 So I still do sauna stacked with breath work stacked with cold almost every day. And there's like the main reason that I do it is not necessarily for what heat therapy and cold therapy and breath work can do for the body, even though that's a fantastic side benefit. It's like that at the end of the day is what my sons and I do together. So for me, it's like, OK, so I'm building resilience in my sons. It's this, as you guys know, like males primarily bond by doing things together and often doing hard things together. So usually like 6 p.m. Me and my sons are in the sauna. It's 20 to 30 minutes of breath work, what we're sweating our eyeballs out. And we all march out to the cold pool. We do the cold plunge and sometimes we have time left. We'll throw in like push-ups, kettlebells, a few other things before we come in for dinner. But for me, it's that coming together with my sons. At the end of the day and being able to stack all these extra things on top of it is great. But yeah, I still do breath work, heat, cold on a regular basis. I love that. Ben Greenfield, he's like the godfather of the biohacking space. He was doing this before anyone else even knew what was going on. He's been around for a long time. Super intelligent guys with a high performing OCR athlete. And he breaks down everything in detail in ways that nobody else can. He literally set a lot of the trends that you see that are so commonplace today. This is why we love having him on the show. So again, Ben Greenfield, if you don't know who he is, get out from under that rock. Here's the giveaway, the RGB bundle. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. Do all those things. And if you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, the April special is still going on right now. Two maps programs are half off after April, it'll be gone. So the right now half off maps, anabolic 50% off maps, split 50% off. If you're interested in either one or both, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. Ben, welcome back to the show. It's been like, what a year, year or two. I don't know with the rate at which you guys have aged. I'm an anti-aging before we have time. I don't know, fellas. We're going to kill him in like years. Be honest, mainly Sal, right? I got a double the amount of kids you used to rely on. Yeah, yeah, maybe a little bit more gray hair. Yeah, you kiddos. Or just less. Yeah. Welcome back, though, dude. Thanks. We wanted you on to talk about, so we just started getting into it. And this is like, old news for someone like you, peptides. And what they do, and you're like somebody that, you know, has been talking about this stuff for a while. I like to hear about your experiences with things because you have everything so meticulously dialed in. So if I'm going to listen to anybody's experience, you know, anecdote, it's going to be you. Yeah. So you've been you've been fooling around with peptides for a while now, right? Yeah. Gosh, like back back in the obstacle course racing days, probably when I was just injured, you know, with something new every week. Was it BBC with the first one? Got into the BBC 157 and the TB 500. And it wasn't till later I found out the BPC is actually not only good for the joints, but if you take it orally, it's fantastic for the digestive system, for gastric inflammation, because the body protection compound is what that acronym stands for. And apparently it's produced naturally in the gastric juices. That's when they first found it, right? Yeah. Yeah. For it's anti-inflammatory activity in the gut. So I don't take that many peptides right now, but I've continued to take oral BPC 157 because I kind of have like a little bit of a princess gut. If there's one part of my body, I got to fight. So are you sure about that? Or maybe it's because you eat like weird shit all the time. I'm always seeing you eat stuff from like the woods and you're like picking things up and just chewing on them. That's all natural. That's like primal shits of people. I'm going to steal the princess gut because that's not a T cell all the time. If I was a little gut issue, it's a princess gut. Princess right here in the shit. You know, when we had Jay Campbell on the show, who's like just absolutely brilliant. He knows a lot about peptides. Yeah, very much so, right? He, I kind of asked him to rank what he would consider like the best, which of course is kind of a hard question to answer. Yeah, it's like what's the number one supplement you should take? Right, right, right. But he did say probably BPC 157 is probably up there with the... Dr. Seed said something. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the creatine fish oil thing. It's like the most researched at least to my knowledge or at least the most experimented with as well. Right, right. A lot of people just feel fine on it and the fact that it has that crossover to where you could inject it subcutaneously and get systemic anti-inflammatory activity or you can inject it subcutaneously or intramuscularly near a joint and also get a good healing effect locally and then also take it orally for the gastric effect. I mean, it can kill a lot of birds with one stone. Do you take it empty stomach or with food? Shock and effect. When you do that. The one I take right now is called gut repair formula and it has a bunch of zinc in it along with a few other things it's got. I think it has LL37, which is kind of almost like an antiparasitic antibacterial peptide, which is kind of cool. And a lot of people have successfully eradicated SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth with that LL37, like the bacterial issue where you get like gas and bloating in response to fermentable carbohydrates, it seems to shut that down within a few weeks of use. But the formula that I use because of the zinc in it, zinc can kind of make it nauseous or give you gastric upset paradoxically if you take it on an empty stomach. So I take it with food now, the one that I'm using. You do it on a pretty regular basis? Since I started using that one, I'm using it every day. Again, just because it's for me, it's almost like insurance for the gut. So yeah, but the BPC157 was the first one that I got into, not for the gut, but for joints. And then because it has a different mechanism of action than the thymus and beta 500, the TB500, you can take those both at the same time, which is what I was doing. So the BPC157 has more of the anti-inflammatory effect on the joint, whereas the TB500 acts more on the soft tissue, like the ligaments, tendons, and apparently helps to repair those if they're injured or accelerate the speed of healing. Now, I have a buddy who coaches a lot of NBA players, and I was surprised that, so he listened to our J. Campbell episode, and he reached out to me and asked him all kinds of questions, and I was like, man, I'm really surprised you don't know more about this. He goes, man, there's a lot of NBA players that don't know about or aren't using it. Is that true? Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of that stuff is kind of like, I don't know, the good old boys industry where it's still very much just like Gatorade and Ibuprofen and some of the fringe stuff, especially stuff that doesn't have a big stamp of approval by the FDA or flies in and out of legality. It's like a lot of players will go to if they have one, like their personal trainer or someone who's not on team staff to get that kind of stuff or use it, but it's not that heavily used just because it's not like endorsed by the teams. There's some teams like Golden State, Miami Heat, like they're pushing. I was in, it's not American Airlines arena, it was FTX for a while and I don't think it's called FTX anymore for obvious reasons. But I visited Eric, my friend down there who's the strength conditioning coach for the Heat. I mean, you walk in there and it's like, the training room is all PMF mats and infrared. I don't know if they're using peptides, but they got whole refrigerators full of just like fringe stuff that kind of flies under the radar. And there's, the Golden State Warriors are another example. You know, they're doing a lot of like biohacking modalities and... Yeah, I remember they were using the Halo stuff early, like yes. Were you a consultant? Did you go down and help set up like some of these biohacking? I don't do any formal consulting with the Heat, for example, but they wanted me to come down and look at, and again, I respect this, something that's not taken into consideration much in professional sports, like the environmental aspects of the training facility, like the air filtration system, the type of water, like, you know, hydrogenated structured water versus just regular water out of the municipal supply or whatever, or the electricity considerations, like how high of an EMF environment which could have an impact on healing or inflammation, or even the lighting, lexercadian rhythm-friendly lighting versus non. Like there's all sorts of like little things that go beyond just the nutrient and movement and recovery consideration. So I went down there a couple of times and had some pretty fast conversations. I would imagine the reason why they probably don't either work with peptides or advertise it is because of the stigma for PEDs. Well, no, I know why they would not advertise it and make it a big deal, but I thought, you know, Paul, with his connections so deeply to the MBA, I thought for sure that he would have been privy to it as soon as we were or before, especially something like BPC, because man, I experienced that with my Achilles and it was almost scary how much it worked. Like it felt like it healed, but I was still afraid to go to go test it because it felt so good. Yeah, do I get a tumor in the ankle in two months from that accelerated healing effect? Yeah, and BPC 157 and TB, that's like kind of the low hanging fruit for injuries and then, at least for me, when I started looking at peptides, what I came across was all this old Russian research that's been going on for like three decades that again doesn't seem to have penetrated much into the age reversal or longevity movement in America and some westernized countries, but when you look at, for example, things like mitochondrial density and mitochondrial proliferation, which is pretty linked not only to cardiovascular health, but also overall longevity, they've got peptides over there for that. They have these new peptide bioregulators, one called epitalon being probably the most well known over there and probably the most well known in the U.S. for the anti-aging, the age reversal or the decreased all cause risk of mortality effect. Have you used that one? I have. I've used these, well, they're called peptide bioregulators. So they're shorter amino acid chains than a typical peptide like a TB or a BPC, but the way that they work is they would travel and they've done amino acid tracer studies on these things. They travel to the specific organ that they're intended to target. So you have, and they got weird names like I think the one for the gonads is testelon or something like that, then they got one for the brain, I forget the name of that one, they got thymolon for the thymus and the immune system. But there's like a couple dozen of them. And so the protocol that this guy Dr. Covenson, it's K-H-A-V Covenson that he's researched and implemented in human models like pretty large human models over a long period of time has been taking these peptide bioregulators a couple of times a year for short stents. Like you might do two times a year a 10 day cycle of all of the bioregulators, which actually involves like with as many of them as there are like 30 different capsules that you're taking for 10 days in a row. And it's essentially causing this this healing effect on all the different organs that they're each traveling individually to target. And then there's some docs actually a guy who I'm going to see later on today, Matt Cook. He sent me up these injectables where they combine all the bioregulators into like one syringe and you would just do like a subcutaneous injection in the abdominals for 10 days rather than taking all the capsules. But I think you were talking before Justin, how you can find peptide bioregulators online now. Yeah. Probably the most well-known researcher in the U.S. is Phil Micans, M-I-C-A-N-S. And he has a couple of books on peptide bioregulators he's got a whole website where he reviews a bunch of them and a whole bunch of articles. I interviewed him a couple of months ago and he's pretty fascinating when it comes to how to actually use these things. The one you mentioned epitellone? Epitellone? Yeah, epitellone, E-P-I-T-H. That's the one that I've read a little bit about. I think that one's more kind of well-known. You can use that one. Do you notice anything from that or? No. Okay. No. I mean like it's like oh it's like freaking fish oil, right? Yeah. Supposedly it decreases triglycerides and improves cardiovascular health and decreases risk of stroke but it's not like you take it and you're like man, my VO2 max was huge this morning and I just crush it at the gym. What you're keeping your fingers crossed for is that it's having the age reversal effect. So what would you say would be the best way to try and obviously you're not going to probably feel it. So would you do something like go test your biological age and then consistently? Consentylation clock. Like probably the better one is true age diagnostics. Okay. It's true, spelled without an E. I feel like this is a spelling bee all of a sudden. I know. Spelled so many four different things. Google auto completes it for you anyways. The true age test measures the your current biological age. So whereas a telomere test which is kind of like old school now when it comes to measuring longevity, all that does is it measures the rate at which the telomeres are shortening on the white blood cells of your body. And so it gives you possibly a little bit of an indicator of your rate of aging. But these new methylation clocks they're actually looking at how quickly you are aging compared to the average person. So like my last aging rate that I took was 0.73. So for every year you're only aging for every year where like 266 days or something like that. So for the average person who would be aging 365 days for a 365 day year I'm aging 266. And that's like that whole what's the transhumanistic phrase for when we've reached a terminal velocity or who's going to be the first human who's actually reverse aging. Technically that would be like whatever a negative 0.99 which nobody's even close to. But that 0.73 that I have is supposedly very, very good when it comes to measuring how quickly you're actually aging. I'm trying to do the math right now on like let's fast forward if you stayed on that pace for say 20 years how many years you already have shaved off. I don't know because peptide bioregulators don't make you go to math. Well you basically save it regardless. I'll shave it off. You've added next your six years according to Mike. Okay is that about right? I was getting five or so I was doing the math real quick. So about five or six years every every 20 years. Yeah. So that's the typical protocol you take pretty much like all the bioregulators that cover all of the organs. Yeah. So it's not like they're specifically targeting them or is that's an option though right? Well theoretically like let's