Today, Brad Weimert sits down with Ben Greenfield, a renowned biohacker, competitive athlete, entrepreneur, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including the popular title Boundless.
Despite being named America’s top personal trainer and a leading figure in health and fitness, Ben’s childhood was quite different.
As a homeschooled student, he played the violin, mastering chess and reading books–far from the athletic activities one might expect. However, his story took a dramatic turn when he discovered tennis in high school.
In today’s episode, Ben shares his incredible journey, from college tennis and Ironman races to becoming a biohacking expert and a successful entrepreneur.
He offers practical advice on optimizing health and performance, highlighting the science and benefits of fat adaptation.
We also explore the connection between sports and entrepreneurial mindset, innovative biohacking tools and supplements, strategies for maintaining a sustainable work-life balance, and a few “strange” biohacks you’ve probably never heard of.
Let’s dive in!
Ben Greenfield 0:00
Caffeine. If you get up at around 1000 MiGs, it’s like 10 cups of coffee. You can actually cause death due to a cardiovascular event, and you can buy bags of just like pure caffeine powder off Amazon.
Brad Weimert 0:13
Anybody could get off the couch run a marathon today. 12
Ben Greenfield 0:17
months I followed 90% fat based diet. We rewrote the textbooks on human nutrition because we were burning, on average, one and a half grams of fat per minute. And up until that point, it was believed that the maximum amount of fat that a human body could burn was one gram of fat per minute. Wow. Now my diet is not like that. Now what my diet looks like is,
Brad Weimert 0:41
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Ben Greenfield, it is great to see you. I am sad that you’re not in Austin right now, but we missed the mark last time you were here.
Ben Greenfield 1:29
I don’t know. I wish I could tell you. I’m sad that I’m not in Austin, but I’m kind of happy to be home. I like my house.
Brad Weimert 1:37
Yeah, this is a good time of year to not be in Austin too. Summer is not when people usually come visit. Oh, I mean, because it’s hot. Yep, exactly. Oh, man,
Ben Greenfield 1:46
yeah. Do you know? Do you know there’s, like, you know, a lot of people will sleep on a chili pad, or, like, a Eight Sleep mattress, or, or I use this one called the bed jet. It’s like an air conditioning unit for your bed. But did you know you there’s, there’s actually a supplement. I think it falls under the category of an amino acid that you can consume and add about five grams that actually lowers your body’s temperature. A lot of you’ll find it a lot of sleep supplements, but you can use it on a really hot day. It’s called, does
Brad Weimert 2:17
it glycine? Does it kill you if you take too much of it? Anything kills
Ben Greenfield 2:23
you if you take too much of it. I mean, even I think, I think caffeine can cause enough like electrical fibrillation of the heart that if you get up at around 1000 MiGs in a serving, or an average big cup of coffee is like 100 milligrams, like 10 cups of coffee, you can actually cause death due to a cardiovascular event, and you can buy bags of just like pure caffeine powder off Amazon that are north of 10,000 milligrams in a bag. So if I had to go, I think doing it on caffeine could be one relatively pleasant way to do it. You’d at least, I mean, you’d at least, yeah, you’d be fully alert.
Brad Weimert 3:04
Well, we’ve got other stimulants that fit in that category. That may also be a fun way to go here.
Ben Greenfield 3:10
Yeah, if we’re talking about how much of something could kill you, I don’t know if glycine would be my, my pick. So, yeah, I don’t know. We’re probably being really insensitive towards a select group of individuals right now, but, yeah, if you’re listening in, don’t use high amounts of anything we mentioned on this show to induce death.
Brad Weimert 3:30
I use an eight sleep so I’m a fan. Do you use any, any such thing? Well,
Ben Greenfield 3:36
yeah, I use that, um, that thing that I mentioned a second ago, the bed jet, because it’s like, it’s almost like a small air conditioning unit, but they designed it as the name implies to be niche to the bedroom. It’s kind of like the chili pad. And the eight sleep, I think, have this function on them as well. You can adjust the temperature so it could be kind of cold when you get into bed, and then go colder and colder as you sleep, and get into deeper sleep cycles, and then get warmer as the time arrives at which point you want to wake up. So this is like that. But instead of circulating cold water underneath the sheet, it’s just air, and it kind of like blows it underneath the sheet, and it gets pretty cold, like I can handle it at maybe 60% capacity, so keeps me cool, and I like the eight sleep but I’m one of those guys who likes to have as little electricity in the bedroom as possible. And I had a building biologist come through my house and kind of measure the EMF that was in different areas of the house. I think the bedroom is probably the most reasonable place to protect yourself from high amounts of electricity, and that bed jet really kicks out next to nothing. I mean, it’s like, you know, five feet away from my bed. And I think the Eight Sleep, the last time I looked into it, you couldn’t really disable the Wi Fi on it during the night of sleep. And because, I mean. Not only do I encourage a lot of my clients, and you know, people listen to me, to unplug the Wi Fi router at night, just you’re not getting bombarded with a signal during a night of sleep, I also think that it’s a good idea to just have anything unplugged or Wi Fi disabled in the bedroom, that you can have disabled. And I don’t even have Wi Fi in my house, like everything’s hardwired, like the computer I’m talking to you on right now, Brad, hardwired with Ethernet just to keep myself from having to have a bunch of radio frequencies and Wi Fi bounce around my office. So this is how I use my phone in my office. I just have an Ethernet cable right this plug in the router. This is I have the iPhone 15. So this is a Ethernet to USB C adapter with a power option on it so my even my phone can be hardwired all day.
Brad Weimert 5:50
Wow. Well, none of that surprises me at all, because it’s Ben Greenfield talking here, and I have about 1000 questions related to nerdy health shit that I know you’re gonna have answers to but I want to lead up to that because for those that don’t know you, you’ve been sort of in the in the biohacking space the entire time it’s existed, quite honestly, and you’ve written a shitload of books, New York Times bestsellers. You’ve got boundless 2.0 which is a biohacking guide coming out in 2025 but before that, you’ve been a pretty serious athlete from jump. Tell me about your college tennis career and kind of the progression into more intense athleticism.
