speaker 1: say that if you were to look at me and
Speaker 1: judge me through what our world considers to be fitness,
Speaker 1: which I think is a bastardized version of fitness, I
Speaker 1: was one of the fittest humans on the planet, like
Speaker 1: like I really did look good in spandex and could
Speaker 1: ride my bike really fast, you know, run of pills.
Speaker 1: And to reply to the meat of part of your question,
Speaker 1: it was about nine years ago or so when I
Speaker 1: really got into self qualification, testing of blood work, testing
Speaker 1: of biomarkers, sleep, nervous system, you know, all these things
Speaker 1: that we can easily test now that you normally would
Speaker 1: have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it,
Speaker 1: you know, the Princeton Longevity Institute or some executive facility
Speaker 1: you know, only available to wealthy ceo as we can
Speaker 1: now get all these tests in our own home, and
Speaker 1: I got super interested in this stuff, and I started
Speaker 1: to get all these tests, and I realize, oh crap,
Speaker 1: Like I'm fit on the outside, but I'm dying on
Speaker 1: the inside. High inflammation, low testosterone, disregulated thyroid gut inflammation
Speaker 1: and gut issues and constipation and brain fog and all
Speaker 1: these issues that technically somebody with like low body fat
Speaker 1: and muscles who can like run and lift weights you
Speaker 1: wouldn't expect to have. But really, true fitness is not
Speaker 1: about going to a little fake box at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the day and pushing, you know, fake heavy things
Speaker 1: around for an hour and then walking out and assuming
Speaker 1: that you're good to go and maybe kind of sort
Speaker 1: of eating healthy like a protein bar Trader Joe's or whatever.
Speaker 1: There's so much more. There's there's so much more when
Speaker 1: it comes to the body. And that's what I began
Speaker 1: to discover. My first big book that I wrote called
Speaker 1: beyond training was just that it was like, okay, so
Speaker 1: as an athlete, there's all these other things like digestion
Speaker 1: and hormones and endocrine system and inflammation and blood sugar
Speaker 1: regulation and immune system integrity and all these things that
Speaker 1: we don't think about when it comes to what it
Speaker 1: truly takes to have long health spin and life spin.
Speaker 1: And so what I discovered along the way was all
Speaker 1: of these things like not I mean Men's Health magazine
Speaker 1: or Women's Health magazine, whatever will tell you how to
Speaker 1: exercise and how to eat healthy. Okay, maybe sometimes they
Speaker 1: missed the mark a little bit, but for the most part,
Speaker 1: it's not rocket science for somebody to go out there
Speaker 1: and figure out, okay, eat real whole food that's recognizable
Speaker 1: that preferably is as close to Earth as possible, and
Speaker 1: then like move your body, lift heavy stuff and occasionally
Speaker 1: breathe hard playing tennis or soccer, high intensi interral training
Speaker 1: or whatever. Like, we've kind of cracked the code on
Speaker 1: eating healthy and moving, and most people can find that
Speaker 1: information for free pretty readily. But what most people don't
Speaker 1: pay attention to are all the things that the body
Speaker 1: really truly needs to be optimized to produce ATP to
Speaker 1: produce energy. And this is a big part of what
Speaker 1: my last book, Boundless was about, like light and how
Speaker 1: the photons of light interact with the human body to
Speaker 1: charge up the mitochondria to allow it to be able
Speaker 1: to produce ATP. The negative ions and the electricity produced
Speaker 1: by the planet Earth that take when you're outside barefoot
Speaker 1: or you're touching trees and rocks, you're soaking up all
Speaker 1: those negative ions and just restoring the natural state of
Speaker 1: electricity the body, the body, which is like a battery
Speaker 1: is supposed to be in when you get exposed to
Speaker 1: stressors of heat or stressors of cold, there's enormous variants
Speaker 1: that spring up in the human body like like like
Speaker 1: like heat chalk proteins and cold chalk proteins, and blood
Speaker 1: flow and nitric oxide. When you drink pure clean water
Speaker 1: that's chock full of minerals, right trace liquid minerals or
Speaker 1: sea salts or things like that, that harryes that electrical
Speaker 1: charge through your body. And I began to realize, Holy cow,
Speaker 1: I thought you're just supposed to like go to the
Speaker 1: gym and eat a protein bar to be healthy, But
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, it's like sunlight, it's magnetism, it's water,
Speaker 1: it's earth, it's heat, it's cold, it's it's positive relationships
Speaker 1: and love and gratitude and all these things that we
Speaker 1: just we forget about when it comes to being a full,
Speaker 1: complete human being. And so that was when the light
Speaker 1: bulb happened for me, when I realized I'm healthy on
Speaker 1: the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. And there's
Speaker 1: all sorts of avenues that this entire fitness world has
Speaker 1: yet to explore when it comes to what it truly
Speaker 1: means to have. You know what I talk about in
Speaker 1: the book, You know what I call boundless energy. Number