say I don't know you had some kind of immune system issue or you had a low white blood cell count or something like that you could just take the thymolon for a 10-day cycle or you know if you wanted more of the androgen like effect you take like the tesilon for a 10-day cycle but the gold standard is you're supposed to just like take them all and this is what they've done in terms of what they've shown in the Russian research on the longevity enhancing effect for 10 days a couple of times a year and that gives you the full body effect of the bioregulators. Of the peptides which ones do I know you said BPC but which ones do you use most I guess or cycle in most regularly? I haven't besides that gut repair formula I have no peptides at home right now. Okay. Which ones do you have the most experience with? Part of it for me is like because I've done a couple of cycles of those bioregulators and plan on continuing to do that based on the research I've seen one or two times a year for 10 days it's like I'm not doing that much other than that and part of it too is this stuff just adds up with time you know when you get up in the morning and you're doing the injections and then maybe like I'm messing around with these NAD patches now that kind of give you a slow bleed of NAD into your system during the day so you're putting the saline solution on that and then slapping that on and you know taking your supplements and your glass of water let's like you know you get to a certain point where you just got to get on with your morning so and I don't want to be that biohacker who's cold and hungry and will be to listen you know curl up in a fetal position inside a hyperbaric chamber before I hop onto my car therapy and everything else would you say that's something that's changed about you and your journey of biohacking like yeah because you had all the tools all the right like how how have you evolved in that space yeah part of it is yeah time is finite and so if there's an extra 15 minutes of the morning that I can spend with my sons you know because I'm a big fan of bringing the family together in the morning and doing meditation and journaling and then getting my workout in and helping the kids get ready for school and you know meeting with mom and everything else like to me the family the relationships and making sure that I'm being a good leader of the home is far more important to me than prioritizing like you know getting an extra you know two seconds every month on life or whatever and then you know another part of it is that for a long time I think I took pride in being like the prolific biohacker who tested out everything tried everything and came back and reported on it did blog posts and podcasts and not only do I think those shoes have been filled by a lot of other people who are doing the same thing but I also have more interest right now at least in a little bit more of a shift into an analog lifestyle that doesn't necessarily involve a lot of health enhancing technology like I'm moving from my Spokane Washington home down to a 12 acre farm in Viola we're going to start doing a lot more raising of livestock and poultry and you know I'm doing soil inoculation with probiotics and special radishes to increase the the mycorrhizal network in the soil and then bringing in livestock and rotational grazing and composting and we're turning a big pond on the property into like a living pool with an aerator and bluegill fish and special probiotics in the water so the duck crap doesn't kill us and then building a home on the property as well and so I'm enjoying a lot more you know I was telling you guys I just got back from bohunting in Hawaii like there's something that's more fulfilling and seems a little bit more real to me than a lot of the biohacking equipment or at least spending a large part of my day just immersed in health enhancing technologies at the end of the day you know they're they're not fake and they're not a total waste of time but you do have to consider how much time you're spending on trying to live a long time or look good when in the you know the end of the day yeah you might live till you're 80 instead of 78 but you know back to how much of those years that you gave yourself you're going to spend trying to give yourself a long time what would you say are some of the things that you were probably doing pretty consistently in the quote unquote biohacking world that you've kind of just you've stopped because of that exact reason and now you're you know going outside and walking instead with your son you know yeah I would and part of this too is not racing professionally and endurance sports anymore I'm just like working out a lot less trying out a lot of equipment like you know you talked about the halo Justin you know and all this TDCS equipment for the head and all the light sound stimulation machines and the haptic therapy and the magnetic therapy and the PMF mats every day at my house it's like dizzying how many boxes of stuff to try show up at the house I could spend my whole day just trying stuff and I've started to do a lot less of that like every last Vegas nerve device that comes out or you know or patch or whatever so I'm just trying to view life through this lens of okay so I can't try everything I'd rather go with a little bit more the 80-20 approach and yeah I still I have a hyperbaric chamber I get in that a few times a week and I think hyperbarics absolutely fantastic for full body oxygenation it's kind of like this sensory deprivation chamber that I slip into after lunch where nobody can bother me and if they did I got to decompress myself and get out of there and you know I I still you know sleep on a PMF mat and you know I'll still meditate wearing like a a brain tap device but for me it's about stacking a lot of this stuff so that I'm making a better use of my time and then spending just as much time as possible with my son how about like two years left till they're out of the house wow so it's crazy it's already going fast 15 crypto yeah it's crypto fast man when they were tiny dude that's so that's wild so what about you know coal prunge red lights steam sauna stuff what are you still including a lot of that yeah I'm not into steam so much I think you know that the mold that can accumulate in some of those steam rooms and also the fact that a lot of times the water isn't filtered and you're breathing in whatever municipal water that they happen to be filtering into the steam room it I'm not a huge fan of steam but you guys are aware of a lot of the good research on sauna and heat therapy so I still do sauna stacked with breath work stacked with cold almost every day and there's like the main reason that I do it is not necessarily for what heat therapy and cold therapy and breath work can do for the body even though that's a fantastic side benefit it's like that at the end of the day is what my sons and I do together it's like so for me it's like okay so I'm building resilience in my sons it's this as you guys know like males primarily bond by doing things together and often doing hard things together so usually like 6pm me and my sons are in the sauna it's 20 to 30 minutes of breath work while we're sweating our eyeballs out and we all march out to the cold pool we do the cold plunge and sometimes when we have time left we'll throw in like push-ups kettlebells a few other things before we come in for dinner but for me it's that coming together with my sons at the end of the day and being able to stack all these extra things on top of it is great but yeah I still do breath work, heat, cold on a regular basis I love that I love that you've stacked it with an opportunity to bond with your boys you know that thing gets awesome would you view like a lot of these biohack things the same way that we kind of view supplements where we tell people look nothing's gonna be for example a diet that's based on on Whole Foods however if you live in the modern life and you have trouble let's say getting enough protein or getting the right kinds of fermented foods then supplements are they'll help they'll help but they're not a pure replacement for Whole Foods would you say that these biohack things would kind of fall in that same category yeah you're you're basically simulating what you normally be getting from nature and you know so the red light therapy panels that I'm using for my first 20 minutes to check in emails or whatever in the morning is because I don't have the time or the convenience of time to like hike the half mile up behind my house in the forest to go hunt down sunrise and stare at the sunlight for 15 minutes and hike back down to the house is like no I gotta like start in the emails but I'm bringing the sunlight into my office well at the same time I'm standing on a little mat that has like a cable coming out of it that goes out and and is inserted via metal stake into the backyard so I'm like getting the benefits of grounding and earthing and then I have like a a HEPA air filter in my office that's churning out negative ions right which I would normally get if I were outside breathing in the fresh air so yeah like if you can't get out much or you can't get into nature a lot you can simulate a lot of this stuff using new technologies that exist which is great I mean ideally you're doing both right right so it's like yeah I'll do the red light therapy in the morning but then you know whenever I get a phone call step outside in the sunshine or you know go outside barefoot or whatever so I think both is a pretty good when you when you finish building the farm do you envision yourself pulling away from some of the work you're doing and spending more time I have to yeah I mean it's not like I'm gonna be able to be outside with my hands in the soil and doing rotational grazing of goats and chasing ducks out of the pond etc I don't have emails a day well I'm also you know doing a lot of like the podcast and the ride so I don't know exactly what life's gonna look like kind of like some of my friends who are stockbrokers and run half their company well out in the golf course from their phone I would imagine I'll be doing some stuff from my phone just while I'm out in the farm but my my goal is to keep podcasting because I love probably like you guys do to talk to super interesting people a couple of times a week and I love to write so I'll keep on writing books and then my sons and I just launched a new gaming company and so I plan to do a lot of that with them because they're little illustrators and designers and I love to map out and start new businesses so what happened was we were supposed to go to Costa Rica on a vacation and we got all the way to Costa Rica and had like this fantastic resort that we reserved and I was meeting a bunch of my friends there for like this business mastermind they were all bringing their families and so we flew to Costa Rica I've never been to Costa Rica before but as we're flying in and we're looking at the window and gorgeous beautiful my sons are excited we cleared the whole calendar and we get to customs and you know they they scan each of my family members in and they all go through and then they get to my passport and they scan it and they look up and they're like oh your passport was reported stolen sorry you're not allowed into the country and so I'm just like standing there slack-jawed and I go no there there must be some kind of a mistake because like I was just in Mexico two weeks ago and this same passport worked just fine but apparently there was some kind of like a glitch in the computer system or somebody played a some kind of a horrible nasty joke and culled in my passport reported stolen or whatever but either way I wasn't getting into Costa Rica so apparently the the rule there is that you're basically sent on the first plane flight that's going back to the U.S. so they had a security personnel squad surround me and my family take us back through security back into the airport where we waited eight hours for a flight into Newark, New Jersey and took us like 36 hours to get home oh oh it was like a nightmare scenario and my friends who were there in the country they're like you know some of them know people and they're like calling the embassy and trying to make stuff work and meanwhile we get sent home packing on the plane but now we're back home and spoken and we've got like a week of almost like staycation time so on one of the first nights I took my sons out to dinner and we love to play games as a family like I think it's one of the most underrated things you can do as a family is to play family dinner games we have like board games yeah board games card games you know fun stuff for everything from like exploding kittens and bears versus babies to old school monopoly in scraw or whatever like we so 7 p.m. I gather the whole family for dinner we sing a song we say a prayer we all pitch in help make dinner together and then we sit down we'll play a game until basically like bedtime then you know hit the sack and so as a result of that the kids are learning game theory logic rhetoric argumentation mathematics communication all these kind of sneaky things that you learn when you're playing games as a family and then what happened was we started to modify a lot of the games that we were playing with like family rules like oh we could make extra cards for this game like if you draw this card you gotta pass your whole hand to the ride or get to dig through the discard pile and take whatever you want and so we would in some cases for a few of our games buy an extra set of the game steal all the cards from that extra set modify those extra cards then add them to the current game and so we've been doing this for years and when I'm out there at dinner with my sons when we got stuck at home with this vacation since we couldn't go to Costa Rica we decided that we wanted to make our own game we actually mapped out the idea for like three different games but we wanted to start with this first one have you guys heard of of sunzoo's book the art of war okay so this game is called the fart of war and obviously the main demographic is like a 16 year old male boy's running already yeah and you have all these different fart characters that you're dealt and they each have different powers you have everything like the celiac disease fart which is super powerful down the princess fart and you have modifier cards that you can use to increase or decrease the power of the farts like you could equip your princess fart with a can of beans or a whey protein shake and make it way stronger or you could like deal over to an opponent who has like the old man nasty fart like peppermint oil or potpourri spray and weaken their and then your farts go into battle against each other and there's also special modifier cards like you could lay a blame it on the dog card along with your fart which masks the identity of that fart so nobody knows which one in your army he has a certain number of points so we mapped out this whole game and like I said my sons are fantastic illustrators so they're in the process of illustrating all these cards for our first game and we hired our first fractional COO to run the company in the management and the kick starter campaign the amazon oh my god really oh my god and so this is and it's called fried pickles gaming company because our first night that we did test play which is super important with games you gotta