Ben Greenfield 6:34
Yeah, by the way, nerdy health chit would be a good title for the next book. It’s like other NHS. Isn’t national health services. Isn’t that like the UK? I think I don’t know. So I wasn’t really into like, sports or athletics much at all growing up, I was homeschooled K through 12 in North Idaho. So as you can imagine, just like a super kind of like, crunchy Christian conservative homeschooled family where my athletic prowess was best displayed, like with a violin bow, or on the chessboard or in the library. I was pretty academic and intellectual, but not very athletic. I discovered tennis in high school, and I was kind of off the bat, just good at it. I don’t know why. Like, I’m good at just about anything that involves hitting or striking a ball over the net, right? So I played middle for the men’s volleyball team at Idaho. I wound up walking onto and playing on the college tennis team. I’m pretty decent at pickleball. Even though I don’t play much, I can drop into a pretty advanced game and do pretty well pickleball. So I don’t know, maybe it’s like my shoulders or the hand eye thing or whatever, but tennis kind of took me down the path of weight training and explosiveness and power lifting. And because I was studying exercise physiology and biomechanics at University of Idaho, I got in a body building like I mentioned. I played volleyball, played middle for the men’s water polo team, and then just total 180 dude. I was in Coeur d’Alene one year, and the Iron Man Triathlon was happening, and I watched these people crossing the finish line of the Iron Man, and I thought, gosh, I have to do that someday. That was just badass. It’s kind of like grass is always greener, right? Like, an endurance athlete looks at a sprinter or a bodybuilder, they’re like, Dude, I would love to, like, kind of like, bulk up someday. And I think a lot of the big bodybuilders will look at the endurance athletes and be like, Man, I should just, I should try to run an ultra. That would be badass. So anyways, it kind of goes both ways. But I got into triathlon. I started doing sprint triathlons and Olympics, then half Iron Man, and then I got an Iron Man, and dude did triathlon for like, around 18 years, and I was I that that led to me writing my first book called Beyond training, because I was really healthy and fit on the outside, and I looked good in spandex, and I could ride a bike really fast, but I got into the early days of self quantification and testing your blood and your biomarkers, and realized that despite having relatively good aerobic fitness, like I had rampant levels of inflammation, dysregulated thyroid, low testosterone, joint issues, like a lot of problems that tend to arise when you’re kind of running from a lion in your exercise program for multiple hours almost every day of the week, which I don’t think is necessarily healthy. But the other problem is that you know, you probably know this, Brad, because I know you’ve done some endurance sports, is it’s just swimming and biking and running, and that’s it, maybe a little bit of core work over and over and over again. So I was also pretty weak by the time I was, like, 35 years old, like, I could swim and bike and run pretty well. I competed in Iron Man World Championships six times. What happened was I saw a Spartan Race on. On TV, you’re probably seeing a pattern here. And I thought that
Brad Weimert 10:03
looks pretty cool. I would like, it’s not a normal pattern, by the way. I would
Ben Greenfield 10:07
like to try one of those. So I signed up for a Spartan Race, and I thought I was just gonna crush because I could, you know, I had an engine. I could just go for days. And I remember, I was, like, three miles into the race, and the women start five minutes behind the men, and the lead female just like then, this was during, I think, the the bucket carry with the big thing of gravel, and the lead female just cruises by me, and I’m trying to get this bucket of gravel up a hill. I couldn’t climb a rope to save my life. Barely had the hip mobility to get underneath the barbed wire. And, you know, hauling a sandbag up a hill just destroyed me. After that, I realized I thought it was fit, but I’m not really like full body Batman fit. I can just, you know, be hunched over on a bike riding for a really long time, or staring at the line at the bottom of the pool. So
Brad Weimert 10:58
Well, let me, let me pull back a little bit, because the the the that path covered 1000 different things, and tennis to Iron Man, I can see the allure. I can see the weight lifting moving into endurance and kind of the gap, because it’s so different. And I also grew up playing tennis and started weightlifting when I was probably 18, strength training, and I got introduced to endurance, and there was something about it that was just different. And I didn’t think that I would have any attraction to it, like I liked the explosive nature, the adrenaline that came from, you know, quick bursts and endurance just seemed fucking long and boring. It turns out, somehow, there’s, like, some mental thing in there that’s really exciting or interesting.
Ben Greenfield 11:44
Yeah.
Brad Weimert 11:45
What do you like about endurance in particular? Well,
Ben Greenfield 11:49
yeah, and I mean, even obstacle course racing, like I was talking about, that could fall into the category of endurance because it is a lot of cross repetitive motion, especially if you were to compare it to something like baseball or football or power lifting or something like that. Like a lot of those races you’re going I mean, I did one that was three days long, right? So there’s still a great deal of endurance and stamina and perseverance involved. And when you look at those character traits, and you look at the average kind of like hard charging, high achieving entrepreneur, there’s a lot of stick to itiveness that is required for being an entrepreneur, for building your own business, for taking those risks, for being able to roll up your sleeves and, you know, Moonlight, in many cases, sleep under your desk. Put a lot of you know, I’ve experienced that many times in my life, just basically having to focus for extremely long periods of time and put in a lot of work and kind of pass the marshmallow test, so to speak, of trading off short term pleasure for long term gain. And that, that is endurance sports. So it is also interesting, because if you look even into genetic pathways, there’s certain genetic pathways that you can test, like how long dopamine hangs around in between neurons. It’s called your C, O, m, t pathway, or the amount of rumination that you might be hardwired to have, which is more of a serotonin pathway. You can actually see direct correlation between the type of mental whether you want to call it stubbornness, perseverance, stick to itiveness, determination, grit that someone has, and and how they’re hardwired, from a neurotransmitter standpoint, to have that, and the type of sports that they’re attracted to or good at. And so when you look at the stereotype of, I don’t know, the executive entrepreneurial type who was maybe a cross country runner in high school and now does Iron Man triathlons, and also is very good and successful at running a business and having the focus and the determination in the organization to be able to do so, and you could compare and contrast that with like, kind of, like the, I don’t know this is going to piss off a lot of people, but like, the hot headed football player who is now whatever, you know, working construction, or, you know, or engaged in more of what might be considered like a blue collar job, like there is a little bit of hard wiring, and I realize I’m totally stereotyping, but there’s something about endurance sports, triathlon, marathoning, swimming, cycling, etc, and the type of psyche that that involves, and a crossover between that and being really good at focusing for long enough periods of time to be able To build a business,
Brad Weimert 14:41
is that, do you think that that’s causal or, I mean, there certainly seems to be a correlation. I think
Ben Greenfield 14:47
it could go both ways. Right? I think that, you know, some people will develop a lot of those character traits through building businesses, through failure, through trial and error, and that will. So give them the mental fortitude that allows them to do something like, you know, bite off and chew an Iron Man Triathlon. And then I also think that certain people are able to stick to certain things for long periods of time. Discovered that early in life, got good at endurance sports as a result, and also have developed entrepreneurial business building capabilities because of those character traits. So I think it could go both ways.
Brad Weimert 15:23
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I’ve done a fair amount of rock climbing in my life, and there is a an odd amount, depending on who you talk to, of engineers in rock climbing. And there are also, there’s a, you know, community that refer to themselves as dirt bags rock climbing, because they are basically living in their backpack, which is a bag full of dirt if you’re climbing all the time. But there’s this engineering mind that is problem solving focus. And rock climbing is very much a problem solving activity of figuring out how to balance, how to position, where to grab, etc.
Ben Greenfield 15:59
Right, right. Yeah, that makes total sense. And I mean, if you look at triathlon to be successful at something like triathlon, you’re sitting down and mapping out a week of precisely coordinated and scheduled swimming sessions, cycling sessions, running sessions, core training sessions, everything you’re going to do leading up to the race, as far as what’s called the periodized approach to when you’re focusing on endurance versus power versus speed, etc, there’s a massive level of organization required to be good at that sport, and those same skills, of course, have some pretty good transfer over into business success.
Brad Weimert 16:39
So you bring up an interesting point, because I have a general belief that basically anybody could get off the couch and run a marathon today. It’s just a question of how long it’s gonna take them. It’s gonna suck afterwards, run,
Ben Greenfield 16:57
slow dance, slow walk, yeah, oh yeah. And honestly, I think the same thing about Iron Man A lot of people like, oh, they did 50 Iron Man triathlons in in 50 days. And I say, well, that requires a lot of grit and determination and perseverance, but if you look at the speed at which those Iron Man triathlons are being completed, or even just one, it’s kind of like pointing your body in one direction and going for really long periods of time and provided enough food and energy, gels and water and whatever else you’re using to get you through that it can be done like doing an Iron Man in 17 hours, or a marathon in the allotted, you know, maximum. What is it? Six hours? It’s it’s hard, like, mentally, but it’s not like a huge athletic feat. It’s way more impressive for me to see someone who can run a mile in four minutes or less than somebody who can do like 5016 hour Ironmans. Yeah,
Brad Weimert 17:54
well, because, because you’ve been there, but that where, what I wanted to ask you was, I look at endurance activities as having three critical components. One is mindset, the other is training, and the third is nutrition. And I happen to be terrible at the nutrition element. What do you think the most important part of endurance is?
Ben Greenfield 18:19
Oh, man. I mean, it’s, it’s difficult to say, because it’s gonna, it’s gonna vary from person to person, right? Like, for a complete athletic specimen with good genetics for them, it by it by me, mindset, or managing the so called attrition component, right? Like, just your body pooping out because you don’t have the right nutrition. For somebody who’s got an iron gut and can, just like, you know, I’ve had friends who they’ll do an Ironman on hamburger and french fries on a pizza. For them, it might be a little bit more of the training component because they’re slow. But, you know, the the thing about nutrition is interesting, because it is a big struggle for a lot of people who want to do a marathon, a cycling century, a triathlon or whatever, and I went for the longest time, pretty much swallowing hook, line and sinker, what folks like the Gatorade Sports Science Institute would preach about nutrition and carbohydrate, fat and protein ratios, and even what I learned, you know, I have a master’s degree in physiology with an emphasis in human nutrition, and I was taught pretty much what I believed up to, maybe like 10 years ago, which is high intake of breads and grains and whole grains and fruits, and, you know, 55 to 65% carbohydrate intake, often, if you’re going to race in an event, getting up to like, 80 to 90% carb intake leading up to the day of the race. And you know, pretty much kind of old school food pyramid type of stuff. And then I remember, I got an invite, this was probably 10 years ago, to participate in. Study, and it’s actually now a pretty famous study. It’s called the faster study, took place at University of Connecticut, and what they had one group of endurance athletes do is eat a high fat diet, and even if you’re not an endurance athlete, this is going to be interesting information for you, as far as like how to burn fat. So they had one group follow really high fat diet. And by high fat, I mean what would almost be termed a therapeutic ketogenic diet, right? So a ketogenic diet, restriction of carbohydrates and introduction of a higher amount of fat, is something that has variants, as far as the levels of it, meaning you could kind of sort of be in a state of ketosis, generating these ketones, which are a great preferred fuel for the heart, for the diaphragm, for the brain, for the liver, you could eat, like maybe 30% carbohydrates of your total dietary intake. And if you’re pretty active, you could still kind of sort of call that ketosis. Technically, it’s a little bit more low carb, but you could call it ketosis for managing things like Alzheimer’s, dementia, post TBI, concussion, seizures, epilepsy, things like that. There’s some evidence that from a medical management scenario, eating a low carb, high fat diet can have some pretty good effects. So for this study, what they wanted to do was see, what if we take that super duper, duper low carb, high fat approach and apply it to endurance sports with the hypothesis that in aerobic endurance sports, you’re going for long periods of time at a low intensity, and the body burns more fat as a fuel at those lower intensities anyways, so why not feed it with more fat instead of more carbohydrates? And so for 12 months, I followed 90% fat based diet, meaning it was all like heavy cream and butter and cheese and olive oil and avocados and olives, and you know, you’d walk past an Italian restaurant and just go crazy because you couldn’t eat a thing on the menu. And this was for 12 months. Because what they wanted to do was something that no study had ever done before. They wanted to see if it was possible, if a human being actually cut out a whole bunch of carbohydrates from their diet, if they could shift their body into becoming more of a fat burning machine. And furthermore, if you did that, if it would actually like affect you from a physical performance standpoint. So I go into the lab after a year, and it was me and I think maybe 12 other athletes who followed the high fat diet, and then another group of athletes endorsed athletes they followed the standard, whatever, you know, 55 to 75% ish based carbohydrate diet. So they did, you know, muscle biopsies, where you shove needles into the tissue and like, like a guillotine, like, cut muscle out. And this was the night before they had us run for three hours on a treadmill. So they did it down the front and the back of the legs. They did fat biopsy, you know, poop test, dual test, walk around with a giant jug to collect your urine for 24 hours the night I got there, a vo two max test, which is a run to complete exhaustion on a treadmill. And then kind of the icing on the cake was the second morning I was there, I had to run for three hours on a treadmill as far as I could go, and there was no music, there was no TV. This is just like staring at a white wall wearing a mask that collects your gasses. You can see how much fat and carbohydrate you’re burning. You know, needles sticking out of your arm to collect your blood work. Basically what happened was with me and every other athlete who followed the high fat diet for 12 months, we rewrote the textbooks on human nutrition because we were burning, on average, one and a half grams of fat per minute. And up until that point, it was believed that the maximum amount of fat that a human body could burn, even during exercise, was one gram of fat per minute. So what that shows is that if you somehow limit carbs, especially from things like added sugar and crap and processed foods, multi processed foods, you can actually get your body to the point of adaptation where preferentially burns more fat as a fuel, which is very interesting because I have some clients who have coached who I’ll try and get them off sugar, off carbs, off their morning scone and biscotti and their sandwich or subway for lunch, and, you know, the glass of wine and chocolate and fries with dinner. And they have a really hard time for a lot of times, up to six months, because it can take six to 12 months for the body to adapt to lower carbohydrate intake. If you’ve grown up like most humans in westernized societies these days do on cereal and bread and grains and sweet baby food and sugar, and your body becomes just a sugar burning machine. But the problem with that is it can cause inflammation, atherosclerosis, you know, sluggish energy levels and. Energy going up and down. So to have more stable energy levels, you can make a case for at least restricting carbohydrate and sugar to a certain extent. The trick is you got to do it, typically for about six and up to 12 months, to kind of reset your body’s metabolism and to be able to have really stable energy stores, because you can store maybe 2000 calories of carbohydrate on your body, but you can store 10s of 1000s of calories of fat that you have access to be able to burn as a stable energy source all day long, and then, kind of like the new cheat code you probably heard about this before, is they now have drinkable ketones, where you can drink the same stuff that your body would normally make if you were burning a high amount of fat, and that’s what I use now in people who I’m trying to get off of sugar, is it really helps ease that transition, like if you’re used to having some fruity pre workout shake or a bunch of carbs with dinner, and now you’re hitting a wall during your workouts, you can take a shot of Those ketones, and it makes a night and day difference.