Speaker 1: one is no, I didn't always like this stuff, but
Speaker 1: I gradually developed a love for it. And I think
Speaker 1: my curiosity, my independent drive to learn, and the fact
Speaker 1: that I was a real geek just tended to fuel
Speaker 1: my drive to learn a lot of these things about
Speaker 1: how people can really feel good. And then number two,
Speaker 1: I after twenty years, realized my own mistake of just
Speaker 1: like beating up the body and expecting it to bounce back.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that was true fitness. And then finally see
Speaker 1: and this is really this is where where I'm really
Speaker 1: driving a lot of my platform, my teachings. What I
Speaker 1: really want to focus probably for the rest of my
Speaker 1: life on one is the fact that we can achieve
Speaker 1: all these things we've been talking about. Jay, you can
Speaker 1: sleep like a champ, and you can have you know,
Speaker 1: if it's important to you whatever six pack abs or
Speaker 1: veins in your abs, or you know, be able to
Speaker 1: do a triathlon or an obstacle race or just like
Speaker 1: rule a CrossFit box, or you know, anything else that
Speaker 1: might be important to you. Have a full head of hair,
Speaker 1: defy aging, low wrinkles, like like how many close to
Speaker 1: billion dollar industries have sprung up around us trying to
Speaker 1: optimize ourselves as human beings. And yet at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, because I see this over and over again,
Speaker 1: not only in having experienced this myself, but having seen
Speaker 1: this in many of like the wealthy and successful executive
Speaker 1: It was like coach and pro athletes I've worked with,
Speaker 1: and people who appear on the outside to be crushing
Speaker 1: it in life. At the end of the day, none
Speaker 1: of this is fulfilling. None of this is ultimately fulfilling. Okay,
Speaker 1: Like I can literally be like pose on the cover
Speaker 1: of a magazine whatever you know, with with girls draped
Speaker 1: off of each arm, you know, eating one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: steaks for dinner every night, and experiencing you know what
Speaker 1: many people would would would covet as an amazing life.
Speaker 1: But I got news for you. I'm not happy in
Speaker 1: that state. And I've I've seen a lot of people
Speaker 1: also not be happy in that state because there is
Speaker 1: a yearning in our soul. There is a hole in
Speaker 1: our soul, right, there is there is this deep longing
Speaker 1: for some kind of fulfillment that in my world, we
Speaker 1: throw fitness and a healthy diet and the way you
Speaker 1: look and the way you perform into other people will
Speaker 1: throw cars, throw money, throw sex, throw homes, throw experiences,
Speaker 1: throw anything else that seems like it might be that
Speaker 1: one thing that you've finally discovered that's going to be
Speaker 1: the ultimate key to fulfillment. Right, I'm finally about to
Speaker 1: cross the finish line of that iron Man trayathlon. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: life's going to be different after this. It's going to
Speaker 1: be different. I've done it and now i can just
Speaker 1: be on cruise control the rest of my life because
Speaker 1: I've checked that fulfillment box. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, none of that stuff is fulfilling because and
Speaker 1: you know, I'm, I'm people came before me who have
Speaker 1: identified this. This isn't new information that I came up
Speaker 1: with myself, but there is this. As you know, a
Speaker 1: great writer and theologian named Blaze Pascal would describe it
Speaker 1: as a God shaped hole in our hearts, eternity in
Speaker 1: our hearts. And the only thing that's going to feel
Speaker 1: an infinite abyss, an eternal abyss, a God shaped hole
Speaker 1: in your heart is God is some type of fulfillment
Speaker 1: that's everlasting, that's eternal. And once I realize that and realize,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, like I could train my body all
Speaker 1: day long. But even though physical training is a little
Speaker 1: bit beneficial, it's nothing compared to training for forever. It's
Speaker 1: nothing compared to gratitude, to relationships, to sharing with others,
Speaker 1: to loving others, to volunteer, to service, to community, to worship,
Speaker 1: to having something greater outside of you, and believing that
Speaker 1: a story is written for your life. And now that
Speaker 1: I understand that all of these things that I've learned,
Speaker 1: all these fun little biohacks that we talk about at
Speaker 1: the end of the day are interesting but not going
Speaker 1: to make you ultimately happy. Well, now, if you have
Speaker 1: been doing those things, if you are taking care of
Speaker 1: your body right, and you do have a really good
Speaker 1: body and brain, you're biohacking, you're fit, and you're healthy,
Speaker 1: and you're eating well. Man, When you put not what
Speaker 1: I would call the icing on the cake or the
Speaker 1: cherry on the cupcake, but really lay that on the core,
Speaker 1: on the foundation of a deeply meaningful spiritual life, then
Speaker 1: you're firing on all cylinders. And so I think that's
Speaker 1: what's really important for people to understand, is, you know,
Speaker 1: the wool socks and the chili pad and the hyperbaric chamber.
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, what you should view
Speaker 1: those as is you should view those as a way
Speaker 1: to equip yourself to be more impactful with the purpose
Speaker 1: that you've been given in life, not as your source
Speaker 1: of happiness. Then that was so powerful, and I you know,
Speaker 1: the way you just shared that and the way you
Speaker 1: even talk about biohacking and mastering the body from the
Speaker 1: beginning of this interview, you can tell that it's to
Speaker 1: have these beautiful exchanges with your family, to have a
Speaker 1: meaningful dinner. And you know, when I hear you talk
Speaker 1: about these things like it resonates so deeply with me, Big,
Speaker 1: because what you just set up is exactly why we
Speaker 1: do need to do these things. Who wants to be
Speaker 1: at dinner with their family and be like have brain
Speaker 1: fog and have confusion and be stressed out and just
Speaker 1: be looking forward to bedtime or to be spending time
Speaker 1: with their partner but not having the energy to go
Speaker 1: on a beautiful walk or a hike or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be like. And that's the challenge we're having that
Speaker 1: our health is negatively impact on our relationships, Like for
Speaker 1: those of us who are experiencing fatigue, for those of
Speaker 1: us who are experiencing bloating, for those of us who
Speaker 1: are experiencing inflammation that's leading to stress and agitation in
Speaker 1: your relationships. You think that you're just not getting along
Speaker 1: it is you cannot disentangle the body and the spirit.
Speaker 1: And there are some people that have taken this to extremes,
Speaker 1: Like if you look at at the Nastics right, a
Speaker 1: very very popular religion about the same time that Christianity
Speaker 1: was rising, you know, in fifty sixty seventy a d.
Speaker 1: They believe that all things fleshly and physical were and bad,
Speaker 1: and that the only thing important was the spirit, and
Speaker 1: that marriage was bad, and that good food was bad,
Speaker 1: and anything that even remotely reaked of epicureanism was bad.
Speaker 1: And one should be stoic, but stoked to the nth degree.
Speaker 1: And the fact is that the body is sacred. Food
Speaker 1: is sacred. It's not just this physical biological interaction with
Speaker 1: your taste. But sex is sacred. It's not just two
Speaker 1: bodies rubbing together in mutual masturbation, you know, fitness and
Speaker 1: even the movement of electrons to the body. You know,
Speaker 1: in traditional Chinese medicine, and you know, they call that
Speaker 1: that the chi, the life force, the prawna the energy,
Speaker 1: and western medicine we call it the mitochondri it's the
Speaker 1: same thing. There's a deep spiritual aspect to that. And
Speaker 1: so we are bodies with spirits, and the body must
Speaker 1: be treated as a temple that is to house the spirit,
Speaker 1: and the spirit must be treated as the one part
Speaker 1: of us that we care for the most, because that's
Speaker 1: what's going to go on for eternity, and that's what
Speaker 1: we really use as our deep fuel and our fire
Speaker 1: every day. And so yeah, in an ideal scenario, when
Speaker 1: you wake up in the morning in addition to impacting
Speaker 1: this world fully with whatever purpose you've been given with
Speaker 1: your life in a spirit of loving others, you should
Speaker 1: also be asking yourself, how can I quit both my
Speaker 1: body and my spirit today to be as impactful as possible?