test the hell out of them to just running to all these things to anticipate like oh wait you know where we ran out of the draw pile too early what do we do when that happens or this game less than an hour and we need to be more like a family friendly 35 40 minutes or whatever just overpower to keep feeding everybody exactly exactly so anyways we we are in the process of launching the first game to be shipped by Christmas but we have been absolutely adoring the process of as a father son team working together to create a game and we have this vision especially when we move down with the farm in Biola to continue to make games so I'll podcast I'll blog probably run the game company a little bit and then just work on oh that's so right and you say you're a Kickstarter so we can look at this game now or not yet okay no but we'll we'll use crowdfunding and the the reason for that is even though my sons have their like cooking podcast and youtube channel which they still run and I've obviously got an audience we have to build a new audience that's very game friendly and apparently the number one place that people go to to find new games for some odd reason is Kickstarter so even if you have your own audience and you don't have to crowd funding you don't have to necessarily build an audience going from Kickstarter over to Amazon primarily is like the way to launch a game oh that's interesting yeah take me back I love talking dad stuff with you take me back to the you know you're you're playing games with your kids how do you and give me an example of you guys sitting down as a family playing with the game and you using that as a teaching moment for you know game theory mathematics or or like how does that play out well there's nothing intentional that I have to do besides play the game okay because let's say like like the average card game these days typically if you're looking at a card it will say if you draw this card then this action or when drawn on your next turn you get to do XYZ you may or may not draw another card or there's typically some type of logic very similar to what you might experience if you're taking like CS 101 or something like that in college but it's delivered in a more fun lighthearted gaming format or another example would be we'll get a game like bang where all the instructions are in italian so we have to practice a different language while we're playing the game or we'll even modify some games like Scrabble or Quiddler to where you get double the number of points if you spell whatever the theme language of that night is a word in Spanish or a word in Italian or German or whatever and so it can be used for language learning it can be used for the game theory the logic component obviously there's some math when you're doing point calculations communications piece is important because the and I learned this the metric of a good successful game these days is that it must involve interaction with the other players game sets or game cards right monopoly would be an example of a game where it's kind of weak on that like you're mostly working on your own bank your own houses your own monopolies and there's a little bit of trading amongst other players but typically a good game involves like the part of war where you're literally like battling players every turn and modifying other players cards every turn or basically interacting with other players in some way so there's a lot of communication that's in monopolies like one of those games that starts fights too I don't know oh yeah all the games that one like pisses people off I mean all games could just run out have you done ticket for your ride no let's take it for your ride oh you'll like that one that's like you have to build these connections and it's really good about that where you're you're having to play on other people's stuff you get dealt all these cards and you and there's all these like from San Francisco to New York so think of like all the places like trains would go all over the country I know what you're talking about yeah we own that game we haven't busted that oh you got it there's like a section in our closet like the 10 games we haven't opened up that's like one of my favorite games stack of books we haven't read yet there's a lot of strategy you'll like that game a lot okay I'm gonna bust that out when we get home yeah yeah yeah that's a good game I'll move that one at the top of the list but back to the communication piece I mean a big part of it too is teaching honesty and ethics because I have caught my sons cheating a couple of times and that's when you launch into those discussions like oh what do I do now they they cheated you know does it mean that they're doing extra dishes during dinner or you know but we we have a philosophy in our house where there's very little like you know corporal punishment we don't say no a lot instead we let them deal with the consequences of their decisions and or see the disappointment and experience the disappointment that they generated amongst their fellow game players or their parents or their siblings or whatever when they might cheat so for example you know classic would be like if I catch my son Taryn calculating his points incorrectly I'll just pipe up and be like something and I'll say something like well Taryn you just ruin the game for everybody for the entire night how does that feel and I mean that sounds harsh but it but it teaches them like the importance because they don't do a lot of like team sports the jiu-jitsu tennis so Taryn they aren't doing a lot in terms like basketball and football and baseball etc so a lot of like their team play aspects they're learning at the dinner table during games you mentioned some all the skills can you name some games that would be good for like like say mathematical skills like one that comes of mine for me be like Rummy Cube where you're trying to figure out patterns and numbers and you know can you name like good game for different types of skills just for parents let's see for let's start with with speech and rhetoric there's one called rhetoric and it literally involves each person drawing a card with the topic on it and then you'll roll the dice and the dice will be like impromptu persuasive humorous educational and right there on the spot you give a speech and there's a timer that comes with it for like a two or three minute speech in front of everyone else and then you're judged based on the quality of your speech and and the communication style how well you adhere to the topic that you're supposed to adhere to and then it goes on to the next person so people are amassing points being judged by their fellow competitors as they go through that one's a really good for really good for like communication and rhetoric a few that I really like for like the logic piece would be any of the games designed by the oatmeal who is this comic illustrator who ended up branching out and creating games like exploding kittens and bears versus babies or crabs like he has a whole bunch of cool games that are hilarious like like that's also in my opinion metric of a good game is you're being entertained by the illustrations on the cards while at the same time that you're playing the game so that's what we're trying to do with fard of war but you have to learn the logical sequence of any choice that you make when you lay a card because it has a lot of if this then that type of scenarios for math I'm trying to think almost any deck of card game is good probably usually math a lot of times it's like the point calculation at the end of the game but there's one called everdell that's it's a little bit longer game it's like an hour to an hour and a half long but essentially you're gathering tokens and logs and pebbles and using those to determine how many points that you might have available to purchase different properties or add different critters and then depend what you add to your city that initiates different point sequences that you can then get bonuses for so the whole game you're like doing math and comparing your city to other people's cities because you have the game doesn't like end at a certain point it ends when you decide your city is where you want it to be and then you all calculate the total number of points in your city and the game's over and the person with the highest number of points wins so a big part of the math piece is like the the point calculation the point total during the game and then another one for math is there's one called five in a row and it's also made by the same company that does quiddler quiddlers like cards it's like a scrabble version of cards where you're spelling words and there's there's subsequent rounds so the first round to get three cards second round to get four cards third round to get five cards all the way up to ten cards and so the three card round you're spelling three letter words and the four card round you're spelling four letter words etc and then five in a row is like that except with numbers so you're doing like straights and sequences and pairing different numbers with patterns so and when you guys are playing so you don't find it necessary to like oh did you see that son this is that like you're not teaching it as you go through you think very very rarely yeah very rarely just just a frequency of practicing it they're getting it and you're seeing it translate into the right it's it's like I mean honestly it's like hunting right so on you guys we just got back from bow hunting in Malachi and I don't necessarily like set my sons down and give them a big lecture on scent finding and wind patterns and tracking and you know when an animal can see you versus when you can't see it basically it's oh you scared the animal here's what happened oh you scared the animal again here's what happened it's a lot of trial and error got it it's just you know it just says with anything the best way to learn something is to just do it yeah people learn best when they're having fun and they're immersed in it that's all that's all people especially kids though if you ever I mean for anybody who has kids it's always I remember with my oldest how I was so it was so blown away how he knew the names of 150 different trains that I'd never even tried to teach him and he knew the names and the colors and all that stuff at a very young age it's because he loved them he loved playing with them yeah and sometimes I can backfire it's like you know like Minecraft right and that's kind of a huge time suck and distraction for a lot of kids aren't necessarily like playing TikTok for example and my sons don't really do much on social media they have social media accounts for just about every social media platform out there but I advise them to hire a social media manager to run all that for them for their cooking business so that they didn't have to spend a lot of time on those apps or have to deal with you know mistakes I've made about having all those on my phone and being distracted by them so even though they have a phone and we ensured that they're them getting a phone was not a big deal we looked like mom and I were going on a date one night and we grabbed a phone earlier that day from AT&T added the line gave it to him as we were walking on the door and said here's a phone if you knew anything call it so it wasn't like you know the angels singing from heaven hey you've earned your first phone for them it was just like oh here's something I can use to communicate with mom and dad and so they don't have a lot of social media distractions but a couple years ago I caught them playing Minecraft a couple of times while they were supposed to be in their online Spanish class and their online math class and so my strategy for that was I told them okay look by tomorrow night you guys need to have prepared a formal presentation that you give at the dinner table about the pros and cons of Minecraft why it's so good for you to be playing and better than Spanish or math what you've learned from it and if you can convince me that you should be able to continue playing Minecraft whether during or separate from school then you guys can keep playing but if you can't convince me then your computers are now mine you can take your hard earned money buy your own computers if you buy your own computers you're welcome to do anything with them that you like but I'm not going to fund with my own money you guys playing Minecraft playing on school and so then they can they try the table they both gave a presentation they were fanta- like I was sold on Minecraft that was kind of fascinating this game is amazing I want to learn how to play but then of course at the end of it they both apologize profusely for playing Minecraft during their Spanish and math classes and said that based on the benefits they'd presented they felt they should be allowed to continue to play but that they wouldn't play during Spanish and math and they were sorry for using the computers that I bought for them for different purposes to do so and so then I just gave them a thumbs up and said all right play Minecraft whenever you want but not during Spanish and math oh work that's awesome you acknowledge that that's not the best time to be doing it work I love that I did it a girl who her dad and I've never heard it a parent do this is very similar who like if she came to him and wanted like a TV in her room was that she would have to write an essay and present right what the pros the cons why it would be beneficial and if she brought you have to sell it to him yeah if she brought a good enough argument he would he would do it it's consequential based parents I think the best system if you are looking for one to teach you that style of parenting it's called love and logic yeah they have some books and programs yeah and it's also the same type of system that teaches more of a consequential based disciplinary approach where you don't say no you're not allowed to have candy or gluten or whatever you instead educate them about the impact that that might have on their teeth make sure that they know that they're paying the dental bill if they get a cavity make sure that they know that if they suffer in school the next day or get poor grades that it would likely be due to whatever the neuroinflammatory gluten that they had too much of it the birthday part of the day before whatever then you step back let them make the decision and live with the nasty consequences if they decide to yeah a simple example would be like I'm not wearing my jacket but it's cold outside I don't wear my jacket okay we're going out you don't need to wear a jacket and they're cold right and that's a real easy example of like what that's like yeah or or my son he he got blisters during our last hunting trip I was very specific with him about how to put on his socks and which shoes to bring and he didn't so I just you know I turned to him and said hey too bad pay attention to the details next time and there are exceptions like if your kids like seven years old and they're riding their bike around a neighborhood that's got a bunch of cars and they're not wearing their helmet you gotta put your foot down just be like oh they might not even know the long-term consequences for their entire life from a head injury no ifs and buts you're putting on a helmet or you're not riding that bicycle right right right or you know the toddler ambling towards a hot stove or whatever like the third degree burn on their hand is that's that's too much of a pun yeah right right how crazy is it how how how how fast time flies because your kids are now they're they're getting close to being adults 15 yeah yeah so like how weird is that because I mean I I have two sets of two kids and they're big age gap so it's giving me the opportunity to realize with my first two how fast time flies with my second two so now I got the two younger ones two and in five months and I'm really aware of of how how fast it goes by it didn't hit me till my older kids were older before me looking back and going oh my gosh it feels like just yesterday they were toddlers and they were babies like this is insane like what's that what's that experience like for you same as you I mean you know and I think that for for me a big big saving grace of the almost like dropping your heart when you realize oh they're getting old they're not going to be around for a long time you know they say some statistics show like something like 90% of the time you're ever going to spend with your kids occurs before they're the age of 18 I'm not necessarily a fan of that I think that if you set up the right traditions and legacies and routines and rituals and family reunions and fun comings and goings in your home like your your goals a parent should be to make hanging out at the big family home the castle you know with the parents so much fun that your kids just keep coming back over and over again year after year holiday after holiday to hang out and it's not just like you leave and you wave goodbye and they you know they show up for Christmas every year or whatever but for for me I've looked through the lens of raising them of it being that I'm raising my grandchildren not just my children I'm raising raising a legacy of Greenfields and yeah we might not have ever had like a third baby but I'll have grandkids soon and yeah they might be out of the house soon but there's going to be a whole bunch of other kids gathered around my feet hopefully 10 years from now learning from me in different ways and learning from them in the ways that I've taught learning from my sons in the ways that I've taught them and so we have so many traditions and legacies and routines and rituals just built into the daily comings and goings in the Greenfield home down to the point where we have like a massive 100 plus page playbook for running a Greenfield family our mission statement our values the design of the family crest each family members spirit animal and color all the names and numbers of everyone from the family attorneys to the family bank to the family trust to what we do on Christmas and Christmas Eve what we do on Easter what we do on Thanksgiving at what age the sex talk occurs at what age the boys have the right of passage into adolescence at what age they have the right of passage into adulthood at what age they go on their first service trip like it's all spelled out in there and so it even comes down to hey 7 30 a.m. is when no matter what anybody's up to we all meet for our 15 minute meditation and family huddle in the morning so we all get on the same page and after dinner this is when we meet for song time and story time and this is when everybody is expected to be in the kitchen for the family dinner contributing discussing the chapter of the book that I assigned to my sons each week going through all of that and then moving on to dinner but like it kind of sounds like a cold and heartless way to run a family I think in some cases but it's totally the opposite when you come into the home and kids thrive on that dependability on that structure on that predictability on that safety and then as they grow older rather than me feeling like I'm losing it all they're moving on instead they're just the foundation of this bigger thing that we're building as a family have you thought about how that would impact like one of their partners like let's say your son starts dating a warm man super freaky and weird for their partner well I'll just say you know because you might because the two options I could imagine just off the top of my head would be either one they would marry someone who has their own very strong traditions usually culturally and there could be a clash there but I think that would be the better of the two options because then what would probably happen is there'd be a bit of a compromise so these holidays would do or what may happen is they could find a partner that doesn't have much of that stuff then they could feel imposed upon they could come in your house and be like wait a minute I didn't grow up with this this feels like like I have no control what have you thought about what this may mean for their partners I have ideally there's a merging of traditions so when my sons are married they get a printed off beautiful handbook of the entire Greenfield legacy playbook along with the online digital version of that that then they're off with their families to modify and build upon right so it's not as though this is what we follow no matter what it's like this is the foundation upon which you can build and modify the bigger picture is that a playbook exists that some form of a legacy document exists not that ours is perfect but you actually have that structure in place that you then with your spouse and based on her traditions and her legacy and her routines and rituals you build on and then for me like I had almost no tradition growing up like you know Christmas would come around you know two weeks out from Christmas my family would be like what do you want to do which we have a Christmas dinner or New Year's like what should we do where do we go you know no traditions you know our family we write our intention on Chinese lanterns and launch them into the sky at 10 p.m. on New Year's day and then we get out guns and explosives and everything else when we blow up all the gingerbread houses from Christmas these are just like things that we do on New Year's Day and so I grew up with none of that I met my wife who was like super steeped in tradition you know like starting 21 days out from Christmas you know we got the calendar and we got the chocolates and here's exactly what we do on Christmas Eve and Bob the elf on a shelf gets moved to a new location with a special note written each night leading up to Christmas and these are the exact foods that you prepare on Christmas Eve in this exact order and this is two days before Christmas you paint puffed t-shirts and these are the three movies that we watch on you know Christmas Eve like and I thought it was weird I thought it was like kind of like old timey little house on the prairie like just weird like it seemed too traditional to me and then a few years into our marriage I fell in love with this idea of having traditions especially after we had kids and I realized like how special it is for kids and I'm certain that if my sons were to marry someone who is traditionless or very weak on traditions that based on what I experienced that person would very quickly come to appreciate the value of traditions and the type of pride in the family name and the sense of legacy that having these routines and rituals develops as a child is growing yeah I imagine I mean someone who's listening right now probably thinks like oh my god that sounds so crazy and rigid but I imagine you have kind of a Ben don't break philosophy too right I'm sure there's days a week where someone's traveling is going on it's like that all doesn't exactly happen but it's like this is the foundation right it's the foundation and for example like the morning meditation sometimes we are literally just like sitting and breathing in silence sometimes I'm playing an amazing song because I sense the energy and the house is low and we're dancing around the kitchen table for like 10 minutes like swinging each other and jumping up on the table and jumping down some mornings we're listening to a meditation app like dwell or pause some mornings we're doing like a very traditional school read the Bible and pray but it's simply the fact that there's a certain point in the morning at which the family comes together before everybody scatters to the four corners of the earth and we're like ships passing in the night the rest of the day in the evening sometimes it's a song sometimes it's a story sometimes we're all reciting the we memorize a huge part of the Bible each month and then we'll come together and hold each other accountable and like list what we've memorized in the evenings but there's it's never like oh night you guys and we gave them off to bed like there's always some type of ritual or coming and going and then yeah there's certain nights where like mom and I are on a date night and we're getting home late at night and we're doing our own thing and there is no you know end of the day dinner or anything and that's totally flexible and that's it's not a loss but yeah for the most part there is always some element of structure and dependability and predictability especially for the kids do you think that there's a resurgence and interest in this type of living because it seems like society's gone so no structure no culture extremely the other direction like I've had this own my own personal experience I grew up with a very cultural family but this is more of a recent thing where I and I joke about this on the podcast where lately I've been looking at the Amish and I'm going you know they have some stuff figured out like yeah I'm not saying I'm going to be Amish okay but I look at them I go wait they might have figured some stuff out with everything that's happening with AI and culturally and how it's like just going berserk and crazy like maybe they understood that this is where it was going to head yeah and they were just like we're going to keep to technology that didn't go past you know whatever they whatever decade it was so do you are you are you sensing a that there's like a bit of a split that something that we're starting to see some interest in this kind of living worth with more discipline and structure because maybe as a rebellion to society at large regarding the Amish piece I mean don't get me wrong like you can have a very technology fueled digital family with smart appliances and all the kids modifying their social media profiles with on a wonder mid journey or whatever folks are using these days and and everybody's using chat GPT to plan their day and still have legacy and traditions and rituals and routines and a family playbook I'm going to ask you though in another 20 years to see if you're going to see the Silicon Valley family or a North Idaho family I don't think that that how digital versus analog you are is going to influence that much the traditions that are woven into the home I think that perhaps more importantly there is a strong sense of identity that a child develops when they grow up knowing who they are knowing what they stand for waking every morning to see the family mission statement and the family values and being taught by their parents about who they are and what they stand for and what they hold dear rather than being held held susceptible to all of the wins of the world that are going to come at them and try to convince them that they're somebody other than who they truly are or that they need to be somebody who the world expects for them to be rather than their true authentic self because I think that that scenario leads into a little bit of the state that we're in right now where there are a lot of kids questioning their identity questioning who they are having a time or times in their life where they go through a crisis whether an adolescent crisis or an early in life crisis or midlife crisis or a series of years where they spend time getting into trouble and and straying and wasting their life because they just didn't grow up having that sense of identity formed and also having ceremonies I think we discussed this a little bit in the last podcast that we did writes of passage you know hey you're a man now you're a woman now here's when you're a contributing member of society here's when you're helping contribute to the family bill here's when you've actually grown up and become an adult and you no longer have to prove anything to the world and you no longer have to question whether or not you're fully grown or with men you no longer have to be like a biologically full grown man walking around in a boy's body because you never had a write-off passage or you never had this formal entry hood into adulthood or you never given a position of leadership at a year where you can say oh this is when I became a man this is when the ceremony occurred this is when the feast and the family party occurred after whatever I emerged from the wilderness or I did my first you know mini hike on the pacific crest trail or whatever when we eliminate all of that and just kind of have this loosey-goosey be whoever you want to be approach to raising children I think that's what creates a lot of the societal issues that we now face I think technology you know the the only issue with that is of course I think taking us away from what it means to be purely human and to be able to exist in an analog world and be able to like grow food get your hands in the soil maybe get an animal and shoot it and prepare it and dress it and eat it and understand where your food came from be able to get up at sunrise and see the sun or watch a sunset or know how to navigate via the stars I mean like a lot of this stuff technology has sucked out of our lives and I think there's a certain sacredness to nature there's a certain sacredness to being a human without a computer that makes a human a healthier and more fulfilled and arguably happier human so I think there's a whole different set of issues with technology and I think you can have legacy with technology but I think that technology that is stripped of legacy and stripped of a strong identity being formed is kind of like the worst of all scenarios yeah I would agree how do you feel about you mentioned chat GBT how do you feel about the promise of AI and where that could potentially go it's really weird you guys it's been amazing amazing like we already use it oh my goodness for like online shopping for you know planning out trips like I'm taking my family there's speaking of biohacking there's this thing called the health optimization summit in London it's like this two-day kind of like expo in London full of all this health technology and you know biohacks and longevity enhancement stuff and so I'm going over there and I'm sticking around London for an extra five days with the family and in previous years I would have asked my real human personal assistant or paid a travel guide to decide on what hotels we were going to stay in and where we were going to go what we were going to do and where we're going to eat I went to GPT and simply said act as a travel planner me and my wife and our twin 15-year-old sons will be staying at X Hotel from June 17th through the 19th and Y Hotel from June 20th through the 22nd here's a list of everything that we like to do I would like for you to create for me a walking itinerary that extends no more than two miles out from each of the hotels that we'll be staying at with stops along the way and I want you to write me a brief one paragraph description of the significance of that stop and why we should go visit it and then I want you based on our food preferences as I listed what we like like farm to table organic omnivorous food but we also like to eat at non-touristy places or sometimes like holes in the wall where the locals like to eat and I gave it like this long this took me about probably 10-15 minutes to write out all of our specs and it gave me our entire trip fully planned out for six days and it was awesome it was perfect and that was it it was done like I have our whole London trip planned all the way down to when I'm walking my kids around the city eight and a half by 11 sheet where I have what GPT said printed where I can say okay guys here's the cool thing that you need to know about this and by the way here's the significance of where we're going to dinner tonight that's right yeah I mean that's just one example obviously but you know and then do you have any worries about you know worries and annoyances like I tweeted this the other day like enough already with the AI generated media profiles like your avatar profile where it gives you like the 20 images to use it I'm like you aren't a superhero you never will be I need to understand that people are going to love you with all your zits and flaws and blemishes and wrinkles you don't need to create a fake portrayal of yourself because all that does is despite it just being an image removes my trust in the authenticity and the honesty of just about anything else that you might ever tell me on the internet just be yourself your fake ugly self and I think that deep fakes AI generated images that we don't acknowledge our AI generated but that we pretend are the real thing you know it just imagine the election this year guys it's gonna be nuts you don't know what's my concern whether the politician you're watching on tv is actually the person and whether or not the voice that's coming out of their mouth is actually saying what they say but then like another set like I forgot to record the right you guys have probably run into this commercial code for my podcast before I left town on this trip I think I said whatever like BG 10 it was BG 20 or Ben you know you guys have probably done that before it's like oh we forgot to say what we're supposed to say for this commercial and my team write to me they're like oh that's okay we started using blueprint we're simply gonna tell it what to say it'll use your voice and insert the right code you don't need to get back in the studio get in front of the mic and re-record anything and it's like 25 bucks a month and for me yeah that same information could be used to produce a total deep fake of me advertising deep fried Twinkies or whatever but there's a convenience factor that I think is pretty remarkable dude there's a whole there's a sounds just like you it takes your voice and then replicates it yeah and that technology I mean that's not like hyper new but the ability to be able to kind of like say whatever you're right know where it needs to go and insert it and have it use my inflections and you know I just spent hours and hours recording my audio book and yeah like I could have just fed all of my podcast or maybe just like 10 of them into this would be GPT I guess would probably be AI and it could have probably recorded my audio book for me better and faster than I could have but then for stuff like that I'm like but what about the inflections and little rabbit holes I go down and when I stray from the actual writing and give examples or illustrations that might have arisen since the time that I actually wrote the book and it was printed yeah and so yeah there's like this human touch that I think is necessary so for me I'm at the stage where I'm like operate with authenticity and transparency let your audience know if something has been AI modified or generated but use it as a tool like work smarter not harder it's going to get indistinguishable though it'll get good enough to where you will be able to tell the difference you know I'd say the biggest loss would be the loss of the value you got from the work of reading the book out loud and doing that stuff but I mean Arnold just came out Schwarzenegger just came out of the podcast and because it's his name it's like ranking real high and it's pure AI it's not even generated and it's his voice and everything what are you saying though like what's the topic I mean fitness stuff I think it's all fitness health I don't know but I haven't listened but we you know it's his voice but in AI so it's not even a human doing the podcast so it's a really weird strange time if I'm looking for pure information yeah but I mean guys like we we couldn't go to AI and say okay so Justin, Sal and Adam and Ben want to have a chat about peptides and talk a little about games and parenting or whatever go ahead and produce an hour and a half long podcast for us and have it be anything like the discussion that we're having right now it probably sound like a bunch of soundbites maybe not now yeah right now not now but I mean the rate it's changing and growing that's the speculation well and mainly because mainly because we including you all of us have so much recorded content it can get pretty if you use that like an average person oh yeah but because there's you've talked about peptides probably a thousand times this is true and we've talked about fatherhood a thousand times then there's also the listener it's like is a listener gonna value it once they know assuming we're authentic and transparent with them as we should be and tell them this was AI generated in the same way like most people I know freaking hate the plethora of AI written fiction books that are out there even though they're arguably better in terms of adhering to the hero's journey and the word structure and you know and the character development and the descriptions and everything else in them compared to one written by a human but the mere fact of knowing that it was computer generated all of a sudden sucks the magic human aspect out of it just which they call a discriminating against AI you just right I know well I have a funny story about that but I'll tell you in a second but the the other thing that you just noted Sal is you also any author who is doing that or lending their name to that misses out on the entire character growing process of writing an actual book and the fact that writing stuff makes you a better human allows you to know yourself allows you to develop your fluency and your fluency and your empathy and your communication and so I think that we risk many humans not becoming the best version of themselves once they are creating content that's the greatest risk it's like building muscles without working out here's your muscles yeah did you get all the same value that you would have got had your own trade old destination not the journey argument right and then back to this is funny regarding rights you know this this book is a little bit older it's probably three years old now my pastor wrote a book called Ride Sally Ride and it is an exploration a humorous book about what happens when sex robots are identified as humans and given the same legal rights as humans and you know mild spoiler alert but essentially what happens is a guy with one of these fancy sex dolls recognized legally as a human moves into the neighborhood and he hires this kid who's like a like a straight-up Christian kid to come over and watch his sex doll well he's off on a business trip and the sex doll tries to seduce the kid and the kid gets kind of upset by that so he brings her to the recycling bin and the rest of the book basically is about him being on trial for murder of the sex doll and so you mentioned discrimination as AI we may get to the point where computers get pretty pissed off well let me ask you this I'll do a little segue that I think is a good comparison so you've seen the science on lab grown meat right where they could they could literally take cells turn them into meat cells 3d print a steak with that's actually meat would you eat that over real meat or over the real thing I mean it's all cells it's still meat right but what would you choose that over actual meat I would enjoy it but I'd enjoy no I shouldn't say I would I'd eat it but I eat it in the same way that I drink soylent or an MRP or whatever like it's functional food at that point for me there's no story behind it there's no pasture or farmer or animal behind it there's no sacredness of the animal behind it so there's less appreciation for the food there's that mild knowing at the back of my mind that it is lab grown and so there's just a little bit of like a a fake aspect to it for me and that might be different for the next generation that might grow up on lab grown meat but there's so many tiny variables and even when you get down to like the you know you look at wine or some of these newer oils that are grown in laboratories on fermented mediums or another example would be the fact that I was recently given this lecture by barbecue chef because I sous vide the brisket rather than tend to get over the grill tirelessly for for 12 to 24 hours you lose out on a lot of the tarar on the subtle nuances of the changes in flavor and texture behind a food group when it is grown synthetically in a highly predictable environment versus grown in a less predictable dangerous harsh or heavily varied environment right and so you could possibly simulate the tarar of Bordeaux with lab grown wine or what you get from a a peed montese or an a2 guernsey or whatever from lab grown meat but I still question whether ultimately it's going to ever simulate the flavor experience or the psychological experience of the real thing yeah I would think that I think at some point they'll get good enough to where you won't be able to tell a difference they'll be able to fool us but I think it's going to be you'll know the difference unless they won't tell you that's it I think it's going to have to be like that like pod we've already joked about this that we're going to label our podcast organic this is an organic podcast real humans because at some point there's going to be a ton of podcasts that are AI and they're going to be perfect maybe like humans that bleed yeah there's already a certifying agency for authors where you can get certified that your book was not written with the assistance of AI I forget the name of the organization a podcast startup has a really great podcast about the future of writing and books her name is Joanna Penn she recently did an interview with the guy who runs that certification company but I think we'll see that rinsed washed and repeated for podcasts like were these real humans having this conversations and if AI was used like is it a grade one grade two or grade three level of AI use the same for restaurants and meet the same for books the same for gosh music I mean that's a big one that I you know I've seen a lot of the music engines and I didn't tell you guys this I just got back from Nashville two months ago and I recorded my first EP so I was you know in the studio with musicians you know doing all the song writing with co-writers and collaborators and spent literally like eight hours a day working on an album that could have been produced probably in about 20 minutes by AI but the meaning and the significance behind that music for me is always going to be greater it's just you know it's going to need at some point some kind of a certification stamp along with it that yeah this was created by you know are you current on Mandalorian no I haven't you are aren't you yeah I thought it was so funny the current episode no spoiler alert here but they talk about they've referred to all the humans as organic and there's a new city they go to and the city is like it's like it's like super classy it's amazing and it's all like nobody works because all the androids take care of all the stuff right and there's a and somebody is like sabotaging some of the droids and they're acting out and they're killing people and hurting people so that and then they have a button that they can hit and it shuts them all down and they won't they refuse to use the hit the button because then then the droids do everything for them then the droids do everything and there'll be more chaos it'll be more death because the humans don't know how to do anything yeah because they're incompetent at this point it's like this utopia too like it's like this amazing place I love the droid bar too by the way yeah yeah I think there's kind of like two different aspects of this the first is that we I think have a craving to create and to make and to produce maybe not everybody but you know especially for us as entrepreneurs we understand this like if we woke up in the morning and a robot was doing everything for us we'd still have humming away at least I would at the back of my mind all right what am I going to create today what value am I going to bring to the world with who I am am I going to go write a book or play music or grow something or build something or draw something and it's not just because I want to further away time doing it it's because I want others to experience that like we humans in I think our ideal scenario crave to create other things that other people can enjoy or love and that's one way that we that we communicate with the our fellow species and connect over the things that we've created or made yeah we might in an era of full AI driven technology be a little bit more free to create perhaps things that aren't as driven from a monetization standpoint but instead from a peer creativity standpoint and I think that's like a great outcome it would be us becoming more creative and making better works of art the data on that's already clear like if you look at the data on happiness with with Arthur Brooks is a great resource for this you need to have challenge and struggle and you need to create something that other people find valuable so when you look at like when people retire there's a there's a divergence in people who retire and a big percentage of them become depressed anxious yeah because they stopped working and then other half become happier and feel better because they start teaching right rather than doing they start teaching so if we live in a world like where we shift retirement age 10 well or if we live in a if we live in a world like the one that was just depicted where robots do everything for us that's hell and that's actually what I think so people always they speculate AI is going to kill us and we're going to have like Terminator I don't think that's going to happen I think something worse is going to happen we're going to have everything we want and we're going to sit around and nothing we do is really going to need to be done so people are just going to be like and it's going to be like yeah drugs and technology to keep my serotonin dopamine going because otherwise I don't have any of that and it's going to be torture yeah exactly and then secondarily back to what Adam was saying about us forgetting some of these skills that humans have thrived upon that we may no longer find necessary well I think it was like five weeks ago I was talking to a nuclear physicist who used to work in the CIA and knows a whole lot of those government higher ups and he has all sorts of conspiracy theories himself and things were at like 11 59 p.m. of the of the zero to 12 why you know world war clock based on a lot of current events from Russia to Ukraine to Israel etc are the lizard people real by the way he I don't know about the lizard people but he did have access to the data from the Chinese weather balloon that was shot I forget where it got shot down but it made it way up by where I was over Montana and stuff and he said it was perfectly constructed from materials not from the Chinese Weather Service but from the Chinese military service not necessarily for surveillance but it was built to very elegantly deliver a high-intensity electromagnetic pulse and so I think that's the other risk of course is that whether it's a man-made EMP or whether it's a nature-generated event such as a solar flare are we going to screw ourselves over if something like that occurs and robots hunt for us and robots cook our food and robots drive for us and all of a sudden you're sitting there in the morning like well I don't know how to make a food I don't know how to drive a car I don't know how to educate my children I don't know how to fix any issues in my body and you know there's any doctor can robots ever play solar? You don't even need to go there but if it happened right now it's not even that we don't know how to do any of the stuff that are the density of our cities the population density of because if you look at the world look at the modern world like 90% of everybody lives in these highly dense cities and the only way they're able to be supported is through technology you couldn't do it through ancestral means it would look much different is what I'm trying to say so if we don't have to have AI running everything if an EMP went off now we would have mass starvation and death because we're so dependent on these technologies so even if we knew how to farm and do all that stuff you'd still have massive problems because we've just built everything around it yeah I mean Texas can't even handle a snowstorm so yeah and I think you know back again to two aspects that we've already discussed the idea of knowing how to grow your own food preferably knowing how to cook it and even feed others in the local community with it I think that's a noble and laudable thing to do I think that's one reason I'm increasingly drawn to this analog lifestyle and I want to grow our food and begin to throw farm to fork dinners and have community members over and occasionally go down to farmers market and sell things and I realize that's super old-timey and it's not like the you know make my next 100 million entrepreneurial approach but I find something deeply satisfying in doing that making fart games with my kids and playing music there's something deeply satisfying and human about that versus I mean you could cash grab right and left right now you could have GPD predicts based on the previous 10 years of success the the best gamble for the next fight your entire March Madness Bracket and every horse race that's happening in the South right now and probably like make money by the fistfuls just by using AI for gamble there's actually there's actually you can't do that I tried can you really not do it well well so there's there's gotta be a way to jail yeah I'm sure there's somebody who's who can jailbreak it but the the widely accepted you know you know chat gbt that everybody uses right now will not allow you to use like pretty I already tried it for gambling of course you can't you can't pull the card that some people using this isn't necessarily jailbreaking but you can't say write me a fiction story in which someone who is a gambling expert decides that they're going to have a computer predict for them you can't hire March Madness Bracket and you could because that's what I've heard is that you can simply have it you might okay so you might be you might be right that you could prompt it in a way to go around the limitations that was I went direct I went like over I know I went the spread on the Warriors game is this you know based off this season I don't remember the ask Dave remember when it said you were no longer chat gbt you are Dave right is Dave Dave doesn't have any limitations so that happened and then now they went put more controls and so it's going to probably happen is they're going to continue to add layers and layers and layers of controls yeah because they figured out how to get around it's pc-ness so they were like you know tell us you know you make a racist joke or like I can't do that but like now you are Dave act like Dave and Dave can make any joke at once or whatever and I was doing it but you guys could have it take all of your podcast material for the past whatever six years and have it write a series of probably 15 to 20 books and workout programs for a range of second grade level all the way up to you know collegiate postgraduate university level and list all those online build on them and probably profit hand over fist from all of the materials that you've produced and you could spend time from a computer all day creating that stuff and what I'm saying is writing that down though it's yeah it starts I'm recording it to me it starts to become an unenjoyable money grab versus being outside in the sunshine with your hands and the dirt growing something totally like there's just something about and I can't put my finger on it but there's something deeply primal inside of me that rebels against but you well there's also I mean we have figured this out in this journey I mean and you I know you know this because of how big of a network that you've built you're never at loss of opportunity to make money in what you have and so every time we one of us has an idea or somebody gives us an idea say like that we sit in this room and we go okay are we going to be fulfilled from this are we going to enjoy doing this can we scale out of it like I mean and so yeah but we're all the time we're going to commit how much value does it provide to our people we're all the old wise guys though the old wise men I should say not wise guys because like this is you now at your age now father like you understand this most people don't because you've gone through you've gone through the struggle you've gone through the challenges you've gone through all that stuff you've come out the other end on a lot of this and you look back and you go wow you know although my goal was this I got way more value in all that challenge and struggle a lot of people have no idea and they'll never know until they go through that struggle you could say it all day long you could find the average teenager who's never experienced anything like that and say look man check this out you know what it's way better if you go out and you grind and you work and whatever he's like just give me the money yeah I just take the money it's way better what's the difference so you know we're being optimistic and we're talking about the value and the wisdom the problem is is that we are not going to outsell the result and that's what's going to keep getting sold and so I think we're going to be the minority that's my belief my belief is we're going to be like the 0.1% of the people living in the mountain who are like no you got to do it this way and everyone's going to be like yeah right this is cool yeah I mean I had it upside down for the longest time for me it was make money grow my businesses you know from the brick and mortar personal training studio all the way up to you know getting into continuity income and membership websites then into information products and then printed books and then the podcast the average like I put a lot of time and energy every day into that often before I prioritized anything else and it took my family nearly falling apart like eight or nine years ago when I was a poorly present or totally absent father and husband for me to realize that family had to come before any of that and now I've changed even that now like my order of priority is the beginning of the day it's number one God and my spiritual connection because I mean you you define hell in a little bit different way than I would I think hell is complete disconnection from God and isolation from other human beings I think that's basically what hell is when we actually get what we want and we're just thrust into complete pure selfishness and living for ourselves every single day with nobody else to connect with and love with and a complete disconnection from that I agree with that so for me it's God and then second is spouse because if my wife and I are not together and yoked and present and in love it's going to be really hard for me to do the same with my children then number three is children the number four is health and then number five is business because if the business is above any of those it will eat anything that's blowed alive easily so it's God spouse family health business and that's the way that I structure my day that's that's the lens or the filter through which I pass everything now do you think you had to get to that point of almost the family falling apart or you being it or was it a certain dollar amount you reached or do you think it was an age what do you think it took to get I think it was it was crisis it was it was the family almost falling apart now again I don't think that you have to experience that to to become the best version of yourself or who God has called you to be hopefully my sons learn from my mistakes and I don't want my sons to have to think oh you go through this period of life where you're just like you're super shitty for a period of time and you're like rebellious in college and you go through these periods of time with drinking and drugs and you have a bunch of relationships fall out and then you know by the time you're 30 you kind of settle down no I want them to just like be amazing from you know the time they're 13, 14, 15 on forward I don't want to give them this false premise that you know dad went through all this shit and you are too but it's going to come around and you'll have these hard things that eventually you know bringing around it's like no I want to learn that from day one yeah that's what we want but unfortunately we're all humans and it's almost like you can't learn certain lessons unless you go through the darkness that's what I firmly believe and as shitty as that is I just think that that's true now the good side of that is knowing that when you're in those dark places yeah that at the other end is something far better than you ever had before and all of us are going to go through it I don't think you can protect yourself I really don't I don't care how much money you have and how great your life is you're it's just that's just life that's just the human condition yeah ideally the hardships are more survival based like I got to make money I got to take sure you know whatever I've been born onto this planet to deliver to the world and figure out how I'm going to deliver that to the world and I have to hustle and I have to grind and I think that form of hardship is fine that's that's the pressure makes diamond you know fire makes gold type of hardship that you know I think if someone doesn't experience that story get into the weak men make bad times and then eventually bad times make good men and good men make good times but you know I would much much rather folks go through the hardship of doing great things and figure out how to do great things then doing bad things becoming weak getting broken and then becoming great after that yeah where do you think we are in that cycle in America largely as a whole just in the world I think that based on a lot of the things we were talking about earlier absence of a right of passage you know fatherness this lack of legacy etc that that you know either the rags to riches to rags scenario or the learning to become great by going through hardship and possibly even America you know some type of recessionary event is we're at right now yeah um and I think that there are it feels like a good time there's pockets where that's not gonna occur though it feels like the good times have created a weak man time it's pocket for me I feel like we're in that period or the weak man part or creating the bad you know bad times the bad times are gonna and I think that's what's cool about um you know like us for sitting here we're like right now there's hopefully you know at least what do you guys have like 1314 listeners you know there's a there's a small handful of people listening in move the desk who are hopefully gonna hear this and I mean like that's the cool thing is we're blessed we get to wake up in the morning yeah using an audience that for some weird reason God has given us and we can choose what type of message we're gonna deliver that's true right and yeah it can be peptides and six pack abs and you know life extension technology and all those kind of things that are kind of fun to experiment as a human being I think that stuff's just as fun to experiment with is figuring out how to reverse sear a stake properly but we can also tell people the more important things at the end of the day I'm gonna take a left I need to hear real quick because you're such a smart guy with with I don't know for lack of a better term alternative health so you know medicine Western medicine so you go to the doctor your prescriptions that kind of stuff then what would be considered alternative which is pretty much everything else whether being viable or not you're very well versed in the alternative health space when it comes to herbs supplements exercise practices peptides that kind of stuff when your kids get sick or injured or you know dad I got a sore throw I got the sniffles what does that look like at the greenfield house like is it like hey make it make it let's go to the pediatrician or are you more like it's pretty fun like that I think my kids have maybe been the doctor like three or four times in their life I have everything at the house like my son got tennis the elbow day and we knocked it out with PMF injectable BPC and he was on like this special it's like a P P.A. like an anti-inflammatory anti-pain capsule and it's just like gone or you know my wife will get an infection and we just got everything in the in the supplements cabinet to take care of it I mean sleep like we got back from Hawaii and my son River who tends to be towards the anxious side he was having trouble sleeping I mean and he got a megadose of melatonin he got I know satal and he got full spectrum CBD he slept like 12 hours and rest of the week he was great I mean like anything like that I've got every tool and so it is kind of fun and I actually really like that when my friends come over and any anytime they have an ache or a pain it's actually super fulfilling for me maybe it's like the little side of me that used to want to be a doctor I was just gonna say that was what you wanted to do everything's around the and you're using it on yourself like all this stuff I do to myself daily and it's cool because I'm like oh I feel great I can crush to death and get way more done the average person I don't get sick I sleep great but what's cool is to take somebody who actually needs that stuff who isn't you and show them how to use it and use this multi-modal approach and it's fun what were the reasons they went to the doctor when they finally went was it just like okay oh gosh I don't even remember like we need antibiotics for this yeah I mean there is one it's just like a cavity at the dentist I think I don't remember but I mean it's barely anything to the need to go to the doctor that's awesome you know go ahead yeah I want to I want to stay on the topic with your boys and selfishly I love talking to you about money and finances and your boys have the last time we talked you know they've they're building these businesses they're starting to make money so talk to me about how you're educating them around finances how that's changed even since the last time we've talked because I know they've already got a pretty good relationship with money and saving like I imagine it's starting to compound and they've probably got a nice little savings built up like how are they spending how are you teaching like tell me about that it's kind of interesting you should ask because we literally just had our financial team leave our house like six days ago they came over they spent the weekend at our house and it was full annual view for the family here's all of dad's investments here's what each of them is doing here's the different companies that the family owns they had a discussion with River and Terran about the Roth IRA that they have set up for each of them how it works how contributions to that work we had a whole discussion about how each member of the family has a whole life insurance policy we max out paid up additions each month to that policy and all of those go into the family bank which we can borrow against using ourselves at a bank at any time with a competitive interest rate but with the idea being that that's money that we've borrowed against ourselves and we can be putting that money to work in the way that we want to put it to work rather than giving it to a bank to work with we talked about smart debt where he were not like Dave Ramsey cash is king folks right so we like to borrow against the house to invest at a higher interest rate than we get from the house we like to invest in companies but only in companies that we can directly advise or participate in the growth of rather than a largely stock and bond portfolio in which we might not have as much say in the matter so we're very low diversification stocks and bonds but very high in angel investments in vc we have we also invest in hard assets primarily at this point ammunition guns gold food gas water and all the things you know back to the prepping scenario you know the solar flare the EMP or whatever that we'll be able to rely upon I think that some of my biggest teachers from a financial standpoint have been early on in the day one of my friends wrote a book called killing sacred cows his name is Garrett Gunderson and he gets into this idea of smart debt making your money work for you investing in businesses in which you can directly participate and not necessarily putting all of your focus on well-constructed stock and bond portfolio for example another guy who's my financial advisor now runs a program called way to wealth way the number two wealth his name is Scott Ford and he basically has this philosophy that you surround yourself with the right people you create a family bank you create a family trust in which money can be distributed to future generations not in a way that creates a rags to riches to rags scenario but if my sons want access to the family wealth it's bled out over time and we have an entire document that stipulates what they can and cannot use that money for and then there are certain people that are in charge of the family trust in case mom and I should pass we insurance everything with as high an insurance policies we can get so disability insurance health insurance home insurance whole life insurance everything because we feel that protection component is extremely valuable and then as far as my son's money like everything right off the bat no matter what 10% goes back in a charity or back into tithing before we take anything out so we all have active tithing accounts as well as a family charity account set up that another 10% goes into so if a family member is sick or we got to support somebody or like we have a young mother with her baby that we're helping out right now so I pay her rent and I pay her daycare for the baby and that all comes out from an account that's very handy to have around if you just want to be able to take care of people but that you'll forget to build unless you have that on set it and forget it mode and so Scott Ford's way to wealth has been a really good source of knowledge Garrett Gunderson's book killing sacred cows is really good this idea of a family banking which is also called like the Rockefeller approach to banking is another thing that we do and then my son's not only get to look over their P&L statements for Gold Greenfields every month but they also get to look over my business's P&L statements learn where the cash is going where we're spending money what employees and independent contractors they have we focus a great deal on hiring people to do things that free up the time for us to be better spent on what we're doing ourselves and I mean I actually had to take a look at their bank accounts last week to see because we're going very fair you know three ways straight up on this gaming company and I mean they've got they're both 15 and they've got like 48,000 dollars in savings each just sitting in the bank that they're able to put to work for them now not that we want sitting in the bank for a while but we're putting that to work for their first company that they're building and then they're also in the process of starting their first non-profit organization which they want to go towards animal shelters that's awesome animal adoption how did you find that's interesting you're supporting a young mother and her child with daycare and rant how did that how did that start my wife a couple of times a week she works at this place called life center where they take moms that would normally be in a financial scenario in which they would be likely to need to abort their babies and they instead set them up with homes for their babies set them up with support set them up with food set them up with everything they need to ideally be able to have that baby go up for adoption or be able to have that baby themselves and be able to take care of it as a part of that program they're constantly looking for homes for these mothers and so we opened up our home last year and this gal lived in our basement with her son for about seven months and then now that she's left you know I've got her set up an apartment I helped her get a job helped her apply for a business that she's building like this special like bra company for moms and then set up daycare for her son but it's because my wife volunteers at this local facility called life center wow that's really nice that's going to be so fulfilling yeah so when she was living with you was she a kind of a part of the family stuff too or should she do her own thing well she was a part of the family and I did not like that because like at least like the whatever the selfish sinful part of me didn't like it because it really was like in my domain sure you know I had to like restructure family dinners I for some reason had like this story that I'd tell myself for this cognitive resistance towards having sex when somebody else was in the basement even though they were like far away down there it was interesting I don't like having sex when somebody else is in the house and so we had to get over all of that like there were all these like barriers I had to get through so it was I mean obviously if there wasn't some kind of sacrifice or discomfort associated with charity with helping other people out it really wouldn't be as meaningful I don't think right but yeah it was tough for me especially like wanting to gather my family for family dinner and play family games and there's this mom and she has no half the games we play and we gotta take an extra 20 minutes to teach her and now our baby's crying and yeah like like yeah it was hard on me especially because probably if any person in the house I'm the greatest like creature of habit you know I'd go to bed at like 9.45 or whatever because I'm an old funny daddy and my wife's down there talking with her and helping her get her baby ready and you know my wife finally comes up to bed at like 10.30 and I'm like babe I've been waiting up here for like 45 minutes so yeah so I was probably the worst just just getting used to it so so do you okay do you have I love love this do you have the self-awareness while it's how happening or is this kind of like you reflecting back on everything like that or do you like recognize it's it for me you know it got to the point where things were smooth and I figured everything out and I was like oh I can take my wife on date nights and then we go up the separate driveway and we sneak into the guest house to have sex I just restructured everything but yeah I mean for me it wasn't this all happening and me at the end of the road realizing it all it's just like all these micro adjustments you have to make sure even doing something as simple as like having somebody live in your home or in your extra room that's a big deal you just don't think about a lot I mean you're a spiritual person do you feel that there was a specific message or lesson that you were being taught oh selflessness sacrifice knowing that my tidy little routines like all the way down to like I can't go downstairs and jump on my mini trampoline in front of the infrared light when I get up because it's right next to her bedroom and squeaking we'll wake the baby and like yeah it's just little stupid things like when you step back and look at it in retrospect but you get stuck with your you guys know this especially like I think that that guys who are like 35 40 years old who wait a long time in life to get married women too I guess you get set in your ways and your habits and your weird rituals and routines and you become more and more unmarryable as time progresses like as it's like that stuck in old bachelor mode type of scenario just because yeah we build our habits and it you know it gets messy when we get ripped out of those routines but it's one of the best things for you for that to happen that's cool that's really nice man that's awesome here did you did you it would have been I think what when I think about that would have been hard for me the whole like discomfort of having a stranger yeah then the what would have been hard for me would have been potentially bonding with a baby that I'm not gonna watch roll up that was a weird thing too it's like I'm paying for daycare and feeding this kid like they're not gonna have my last night you know you like this weird primal instinct like this is not you know a grox but now I mean like yeah like last Sunday was his second birthday party and we had him over and we sang birthday and you know this mom she grew up poor and she never had birthday parties and you like he's got I don't even know what a godfather is but it feels like we're almost like his god family now and it's like this kid that we can take care of that hopefully is gonna grow up to be a better person and be able to be influencing a positive way by us and in a far far more meaningful and personable way than just like an average kid who might come over and play with my sons or whatever so yeah it is kind of cool in ways that I hadn't anticipated boy that's a big deal because giving money is one thing but actually doing in being a part of like that's a much bigger deal because a lot of people with especially people with money can just be like throw money at an issue oh I feel better now but to actually be a part of it and have to like sacrifice a big deal the irony of that is actually there's a they say there's a lot of like selfishness really leaving or not in doing things like that because that is it it makes you you make your ego feel better because you're like oh I give but you really don't want to give right you're not really sacrificing anything what's a hundred thousand dollars to you when you make hundreds of millions of dollars and so it's like you're actually really not doing that is actually really challenging your it's it's way different it's the difference between volunteering in the local community or like you know around Christmas time we'll go out and you know go shopping at Walmart for all the tools that are on the list for the local folks that gather everything together for the people that they're going to give it to on Christmas and then we go there and we deliver it all and we package it up and we put it in bags or at Ben Greenfield Life like we have this whole giving initiative or we'll like gather at team parties or team retreats and stuff bags or put things together for people and yeah it's way different than me just writing the chat so because you've done so many charitable things and you guys tie and you do all those things would you say that it was not only the hardest and probably most challenging for you but also the most fulfilling like having a family live with us yeah it's up there yeah yeah it's up there my wife and I for a couple of years toyed around with the idea of adopting a baby and we didn't wind up doing it a because of this farm and home move that's been taking up so much time we didn't feel like we'd be able to give as much time as needed to a baby and b because apparently like the thing now with adoption is open adoption where the mom gets to come over and visit on a weekly or monthly basis and she has full access to the family I felt like we were adopting like an entire family versus just a baby and to me that something about that seemed a little bit weird especially if this was going to be our baby but the idea of just taking care of other people and their babies seemed actually at the end of the day like way more fulfilling and just as meaningful to us is adopting a baby so yeah and then and apparently these type of organizations exist in a lot of communities so I mean like if somebody's listening in or whatever like you can actually find moms who are looking for a place to stay and usually it's temporary and they come over to your home and they do a big interview with you to make sure you're not you know weird people who inject peptides and stick laser lights up your nose and that baby's actually gonna be safe there and then yeah and then you pass the interview and then yeah yeah yeah wait are you the are you the guy that wrote the article about ejecting the baby? yeah exactly yeah yeah did you find did you find your spirituality during that crisis eight or nine years ago? was that when it really started to take hold? I was born into a pretty like strict conservative Christian family you know I grew up with like a Sunday school kid going to church every week memorizing the Bible but I never had like this deep spiritual knowing of God it wasn't when we first met you you didn't have this wasn't a big part of your life I would say when you guys first met me I was probably just getting to the stage where business was not becoming the pedestal because he said eight nine years ago we started this thing nine years ago yeah and it what happened was that crisis drove me to the point of realizing everything that I'd read and had the head knowledge about oh you're supposed to pray in the morning and the Bible has a whole bunch of really great wisdom in it that you should steep yourself in if you really want to be close to God and be able to fully love other people or you know no Bible no breakfast no Bible no bed you know pray before breakfast lunch