Brad Weimert 26:03
Dan, so that’s super interesting. In the endurance world, there’s kind of this, the people that I know, there’s sort of these whispers around that conversation, and there’s this dialog of fat adapted endurance athletes, the most of that world that I’ve been exposed to, and you were competing at a, I mean, a very, very high level there. Most of the people that I’ve known don’t do that and are running off sugar, right? They’re running off the gels, the bullshit. Can you adapt to fat quicker for a short burst, when you talk about taking six to 12 months to really adapt to run off fat, is it possible to do it for endurance events more quickly? Well,
Ben Greenfield 26:42
first of all, you know, when I say you can do it with carbs, you can. But the problem is, like I mentioned earlier, your body gets used to these blood sugar ups and downs. It’s more inflammatory, it’s more acidic. It tends to ferment more in the gut. So people who do a lot of the gels and the traditional carbs for sports and for athletic fueling that a lot of times go with gas, bloating, indigestion, constipation, etc. I’ve never seen any evidence that you can just start to eat more fat, cut out the carbs, and start just burning more fats and getting by on lower levels of blood sugar right away. It does take some time, like there is a definite adaptation period. Now what’s interesting is, not only do the use of liquid ketones help to ease that transitionary period, but now they have a newer kind of form of supplementation called biomimetics, just as the name implies you’re trying to mimic something that occurs in nature. And it turns out that when you fast, the body churns out certain compounds, you know, polyethylene, amides, another one called OEA, increased levels of resveratrol, niacinamide, etc. And so if you supplement with those same type of compounds, you can shift your body into more of a fasting like state, without necessarily fasting, and speed up the transitionary process to fat burning as a preferential fuel versus carb burning. So you could look at that. You can look at ketones, and there’s even alternatives now to these GLP one agonists that produce a little less nausea, and I think, result in a little bit less risk of muscle wasting than something like an injectable, you know, ozempic style GLP one agonist. So not only do liquid ketones kind of fall into that category because they stimulate, or rather, they suppress the hormone ghrelin, which is the one that would normally make you hungry. But then there’s also a way that you can trigger feelings of satiety or shutting down hunger, which helps with that fat adaptation process via the microbiome. So there’s one company called pendulum. They have a probiotic that’s got acumencha Um, butyricum And, I think, Bifidobacterium, and they literally designed it to help to produce bacteria in the gut that produce the same GLP, one like compounds that people are injecting. And then one other, one, fascinating one, this company on New Zealand. I interviewed them recently on my podcast. They found this extract from the bitter hops, the same stuff you used to make beer. It’s called Amaris eight, and it’s so extremely bitter that they have to encapsulate it in like an oily medium. So it goes through the stomach and it hits the bitter receptors in the small intestine, and it induces the stimulation of not just GLP, but two other appetite regulating hormones, one called CCK and one called p, y, y. It makes you not want to eat for like, six or seven hours. So if you look at let’s say you know, what are we talking about, right? Or Brad, because we’re kind of getting deep into the science we’re talking about. Well, whether I’m an athlete or not, how can I speed up the transition of becoming a fat, burning machine and becoming less reliant on carbs? And I would say, in addition to just understanding that you do, you do need to do a good job limiting your overall carbohydrate intake for a period of about six months to really, truly start to see impressive results, and the ability to be able to do that for long periods of time. But you can ease that transition through the use of ketones, through the use of these biomimetic agents. One company called Mimeo, they even have like a done for you biomimetic kind of like pack it and then you can trigger GLP one through something like acromancius probiotic. It’s literally called GLP one, or through this other one called callow curb, which is that Amara state. When you put all that stuff together, you can definitely help to turn your body into a fat, burning machine. But there’s, there’s one important thing to understand that was like, your body needs carbs. Even after that faster study where I followed a strict ketogenic diet, like 90% fat for 12 months, my thyroid was dysregulated. My testosterone dropped. I started having more joint pain, because your joints need a certain amount, what’s called glycan in them, which relies upon glucose to be able to help to stabilize the joints. So now my diet is not like that. Now what my diet looks like is I wake up and I go all day long eating minimum amount of carbohydrates, and that really helps with stable energy levels focus during a work day. You know you can see it like I’m walking on a treadmill right now. So I’m kind of like in low fat burning mode all day long, but it allows me to, kind of allow my body to be a fat burning machine all day. Right? So my smoothie might be some coconut milk or bone broth with ice and some protein powder and some stevia, or monk fruit as a non sugar based sweetener. And then I’ll blend all that up to like a thick ice creamy, like texture, and top it with some coconut flakes, some cacao nibs and some bee pollen, right? So it’s like a super food smoothie that’s got a lot of protein, a lot of fats in it, kind of like ice cream, but not a lot of carbs, and then lunch for me today would be like a bed of roasted vegetables with a can of wild planet sardines that I’ll eat with, like a seaweed wrap, burrito style, and another cup of bone broth with some vegetable powders, right? So again, pretty low carb, but pretty nutrient dense. And then dinner is when I kind of open the floodgates and eat as many carbs as I want. And when I say eat as many carbs as I want, it’s not a ton, like it still comes out to me eating no more than 30% of my total daily intake from carbs. But it comes out to maybe, if you want to do the math, like 200 300 grams of carbs, sweet potatoes, yam, little white rice, maybe some dark chocolate and blueberries stirred into yogurt, a glass of red wine, etc. So with that strategy, it’s kind of cool, because carbohydrates help your body to make serotonin, which is the precursor to melatonin. So if you save all your carbohydrates for night, you’re keeping your body in a fat, burning state all day long, but then you’re putting carbs into your body in the evening, and that helps you to sleep better, and it also helps to restore some of your muscle and your liver glycogen. So you would have, let’s say, a really great workout the next morning without building up long term carbohydrate depletion. And that scenario works really well on somebody like me, who likes to work out every day. If somebody’s less active, they could go lower carb most of the week and then just have a refeed meal on, like a Saturday night and a Sunday night. So it kind of depends on your level of activity. And then, you know, some people might push back on this and say, Well, I heard that the body is more insulin sensitive in the morning, and so the morning is when you should have carbs, and then you should not have a lot of carbs in the evening. And while that is true, the thing is that you can actually make your body more kind of bulletproof and resistant against the blood sugar spiking effects of carbs through specific things that you can do before dinner. And so you can induce a state of almost like your own induced insulin sensitivity before dinner. An example of that would be a cold shower, a 10 minute walk, anything that’s like bitter or herbaceous, like a shot of apple cider vinegar or supplement like Bear brain or bitter melon extract. And so I’ll do that a lot of times before dinner, like, you know, I’ll finish up the work day. We usually have dinner at about seven. I’ll jump with a cold plunge at maybe 630 I’ll make myself a little, you know, sparkling water with some electrolytes and some apple cider vinegar. All. Out before dinner, and so by the time dinner rolls around, it’s not like I’m insulin insensitive, because it’s evening, so just a little bit of physical activity, some herbs, spices, bitters, anything like that. And you can induce your own state of insulin sensitivity, so it kind of allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
Brad Weimert 35:18
Okay, those are 1000 interesting tricks to get fat adapted. The you also brought up, I think, from the beginning, this is all relatively new to you, like, this is the last 10 years or so that you went down this path. But when you were doing endurance in the first place, you were not in this mode, right? You learned this. Oh, starting with this study,
Ben Greenfield 35:41
no, dude, I grew up on, like, taking baked pizza and 29 cent hamburger. Was it? Wednesday, 39 cent cheeseburger. Thursday, like, freaking, you know, the total westernized diet. And also in college, you know, even though it kind of changed a little bit to where, like, I started buying the whole grain bread instead of the white bread, and started having the brown scone at the coffee shop instead of the wider scone with the frosting on it, right. And then so I started thinking a little bit about that kind of stuff. It. You know, I ate a pretty stereotypically high carbohydrate diet for a large portion of my life, which is kind of back to what I was talking about. Like, if you’ve trained your body to feed on sugar for 20 years. It’s not like you can switch to sugar restriction for a week and expect all those cravings to go away in your body, to shift to using fat as a fuel preferentially right away. That’s why it takes away one
Brad Weimert 36:33
of the Yeah, one of the things that I was curious about you kind of answered this already, for me, was there’s a lot of the people that are really intense athletes are not really excited about spending 30 hours deep, diving into a topic to learn the details around it. They sort of lean on a coach or somebody else to tell them what to do and what the regimen is supposed to be. But you also said that through college you ended up getting your masters in this. So clearly, you had a very high level of interest in diving into the nutrition and biomechanics behind all of this. One of the things that I don’t know is why you were doing all of this competition and how you thought you were going to make money in the first place when you were in college, this will be kind of a
Ben Greenfield 37:21
segue into business. So segue into business, and then, by the way, just real quick you did bring up something interesting. You said somebody’s gonna do something intense. Understand that if you’re into like CrossFit and highly so called glycolytic activities and a ton of weight training and high intensity interval training, even though you need to be careful with excess amounts of that, in the same way you need to be careful with excess amounts of aerobic exercise. If you’re on the pointy edge of those sports, sometimes you need to take that carb loading approach I just described and still even have a little bit of carbohydrates before a super intense morning workout, like, you know, a handful of blueberries, or, you know, half a sweet potato with some honey on it, or something like that. So it does kind of depend, because I know you probably have a few more extreme folks who listen in Brad, who who might have a really, really high carb throughput. So there is some, some amount of dependency. And you know, it’s job of guys like me as a coach to sit down, look at stuff like that and advise accordingly. But on the business side of things, you know, I was just basically a race car. Man. Um, so what happened was, in college, I really want to go to medical school, so I took the MCATs and all the pre meds. I got accepted to six different medical schools, and there were two MD PhD programs, Duke and UPenn, that I didn’t get into, that I really wanted to go to so I decided to work in the private sector for a year to make myself more palatable to a couple of these other institutions. So I wound up getting a job straight out of college with my masters working for biomed in hip and knee surgical sales. I absolutely detested that job, I developed a real distaste for modern medicine, standing there with a laser pointer helping surgeons to install overpriced, you know, 20 to $40,000 hip and knee implants into obese and overweight patients who would have been better served to preventive medicine, all the doctors seemed to hate their jobs. I didn’t know a lot about like functional medicine, naturopathic medicine, the more natural side of medicine, which you know that’s, that’s the nature of a lot of the doctors that I interview now, and a lot of the type of medical advice, if you want to call it, that, that you might find in my books. But at the time, my plans for sports medicine or orthopedic surgery were pretty dampened by that experience, so I quit that job after less than here, I feel like nine months, and I walked into into the gym that was across the street from the apartment I was living at in Liberty Lake, Washington, and I slapped my resume on the counter and asked for a job. At that point, not only did I have a master’s degree, I managed the. University of Idaho Wellness Center, personal trained. Had done nutrition coaching all through college. You know, I was already beginning to race in triathlons, and kind of had a name for myself as kind of a fitness guru in the local community. So I got the job right away managing that gym, the Liberty Lake Athletic Club, and absolutely transformed their training program. I introduced group training classes, triathlon training classes, recurring revenue based models for personal training where you’re not paying for a series of, say, like sessions that you’re just allowed to use over a certain period of time, like 10 sessions you use over however long you want to use them. You know, you got 10 sessions for Christmas, and you might spread them out over a year. Instead, anybody who signed up for personal training, they signed up for a monthly recurring revenue program in which whether or not they came to their training session or not, they were being charged because everything was wrapped up, nutrition, their emails, their phone contact with their coach, their session if they wanted to show up for it, but if not, their session was already written out for them, for them to do themselves, etc. So I used a real different approach to the way I had that set up. And about two years into that, I was doing really well as a personal trainer. And one of my clients husbands approached me, and he was a local sports medicine physician. His name was Dr pz Pierce. He was also the the physician for Iron Man Triathlon. And so he kind of knew of me, because I’d started race Ironmans at that point. And he proposed to me this idea of opening a one stop shop for sports medicine, chiropractors, physical therapists, massage therapists, sports medicine docs. I would be the director of sports performance, and so we literally opened this massive warehouse across the street from Gonzaga. I kind of implemented a lot of the same type of billing and group training and subscription based training models that I had been running at the gym, but we also invested in a lot of really cool equipment, like, you know, high speed video cameras for gait analysis and bike fits and blood draw equipment for nutrition programming. Or, you know, injections of anti inflammatory compounds. We had calorimetry that you could wear on your face to measure your fat and your carbohydrate burning at rest and during exercise. And so I pretty quickly made a name for myself in the community as the guy who you would go to when nothing else