Speaker 1: And it's and it's both, and you can have both.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be like a yeah you know,
Speaker 1: no no offense jay, but like whatever, like a skinny
Speaker 1: yogi monk, who's you know, who can't hold up a
Speaker 1: heavy weight without their bones breaking. You also don't want
Speaker 1: to be an Adonis at the gym who just basically
Speaker 1: doesn't even know what a gratitude practice is or how
Speaker 1: to pray to God or anything like that. Human beings
Speaker 1: we are. We are some of the most complex, if
Speaker 1: not the most complex creature on the face of the planet.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe a platypus or something might be up there
Speaker 1: kind of inter saying, but we we have the ability
Speaker 1: to live our lives with this amazing body and an
Speaker 1: amazing spirit, and in my opinion, there's no reason that
Speaker 1: you can't have both and a man when you get
Speaker 1: into the into that state of literally having your cake
Speaker 1: and eating it too, on the highest level, life is
Speaker 1: amazing and everybody, everybody, every single person listening in right
Speaker 1: now has the capability to get to that level as
Speaker 1: long as they realize that most people around them have
Speaker 1: settled for status quo. And if you realize that, you
Speaker 1: actually can rise above and you can train your spirit,
Speaker 1: and you can train your body, and all of this
Speaker 1: is learnable, all of this is teachable, all of this
Speaker 1: is practicable and habit formationable. And I'm going to stop
Speaker 1: making up words now. But anybody has us within their
Speaker 1: power to be able to accomplish Yeah, well said no,
Speaker 1: And I feel the same way. You know, for years,
Speaker 1: I focused extensively on the mind. I focused extensively on intention.
Speaker 1: I focused deeply on gratitude service. And that's where I
Speaker 1: spent most of my life because that's what I naturally
Speaker 1: gravitated towards. It's what my monk training was based on,
Speaker 1: it's what my heart was drawn to. And everything you
Speaker 1: just shared, and I find myself now coming over to
Speaker 1: the other side and wanting to learn more about the body.
Speaker 1: And so what you just said is it sits very
Speaker 1: closely with my heart because I grew up as someone
Speaker 1: who dived deep into the spirit and the mind and
Speaker 1: the heart and the soul, which has been the foundation
Speaker 1: of anything that I do today. But I have come
Speaker 1: backwards almost yeah, And I'm not saying it's backwards all forwards.
Speaker 1: I just think I've I've come to that realization that
Speaker 1: my spirit can only do as much as my body.
Speaker 1: And it's crazy because as monks, the order of our
Speaker 1: priorities were meant to be health, sadener, service, and so
Speaker 1: health is health as you're saying it, your physical, your body,
Speaker 1: your temple. Health, sadener is your daily practices of aratitude, intention, prayer,
Speaker 1: and then savor or service is you then sharing that
Speaker 1: with the world. So the pyramid was meant to be that, yeah,
Speaker 1: but some of us, including me, decided to skip that
Speaker 1: first one and do two in three. And I'm almost
Speaker 1: you know the reason why speaking to you is so powerful,
Speaker 1: And some of the things that I've started experimenting with
Speaker 1: and playing with probably in the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: have been totally that direction of I now want to
Speaker 1: understand my body so that I can serve better, yep,
Speaker 1: so that I can serve for longer, so that I
Speaker 1: can have more loving exchange. That's that's the goal, right
Speaker 1: when you come at with love others. Yeah, right, not
Speaker 1: how do I look in the mirror. That's why I
Speaker 1: never felt fast. It's loving others. And in the very
Speaker 1: same way that the best businesses are not necessarily built
Speaker 1: on a monetary goal, but are built upon a goal
Speaker 1: of how many people can we serve, how many people
Speaker 1: can we touch, how many lives can we affect? And
Speaker 1: the money will follow. I mean for me as as
Speaker 1: a business person, right like, I have to make a living,
Speaker 1: and I'm a content producer kind of like you, like,
Speaker 1: A lot of my business is driven by me educating people.
Speaker 1: And when I write an article, or when I record
Speaker 1: a podcast, or when i'm you know, doing an Instagram
Speaker 1: post or whatever it is, I tell myself, Okay, my goal,
Speaker 1: even if there is a product, a solution that's offered
Speaker 1: here is part of this post or this podcast or
Speaker 1: this story that someone can go by, My goal is
Speaker 1: that someone finishes digesting this content, listening to this audio,
Speaker 1: reading this essay, looking at this post, and walks away
Speaker 1: a better person, regardless of whether or not they actually
Speaker 1: purchase anything, right, they walk away whatever, knowing more about
Speaker 1: the gut, knowing more about the hormones, knowing more about
Speaker 1: the brain, knowing more about gratitude, knowing more about whatever
Speaker 1: it is that I'm producing content about. And I tell
Speaker 1: you what, when I write in that way and I
Speaker 1: teaching that way and I produce content in that way,
Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about money. That just kind
Speaker 1: of follows right, And honestly, it follows in a better
Speaker 1: way because you create a more hardcore audience that trust
Speaker 1: what you have to say because you actually care about them,
Speaker 1: and that's why you're getting out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1: And so it should be the same way for yourself
Speaker 1: when you go to the gym, and try this. If
Speaker 1: you're listening in right now, if you go hit the
Speaker 1: gym tomorrow or you go out, you know what are
Speaker 1: your basement and you know you're breathing hard and beating
Speaker 1: yourself up and doing your burpies or whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be. Think about how you're equipping yourself to be
Speaker 1: impactful at work, to be present for your family, to
Speaker 1: have a lifespan and help spend that enables you to
Speaker 1: be passing wisdom on to your great grandkids or your
Speaker 1: great great grandkids. That level of motivation that you experience
Speaker 1: when you're doing things to love others or arguably also
Speaker 1: doing things to equip yourself to just be able to
Speaker 1: more fully savor this amazing planet that we are on
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, man compared to like, what's the scale,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say it all day, it's just a much
Speaker 1: much more empowering way to train for health. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree, movement, I couldn't agree more. Tell me
Speaker 1: before we get to their final five questions of the interview.
Speaker 1: Nearly at the end, I want to ask you if
Speaker 1: someone you very emphatically stated that anyone who's listening to this,
Speaker 1: anyone who's watching, can do this, can have both. I'm
Speaker 1: with you, I agree with you, I'm aligned with you.
Speaker 1: Tell me about what you said earlier. You were saying, Jay,
Speaker 1: you know I still work with a few people on coaching,
Speaker 1: and you were sharing to me, I should sleep between
Speaker 1: sixty three and sixty five. That's going to be better
Speaker 1: for me than even sixty five to sixty seven. So
Speaker 1: much of this is habit change. You've created so many
Speaker 1: new habits in your life, experimented. For those of you
Speaker 1: who have not read Boundless, when you pick it up,
Speaker 1: what I love about the book is you break it
Speaker 1: down into tiny sections, aren't explaining each part of the science,
Speaker 1: but then giving a practical thing that someone can do. Today,
Speaker 1: you have technology if people want to adopt it. Habit
Speaker 1: change is a huge part of what you do. Where
Speaker 1: are people going wrong in their habit change? What have
Speaker 1: you seen through your extreme experimenting where habit change has
Speaker 1: actually worked for people? I would say what comes to
Speaker 1: mind for me first when I asked that question is
Speaker 1: a big. Big part of it is relevance and understanding
Speaker 1: why you're doing something. When I was in high school,
Speaker 1: I really hated math and science, And when I got
Speaker 1: to college, I just became a standout in math and
Speaker 1: science because I had a teacher first year of college
Speaker 1: who made math relevant by tying in a lot of
Speaker 1: wealth preservation and savings and investing components that made math
Speaker 1: super relevant to me. And so at that point I
Speaker 1: just developed this wonderful love for math and a habit
Speaker 1: of studying math because it was relevant and I knew
Speaker 1: why I was doing it. So understand for math and
Speaker 1: a habit of studying math because it was relevant and
Speaker 1: I knew why I was doing it. So understand why
Speaker 1: you're doing something. I think that the importance of education
Speaker 1: when it comes to habit formation is very important. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another one that that I rely upon a daily basis
Speaker 1: for either stopping habits or making habits is making something
Speaker 1: as accessible and convenient as possible, meaning that I am probably,
Speaker 1: like from a fitness standpoint and a consistency of fitness standpoint,
Speaker 1: probably just about as fit as I've ever been in
Speaker 1: terms of true health and some of those parameters we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier, because partially I really haven't had
Speaker 1: to leave my house to go to the gym and
Speaker 1: was kind of forced into that because of COVID. So
Speaker 1: everything I need is I gotta step over a kettlebell
Speaker 1: to walk into my gym. I gotta like walk underneath
Speaker 1: a pull up bar to go down the stairs. In
Speaker 1: my house, I have to basically like walk past a
Speaker 1: cold tub every day, and you know, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's just healthy feels strewn all about the house. This
Speaker 1: idea of surrounding yourself and making everything convenient down to
Speaker 1: the point where if you're going to go for run
Speaker 1: in the morning, having your running shoes in your shorts
Speaker 1: right there beside the beds, so there's very little cognitive
Speaker 1: resistance to starting. That would be a second thing that
Speaker 1: I found to be really is making things convenient. I
Speaker 1: think the last one is for me personally. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if this is the way for everybody, but
Speaker 1: I like, especially when it comes to health habits, to
Speaker 1: be able to stack things. So anytime that I'm getting healthy,
Speaker 1: I'm also making myself a better person. For example, I
Speaker 1: really rarely listen to music when I'm working out. I
Speaker 1: view my workout as also a chance for me to
Speaker 1: go to university, right, so it's always podcasts audiobooks when
Speaker 1: the going gets really hard. There's actually been some studies
Speaker 1: I've shown this to be a cool tactic. That's when
Speaker 1: the music goes on, like when you need it the
Speaker 1: last minute, So you're kind of like saving your brain
Speaker 1: to get to the point where it really really needs
Speaker 1: the music and it's not just kind of used to
Speaker 1: the music at that point and can actually push past,
Speaker 1: you know. I do like the red light therapy and
Speaker 1: the grounding and the earthing mats and the essential oils
Speaker 1: and this special like water repair device called a nanovie
Speaker 1: in my desk when but I don't go in there
Speaker 1: and just do all that stuff and have it be
Speaker 1: unproductive time, Like that's the time when I bang out
Speaker 1: my first forty five minutes of emails for the day.
Speaker 1: So I always figure out a way to make something
Speaker 1: more palatable in terms of tying that habit into something.
Speaker 1: I mean, I even like I got out of the habit,
Speaker 1: you know, because I'm a big fan of reading scripture
Speaker 1: and reading the Bible every morning. And I even found
Speaker 1: myself and this happened a few months ago. I was
Speaker 1: saying the room of my Bible. I'm like, why am
Speaker 1: I just sitting here reading the Bible? Aren't there other
Speaker 1: things that I could be doing? And you'd think they'd
Speaker 1: be distracting, But now I read my Bible while I'm
Speaker 1: sitting in a pulsed to electromagnetic field chair with a
Speaker 1: biocharger on, and it's like I'm still reading, but my
Speaker 1: body's kind of like getting better at the same time.
Speaker 1: So I love to stack healthy habits, and it's very
Speaker 1: rewarding when you stack them all and also figure out
Speaker 1: how to still be productive during the day. So it's
Speaker 1: not like you're having to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Speaker 1: It's like you're you're paying Paul and Peter at the
Speaker 1: same time. So those are the top three things that
Speaker 1: come to mind. Be educate yourself about why you're doing
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Surround yourself with what you need to
Speaker 1: maintain positive habits while hiding the things that would cause
Speaker 1: you to form negative habits. And then um basically stack
Speaker 1: habits and make the habit fun or meaningful or productive
Speaker 1: so you don't feel like you're wasting time engaged in
Speaker 1: that habit. I love that Bend Green for Everyone band.
Speaker 1: That was amazing. I'm like, you need to come up
Speaker 1: for a pot two, but we can't wait this long
Speaker 1: as we waited to do a pot one. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we can go to some other longevity hot spot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Okinawa would be interesting and even sushi and a couple
Speaker 1: of potatoes. I haven't been. I've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time in Japan, eased to race over there a lot,
Speaker 1: and I've spoken over there a couple of times. But
Speaker 1: I absolutely I love the I love the food depend
Speaker 1: where I'm at, I like the culture. I would say
Speaker 1: probably one of my favorite places over there would be Kyoto, right,
Speaker 1: great great touring grit walks and yeah, I'm I'm a
Speaker 1: fan of I'm a fan of sushi. Although now I
Speaker 1: I um, I know we're trying to wrap up, but
Speaker 1: I'll finish here. I've been making my own sushi. I
Speaker 1: found this service called Stop and they deliver sashimi grade
Speaker 1: fish to my house every week. Wow. And so it's
Speaker 1: kind of spoiled me. I literally take out my sushi knife,
Speaker 1: cut it in strips, put it in a nori wrap
Speaker 1: with some sushi risal, mustard, you know whatever I want
Speaker 1: to sprinkle on there. And so my sons and I
Speaker 1: make poke bowls and sushi all the time. Now, but
Speaker 1: I do I do enjoy a good, good, actual, legitimate Yeah,
Speaker 1: Japanese sushi restaurant. Yeah, amazing, man. Well, Ben, we end
Speaker 1: every episode with a final five, which are fast five.
Speaker 1: So onto that one word, one word, one word to
Speaker 1: ten words maximum. All right, so we're to have dashes.
Speaker 1: That's the most important. Yeah. So the question one is
Speaker 1: what is the worst health advice you've ever received? It
Speaker 1: would probably be, and I want to have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of time to explain this too much, but it
Speaker 1: would be eat a post workout meal. Okay, we'll save
Speaker 1: that for part two. Boundless. Do you talk about them?
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about that Boundless? All right? Great,
Speaker 1: question number two what's the best health advice you've ever
Speaker 1: received or given or heard? Get out in the sunlight more.
Speaker 1: I need to do that a lot more. I was
Speaker 1: talking to someone in my health life recently. They were like,
Speaker 1: because of the color of my skin, I have to
Speaker 1: really be out there, a sun worshiper. I love being
Speaker 1: out there, but I'm not out there enough, even though
Speaker 1: because of my skins, we have a giant battery in
Speaker 1: the sky and early any of us use it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that all right. Third question, what would you
Speaker 1: describe as your current purpose to read and write, learn
Speaker 1: and teach, seeing and speak, compete and create in full
Speaker 1: presence and selfless love to the glory of God. Beautiful?
Speaker 1: I love that, right. Question On before what is the
Speaker 1: first thing you do in the morning and the last
Speaker 1: thing you do before you go to bed. I walk
Speaker 1: over to the sink and I scraped my tongue from
Speaker 1: the back to the front using a copper tongue scraping tool. Yeah. Irabetic.
Speaker 1: At the very end of the day, Yeah, very end,
Speaker 1: very very last, very last thing. Yeah, very last thing.
Speaker 1: I put my arm around my wife and I say
Speaker 1: a prayer with her. That's beautiful. I love that. Man,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. That's great. Oh yeah, we use my wife
Speaker 1: say I raved it. That's all you know. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's our world, all right. Fifth and final question. If
Speaker 1: you could create a law that everyone in the world
Speaker 1: had to follow, what would it be? Every day write
Speaker 1: down the name of one person who you are going
Speaker 1: to help, and then go help them on that day. Beautiful?
Speaker 1: Actually I actually do that every morning. I love that.
Speaker 1: Super meaningful. Thank you, Ben, everyone has been listening on watching.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate all
Speaker 1: of you. Make sure you go and grab a copy
Speaker 1: of the book Boundless and Boundless Cookbook that's out as well.
Speaker 1: We'll put the links in all of our captions. Ben,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for doing this. I think you shit.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are countless parts of this episode that
Speaker 1: I'm going to use in my own life. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go home and tell my wife's straight away to switch
Speaker 1: us from sixty that's gonna change. We're going to be
Speaker 1: getting a few more changes in our bedroom, I think
Speaker 1: based on this episode. Now, yeah, I love it so
Speaker 1: thank you and everyone's been listening watching. Make sure you
Speaker 1: tag me and Ben on Instagram to let us know
Speaker 1: what resonated with you, what stuck out to you, and
Speaker 1: what you're gonna experiment with. That's my hope. My hope
Speaker 1: is that this episode gives you a whole new list
Speaker 1: of tools to experiment with and try out to see
Speaker 1: what works for you. And of course Ben's books are
Speaker 1: a great guide. They truly are a guidebook and a
Speaker 1: map into some of the depths of all of this.
Speaker 1: We've just scratched the surface. If you want a full
Speaker 1: proof plan of how to practice this the bound, this
Speaker 1: book is going to help you do that. So Ben,
Speaker 1: thank you for being here. Thank you, mister Jay Shetty,
Speaker 1: Thank you Mann. If you want even more videos just
Speaker 1: like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on
Speaker 1: the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you
Speaker 1: know that you can now get my book Think Like
Speaker 1: a Monk from Thinklike a monkbook dot Com. Check below
Speaker 1: in the description to make sure you order today.