In bed.

I would say in bed.

So people are on their phone, they're in bed, they're not getting enough light, or they just artificial light, or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window.

Terrible.

They are then going and sitting and getting into like hip flexor contraction.

They're drinking coffee too early in the day.

They aren't getting into any kind of movement, but it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities.

yeah yeah yeah so you know was it before me again today

In bed.

I would say in bed.

So people are on their phone, they're in bed, they're not getting enough light, or they just artificial light, or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window.

Terrible.

They are then going and sitting and getting into like hip flexor contraction.

They're drinking coffee too early in the day.

They aren't getting into any kind of movement, but it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities.

yeah yeah yeah so you know was it before me again today

How do you make your brain boundless? A lot of people struggling from slow thinking,

you know, Yeah, you want and you should have and you deserve to have all the mental energy that you want at your beck and call throughout the day.

Physical energy and spiritual energy too, which is the entire thesis of the book really is boundless energy in all areas of life, mind, body, and spirit.

And when it comes to the brain, I would say that particularly...

There are a few factors that would directly affect things like brain fog, fuzzy thinking, etc.

Most people are aware that excess stress and lack of sleep will affect that function.

But those two very important variables aside...

How does that relate to brain energy?

In bed.

I would say in bed.

So people are on their phone, they're in bed, they're not getting enough light, or they just artificial light, or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window.

Terrible.

They are then going and sitting and getting into like hip flexor contraction.

They're drinking coffee too early in the day.

They aren't getting into any kind of movement, but it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities.

yeah yeah yeah so you know was it before me again today

And of

course, the first most important thing is don't think of yourself as average.

That'd be one big step.

But I get the way you're framing your question.

I think the most important thing to understand is that we are electrical beings.

We are electrical beings.

And that means that our cells operate at specific voltage potentials.

And my little girl, Eve, who's now 12, was born 30 days after that, after five years of

Mm-hmm

...

Sports Science Institute and was just doing like ketones, high fat, low carb.

There are some downsides to that approach.

Like, you don't get enough glucose in if you're active for, like, the proteoglycan formation in joints, so you get some joint pain.

Uh, testosterone suffers.

Thyroid suffers, 'cause your body kinda down regulates the metabolism if it thinks you're in a time of starvation or, or famine or whatever.

Oh, yeah

Ben, tell me, what was the moment? What was the moment that you said, oh, I have to change this?

I was pretty obsessed with this whole world, speaking of obsession.

And I almost lost my family.

My wife and I almost got a divorce.

I realized I wasn't seeing my kids.

I'd grown really pretty distant from Jessa and my wife.

And that was the point at which I kind of realized that I was...

Yeah, isn't

Anyways, give us a little bit of the backstory for Boundless and where you're at today.

Yeah, you're so spot on with your comment about perfection because in the realm that you and I operate in and have been in for a while, the pursuit of perfection is kind of lauded.

You know, it's noble.

noble pursuit, and at the end of the day, and this is really the thrust of the film, an empty pursuit if that's where your identity lies, because at the end of the day, at some point, no offense to your podcast title or mine, which is boundless, we will break, right? At some point, The outer shell will fade away and our muscles will be stringy beef jerky and our bones will be porous and our brains will have plaque.

And everything that so many people nowadays, myself leading that movement for so long, put a lot of energy into... is pretty finite, right? And so if that's the mountain you're climbing and that's where you think happiness and fulfillment lies, right, in whatever, how many Ironmans you've done or the veins in your abs or the perfect diet or, you know, the modern obsession now with like the perfect blood and biomarker panel and, you know, your five-hour elaborate morning routine, you will have like little pockets of fulfillment and little rushes of dopamine along the way But at the end of the day, if you're trying to dump a bunch of finite, eventually fading...

If you're trying to put a bunch of energy into a finite, eventually fading goal, then you're going to be unhappy at some point.

The opposite of that is...

Notice,

You think VO2 max or muscle mass is more important when it comes to training for longevity, if you could pick one?

I would choose, if I had to pick one, I would choose muscle mass because I think low muscle mass, I'm not just saying this because Gabriel's sitting next to me, puts you at a higher risk for frailty.

And I think frailty is one of the, like not being able to outrun a lion is less likely to kill you than like stepping off the curb and being frail.

Like with the VO2 max equation, like joking aside, yes, VO2 max can have a significant impact on cardiovascular health.

but you can get pretty good cardiovascular health, including blood pressure management with strength training.

So if I had to choose one, it's an unrealistic scenario anyways, based on how easy it is to do max.

You do both.

What's the 30,000-foot view of the most defensible science? behind EMF's exposure to electrical frequencies and stuff like

... or is it the breath?

The, the idea behind resonance breathing, and it's, it is actually kind of fascinating that nearly every human being on the planet with a breath rate of around five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out achieves peak HRV.

So that's about where you see really good vagal tone is at that breath rate.

And this lamp is essentially an entrainment tool to either via visual cues or via vibratory cues if you're using the stone, to cause you to breathe at that rate.

There's a book called, uh, Coherence, and, uh, in the latter pages of that book, it was one of the first books I ever read on resonance breathing.

There's like a link or a QR code to a downloadable MP3 file called the Clock and Bell, and that was when I first discovered the power of resonance breathing because it's literally like tick, tock, tick, tock, ding, tick, tock, and you play it while you're working or while you're checking emails, while you're doing whatever would normally be stressful.

It keeps you from email apnea because you know that you're, you're doing resonance breathing, but it trains you how to like subconsciously resonance breathe.

... digestion and leaky gut.

Mm.

You can get to the point where, like- You're not like out in the sun, you're not swimming with the sharks, you're not going out and climbing mountains or staying out past your bedtime dancing and having an extra glass of wine on a date night with your wife because everything is about self-optimization.

And anybody who's stepped outside of that, especially after being stuck in like this, you know, optimize health at all costs world for a while, realizes that, gosh, it actually is kind of fun to just like, you know, throw a dinner party-

Mm.

And that...

And, and, and there, there's kind of a, a, a part of the film where I'm out by his gravesite, which is on my land in Idaho, talking about how it's, it's that brokenness that we become most intimately familiar with when we're around death, such as the death of a loved one, that is the same brokenness that exists in every human being.

Just

from a practical standpoint, number one, exercise trumps like almost everything.

meaning if you are strong and you lift weights and you do cardiovascular exercise and you stay active during the day, I mean, it can combat sleep deprivation.

It can combat a poor diet.

We live in a post-industrial, relatively sedentary society, and I think the healthiest people I work with, if there's one thing they understand, and a lot of people in the biohacking world understand, I think sometimes don't like to hear this is blood, sweat and tears like on the trail in the gym.

Like there's not much of a replacement for that.

Like it really moves the dial in a lot of ways in terms of resilience.

is there anything I could be doing for me and for all the listeners that could focus a little bit more on my health span rather than on just the daily needs? And obviously that's being said that, you know, look at your deficiencies, supplement those, check again, you know, go through the journey, right? Um, but what is it that you found that, you know, beside obviously the workout, the food, the sleep, um, what is it that you found from a supplement perspective that you would recommend to your son, for example, or for someone like myself?

What do you think, w- w- where do you think we're going wrong here?

Yeah, you're totally right.

It's about the, the life in your years, not the years in your life necessarily.

And, uh- I'm kind of torn between fitness and sleep.

Like, [laughs] 'cause, 'cause, like, if you're poor on sleep then fitness becomes hard and nutrition becomes hard.

Uh, but then if you don't work out, a lot of times you don't sleep as well.

So, so those two are kind of, like, almost even for me, fitness and sleep.

So how do we create some sort of balance, or how do we educate people on, like, all right, a little bit of this, a little bit of this, and then you'll have a, a clear path to a better, he- healthier life?

Mm.

Um, I've seen companies in the supplements industry actually get a pretty low valuation because they didn't disentangle some, like controversial or lightning rod-esque type of former CEO or founder from the company.

And so that person's out, whatever, doing blogs and podcasts and content that might be considered to be controversial.

And that can affect acquisition or valuation later on.

And then the other issue that you run into is that if I were to take all the Ben Greenfield Life content like I originally did when I launched Kion and use that as SEO to drive traffic to purchase supplements, uh, and that company gets acquired, then whoever acquires Kion acquires all my IP that I've been working on for 20 years and can do whatever the heck they want with it, in many cases, depending on how the contract is written.

And I'm not just making this up.

Like, I've seen, uh, you know, one very popular supplements company get a low valuation because their founder is a controversial person.

What would, what would you say to them?

again for me? Yeah.

So the first is prayer.

Specifically identified that while...

I do a good job with the calendared prayer times, uh, constancy of prayer, like listening for God's voice throughout the day before an email, uh, you know, before a chat, when I'm a little bit frustrated at a certain point during the day, like turning to God in those moments is something that identified as something I need to do a better job of.

So that's one.

And then, um, kindness and contentedness, uh, were two and three.

Kindness, pretty obvious there, just, you know, back to the whatever, not treating people I interact with virtually like digital avatars.

So how has that gone for you and how does your audience receive it?

I was already into, like,

strength and power.

And, you know, I didn't get into, you know, after bodybuilding, I spent 20 years doing, like, extreme endurance sports.

Like, I did 13 Ironman triathlons, and I did Hawaii World Championships six times.

Raced in Spartans and adventure races and just all of this, like, highly masochistic stuff.

But then before that, I was just full-on strength, power.

You know, I played tennis in high school and college, played water polo, played a lot of basketball and did bodybuilding.

It's got to be deeper than that, right? Yeah.

You know? So how did you get from there to that place where you were feeling this emptiness to the fulfillment that you're experiencing today?

Yep.

I think, I think it's, I'd say three things.

Um, priorities, boundaries, and then a, a, an actual realization of what's truly fulfilling for us as human beings.

So when I say priorities, uh, my big five order of priorities is number one is my faith and my relationship with God.

Number two is my spouse.

Number three is my kids.

Just, uh, feasting

How do you make your brain boundless? And a lot of people struggling with from slow thinking, you know, Yeah, you

want and you should have and you deserve to have all the mental energy that you want at your beck and call throughout the day.

Physical energy and spiritual energy too, which is the entire thesis of the book, really, is boundless energy in all areas of life, mind, body, and spirit.

And when it comes to the brain, I would say that particularly...

There are a few factors that would directly affect things like brain fog, fuzzy thinking, etc.

Most people are aware that excess stress and lack of sleep will affect that function.

But those two very important variables aside.

make

It's become a key and, in some circles, completely normal part of the more extreme or even mainstream fitness world.

At the time, I was racing in Ironman Triathlon pretty competitively, and so I learned about two peptides that could assist with tendon and soft tissue repair and also inflammation.

Ben Greenfield is 45 years old, lives in Idaho, and does many things.

I'm an author, a podcaster.

I advise a lot of companies in the health and fitness and biohacking space.

My formal background, uh, from an educational standpoint is in exercise physiology and biomechanics.

Yeah,

yeah.

Yeah, if you look at biohacking, I think that – a lot of the benefits of it.

If we're going to define biohacking as using science and technology and self quantification to somehow get the body to do something more quickly or more efficiently than it might be able to do in its native state, that the majority of benefits actually do come from what you were just alluding to being able to recover faster and being able to rest more deeply.

Um, I think when you get into the exercise side of biohacking, there's a lot of perceived shortcuts.

Like, oh, I'm going to use this fancy machine and get the equivalent of a three-hour run in a couple of minutes.

Um, you know, attach electrodes to the body with electrical muscle stimulation and build muscle with just a couple of 20 minute workouts a week.

And have you used that stuff

Uh-huh

... is just me and the Bible and God and prayer, and typically there's a lot of gratitude poured into that too, just because I'm, I'm not starting off with a podcast or an audiobook or opening social media or whatever.

So the phone's in airplane mode.

I'm tooling around, getting ready for the day, kind of building myself up spiritually, and I finish that with prayer.

So whenever all that stuff ends, sometimes I'm in the living room, sometimes I'm out, out in my office by then, but I say a prayer.

And it varies from day to day.

It's usually just me pouring out my worries, my cares, my anxieties, you know, people that I've told them that I'd pray for.

[laughs]

Hmm.

And it's not like we don't talk.

It's like we're, we're playing a card game or a board game and there's chatter going on in between, and of course there's the lead up at family dinner, us talking beforehand, then finally settling in, and the game's on the table and we're talking about everybody's day, and then we jump in and we're like, "Oh, who's gonna go first?" And roll the dice.

And um, it's been an incredible experience to create this almost like party environment at our house every night.

It's like we gather, it's 7:00 PM.

I take out the guitar.

We sing a song.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you're super sensitive to paint.

Um, not everybody's like that, but people who have a poor ability to detox, though, it's, it's almost like a survival mechanism.

[gentle music] When we talk about emotional health, especially in our families, one thing that often gets overlooked is the environment we create at home, and the kitchen plays a bigger role than most people realize.

It's where routines are built, where families connect, and where consistency really matters, and having the right tools can make a huge difference.

In my kitchen, we use Caraway cookware, and over 2.5 million homes like ours cook with Caraway too.

And I am so grateful that Caraway is third-party tested and designed with high standards when it comes to its materials.

Yeah.

Hey

... is right behind you.

And I think that some people will hear about therapeutic ketosis where, you know, recommendations might be twenty, thirty, forty grams of carbohydrates a day, and a person who's exercising for an hour a day might hear that that's a ketotic diet, when in fact the ketotic diet for an active person can be often in excess of a hundred grams of carbohydrates per day because they're simply burning through more carbohydrates, they're more insulin sensitive, um, they have a higher calorie burn.

So with protein intake, it's like, yeah, there are base recommendations, then there are, there are the recommendations that make sense if you're active.

So it's almost like the food pyramid became more appropriate for people who should be exercising anyways.

Um, so that's, that's one thing that I think was impressive.

The higher emphasis on healthy fats, like trying to get past this, this fat-phobic environment, I think that's good too.

So let's talk about, you know, nutrition and other strategies where we can, we can turn on better metabolic flexibility, better mitochondrial health, better fat burning.

It's more pressure

... expiratory and expiratory muscle training, and at the same time, like, you have no choice but to nasal breathe.

Wow.

Okay.

I'm gonna start measuring- Just being honest.

Yeah.

I'm gonna start measuring my VO2 max.

Yeah.