was working, or when you just wanted the best of the best, right? Like money wasn’t a factor. You just wanted to totally optimize your body and your brain. And that was kind of like my early days of biohacking, because I’m using all this equipment that a lot of other trainers weren’t using and we also, by the nature of us having medical staff in our facility, developed a relationship with a lot of the local physicians in the community. And so I use a lot of the resources from the American Academy for sports, medicines, exercises, medicine initiatives. And we had a lot of physicians setting their patients to us for rehab and for exercise and for medical management. So we kind of had, like these super duper high end athletes and executives and entrepreneurs, and then also really good referral system based from the local medical community. Several of these doctors in 2008 nominated me for the personal trainer of the Year award. And so, long story short, as I won as America’s top personal trainer, I went to Vegas and got my trophy and my award, and then I went up on the cover of all these fitness magazines. You know, I had just started a podcast. I had a website where I was sending out newsletters and writing articles, and kind of got, let me, let me pause on the line. Let
Brad Weimert 43:43
me pause on that because, well, this is the, this is the chapter that people that you have this huge brand for now. But what’s curious to me is sort of, you know, you had a, it sounds like a very distinct path that you were going down, which is medicine. I wanted to be a doctor, and you had this goal in front of you, and there were other things along the way, with training, but from a schooling perspective and a career perspective, that was the path right everything leads up to, I’m going to be a doctor, and then you had a pretty hard shift through that period. Did you have a goal in front of you? If
Ben Greenfield 44:20
I was honestly more interested in going around the world and racing, because at that point, like I mentioned, I was a race car. I had a bunch of sponsors paying my airline miles and hotel fees and writing me checks to go where their logo and race and triathlons. And I was doing really well. And I was doing like, travel writing and writing for different fitness and triathlon magazines. And so I was almost like this sponsored freelance racer who also had a side gig that was pretty good as one of the top personal trainers in town. And I was honestly pretty happy with that whole scenario, until my wife got pregnant and found that she was pregnant with twin sons and. And dude, I would like, wake up at 4am ride my bike 10 miles to one office. Work all day, coaching and training clients. Do my own training sessions. Ride home, get home at like eight, have dinner with my wife, go into the office, write my newsletters, my articles, work on my website, programming, record a podcast, go to bed at like midnight and get up and do it again, right? So I’m sleeping like four to six hours, Max, working my tail off, loving my job. But I also knew that if I was going to be a present at home or available father and husband, that something needed to change as far as the way that my career was set up. I was at one conference where I was literally teaching how to make money in the brick and mortar personal training studio space. And this guy got up and gave a big talk about VSLs. I had no clue what a VSL was, but he told, you know, he gave out a script for his video sales letter. He talked about JVs, which I thought was like when you suck too much to play for the varsity basketball team. I later learned about affiliate ventures and joint ventures and Clickbank and information products and VSLs and copywriting and this whole new world kind of opened up to me. And this was right when my wife was like, eight months out from having our first children, you know, our twin boys. So this was, you know, they’re 16 now, so 16 years ago. So I spent like six months developing my avatar, my problem, my cause, my copywriting scenario. I wrote out an entire triathlon training program designed for the busy, hard charging executive or entrepreneur who wants to cross the finish line with a smile on their face, but still wants time left over for social life and family and friends and career and hobbies to be able to complete their goal of doing an Ironman Triathlon using science backed training tactics that allow you to be able to achieve that goal with the minimum effective dose of exercise While becoming healthier and fitter and stronger in the process, developed a relationship with disc.com in Texas to do physical fulfillment of $197 package of books and DVDs and training programs and nutrition and diet plans. I had the same thing available as a digital download. Had it on ClickBank, hired my first VA after reading Tim Ferriss Four Hour Work Week, and had her do a bunch of research on all the top triathlon clubs and triathlon clinics in the US, made personal phone calls and emails and got them all signed up as affiliates for the program and launched what was called the triathlon Dominator during Iron Man Triathlon race week in Hawaii, and I was racing also, right? But I knew there’d be a lot of traffic to triathlon websites, and buzz around triathlon and people looking for Iron Man Triathlon training programs, like I had been, you know, years before, when I’ve been standing in Coeur d’Alene watching these Iron Man triathletes cross the finish line. And I kind of wanted a way to do it myself. I was racing, but I literally launched on race day, and I had all my tweets pre scheduled, like coming out of the water right now, a big smile on my face. I use the triathlon Dominator training plan, or I’m halfway through the bike. Feel great, and you know, I’m right on track to finish this race using the triathlon Dominator training program. And of course, shit could have hit the fan. You know, anything could have gone wrong, and that would have backfired. But the race went exactly according to plan. You know, all my pre scheduled tweets, my marketing, everything, the program went live. This is 2008 Yeah, the program went live when I crossed the finish line. Um, I did about $50,000 in sales over around five days, which for me, at the time, a little less than half of what I was making annually as a personal trainer, but for being able to do it in a week in my underwear from my home office, or at least do that amount of sales in a week, and understand that I could do copywriting and information, product creation, and a lot of this stuff that I learned over the past six months while still being at home with my sons and my wife, that was a real light bulb moment for me. So I wound up, over the next few months, selling out all of my personal training studios, gyms, equipment, moving into a home office, focusing more on the podcast, focusing more on writing. I did an information product for marathoning, for swimming, for knee pain, for back pain, you know, then I started writing books. Continued to freelance for magazines. Eventually, I launched a supplements company, because I had so many relationships with all these different folks who I’d worked with as sponsors in the Ironman Triathlon industry. So I launched, pretty much out of my garage, a company called Greenfield fitness systems, which involves kind of a combination of drop shipping and warehousing, and that eventually became key on, which is now a very successful supplements company that, you know, we rebranded and and that operates out of Boulder and. And so, you know, that’s that was kind of the slow rolling snowball that brought me to where I am now. You know, I podcast, I coach and work with people from all over the world via phone calls and online coaching. I write books. I I do a lot of investing in the health and fitness space, investing, advising, use of lightness, type of stuff. Still do a lot of work with affiliates and partners, launching a new membership based website for health advice starting in September. And so, yeah, that’s that’s kind of how all that gradually happened.
Brad Weimert 50:33
So basically, the introduction to Tim Ferriss information products ClickBank, which is a way to sell information products through affiliates, led to the realization of self sufficiency through that, yeah,
Ben Greenfield 50:49
realizing that trading time for dollars can definitely pay the bills, but that because really at my heart, I love to learn, but I don’t just Love to Learn for learning’s sake. I love to learn and then turn around and teach people with whatever I’ve learned that I could get paid to do that from the comfort of my own home and still be able to be with my family, you know, which, along with God, is the most important thing in my life. Like, you know, it’s kind of a lifestyle reinvention, and so it was fantastic. I’m recording this podcast with you in the basement of my home office. You know, we’ll finish the podcast, and I’ll go up and see my son, who’s probably sitting up in the breakfast Nuke, you know, in an online math class, or working on his card game business or whatever, and give him a hug and hang out and say, how your day, how’s your day going? And, you know, move along. And so just kind of cool. I love being, you know, the work from home, but also be a stay at home father and husband.
Brad Weimert 51:43
Yeah, it’s awesome in the transitional path. I mean, one of the things you said is you’ve written a bunch of books and a couple very well known and you’ve got a few different topics that are interesting, from nutrition to training to spirituality to cooking and relationships and all sorts of stuff. Where do the books fit into the business model? Is it just scratching your own itch or using the books to drive something else? Yeah,
Ben Greenfield 52:10
well, but books are a calling card. Books don’t pay the bills. I get a royalty check for my books. But there’s, you know, is nothing significant. I think, probably the primary benefit of a book that you’re able to leverage a publisher and branding agency with to get good space on shelves, or whether you’re able to self publish using modern self publishing tactics to get really good distribution. It’s basically a way to get onto bigger and better stages and get paid more to speak. And then also, as long as you have really good funnels and lead generation tactics built into your website to be able to build your list and drive traffic to a low ticket, mid ticket, high ticket item, or all three. And so yeah, your book is just basically one giant calling card with maybe a little bit of that, you know, like you mentioned, Brad scratch my own itch, because I do love to write books, type of thing.
Brad Weimert 53:08
And for you, the monetization key on is part of that. Are there other monetization mechanisms you mentioned? Low, mid, high. Key
Ben Greenfield 53:16
on doesn’t make much, or get much traffic from my books. That’s purely e commerce and PPC, you know, it’s just, you know, our own last click acquisition software, you know, almost no retail, no wholesale. It’s key on products I talk about in my book, but it’s, you know, it’s not really huge part of the book. The Book, the main thing for me, in terms of the funnels that I drive my books to, are coaching, speaking. There’s not necessarily a speaking funnel in there, but just the mere fact that if anybody in EO or yp or whatever happens to grab your book and read it like the fact that you have a book out there, the amount of organic speaking opportunities that come through from people who have read my book, even though there’s not a precise funnel built around that, that also is pretty significant. And then once I launched this membership website in the fall, that will also be a major call to action, both like on the last slide of any presentations I get from stage as well as within the pages of the book. So I think probably the main thing though, is, if you have a newsletter or a coaching program relative relevant to the content of your book, you know, that’s where I focus. A lot of the traffic from the book is my email newsletter and my coaching, the speaking happens organically. And then, you know, besides that, I would say the only other thing is something like a cookbook. There’s also a lot of kind of partner based income involved with income involved with that, because everything from kitchen tools to ingredients to, you know, to meat sources, etc, a lot of those are based on partnerships. And writing a cookbook is kind of cool, because you know any tool, ingredient, product, you know, meat or fish service, etc, that you. Mentioned in there, they’re pretty incentivized to promote your cookbook also, so it’s really great for things like bulk buying and partnership revenue.
Brad Weimert 55:06
The membership side of things, you mentioned coaching and you mentioned launching a membership right now, how much of that goes to you personally, spending your time coaching versus a group coaching versus any other model? Yeah, great
Ben Greenfield 55:19
question. I coach 10 people maximum per month. Those people pay 5k a month for me to be kind of like the CEO of their health right. So right now, I’m coaching seven people, and that means that they’ve got unlimited access to asynchronous communication with me via an app called Voxer, which is like a walkie talkie, so they can just ask me questions whenever they want. Every Saturday, I sit down, I look at their ring of wearable data and program out what the next week of workouts is going to look like based on where they’re traveling, what they have access to, how they’re feeling if they’re injured, etc. And then I also do all a car coaching calls. So like, you know, in about 15 minutes here, I’ll launch into three separate calls, a 20 minute, a 30 minute and a 60 minute consult with people who just hire me all a card to talk about their their health needs. So I spend about a solid 30% of my time coaching and then I also have a couple of dozen other people who have gone through my coaching programs, who are certified and who we also direct clients to, just for the very simple rev split agreement. And then I spend, typically another six to eight hours per week doing video content for my website and also for other partners who are paying for things like white listing or use of likeness. I spend another around six to eight hours per week on podcast prep and podcast recording, which is primarily based on affiliate and partnership revenue. And then typically, I spend about an hour a day writing, editing articles, book chapters, etc. Those be the primary ways that that I really spend my time right now, besides a lot of times in the afternoons, between about 430 and 6pm I reserve that for things like advisory calls with companies who I’m working with, investments, due diligence, etc, a lot more of what I guess you would call the reactive versus the creative work.
Brad Weimert 57:17
Yeah, that’s super helpful, man. Because I think a lot of people, especially today, when entrepreneurs are sort of pushed to this space of personal branding and content creation, how much time is being spent by somebody like yourself that is really deep in the weeds, that is really thorough in their expertise is completely disproportionate relative to what most people spend on creation, but it seems like you enjoy it too.
Ben Greenfield 57:44
Yeah, yeah, I probably work about, you know, average around 5560 hours a week. And I know a lot. It’s just a ton of fun. You know, I’m getting to shoot the shit with guys like you and research cool health concepts and talk on podcasts. And I love to write, and love to help build companies and grow companies. So, so, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s fun.
Brad Weimert 58:03
So part of biohacking is it’s not common, right? It’s new stuff that’s different. Figuring out what works. What do you think the strangest thing is that you’re doing right now, physically?
Ben Greenfield 58:18
All right? I gotta go in a couple minutes. So I’ll give you a I’ll give you the basic overview. So if you would have asked me this, like a month ago, I would have said paying a hell of a lot of attention to the health of my big toe, big toe mobility, toe spacer devices, little proprioceptive balls to work on the bottom of the foot. Barefoot shoes like Palooza or vivo barefoots, because I realize through myself and a lot of my clients that mobility, strength and flexibility of the big toe affects the rest of the body in really surprising ways. And then I got my toes and the bottom of my feet really strong and supple and flexible and just the amount of comfort I feel when walking, and the strength and the supplements of my feet is incredible. So now I’ve moved on, and now I’m pretty hardcore, focused on tongue, teeth and jaw biomechanics. There’s a book. The last book I read is called JAWS, the story of a hidden epidemic. It’s about how we breathe, how we carry our head and neck posture, the type of dental work that you can have done to reshape the mouth and the biomechanics of the teeth and the jaw to assist with not just reduction of disease causing bacteria in the mouth, but also the ability to be able to chew and masticate properly, specific tongue exercises that you do to allow for better mobility of the tongue, better salivary enzyme production, and also this is important for a lot of people, complete elimination of sleep apnea, or obstructive sleep apnea, or issues that occur with poor oxygenation during sleep. So if you wanted to look into this, I would say, look up the field of bio esthetic dentistry. I check out that book, JAWS, the story of a hidden epidemic. Look up on YouTube, for example, the concept of mewing, M, E, W, I, N, G, there’s even entire YouTube channels, like jaw hacks devoted to this. And so my teeth, my mouth, my jaw. That’s like the number one thing that I’m working on now, and the most surprising thing Brad is I’m now chewing all of my food to complete liquid dew like 25 to 40 times. I’ve retrained my mouth properly to do so my tongue is suctioned up against the roof of my mouth when I’m working out. So I’m able to breach my nose the whole time and just how I feel after a meal, as far as absence of bloating, really good digestion, even great poops in the morning, everything has really been surprisingly impacted by attention paid to teeth, mouth and jaw. So I’m planning on doing a few podcasts on it over the over the next few months, but I would say, like two neglected areas people don’t think enough about, are their mouth and their big toes. So those would be two things to look into from almost like a bio hacking standpoint.
Brad Weimert 1:01:12
So from an ingestion perspective, we have a client that drinks urine. Should You Drink urine?
Ben Greenfield 1:01:20
I have before, there’s even whole books about, like, your own perfect medicine, I think is the name of the book, about some of the antibodies and beneficial compounds and stem cell precursors and stuff like that in urine. But, you know, I interviewed a guy who was super into it, and I haven’t tried it for a week, like, not a lot, just like, a few dropper fulls every morning, I didn’t notice anything, and it just it was yet another thing to do that simultaneously seemed a little gross, so I didn’t stick with it. But I think that you could make a case that there could be some immune modulating properties of urine that would dictate that micro dosing with your own urine with a very small drop or full amount of first morning void could have benefits, but it’s not something that stuck with me.
Brad Weimert 1:02:10
All right. Last question, Brian Johnson is convinced that he’s going to live forever. Yes or no.
Ben Greenfield 1:02:18
Well, look, you’re asking a Christian. I think everybody’s gonna live forever, for better or worse. So kinda depends if you’re talking about this mortal body, no, if you’re talking about the immortal soul, sure, I think everybody goes on to to live for eternity. And I think that honestly, the most important thing to consider here is your health span versus your lifespan, right? Like I want to be really healthy up until I’m like, 90 years old, playing football with my grandkids or great grandkids in the backyard, feeling great, having sex, you know, climbing mountains and then just drop dead as close to that point in death as possible, right? Because you don’t want to live a long time if you’re debilitated for the period of time between 110 160 with all your friends dead and you’re sitting lonely in a hyperbaric chamber, you also don’t want to like spend years of your life cold and hungry and libido less, chasing after longevity and spending all the extra hours that you’re giving living chasing after longevity. So I try to strike a balance. I think that at this point, based on where science stands and the maximum human lifespan on record, and our access to stem cells, gene therapy, you know, lower you know, electrical and light and air pollution, if we really have our environment set up properly, I think that some of these cats, like Brian Johnson, Dave Asprey, Peter Diamandis, etc, they could probably make it to around 120
Brad Weimert 1:03:46
interesting well, I’ll be curious to see, or maybe I won’t see that’s beyond my years.
Ben Greenfield 1:03:54
Me, I don’t care. I’m gonna live forever with Jesus. Anyways. Hallelujah. Ben
Brad Weimert 1:04:01
Greenfield, I appreciate the time. Man, where, where do you want to point people? Oh,
Ben Greenfield 1:04:04
just my website, bang. Greenfield, life.com, you could find out most of what I’m up to there got mentioned. I got that book launched in January, boundless, the upgraded, so called Bible of biohacking. And then I’ve got the the Life Network, new health membership website launching in around September, and that’ll be at go wife network.com, so there’s all your goodies.
Brad Weimert 1:04:27
Dig it. Well, it is almost August of 2024 so keep that in mind when you’re listening, always good to see you, man, good to see you, too. Brian, that was fun. I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond them. Beyond a million. The podcast itself, beyond a million.com. Which has some cool free resources, including a free course, and we finally launched the beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe, and if you don’t want to, you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content. 10. Check it out, youtube.com, forward slash at beyond a million.
Books:
🔹 Beyond Training (Ben’s first book)
🔹 The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
🔹 Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic
🔹 Your Own Perfect Medicine by Martha M. Christy
🔹 Boundless Parenting: Tools, Tactics & Habits of Great Parents by Ben Greenfield
🔹 Boundless Cookbook by Ben Greenfield
🔹 The Low-Carb Athlete by Ben Greenfield
Resources:
🔹 The FASTER Study by the University of Connecticut
Today, Brad Weimert sits down with Ben Greenfield, a renowned biohacker, competitive athlete, entrepreneur, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including the popular title Boundless.
Despite being named America’s top personal trainer and a leading figure in health and fitness, Ben’s childhood was quite different.
As a homeschooled student, he played the violin, mastering chess and reading books–far from the athletic activities one might expect. However, his story took a dramatic turn when he discovered tennis in high school.
In today’s episode, Ben shares his incredible journey, from college tennis and Ironman races to becoming a biohacking expert and a successful entrepreneur.
He offers practical advice on optimizing health and performance, highlighting the science and benefits of fat adaptation.
We also explore the connection between sports and entrepreneurial mindset, innovative biohacking tools and supplements, strategies for maintaining a sustainable work-life balance, and a few “strange” biohacks you’ve probably never heard of.
Let’s dive in!
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