Shawn: Hey, BioTrust Nation, we are back with an incredible interview of Ben Greenfield.

Tim: That’s right, gang. We’ve got Ben Greenfield, health fitness biohacking mogul, and today he’s going to share his current morning routine and more—and this is exclusive. He admits, these are things that he’s not shared on his blog or another podcast before, so get it here first.

Shawn: That’s pretty exciting that there’s a lot of exclusive stuff here. Not only that, we’re going to have an unedited version on BioTrustRadio.com/Ben. We will have show notes. We will have links of where to buy all these devices and things that he mentions. We’ll have an infographic that actually shows you what his morning routine looks like and how you can execute it as well. And we’ll have links to things like his various podcasts where he’s interviewed people that are experts on this. So, if you want a lot more, we appreciate you being on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, but we got a whole lot more if you want to dive in at BioTrustRadio.com/Ben. Thanks people.

Tim: Enjoy.

Intro: When it comes to health, fitness, and nutrition, you’re flooded with sensationalism, hype, and fads. Who can you turn to? Who can you trust? Welcome to BioTrust Radio, your premier health podcast and trusted resource for all topics related to fitness, nutrition, supplements, and living an optimal life. It’s time for another episode with Shawn and Tim. Thanks so much for joining us. Here’s to your health.

Shawn: All right. Welcome to BioTrust Radio where we have incredible guests now. And it’s not just Tim Skwiat and Shawn Wells, but we have one of the most famous people in my world, at least, Ben Greenfield.

Ben: Thanks, Bro.

Shawn: The world’s greatest biohacker, in my mind. And you might be wondering what biohacking is.

Ben: Do they have a trophy for that, by the way? Like some kind of giant rhinoceros wearing an electrode cap or something crazy like that?

Shawn: Yeah.

Ben: Maybe a chimpanzee with a coffee enema.

Tim: It’s more like one of those participation ribbons you got as a child.

Shawn: Perfect. Okay. All right, so Ben, you are an expert at biohacking, so tell us what exactly what biohacking is.

Ben: Biohacking is not what we have created it to be in pop culture and in wellness culture, specifically. Meaning that I don’t think biohacking is putting a bunch of nutrients like turmeric and coconut oil and ketones into a Blendtec and making yourself a nice little morning smoothie that turns on the brain. To me, that’s cooking, that’s not biohacking.

Shawn: Right.

Ben: That’s making a recipe in the kitchen. I also don’t think that biohacking is flipping on near and far infrared lights and shining them on your balls to increase testosterone and your back to increase collagen production. That’s just basically simulating sunlight. True biohacking is the guy who injected chlorella into his eyeballs or a guy like Kevin Warwick, you know, the human cyborg who implanted chips in his and his wife’s fingertips. Actually, they didn’t do fingertips. I think they did heads so they could telepathically communicate. But there’s another guy with magnets in his fingertip so he could interact with his devices better. Or there are devices now you can have implanted into your ears to allow you to echolocate. This whole idea of the human body being what they call “wetware,” and then what you put into the human body, usually via some sort of implantation as hardware. To me, that’s true hacking of the human biology.

Now, you could argue that we’ve kind of taken that word, we’ve perhaps bastardized it a little bit or used it in a different sense to all of a sudden say that some of the things I alluded to earlier; shortcuts or recipes are now biohacking. Or for me to use some sort of exercise machine, like a four-minute exercise machine or an ARX Fit or any of these things to get a very quick effective workout in 12 to 15 minutes. We could say now that’s biohacking because essentially you are still kind of/sort of hacking biology in then you’ve made up some kind of shortcuts to get results faster than what you would be able to normally with just the human body that you were born with.

So it kind of depends. You could argue both ways, but ultimately, I would say that biohacking is exactly as the word implies. Hacking your biology to achieve some outcome more quickly or more efficiently than you would be able to do so otherwise, with your body in its natural unassisted state.

Shawn: Right. And so the end goal of that is like what I was saying, essentially, to get more quantity and more quality out of life, correct?

Ben: Yeah, I guess that would be a pretty good way to put it, you know, get more efficiency. So yeah, absolutely.

Shawn: All right, well I know you can talk on—

Ben: And sometimes more explosive diarrhea. So it all depends on the biohack that you’re using. Sometimes they backfire on you, pun intended.

Shawn: There are potentially side effects to some things that may have benefits in some areas and certainly side effects in other areas, for sure. So, you are an expert in so many areas, but we thought it would make sense to talk about a specific area and have you hone in, because we have a limited amount of time. So, biohacking your morning routine, I know you do a lot of different things be it journaling, different devices, meditating. Can you speak to how to biohack your morning routine and get more out of your day? I mean, that is essentially where your day starts, so any thoughts?

Ben: Yes. I would, if we’re going to stay strictly to biohacking, I’ll steer clear of things like, you know, gratitude journaling and breathwork and some of these things that definitely wouldn’t be biohacks, but they’re included in my morning routine, or I could just walk you through.

Shawn: No, no, actually I want that. I want your whole morning routine.

Ben: My whole freaking morning routine. I wake up and the first thing that I do right now—because my morning routine always changes. I may talk about some things right now that I don’t write about because I’m constantly testing things and there are things I’m testing right that I really haven’t written about or talked about. So, I begin the morning by waking up, where I would have stayed in bed, now I walk across the room and I do about 5 to 10 minutes of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy using a very powerful device. This one I got from a company called Pulse Centers.

Anyone who’s done what’s called PEMF or Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy and not really felt it, meaning not felt an actual surge or a pulse going through the body, has probably used a regular consumer PEMF device. And those work. What they do is they open and close channels on the cell membrane, allow for an influx and efflux of metabolites. Like an influx of oxygen, for example, or glucose or ketones, and an efflux of things such as metabolic wastes and other cellular metabolism byproducts. And they also restore a little bit of an electrochemical balance to the body, meaning that when you’re exposed to lots of electricity from appliances or Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever, the electrochemical balance across the cell membranes changes because exposure to Wi-Fi signal, for example, affects the calcium channels in the cell. So you might increase from a normal millivolt potential of let’s say 20 or 40 or 60 millivolts. Usually it’s about 20 to 60 millivolts is what the human cell normally operates at, up to 80 or 100 or 120 millivolts, and that affects normal cellular metabolism.

The way that you would you would push the reboot button on that would be to expose the cell to negative ions, such as you would get from walking on the beach with your shoes off or swimming in ocean water or using a negative ion generator in an outlet of your house, or Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy is another way to do this. And it’s used for everything from injuries to increasing bone density. There’s a lot of pretty good clinical research behind it. And so what I do is I get out of bed now and it’s almost like—the best way I can describe it in layman’s terms is you’re exercising your cells as soon as you get up.

So, I go and sit on that thing, that Pulsed Electromagnetic Field chair is just full-body PEMF, and I like to set it at about 7.8 Hz, which would be called your Schumann frequency, which is the same frequency that the Earth’s magnetic field produces. And I sit there for about 5-10 minutes, and it sounds like this is like [machine sounds]. So, you can actually hear the thing and my whole body kind of shakes a little bit. So, I mean, it really is exercising the cells. It’s a very weird sensation.

And while I’m doing that, I gratitude journal — that’s a staple of my morning routine. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass since I started this practice because my gratitude journal kind of bounces around just a little bit, because this thing’s vibrating my body. But I’ve figured out how to write and read decently. So, I gratitude journal. I write down one thing I was grateful for. I write down one person who I can pray for or help or serve, because I really got burnt out in these gratitude journals that are just like your daily affirmation, I-I-I, me-me-me. I’m so good, great, wonderful, gosh darn-it people should like me. Instead I’ve found to be others facing and approaching with the spirit of empathy and thinking of someone who you can help that day, to be incredibly helpful as far as the impact you can make in the lives of others. So I write that down.

And I also write down one truth that I discovered in that day’s reading, because I like to start off the day with reading something spiritual, something devotional, something that feeds my soul, the most important part of me. And I’ve found that if I read and I know that after I read I’m going to be answering a question about what I read, I read with a greater amount of intention and I don’t skim as much. It’s just like when I read books at night, a lot of times I know I’m going to be interviewing that author on my podcast or I’m going to be teaching that concept to somebody on a show or on stage, so I tend to read with a lot of intention and purpose and understanding, rather than just like flipping over the pages, forgetting what you read on the last page, and flipping backwards, etc. So, I read with intention while I’m doing this PEMF therapy and that’s 5 to 10 minutes.

And I get up and I go downstairs. We live in this big barn home, so I walk down the creaky stairs and try to stay quiet because the kids are sleeping and it’s a very kind of like open home. They just have like this a little sliding barn window that opens up into the living room in the kitchen. So, I put on the French press, and while the French press water is boiling and the French press is steeping with the coffee after I’ve poured though the water in, it gives me about 10 to 15 minutes. And I spend those 10 to 15 minutes doing, it’s not a set morning routine every day, but it is making love to the foam roller. It is decompression breathing. Sometimes it is a Wim Hof breathwork protocol. Sometimes it is hanging upside down from an inversion swing or a neck traction device.

I listen to my body in the morning routine and I just feed it what it needs. And a lot of times that’s based on what the previous day’s workout was. Like yesterday’s workout I had my friend over who I think you know, Shona Angelo, was up here and we met a lot. We walked a lot. We did a lot of walking meetings. We must have walked like probably seven miles yesterday, so my calves needed a little bit of deep tissue work. So I spent most of those 10 to 15 minutes doing some deep tissue on the calves, doing some down dogs, working the hips a little bit, doing some rolling, and a few lunging hip flexor openers.

I have a hard stop—15 minutes is the max amount of time that I’ll go, and after that you start to feel selfish about just like wasting too much time on your body. So then I’ll pour my cup of coffee, I go downstairs, and I jumpstart my circadian biology as I drink my coffee by putting something called a Human Charger into my ears.

Shawn: Yeah.

Ben: And this is two buds that produce like a bright white light that interacts with the photoreceptors on the surface of your brain to send your body a cue that it is daytime. And then I also wear these glasses called Re-Timer glasses. And those produce a greenish-blue wavelength that’s very kind to the retina. A lot of these blue light boxes are damaging to the retina. This one it’s a natural light.

And so, I work on my computer. Usually for me I do writing in the morning. I spend about 15 to 20 minutes writing, starting a blog post, working on a book chapter, etc., trying to be more creative than reactive. And if I accomplish nothing else that day, at least I’ve written maybe 300 to 500 words in the morning as I’m drinking my coffee, got the light in my ears, light in my eyes. I also do what’s called photobiomodulation, meaning that I’ve got these infrared panels that produce near-infrared. And I flip those on as well because they’re really good for blood flow, they’re really good for inducing a nitric oxide release. They activate what’s called cytochrome C oxidase in mitochondrial tissue. So you get a little bit of a jumpstart of mitochondrial activity.

I’ll spend about, like I mentioned, 15 to 20 minutes sipping my coffee and working, while exposing my body to light. It’s difficult for me to go out in the sunlight and still be able to type and work and not have the glare from the laptop and, you know, half the time there’s ice and snow on the ground. People say, why don’t you just go out on the sun? And the fact is, and returning to biohacking, you could argue this is a biohack where I’m kind of shortcutting it and enhancing my ability to be productive while also simulating sunlight in my office.

I also have these bulbs called Awake & Alert bulbs. They’re developed by a company called Lighting Science. They’re very biologically friendly LED. They don’t have a lot of flicker. They don’t have a lot of glare, like a lot of LED or like a lot of fluorescent lighting does. And so I have those on in my office as well. So I’m just like bathing my body in every form of light known to man while I’m working. And that’s very useful, especially for me because I travel a lot, to be able to reset my circadian biology in the morning. Because the circadian rhythm responds very well to a food and it responds very well to movement and it responds very well the light. So I try and get all three of those done in the morning.

After that, I go upstairs and I use the bathroom. And then after I’ve used the bathroom—and I and I do, by the way, once a week, I do a coffee enema as part of my morning routine to jumpstart my gallbladder bile production, to induce peristalsis. You just feel squeaky clean afterwards. So, once a week that’s kind of what I do is instead of the protocol that I just outlined to you, I just do all of my little work and stuff while I’m lying on my right side in the bathroom with a coffee enema. It’s actually a pretty healthy weekly practice, in my opinion.

But anyways, most mornings I just go up and use the restroom. Once I’ve used the restroom, I do a half hour, approximately, of something that’s very parasympathetic nervous system stimulating. Because when you wake up in the morning, you’ve already got a lot of cortisol surging through your system. Sometimes doing a very hard workout in the morning can be extra stress on the body. It can induce the urge to eat a lot more the rest of the day. And frankly, your reaction time, your protein synthesis, like your post-workout protein synthesis, your grip strength, your body temperature, lot of these things peak later on in the day. And so, the morning, unless you have the time to do a really good long warmup—and I don’t—it’s not the best time of day to do a super hard soul-crushing workout. And granted, there are some days where I know it’s going to be such a busy day. I’m going to have so much decision-making fatigue and so much cognitive exhaustion by the end of the day. I just need to get my hard workout done early in the day.

But most days I try to do something like an easy walk in the sunshine or I have an infrared sauna. So I’ll go and do a yoga session inside of my sauna. Or I’ll do a very easy swim, like down in the river or I’ve got like a cold pool outside of my house that I’ll go in and out of. But something kind of that you would consider like more easy aerobic parasympathetic. Sometimes it’s just meditation or Kundalini yoga. I bounce around a little bit, but it’s something in the morning. Always in a fasted state.

And then I finished that up and I always end with some kind of cold exposure, just to tone my vagus nerve, to jumpstart even more nitric oxide production. And it’s just kind of like a cup of coffee for your whole body. So I do the cold as part of my morning routine.

Typically, let’s say I get up at 6:30. I don’t set the alarm. I just kind of wake up when I wake up. Usually it’s an average about 6:30 a.m. I’m kind of done with everything that I’ve just described sometime between about 8:00 and 8:30. And during that period of time, I’m popping upstairs occasionally, saying goodbye to the family, giving the kids a kiss before they head off to the bus stop. You know, just kind of taking care of some family time as well, even though most of my family time—we have these big elaborate dinners in the evening every night and spend a couple of hours playing music and going over our gratitude journals and playing Table Topics. So, for us, most of our family time is in the evening. However, there’s a little bit of family time in the morning.

So, I finish that work out and then I make myself either a big, I call it the big ass smoothie, and usually of late that’s just a big pile of frozen bone broth into the blender along with some lemon or some vitamin C to enhance the collagen absorption, a couple scoops of a really good tasty protein powder, some cinnamon, some stevia, and what else have I been putting in there? Sometimes a little bit of turmeric, but it varies from day-to-day. But I’ll blend something like that up for about two to three minutes, so it gets this really nice silky smooth consistency that’s about the consistency of ice cream almost. And then I spoon that out into a big bowl or into a big wide mouth mug and I dump cacao nibs or spirulina or coconut flakes or little chunks of a good energy bar, or anything like that, so I’ve got some crunchies on top of it. And then I start into my work day, which generally begins with a with a team huddle where all the members of my team kind of gather around virtually. We chat on the phone for 15 minutes and I’m usually eating my smoothie during that time and kind of launching into the work day.

That’s generally how the day begins. And I should mention that typically, for me, that means that every single day I’ve got somewhere between about 12- and a 14-hour fast because I don’t really launch into breakfast until I’ve kind of kind of gotten outside that fasting window. And the only day that I don’t eat breakfast would be Sundays because I try to do a 24-hour fast Saturday night at dinner to Sunday night at dinner, just to get some of the cellular autophagy benefits that tend to not kick in until about the 16-hour mark or so of fasting. So there’s one day a week were I’ll fast for a longer period of time. But those are the biggies.

Shawn: Nice. So that is very dense. Is there any other new devices you’re looking at, things that you wear like any type of like Fitbit or clothing or any other things?

Ben: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. A few of the things that I do, one would be if I return from a bout of travel, in addition to flipping on those lights I mentioned, I have something called VieLite, which is photobiomodulation for the head. It was developed for Alzheimer’s patients, but essentially it activates mitochondria in neural tissue, and it’s like a probe. One goes in the nostril and the rest of it goes over the head. You could Google the VieLite device and V-I-E-light and see what it looks like. I also did a podcast with them on my show to talk a little bit about it. Cool, very cool device. It does create some amount of reactive oxygen species, so you don’t want to overuse it, just like you can overdo exercise or radiation or cold or heat, or anything else. You know, excessive ROS is something you want to be careful with. But I use that when I travel. It does a really good job at kind of clearing my head after I’ve traveled.

I diffuse. You know, right now I’m diffusing mint oil in my office with an essential oil diffuser. And usually a little mint or rosemary or cinnamon is kind of like a cognitive pick-me-up as I’m sipping that coffee in the morning. So that’s another one that I’ll do.

I have a somewhat new device next to me here that I will turn on. I turn it on more during the day when I’m working because it’s like a tube that you place close to your mouth and you breathe oxygen from the tube. But the oxygen actually is passing through a signal generator, and the signal generator is infusing the water with a frequency, because water can actually store specific frequencies. If you look at some of the research done up at the University of Washington by Gerald Pollack. We know that exposing water to everything from infrared rays to music, to some would even argue like positive thoughts and prayers and emotions. I don’t know how on-board I am with the scientific rigor of that research. But we do know that water can change. You know, not all water is created equal. So, they expose us water to a signal. It’s the same type of signal generated by the reactive oxygen species in the body that engage in DNA repair. So you breathe through this tube. The only thing is that I sometimes do that in the morning, but it interferes with me sipping on my coffee. So, generally I’ll put that on later on the day when I’m writing or something like that. But that one’s called a Nano V. I interviewed them on my show just very recently. So that’s kind of a cool little device.

Shawn: And you wear Whoop Strap, is that correct?

Ben: No, I wear a ring called the Oura Ring, O-U-R-A. And that one will measure my heart rate variability during the night and my sleep cycles. And I do take a glance. I don’t obsess over them, but I do take a glance at the screenshot of that in the morning.

And I just realized I had mentioned when I was telling you about that my smoothie that I do one of two things. One is the smoothie. The other option is I get out the NutriBullet and I just make another cup of coffee and I dump that over. It’s not the same thing every day, just like my smoothie isn’t the same thing every day. Like this morning, I dumped that over a scoop of powdered MCT, a scoop of exogenous ketones, one packet of this tasty stuff called Fat Fudge, a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of stevia, and about 20 grams of collagen. And I blended that up and sipped on that. So, sometimes I’ll do like a piping hot cup of things like that blended with coffee and then sometimes I’ll do the smoothie. It just kinda depends on what I’m feeling for the day. So, yeah, those are some of the biggies, man.

Shawn: And would you describe your diet as what? It’s somewhat ketogenic, but I think you’ve talked about carb backloading?

Ben: Yeah, it’s cyclic ketogenic, carb backloading, however you want to call it. But I essentially really need little to no carbohydrates the entire day. Then when I’ve done that hard workout later on in the day and my GLUT4 transporters are upregulated, I’m relatively insulin sensitive, and eating dinner as a family anyway, so it’s kind of like more of—I don’t want to say a cheat meal, but a more nutritionally complex meal. Because my kids like to cook a lot, my wife likes to cook a lot. Like last night they made sushi. So, of course, you know, sushi has rice and everything. It was a fantastic meal, but I always know my dinners are going to be more carbohydrate-intensive anyways, just from a social standpoint if anything else. So I just save all my carbohydrates for the end of the day.

Shawn: Yeah, that makes sense. And you were talking about water before, but I know you have unique water coming into your house, and then you also do something unique as far as Wi-Fi and even just electricity. Can you talk about that?

Ben: Yeah, like I mentioned with water. You know, I have well water and a lot of people think well water is just like pristine unicorn tears, but it’s not. You know, a lot of it has like, in my case, high levels of manganese and high levels of bacterial-based iron. So, I pass my water through a manganese filter and through an iron filter, so I don’t build up mineral excesses or hemochromatosis or something like that. And then I end by structuring it, meaning that once water is passed through filters and it’s been in cisterns and pipes and gone through that whole process, you tend to see a loss of what is called the exclusion zone, which is an area of a positive charge toward the outside of the water, and there’s a negative charge towards the inside of the water. And that allows water to move through vessels when it’s electrically charged like that. It’s also known as like a crystalline structure. It’s a structure to the water. We see that in plants. That’s how plants move water up against gravity, or trees move water up against gravity. It’s one of the ways they do it because obviously plants don’t have a heart and trees don’t have a heart. The water just moves via an electrochemical gradient. So, you can do the same thing with your water. So I use a structured water filter. That’s the last filter that the water goes through. And then I drink it.

I also have now what’s called a hydrogen-rich water generator, and that’s very cool. If you look at some of the research on the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation’s website, hydrogen rich water has a really cool antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect. Interestingly, it’s one of the few antioxidants that doesn’t blunt the hormetic response to exercise, so I like to drink that water after I’ve exercised.

And then the other question that you had was about electricity. And this is probably the question that I may need to end on, based on my limited availability of time today. But because I’m not a fan of Wi-Fi signaling, what I did in my home was I have the whole home just basically hardwired through the walls with a metal shielded Cat6 Ethernet cable. So anytime you want to use the Internet in any room, you have access to high-speed internet, but it feeds via parabolic microwave antenna into just a small corner of the house, and then everything’s hardwired. Everything’s hardwired. There’s no Wi-Fi. So, if you want to connect to the internet, there’s just like an Ethernet cable kind of tucked away in the corner of every room and you plug your computer in or your device in. So, that’s the way that I’ve got the internet set up.

And the reason I chose microwave, by the way, instead of satellite is because like we’re talking right now on Skype and satellite creates like a 1 to 3 second lag time, whereas microwave doesn’t do that. So a lot of people who are in the in the podcasting sector or the internet sector or whatever who asked me about how to biohack their home in the same way that I did. I warned them not to use satellite internet if they want to ever do like a podcast or something like that, because I made that mistake and I had to get rid of that whole internet service because it doesn’t work for podcasting. So, yeah, that’s it.

Shawn: And the electricity, don’t you have dead switches to each room?

Ben: Yeah, we’ve got kill switches in all the bedrooms. I actually have a book. I think it’s on Amazon. I know it’s on my website. It’s called, “How to Biohack A Healthy Home.” And I just went into everything that I did to my house.

Shawn: All right, well we appreciate you taking your time out of your busy day and this was so rich with so many things to do. Once again, Ben, thank you so much for sharing your morning routine and so much more.

Ben: Yeah, so many activities, baby. It’s so much fun. If you guys have follow-up questions or your listeners have follow-up questions or anything like, that I’m sure you guys will have resources in the show notes or whatever, but just let me know any other way that I can help folks out. And thanks for reaching out guys. I’m honored that you found it in your hearts to slap me onto your show.

Shawn: All right, well thank you. Thank you Ben Greenfield, and thank you everyone for listening. We’ll talk to you all soon.

Tim: Thanks, Ben.

Ben: All right, thanks.