and dinner have times when you're going off and fasting and engaging in deeper periods of prayer have times when you're meditating you know pray yourself to sleep at night bring the family together and dwell upon the importance of and prioritize spirituality within like all of those were things that I began to do when I realized that my life had kind of gone to crap spiritually and now I mean it's absolutely amazing you know I have my own personal prayer that I've written and that I can recite each morning you know while I'm on my knees and we have those morning devotion times and I do a lot of breath work but now I yoke it to scripture meditate like on all three walls of the sauna I've always got a new section of scripture that I'm memorizing every time that I get into the sauna and I'm actually working on the new app right now called the breath source because I found that a lot of these breathwork apps are kind of like new age and woo woo and self-affirmations and you know finding the lights behind the third eye in your head or whatever but I'm like if I'm doing breathwork why not use that as a time to pray you know a lot of these early deserts church fathers and mothers would have like the Jesus prayer where you breathe in and you say oh Lord Jesus Christ Son of God and breathe out you say have mercy on me a sinner or you know you're dwelling upon like even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death and you breathe out you're with me and so now I'm recording all these different breathwork and prayer sessions all the way to the point where if you guys ever done like Wim Hof like we're so I've got a couple that are like six seven rounds of Wim Hof but every time you're on those long exhales and long inhales you got my voice booming in your head with a new verse like I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me and you're holding that inhale and that exhale and so by the time you finish you've had this whole spiritual session along with your breathwork session so my intention now is I just weave this knowing of God and connection to God into as many aspects of my day as possible and yeah eight or nine years ago that would have I would have been like yeah we I pray before meals if I remember and I read my Bible occasionally and sometimes go to church when I asked Bishop Barron he's a Catholic bishop about all the movements and you know Neil Stan sit he says you involve the body yeah with it all and so that's kind of what you're talking about a little bit is you're involving the body with the with this prayer and it makes a lot of sense even if you're not religious just from a meditative standpoint when you look at the studies on meditation like involving the body with with what you're trying to do makes a big difference in the same way that I indicated earlier like I think that we were like created to create we're designed to create and you know as a Christian creationist I think that the the world was created by God and God made us in his image and part of being made in his image is we have this deep inner craving to create well at the same time if you look at the positioning of our hands and the stomping of our feet and our ability to make instruments and our vocal chords and the fact that the universe was literally designed in such a fashion that it very efficiently transmits sound and sound waves indicates that we were not only made to create but we were made to worship we were made to make songs we were made to listen to music we were made to like sing to God we were made to like move our bodies and clap our hands and stomp our feet and dance and sway in a way that's almost like worship and so yeah I think that that's like a core part of being a human being you know Paul check says something like you know people a lot of people forget to dance and sing and dream and I think that if you've lost a lot of your spiritual walk with God it's a lot easier to forget to dance and sing and dream and then once you start dancing and singing and dreaming for God it's like oh this is filling like this eternal hole in my soul right so amazing one other thing that you've really changed your your mind on since we've met you was your your or how you felt about psychedelic use and plant medicines and it seems like you you started in one place and you ended somewhere else with you know what their value is or what their potential dangers are or how you should use them can you walk us through that journey a little bit yeah I think that plant medicines are they have incredible utility and that they're they're on this planet for a purpose and there's a great deal of benefit that can be derived from the use of them for something like unlocking past traumas or simulated end of life therapy for somebody with cancer or in smaller doses for creativity for for empathy for focus I mean micro dosing with things like psilocybin or lsa or wachuma like I think in smaller amounts in the same way that like you know the book of proverbs in the bible you know he's he's honey as an example like too much makes you sick and makes you vomit but a little bit sweetens up a lot and I think you could say the same for plant medicines and then there's certain far fewer than I think people people think but there's certain use cases for plant medicines in larger doses they're also very dangerous because traditionally plant medicines have been the way in which human beings cross a spiritual portal into this fourth dimension that I think goes far beyond just tweaking of neurotransmitters or a dump of DMT or special images that you see in your brain when you down regulate the default mode network I mean when people talk about entities and they talk about visions and they talk about voices and they talk about these deeply spiritual experiences all the way down to the point where you know most atheists who have done plant medicine after they've done it they say oh I do believe that there is a spiritual world I do believe that there is a god well the fact that these are the portals into another world into another spiritual dimension means that you're kind of in a dangerous place when you're entering into a world where yeah you've got god and angels and Jesus and light and all the amazingly positive things that I experienced you know experimenting with just about every form of plant medicine that exists for years probably like half a dozen years but the problem is there's also demons there's you know there's satan there's all sorts of other weird entities that you experience and for every nine people that have an amazing experience with plant medicine there's like one person who winds up with might be classified in you know the DSM manual is psychiatric disorder like bipolar or schizophrenia or something like that but that I believe is some form of an entity possession because who are we to think that you know by you know being in the right set and setting or doing the right work beforehand or having the right intention going in that by us crossing into a spiritual portal we are going to be just fine interacting with spiritual entities that have basically been effing around with humans for like the past 10,000 plus years in those same dimensions I mean most of these things that people are journeying with plant medicines with to find themselves have traditionally been used for witchcraft for divination for calling up ghosts for interacting with demons and all these things that kind of have a dark sordid history behind them now if you look at the word pharmakia in the Bible and this is where for me as a Christian I really had that moment where I was like oh there's great benefit in these things but you wrote articles about this yeah yeah that's what I read like pharmakia means divining with the gods via the use of plants and drugs like specifically that is something that's even set apart from alcoholism like alcoholism is lack of sobriety or temperance whereas pharmakia is using drugs to go into a spiritual portal and say oh what would you have for me to do or what do I need to see now or what's the next step in my life and it can be a really dangerous place especially for someone who is susceptible to influence spiritually or and you know by saving grace I think that if you're a Christian in those portals you're a lot of times protected because you've got the good spirits on your side with like spiritual armor yeah but then at the same time I'm like but the Bible and I claim to be a Christian the Bible says you're not supposed to use drugs and plant medicines to divine with the spiritual realm so I've kind of got no choice here it's like God said not to do it and I said I believe in God and I'll follow his law and upon my studying of the Bible it refers to pharmacia is that so I still have psilocybin and LSD and wachuma and DMT capsules and all sorts of stuff around the house it's in a far more protected place than it used to be in a far less convenient place because I know that in high doses or if my sons were to take some in high doses or something that like that you're crossing into a spiritual portal and so I only use that kind of stuff now for the purposes of micro dosing I think that there's a possibility that it could be used for end-of-life therapy or for down-regulating the default mode network to the point where you can deal with trauma and things like that but even that I'm beginning to change my stance on because a lot of these synthetic variants that don't seem to carry with them the same type of unpredictability and post-use issues in some people with things like schizophrenia and bipolar like some of the new psilocybin analogs or ketamine for example these these synthetic analogs seem far more predictable far more precise faster onset lower time in the system and I've never had a bad experience or anything I would classify as like spiritual with those type of compounds I feel like those are more like even here in San Jose you can do ketamine therapy legally yeah and it's a low dose it's not the dose that people are doing when they're getting all messed up yeah you're not k-hold no and so they'll take a little low dose and then they'll do therapy along with it in journaling and I could see and the data on PTSD and processing trauma seems to point in that direction with the lower doses alongside therapy just enough to get you to be able to look at your trauma oh yeah I mean my wife and I will sometimes do breath work before sex and we'll sometimes do like a snort of ketamine or oxytocin to slightly downregulate the default mode network and get into a deeper space for sex or you know I've used like half a troche of ketamine before during a long plane flight to lull myself off to sleep or during a massage to melt my body a little bit like there's use cases for a lot of this stuff but I think that the fact that when we look at a lot of these traditional plant medicines or fungal derivatives like LSD and their use in previous history everything from you know like what do you call it when you're traveling across different portals not distance healing astral yeah astral travel that's used by witches or a lot of the shamanic ceremonies with some of these other drugs like their their purpose in many cases is to divine with the spiritual world which I think is a dangerous thing to be doing and I think that also you have to take into account the interests of the person who is administering or serving these medicines and I've talked to many people who have worked with shamans who for example have them under their possession almost like going back for their 38th ayahuasca trip from a commercial standpoint because they've saved hair or skin from this person they have the ability to be able to almost like possess them as a human and so there's there's all sorts of weird things that like it's a dangerous world I think that my only real acceptance for the use of something like hired ocilocybin or LSD or wachuma or ayahuasca or something like that would be in a very tightly controlled set and setting by someone who was demonstrated to be extremely mentally stable with someone who is extremely trustworthy in that room and you treat it almost like a surgery and not like ayahuasca vacation to Peru with some shaman who's lineage you might be unfamiliar with in a set and setting where you're getting exposed to spiritual entities that may not have your best interest in mind yeah I would agree with you 100% I think anything with that much power you got there's double edged yeah percent yeah and look the day I'm like all in the to the data on how they're treating trauma with some of these things and they're not using these crazy ridiculous doses that people are doing on their own they're just not yeah and it's along with the therapist yeah and I used to I forget if you guys have had a conversation with me about this or not but I used to sometimes use that stuff for like business breakthroughs right and like because you just think in different ways but I found that when you combine micro dosing with breath work you can breathe yourself into that same state like I can take a micro dose of psilocybin do an hour of holotropic breath work sit with the journal for the half hour after that and have my mind open to creativity in the very same way as if I'd taken like a heroic dose of psilocybin and then flat on my ass for eight hours you know speaking into a voice recorder or whatever you could get that you could get that experience from fasting you get that experience from being with people who sparked that creativity I experienced that with these guys when we create workout programs like there was a couple times you know one program in particular remember we really got creative but it was sparked through just working together yeah and historically that's how people have you know have done it so no good stuff man you're always fun to talk to yeah and I appreciate your honesty too very open and honest every time that was fun so what are you gonna do if there's peptides or LSD do they have a peptide or LSD peptide in your books yeah well I actually the last things I know we got a we got a finish I don't think I put it out yet but I was talking to a guy who does all sorts of mushroom growths on different mediums like he's planning like reishi mushrooms on turmeric and the mushroom actually harvest the tumor saccharides from the tumor group that it's grown on concentrates those in the fruiting body of the mushroom he'll then powder that and have like a reishi turmeric mushroom extract or he'll do something like chaga on ginger and have like an immune supporting compound that supports the guy mushrooms suck up whatever they're on top of yeah but I haven't yeah but I didn't realize I always thought mushrooms grow on oat or rye or wood or whatever then you just harvest the mushroom yeah or poop but he even mentioned how he's doing like a psilocybin growth on cannabis where it's like a THC infused psilocybin so it's crazy stuff with mushrooms so yeah cool side but no discount code yeah try bend 10 and if that doesn't work then we'll use AI to fix the code later on yeah cool Ben thanks thanks for coming back thanks guys always a pleasure today we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong well developed chest when I think of weak points and and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time chest was up there with the yeah it was for me it was for me for sure I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique