The Downsides of Biohacking, Prioritizing Your Life, & The Truth About Endurance Exercise - With Ben Greenfield

29:16So it kind of forces me to grow musically also. Gather the family, we sing the song, we pray together, and then we all take out food for the night and we bust out a bunch of card games and board games and just like have these awesome family dinner slash parties every night. That's another boundary, right? I'm not taking 7.30 p.m. Zooms or doing 8pm emails because I've baked that in. So you got priorities. You got boundaries. Another big boundary is I always have the one day of the week for me that Sunday that's just like completely off. It's like a totally different day in our house. Like people are just hanging out, having fun, nothing scheduled.

29:52It's just a total relaxation day. Like that's a rest day. That's our Sabbath. And then the last part is that understanding, right? So it's the understanding that all of all of this goes away. Like I know you're, you're getting old, like I'm getting old Sean, we've been doing this a while. And you know, you know, that sometimes the joint hurts, you don't recover from workout as fast as you thought. And that's, that's all happening, right? Like until we're 70 or 80 or 90, or whenever we kick the can, all of this is just like degrading, right? Like our bones are becoming porous and our muscles are atrophying and our, you know, our brains are developing tangles and this is all finite.

30:37And then if you look at the things that truly bring happiness and fulfillment, they're infinite, right? They're infinite. And, and that's other people. And, and, and if you're a person of faith, that's God, right? And so once you understand that the pursuit of fitness and the pursuit of endurance and the pursuit of strength and the pursuit of a better jaw or hairline or whatever people are focused on now is ultimately very unfulfilling. And you instead fill that hole in your soul with something that's actually eternal. Um, that's, that's where you really start to feel like you, you don't have as much of a tug towards your identity being rooted in self-optimization.

31:17And that's just more of like a, like a wake up moment. And it's kind of like jumping off a cliff. Cause if you're used to, I don't know if you're like a triathlete, you're used to doing two hours of endurance training, or you're a bodybuilder and you're used to just like, you know, just living in the gym, or you're somebody who's got like your four hour elaborate morning routine with your hyperbaric chamber and your red light and your sauna and your cold plunge. And you decide that, okay, well, I'm, I think I am going to spend time with the family more. And I think I am going to do, you know, some gratitude journaling and some spiritual stuff and some meditation and instead of all this other stuff as the priority of the day, you do have to kind of like take that leap of faith that you're still going to be okay, right?

32:01You're not going to get sick and die if you cut like, you know, you know, whatever, like 30 minutes out of your 90 minute routine every day or something like that. So there's kind of like that realization too. And those were a few of the things that helped me help pull me out of the, like the hamster wheel of self-optimization. Wow.

32:19Shawn Stevenson:Thank you for sharing that, man. Thank you so much. You know, I'm, I'm really curious what you think, because this is very common, you know, for individuals, especially who have aspirations and who, you know, want to do things in the world to find themselves kind of wrapped up in those things that at the end of they won't have that sense of fulfillment, right? They might have that sense of feeling empty. Like again, another thing to change my body or my looks, or, you know, kind of these superficial things. Why do you think that we do that? Like what's so seductive about those things? Evolutionary biology, baby.

32:59I mean, like,

33:03I'm laughing just because we were having, before we started recording, we were talking about like, you know, uh men and women and and how how certain guys you wouldn't expect to get the girls and uh shout out to Mr. Reist yeah shout out to Mr. Reist and um you know we we do have this fear of being ostracized or being excommunicated or you know it's it's the same place that the fear of public speaking arises from right like if you're in if you're up in front of a bunch of your peers or the village or the community or wherever else would have existed in our ancestry and you mess up or you look bad or you stick your foot in your mouth or you've got pie in your face, then you might slip in the rung of the social ladder, right?

33:52You might slip down a few rungs and that might affect Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? It might affect the type of mate you get. It might affect the type of money that you're able to make. It might affect whether or not people take you seriously And so we still have that urge to just like look good and present ourselves as looking good to whoever else that we happen to be around. We do a lot on social media. Of course, it's so easy to do now with, you know, filters and AIs like you can be perfect, you know, until somebody actually comes over to your house and sees that you're actually like a messy, messed up person like a lot of people actually are.

34:30Uh, but there is a pole towards being that type of person who's either got it all figured out or who looks like you are hard to kill, better able to provide, right. Better able to, um, to be a protector or a procreator or anything of that nature. None of that stuff is like wrong per se inherently. That's, that's part of who we are. That's part of how we're wired up. but because we have that tendency if we don't check ourselves and we aren't aware of that then we can take that to the extreme i mean even like physical attractiveness for example right social media and magazines and modern health culture would have us to believe that veins in your abs and you know a 12 pack and rock hard glutes and you know a certain typically extremely lean and ripped physique is something that is going to really make you stand out as far as being at the top rung.

35:33If you actually look at ratings of attractiveness, etc, it's closer to like 15 % body fat for men and like 20 to 25 % for women. And so I think even our modern idea of what it actually takes and how much we need, it's pretty skewed. I think some of that can be a little bit shallow to like, like just basing our meaning to the world and our identity on how we look. I'm not saying you totally throw that out the window and become whatever, just like a fat slob, but it's, it's important to understand that you will have a pole. And especially once you get sucked into the world of like exercise and nutrition and eating healthy and, uh, whatever, like derma rolling, micro kneeling, clay masks, red light helmets, It's like all the things, um, it gets easy to get pulled into that stuff pretty quickly.

36:27And when you combine that with some of the other stuff that we were talking about, right? Like addictive tendencies, um, need for control. And it is very easy to control when you are in charge of your exercise program or your diet, right? That that's where things like body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia and bulimia, you know, those arise from that, that tendency to control. but when you combine all these clusters of factors together it becomes a very very easy downward spiral to fall into if you don't check yourself and if you don't put other things into your life like those things that i was talking about that are much more fulfilling and in the long run more meaningful yeah wow you've mentioned the term looks maxing a couple of times can you enlightened people who haven't heard of this uh okay so you're the first person ever asked me that on a podcast and i don't even know if i've actually fully wrapped my head around what it is i first became aware of it when i saw this social media influencer you may have seen named clavicular and this was like a young man who's been on testosterone i from what i understand since he is, I think, 14 years old, which in and of itself is an issue because unless you've got some serious biochemical knowledge going on, and even then it's tough, you're going to nuke your fertility.

37:47And so, you know, the ability to propagate the human species, that kind of gets thrown out the window, and that's a pretty important part of life. And then it delves from just the hormone and biochemical piece, right? Like using testosterone, using human growth hormone, uh using other steroids you know um nandro whatever else uh along with all the peptides that people are now injecting to uh from what i understand certain facial exercises like mewing for example you've probably done podcasts about how good mewing is sometimes for um for nasal breathing or for jaw alignment but these people are taken to the extremes using like jaw exercising machines, you know, to, to actually make the jaw look better.

38:33And, and I guess like even like hitting and striking certain bones, including the jaw to make it like respond with osteoblastic, you know, tissue formation, like, like bone cell growth to help the jaw look better. The exercise piece is of course a given like lots and lots of time in the gym, carving the body along with implants, right? You can get calf implants, you can get ab implants, You can get arm implants and people are actually doing these things as well. So don't forget the appetite suppressant, crystal meth.

39:02Shawn Stevenson:Tell me about this one. This is one of the things that he mentioned at utilizing is crystal meth for appetite suppression. Wow. Wow. I mean, I don't know why you wouldn't just use like Redditor Tide or something. But yeah, that's that whole world. I would actually love to just like interview one of these people sometime and get into their head and take a deep dive into what actually happened. happens in that whole industry. Because I, you know, I obviously haven't studied it that intensively. But that's kind of like the idea is, is, as the name implies, you're, you're maxing as much as you can, primarily your aesthetics.

39:37And I mean, in my, like in boundless, you know, we've done a podcast about that book before. And there's a whole chapter about like beauty and symmetry and aesthetics and the importance of posture, the importance of vitamin K and vitamin D and adequate minerals for bone growth, the importance of like hygienics and, um, and like oral care and dental care and hair care for not just your overall health, but also confidence, right. In the way that you carry yourself in that, in the world, you can say that that's like kind of sort of a form of looks maxing, but just like, you know, the, I guess you call the exercise maximum that we were talking about, right.

40:20You have to know where to draw the line and i think it's okay to like make sure that you're taking care of your teeth you're taking care of your hair and you're taking care of your bones but trying to literally like change the way you look as your main focus in life is you know yeah call me crazy but i think it's just potentially

40:35Shawn Stevenson:a little unhealthy we talked about the two extremes in the middle being you know and it's often referred to like in a process the messy middle but when we're talking about sustainability and practices and habits, we're talking about the miracle middle. You know, this is where, this is where so much good can be found. And, you know, I really want to lean into this idea of sustainability, you know, because crystal meth, for example, isn't going to, it's not going to be a sustainable habit nor hammering your face, you know? And again, it just, how, when does it stop? And what are you looking for?

41:16Shawn Stevenson:And that's the thing underneath it all is like, you're helping to enlighten again. What are the driving forces behind the desire to do these things? Are these truly efficacious and health affirming reasons, right? Being able to self-assess and to understand what's going on with your psychology, right? If you can't do that, should you even be able to make decisions like that? Yeah. Where is the guardrails on this stuff as well? where a kid who's 14 years old is getting access to testosterone. And in reality, again, this idea of maxing, that's not actually what it is. Maxing first, well, let's call it the ultimate tier is maxing what you already have, right?

42:02Shawn Stevenson:Through the most time-tested means that humans have been utilizing forever. Let's max that stuff. And then let's get into what you can add into the mix, you know, with the hormone therapies and the, you know, the potential, you know, the surgeries and this kind of stuff. So many people are so far from maxing what they have, so far from it. And then these things become the superficial supplements. And there's this huge gap in the middle of where their growth is. Because a lot of the things require growth to achieve. Yep. What do you think? And that's like, you know, not that I want to throw the entire industry under the bus, but that's some of the failure of the biohacking industry.

42:53For example, there's a lot of shortcutting in that industry. There are a lot of people looking to pop a pill for, let's say, I don't know, like enhancing growth hormone released during sleep instead of lifting weights, you know, or taking testosterone instead of making sure that micronutrients like vitamin D and magnesium and fish oil and creatine and zinc and some of these precursors are taken care of. or, you know, spending 20 minutes with the red light panel instead of just like carving out some time to like go outside and visit the beach and swim in the water or, you know, doing PMF maths instead of going outside barefoot or, you know, getting into the hyperbaric chamber instead of just like learning how to breathe properly while you're checking emails during the day.

43:39There, you know, there's, there's a lot of value from both a character and a physiology standpoint to actually doing the hard work. I got lucky in that sense in that, like I started off in the realm of athletics and exercise physiology. That's my formal background. And then just because I'm a hyper curious guy and kind of a geek at heart, like, I really liked the idea of all these different technologies and self quantification methods that I was finding to get the most out of the body and the brain, but with the foundation of the hard work. So that's part of it is understanding, I think, as you were just alluding to that, a lot of the good things in life, especially from a physical standpoint, don't come from the shortcut, but come from actually getting in there and doing the work.

44:26And then I think another important part is, you know, back to the idea of boundaries. And I was just thinking about this as you were talking, like, metrics are pretty important. Meaning if you look at guys like, let's say like, like people in the industry who I would look up to and respect in the physical culture sector, like, um, let's say like physical culture or health sector, like Dan John or, um, Mark Sisson or Kelly Starrett, there are like metrics. It's like, can you get up and down from the ground using as few limbs as possible? Um, you know, can you get like a one 50 or plus on a hand grip dynamometer?

45:12Can you hang from a bar for 90 seconds or two minutes? Can you, you know, deadlift your your body weight plus 50 etc there's no like in my opinion perfect list of metrics from any of these people you probably choose choose any of and i've thought in the past about like putting my own whatever like greenfield metrics out there but understanding like okay so if i can hit these metrics if i can just like sit down and stand up using as few limbs as possible and hit that for grip strength and i can walk 8 000 steps a day and um you know i have i have a certain level of strength and can crank out a certain number of pushups or body weight squats.

45:51It's like, I'm good. Like I've gotten to that level. But if it's murky, what you're actually going for and what your metric is, I think that's another thing that can, that can suck you into this idea of, well, you know what more is better than I've got the time. And, uh, you know, I, I can, I can take a little bit more time away from family or away from family dinners or away from relationships or away from, you know, my faith practice or anything else, just to keep on getting better and better with no actual defined metric in sight. I ran into this a lot in the Ironman triathlon community. I was guilty of this myself.

46:28You do a, you do a race, you do your Ironman triathlon. And a lot of people think, dude, congratulations, you did it. You got the medal, you got the trophy, you know, you check the box. And I'd do a triathlon and be standing in line to register for the next one the next morning while i was still just like you know sore and hung over from the one that i'd done before because it was just like never enough like i could do faster i could go more i could get more miles in i could train more um so i think like healthy boundaries in the form of metrics is pretty good as well like yeah like you want to do a marathon don't convince yourself it's the healthiest thing in the world to do but if you want to do it and that's your personal mount everest go do it but you don't have to do 10 And, you know, much respect to the people that do stuff like this.

47:14You don't have to do 50 in 50 states in 50 days, like one on every continent. Like I think that having healthy boundaries and understanding when enough is enough is a good idea. And that paints into the training piece, too. We started off, you know, talking about 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise is more than enough per week. So is around 120 minutes of strength training. It's a couple hours, right? It's not the gym for an hour, six days a week. It's pretty reasonable, the amount of physical activity that you actually need to stay fit. And I would even say like, aesthetically, let's just use the word like aesthetically pleasing enough to have the confidence that you want.

47:58And it's also pretty easy to exceed that, you know, when there's a gym on every corner. and a lot of social media convincing you that you need to do more and more and yet another toy or tool or tactic or biohack that you can use. So a big part of this, I feel like I keep coming back to this, is just like freaking like self-awareness, like understanding when enough is enough and what's really important in life. Yeah, man.

48:21Shawn Stevenson:I wanna circle back to the very beginning really quickly because when it comes to heart health, cardiovascular health, again, looking at this extreme and what can happen by, you know, extreme endurance aspirations, like constantly like living there. When we think about the hardening of arteries, I know most people think about this, that's because of diet, right? It's cholesterol. Right. You know? Cause I didn't bring my, I'm allergic to seed oils card to the restaurant enough times. Yeah. How on earth can that happen as a result of doing this cardiovascular, you know, I don't even know the word, just feasting.

49:05Yeah. Intense, voluminous cardiovascular exercise. Yeah. So if you look at calcium deposition in the arteries or particularly in the vasculature in the heart, it's typically a response to inflammation, right? You're laying down a protective cap across an area of vasculature that's been damaged, very, very similar to how you might build a scab to repair tissue. The heart works pretty hard during a lot of these activities, and it has to recover. If it's forced to just pump and work the entire time, you are creating some amount of inflammation, and that inflammation does require some amount of calcium infiltration to actually lay down that protective cap.

49:49If you look at, like I mentioned, a CT angiography, right? That was what I did yesterday, where they actually injected a radiographic dye and visualize the entire heart. And you can see not only where blockage might be occurring, but whether the plaque, which is comprised, you know, partially of calcium, is stable or unstable. Now, the nice part is that with endurance athletes or athletes in general, you know, because you see some heart issues and For example, bodybuilders also. For them, a lot of times it's like an enlarged heart, cardiomegaly, more than it's arterial stiffness, but you still see heart issues.

50:26The plaque in an endurance athlete tends to be more stable, less likely to rupture, break loose, cause an issue, cause, God forbid, a widow maker, a complete blockage or something like that. But it's still there and it's still an issue when it comes to proper blood flow. And then when I think you stack that with cartilage damage, with thyroid hormone deficiencies, which tend to be very common in the endurance sports world, typically due to overexercising and under eating hormonal deficiencies, simply because the way that I think is easiest to think about it is the body tends to downregulate fertility when, whether or not you want to produce offspring, it is under the impression that you're in a time of famine or war or starvation.

51:15And if you're just like going to town every single day with any form of exercise that would be considered overtraining, you will tend to downregulate hormones of fertility because nature doesn't want to bring babies into the world in a time of stress. Not to mention, you're also depleting a lot of the nutrients that are necessary for things like testosterone and progesterone, et cetera. So we've got thyroid, we've got the endocrine system, we have the joints, we have the heart. And, uh, I would also say, I feel like I'm really throwing endurance sports in particular under the bus, but I, I could, I could do this with a lot of the different sports that people are doing, you know, CrossFit, high rocks, bodybuilding.

51:51We could, we can go through the list of the issues that each produce. Um, you also tend to see like biomechanical issues, right? Like if you look at the body of a marathoner versus a sprinter and do a Google image search for that, you're going to see two entirely different bodies because a marathoner or a long distance cyclist, they tend to have weaker glutes, they tend to have tighter hip flexors, they tend to have a little bit more of a lordotic curve of the spine, they tend to have a forward head posture, they tend to have a lot of things you'd expect from someone just like hunched over with forward motion for very long periods of time.

52:26And you could find really healthy examples, or healthier examples of triathletes, even of marathoners, especially fast ones of high rocks, athletes of CrossFitters, um, bodybuilders here and there, like you can do some of these sports without overtraining and without overdoing it. And, um, I'm, I'm painting with a pretty broad brush here when I'm talking about the biological blowback of overdoing it. Um, but yeah, like, like you do see issues. And again, my goal here is not for people to stay on the couch, but it's just to ask yourself, okay, like just based on what we know scientifically, am I overdoing it and asking too much of my body or am I doing just enough to like stay fit, like look, feel, and perform relatively well and still have time left over for the things in life that are really important.

53:22I love it.

53:22Shawn Stevenson:Makes sense. You're here for a screening of your new film. And as of this recording, that time has passed. All right. So I want to know if people get access to the film, but also as of the release of this episode, folks that are listening right now, if you're in Austin or you want to go to Austin, you'll have a screening at towards the end of August, 2026 as well. So tell us a little bit about the film and when people are going to be able to see it so i take no credit for the film besides i was the subject matter uh my actually the guy who who uh is the ceo of my company caleb applegate comes out of the film industry and he directed uh the film which is called boundless the man who became human and it tells the story of me seeking uh you know money and fame and uh exercise acumen and all these things that we've been talking about at the cost of all in life that I held dear.

54:25And in, in a very visual and in your face manner shows what happens when things go wrong, and how I went about by the grace of God, fixing that. And there's a lot of like sexy, edgy biohacking stuff in there too. Like there's some, you know, it's rated PG 13. Like there's a lot of stem cells and blood and guts and hacks and even sex talk and, you know, all that's in there. And so Caleb had people following me around with a video camera and I wasn't quite sure what he was up to, but, you know, I had interviews that I was sitting down and doing that I hadn't done before. And I was being forced to be very raw and vulnerable with a lot of this stuff.

55:06And about six months ago, I sat down and he had wrenched out a small theater and I screened it along with the executive producer, Zach Efron, who's also very into like the whole like biohacking health scene. And, uh, we, we loved it. And we were like, dude, like we need to show this to people. So yeah, we're on a tour, like you mentioned, like right now where I'm, I'm in LA, uh, and the time of this recording, and then we're going to Austin, the end of August, uh, New York city, the beginning of August, uh, I think we're up Miami, London coming up in September. Uh, and then eventually we'll go to streaming, But the whole idea behind it is basically, hopefully, a wake-up call to a culture that can take the whole pursuit of health a little bit too far.

55:51What happens when that goes wrong and what to do about it.

55:55Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. Amazing. Well, just so people can stay up to date on when the streaming will be available, where can they follow you, connect, all that good stuff? This one would be boundlessdoc.com, like boundlessdoc.com. gotcha gotcha and social uh for you just make ben greenfield uh life ben greenfield fitness whatever tags were available i don't know just google google or cloud or gbt or whatever people are doing these days yeah icon alert all right so going back to the emoji is your your phone isn't in here which i love by the way i'm curious of what your tracks from the quality of social conversation sean i i'm curious what your most used emojis are right now do you know oh i mean like my wife and i have a great relationship so the eggplant's up there eggplant uh um easy honestly dude like i'm i'm pretty basic i'm like winky face uh um uh hearty icon and And I like the prayer one because it covers a lot of bases.

57:05Am I saying thank you? Am I saying I'm praying for you? Am I saying please? Sometimes if I don't know what to do, I just throw that one in because it's real feel-gooder.

57:14Shawn Stevenson:Fits almost all the time on the occasion. It's good for some prayer hands. Yeah, prayer hands plus an eggplant. That's a great one to your wife. Well, man, I appreciate you so much, truly. And congratulations with the film. And I'm here, man. I got your back anytime. Appreciate you. Thanks, man. I appreciate you. Yeah. The one and only Ben Greenfield, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. If you did, you already know what to do. Share it out with somebody that you care about. Send this directly from the podcast app that you're listening on.

57:45Shawn Stevenson:Or of course you could take a screenshot and share it on socials. Tag me. I'm at Sean Model and tag Ben Greenfield as well. Share the love, share the inspiration, share the insights. this can be truly helpful for people who are aspiring towards improving their health and fitness, but also the vets, the veterans who might be doing the most, who might be doing a little bit too much. And also for those who are seeking more fulfillment in their fitness ventures. So there was so much, it was a very rich conversation. And again, I hope that you enjoyed it. We've got some epic masterclasses and world leading experts coming your way very, very soon.

58:29Shawn Stevenson:So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon.