Biohacks For Dramatically Increasing Your Lifespan, How To Live Like Your Ancestors, Why Yellow Glasses and Daily Alcohol Intake Improve Health & More With Mukesh Bansal.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, it never really clicked for me how much like a battery that we are until I started to study those books and I realized, oh my goodness, you know, every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet or solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it charges up the surface of planet Earth with negative ions that if you touch them with your skin, like if you're rock climbing or climbing a tree or walking barefoot on the beach or swimming in, you know, body of water, which is the best way to do it, you're actually charging up your body's battery. And every time that photons of infrared light in infrared sauna or one of these biohacking red light panels, or guess what, the sun strikes your body, you're actually charging up your battery. Every time you drink good, clean, pure water rich in electrolytes and minerals, or add minerals to your water, or use a pinch of a good salt like we just did at lunch a few moments ago, You're giving your body these charged ions that it can use to keep the battery charged up. Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. During my trip to India recently, I had a chance to sit down with one of India's top businessmen, the founder of the Indian fashion e-commerce company Myrta originally and now the co-founder and CEO of a fitness and longevity company called Cult.fit at cult.fit. His name is Mukesh Bansal. He's an author of a great book, a couple of books on health actually that I will link to in the shownotes for this episode, which you can find at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Mukesh. Mukesh. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/Mukesh, M-U-K-E-S-H. He's been listed in the best 40 under 40 entrepreneurs by Fortune Magazine. The guy's incredibly smart, incredibly fit, and is a biohacker and longevity enthusiast as well. We sat down at his beautiful home in Bangalore and had a wide-ranging discussion on parenting, legacy, education, biohacking, health, longevity, lifespan, healthspan, and beyond. This one is a doozy. I think you're going to love it. So again, shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Mukesh. Bengreenfieldlife.com/mukesh. Be sure to check out Mukesh's podcast SPARKS if you like this one, S-P-A-R-X, available wherever fine podcasts are found. Enjoy.

Ben, welcome. Really looking forward to this conversation. I think I read your book "Boundless" way back in 2019. I guess I didn't fully read it. It's a 2,000-page book. I remember being really inspired because I had tracked this field of longevity biohacking till that time. But, you know, bits of information here and there, different people talking about different things. But here's this book which basically literally is a Bible of everything which was relevant in the biohacking longevity space back then. Just want to understand your journey leading up to this book because as an author myself, just writing 100,000-word book takes couple of years and I'm not doing original work also, just doing mostly translation. But, how did you end up writing this book and that too choosing to write it so comprehensively?

First of all, the book was not supposed to be that big. And, it actually became very hard to find a publisher who would publish a book like that and convince them that anybody would even want it. It began with me wanting to write a book about anti-aging and longevity, how to live a long time as I saw people becoming interested in stem cells and peptides and exosomes, all these little hacks to live longer, longer than the arguable 115 years old, which is the current approximate limit of human lifespan. And frankly, I think still is and will be for some time the approximate human lifespan. But as you delve into all of the different physiological systems that degrade with age and you look at the mitochondria and the musculoskeletal system and the brain and not just the brain but the blood-brain barrier and the neurotransmitters and the cardiovascular system and the gut, you realize that in order to properly address human longevity, you have to properly address nearly every human biological system. Yeah. Which frankly, for the first 14 or 15 years of my life, I cared nothing about at all. I was homeschooled K through 12 and grew up in the hills in Idaho and I played the violin and read and wrote fantasy fiction. And, I was president of the chess club and was not interested in muscles or performance or nutrition or supplementation or anything of the like until I discovered the sport of tennis. My tennis instructor was an attractive young woman who I, a young testosterone-infused 14 to 15-year-old boy, had a little bit of a crush on.

So, I wanted to be the best student.

And so, I began to run up the hills behind my house and I convinced my dad to take me to the sporting goods store and buy me a set of 10-pound dumbbells. I didn't know even what to do with them. I'd lay on the edge of my bed and just kind of do curls and little moves. And, I remember I also bought an as-seen-on-TV exercise device for strengthening the abdominals. It was like a rocket ship and you kind of hold it against your stomach and pull in while you did an isometric contraction of the stomach. But, through mentors, my younger brother's best friend's father was a bodybuilder in the community and he began to teach me about nutrition and supplementation. Another friend of my father's was the Washington State powerlifting champ, so he got me into strength and lifting. And I really started to get very interested in the human body. And I wound up actually, I think originally to the disappointment of my parents, deciding not to go off and do an internship with a Microsoft computer programmer that they'd line me up for because my strongest interest at the time was video game design. And, I was taking apart computers and putting them back together and I'd already taken coding classes and I was the guy who fixed the computers at home when they were broken. And, I instead walked onto the tennis team at college in Idaho, in Lewiston, Idaho. I declared a major in exercise science and eventually just got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics. I studied for the, for the MCAT and went pre-med and got accepted to a host of different medical schools, passed on all of them because I really wanted to get into the MD-PhD program at UPenn or Duke. And so I thought, well, I'll make myself a more palatable student. So then I, I got a job in hip and knee surgical sales thinking that if I worked for a little while in medicine, I'd maybe be able to get into a better school. And that entire experience just disillusioned me with modern medicine, you know, installing $40,000 overpriced hip and knee implants into people who would have been better served through what I already knew— preventive medicine, health, exercise, nutrition, and the like. So one day I told my employer that this just wasn't for me. A week later, I found myself walking across the street from my little apartment to the Liberty Lake Washington Athletic Club. Slapping my resume down on the counter and asking for a job. And, at that point, I had a nutrition certification and I'd been personal training people all through college and looked good on paper, so they hired me. And, I never looked back. I've been in human optimization, learning about it, studying it, and helping people ever since.

And, is that the term you like more, human optimization versus biohacking? And, maybe another part of that, very curious, when did biohacking started to become mainstream? Because, I've been interested in health and fitness in general for a long period of time. I've also been active all my life, played a lot of sports, bodybuilding phase, long-distance running phase, and blah, blah, all of that. But biohacking, I think at least I'm aware of this in the last 5, 7 years. But when did you become aware of this? I mean, people call you one of the foremost biohackers in the world.

It goes way farther back than that. And then, to reply to the first part of your question, I wouldn't really even consider myself much of a biohacker compared to what the original definition of biohacking is. And probably a more appropriate definition would be a human performance enthusiast or a human optimization coach. Because if you look all the way back into the mid-'70s or so to the original biohackers like Kevin Warwick, the original human cyborg, these were people who called their bodies wetware and would install hardware like a magnetic compass in the chest underneath the skin that would vibrate every time someone faced true north. Or magnetic implants in the fingertips that allowed you to interact with screens very similar to Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Or there's a guy you can find on the internet who had chlorophyll injected into his eyeballs to be able to install self-inflicted night vision. And these were the original biohackers.

And they call themselves biohackers?

I don't know. I would not be surprised. I mean, if you look at the phrase, essentially, you know, a computer hacker is someone who hacks into an OS. Or even sometimes the hardware of a computer to enable the computer to work more quickly or more efficiently or override a natural setting of the computer that would allow it to operate better. Sometimes to the detriment of the computer, you know, sometimes to the extent where there's smoke coming out of the hard drive, which also happens to biohackers who take too many nootropics or smart drugs, for example. But, you know, when you look at that definition of computer hacking, you could argue that appropriate definition of biohacking would be somehow tweaking the human biology to the extent to where you're allowing it to do something more efficiently or work faster or work better in a way that it might not otherwise have in its natural state.

And, how is it related to the evolution of science? There was a time where first, if you have health issues, either your grandmother will tell you something or your doctor will tell you something. At some point, we had this, I don't know, fitness trainers, nutritionists, maybe even lifestyle coaches. And, at some point, people saying, "I'm going to take control of my own health. I'm going to biohack myself within what I know and what are the risk appetite I might have." When did science go to that point when a normal person can think about tinkering with their body without killing themselves in the process?

Well, look, that's what got me into biohacking, right? I was the guy who was the fitness guy, right? The personal trainer. And then, I raced Ironman triathlon. For 15 years. And before that, I was doing bodybuilding. And after that, I raced for Reebok as a professional obstacle course racer in Spartan. And my whole world was fitness. My whole definition of health was how good do you look posing in a Speedo on stage covered in gold flecked tanning lotion.

Are those pictures somewhere with you?

They are. If you Google bodybuilding Ben Greenfield, you'll probably find them. Or how quickly can you ride a bicycle down the highway in the Hawaii World Championships or how fast can you climb a rope in a Spartan Race. And, it wasn't until I started to experience health issues that somehow I couldn't override by working out harder at the gym, that I couldn't override by eating more broccoli and lean chicken and rice, that I couldn't override by taking a little extra creatine or something like that. That I realized there must be something deeper to preventive medicine and health and life optimization than working out and eating healthy, which is largely still the message of whatever, uh, Men's Health magazine or Women's Health magazine or what have you. It's, you know, you look at the recipes, they're like, how do you suck the most fat out of the food or get the most protein in it? And here's the 12th workout of the month that you can do. And so Early on, when I wrote my first book, Beyond Training, as the name of that book implies, it was all about the things that I had gradually begun to discover that went beyond just fitness. And what got me into that was what you were just asking about, this emerging, and this would have been about 12 years ago, world of self-quantification that up until recently in the past couple of decades would only have been something that someone who would pay tens of thousands of dollars at the Princeton Longevity Institute or Duke or something like that would have had access to. Blood tests, saliva test for genetic analysis, urinary tests for hormones, food allergy panels, blood spot tests that tell you a host of things about your body. And I started to test myself and I realized, I'm fit but I have low thyroid. I can lift a lot of weights but I've got the testosterone levels of an 80-year-old man. Yeah. I can walk into a room and look like I have muscles in my t-shirt but my inflammatory levels are through the roof and definitely decreasing my lifespan. And so, that was the light bulb moment for me. And, that's honestly one of the things that is progressing if you want to call it, the biohacking sector forward to a great extent is now you can test your body in your own home.

Yeah.

You can look at your own biochemical individuality and then you can tailor your nutrition, your supplementation, your exercise program, your choice of what biohacking technologies or lifestyle adjustments that you want to take to allow yourself to have the power in your own hands when it comes to actually living longer and feeling good.

And this whole area of testing yourself potentially at home. Now, as we all know, the body is very complex. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of parameters. They change from day to day, from morning to evening. Someone who is aspiring to be a biohacker, you know, wants to do something about his or her body to optimize performance or health outcomes. Where do you even begin? Because you have to understand the maybe your book is the answer, you know, to understand the terminology, what each thing means, you know, what is HbA1c, why that is important, you know, how does insulin resistance work, what can I measure about that, should I worry about cortisol levels, can it be even tested. Honestly, even today, I don't know how often you can actually test cortisol levels. But the testing and knowing these parameters is big part of optimizing because if you're putting something in your body, whether strength protocol or supplements or therapy, but you don't know what is happening, you don't have the feedback loop going. So, just, I mean, it's an area of interest. I have spent a lot of time learning about it, but it's taken me years and I still don't think I know anywhere close to what probably you know. So, for an aspiring biohacker out there perhaps in India, where can they begin to learn about right language and right things to test?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So, we could just look at this like a as though we were someone who owned a vehicle and we wanted to fix the vehicle. Well, you could just take your car to a mechanic, right? You could just go pay a coach or hire a doctor and have them just tell you what to do and you wander off and do it. And, that's the expensive but convenient solution. But, the fact is that if you look at, let's say, my approach, if I were to work with a client who'd hired me to feel better or sleep better or optimize hormones or whatever, The first thing I'm doing using a very data-driven approach is I am testing them using a lot of the tests that I just mentioned like a food allergy, a hormone panel, or blood test or what have you. Now, what a lot of people don't realize who haven't yet dug into that is that the quality of the apps, the downloadable PDFs, the video libraries, the education has gotten to the extent to where you can know nothing about, let's say, the inflammatory marker hs-CRP, or the heart rate variability, which sounds like a super multisyllabic word that your wearable is telling you. And you can, while walking for 10 minutes on the treadmill one morning for your warm-up in the gym, actually learn everything there is to know, or at least everything you need to know about that topic, about what diets address, about what supplements address it. And if you take that baby steps, one at a time, because I'm personally a creature of consistency, right? I don't run 26 miles on the weekend. I do a little bit of cardio every day. I don't write a book like this in a month. I write this in 3 years by giving myself the task of achieving at least 3 sentences a day, right? So if you realize that the information is out there and can be systematically consumed, and not only that, but more importantly, is not systematically consumed from some encyclopedia but rather the results of a test or a lab or the app that's connected to your wearable is telling you, you can learn a lot over the course of, I would say, I mean, I would say in 1 to 2 years just with a little bit of time each day that again you could do while you're hiking, while you're working out, while you're sitting on a commute to work and your car is a traveling university. I honestly, and maybe we're delving into a little bit of my perspective just on education in general, Maybe it's because I'm homeschooled, but I've always been a very autodidactic person. And I think that the modern educational system doesn't do people many favors when it comes to actually taking charge of their education. And that's why I like the emergence of Khan Academy and YouTube and podcasting and sources of knowledge that allow people to technically never go to school in their life and be wiser or have more knowledge or know more about a certain topic than people who literally have master's degree or sometimes even a doctorate in that field. So, it really is achievable for anyone. I think if I were to respond to your original question, someone who was just starting getting into this, the first thing I would do is I would get the test that I could afford or I would get the wearable like the Ring or the ankle-worn device or the wrist-worn device that I could afford. And, I would just start to look at my data. Hey, what's glucose mean? What's HRV mean? What's it mean relative relative to me and why is mine low? What's the difference between when it says REM sleep and deep sleep? And, I mean, you can learn that in 5 minutes, the difference between REM sleep and deep sleep, and boom, you're off to the races.

I think you're making a very important point. Instead of looking for that today I don't do anything over my health and from tomorrow I'm going to biohacker, it's just asking for too much. I think that 1 to 2 years is a great thing. Just like anything, you have to commit to it, start small, consistent. We did a episode on just on power of habit side, which is just compounding of one action over a long period of time. And you're absolutely right, there is so much content and guidebooks are available today, excellent books are available. But that commitment, I think biohacking is probably not something that one can look for a very quick solution. You can start easily, you're absolutely right, and start on your self-learning journey. And I think it does require some self-journey at least where the science is. Today, there is no— well, there is one blueprint we'll talk about later, but there's really no universal blueprint that anyone can say, "I'm going to start following." You know, sometimes, you know, people ask me also, "What are the 4 supplements? What do you think about rapamycin?" And I'm going to ask about that later. But I think that's not probably the place to start. I think there's a wide area of science, a lot of practice, a lot of different opinion and perspectives that people can slowly learn over a period of time. Ben, I saw you last 4 years ago and I can swear you have not aged one bit. In fact, you look a lot younger. So, clearly, whatever biohacking stuff you're doing is definitely N of 1 is working. How do you feel about— I'm guessing you're probably experimenting on yourself for, I don't know, decades by now. How has been your personal journey and your own realization of how doing all these things about biohacking? I'm sure Maybe everything might not have gone well also, but overall, how has that shaped you in terms of outcome you are able to see in your own life?

I have a Han Solo-style cryopreservation tank at home and I just climb in that when I get home to emerge from the cold.

Where can I buy one? Is there any resource?

They're expensive, but you can build it yourself. We just talked about being autodidactic. There's some lessons on the internet. My own journey, I would say, particularly if we want to talk about you know, self-preservation or looking younger or anti-aging. I would say that it began with the important concept that I discovered in a couple of books, Robert Becker's book "The Body Electric" and Jerry Tennant's book "Healing Is Voltage." And even though I'd taken chemistry and more specifically, you know, organic chemistry and biochemistry and microbiology at college and learned about cell depolarization and the importance of the electrical charge within the cell, a slightly negative charge on the inside and a slightly positive charge on the outside and the movement of electrolytes and things like that into the cell and metabolites and waste products out of the cell. It never really clicked for me how much like a battery that we are until I started to study those books and I realized, "Oh, my goodness." Every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet or solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it charges up the surface of planet Earth with negative ions that if you touch them with your skin, like if you're rock climbing or climbing a tree or walking barefoot on the beach or swimming in, you know, body of water, which is the best way to do it, you're actually charging up your body's battery. And every time that photons of infrared light in infrared sauna or one of these biohacking red light panels, or guess what, the sun strikes your body, you're actually charging up your battery. Every time you drink good, clean, pure water rich in electrolytes and minerals or add minerals to your water or use pinch of a good salt like we just did at lunch a few moments ago, you're giving your body these charged ions that it can use to keep the battery charged up. And every time that you step into a soup of Wi-Fi signals and wear your AirPods all day long with the Bluetooth signal turned up and outfit your home with smart appliances and are in this constant electrical soup, that's a very strong form of electricity compared to that mild form we get from, say, like the planet Earth or from sunlight, you're draining your battery. And so, for me, I think probably the most remarkable thing I've learned in the journey of biohacking is how many of these biohacking technologies and how many of these concepts, whether things that are good for the body or bad for the body, are based on the body being a battery. And so, when people ask me like, "Well, how do I get started with biohacking?" Sure, like we were talking about, you can test and begin to learn, But you can also say, "Okay, I'm going to start with the stuff that charges up the battery, grounding, earthing, sunlight, infrared light, grounding mats, earthing mats, grounding shoes, earthing shoes, pulsed electromagnetic field technology, PEMF, which is grounding on steroids, water, minerals, electrolytes, food that's grown in mineral-rich soil or if it isn't minerals added back to it." And then, I'm going to walk through my house and maybe unplug the Wi-Fi router at night or when I go to sleep at night during the one-third of my life when my body actually does have a chance to recharge, I'm not in an electrical soup. I move the TV out of the bedroom. I've got things unplugged next to the bedside. My phone's in airplane mode or at least the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth is disabled if it needs to be. If I'm using earphones or headbuds to sleep, they're wired instead of Bluetooth And, once you begin to think in that manner, I think that it's some of the lowest-hanging fruit for self-preservation and for beginning to use biohacks that you can immediately feel that really treat the body as it should be treated, an electrical machine.

That's amazing. I think sometimes you get carried away and think biohacking is all about these exotic molecules and hard-to-access, super expensive, these cryochambers and whatnot, but they're everyday. Biohacks. So, let me just recap some of the things that you covered like grounding is a good idea. So, whenever you get an opportunity to walk barefoot and probably whether walking on ground or inside your apartment, let's say like we are on the 19th floor, does it do the same job getting rid of all these electromagnetic radiations around us? And before we started the podcast, you persuaded me to keep my phone away and now I'm glad I'm not feeling that little itch to check my messages now. You are wearing this strange-looking yellow-colored glasses. I'm pretty sure there's some biohack reasoning behind that as well. Do you want to explain?

Yes. And then, by the way, just to briefly address your comment about the 19th floor, no, you are not as earthed or grounded, but this is one reason why even me on my second-floor bedroom underneath the top sheet of the mattress, I have a grounding mat and it's plugged into the grounded outlet. Every outlet travels down to the ground eventually. Hopefully, the home you live in is properly built and has the right electrical wiring. And, if that's the case, then you can actually ground yourself even if you're on the 2nd floor or the 19th floor. You can also, by the way, if you don't have a pair of grounding shoes or earthing shoes and you don't want to walk outside like a dirty barefoot hippie, you can do like I do when I'm traveling and I go off for a walk maybe after the plane has landed. I'll walk 500 meters and I'll drop and do 20 push-ups. And then, I'll walk. And so, my hands are getting in touch and I'm getting the upper body strengthening effects. There's all sorts of little ways that you can do this. And like I mentioned, the opportunity to swim in a natural body of water or even a pool with metal pipes that eventually reach the ground with most pools, even the rooftop pool of a hotel will do that. And we flew here a few hours ago. After we podcast, I'll go back to the hotel. There's a rooftop pool and I'll swim in that because that's the best form of grounding that I'm going to get even better than if I were to go outside the hotel on the ground floor and walk barefoot on the concrete outside or do the push-up trick. So, lots of subtle nuances there, I realize. But the glasses, and this is a little bit related to the battery concept, modern overhead LED fluorescent lighting or the backlit light from a computer screen or a phone, particularly a phone that might not be in night mode or have the screen dimmed, It presents the body with a— or the retina specifically with a very concentrated form of bluish-green light, which is absent of the red light that that bluish-green light spectrum would normally have if you were in the sunlight or even if you were under incandescent lighting or halogen lighting or a newer form of LED called biological LED or OLED. And so, because of that, when people are underneath these bright modern overhead fluorescent lighting, or the reason I'm wearing these glasses is because right now we have the lighting set up for the the podcast, they'll often get this flicker and irritation in the eyes that eventually a few hours into the day results in brain fog, sluggish energy, eventually in many people, the onset of myopia. And that's one problem with children is not only do they have a lot of time now with their faces close to a screen without throwing in horizon gazing or eye exercises, but then the backlit screen that they're looking at is also contributing to retinal irritation. Hence, glasses that would be able to block blue light. So, I own 2 pairs. I have a yellowish kind of almost clear-looking pair like this for the daytime and then a red pair for the evening. And, like many elements of the biohacking industry, you know, the old blue light blocking glass thing is kind of a money grab. You can import cheap glasses from China and make them look like they're yellow and red. But I always look for technology that actually shows the spectrum of blue light that they block. And there are several good companies out there. I would say that probably one of the guys who's popular in biohacking, Dave Asprey, he started the company Truedark when he first launched. And even if you look at some of those real old wraparound glasses, I call them birth control for your head, those did a pretty good job blocking blue light as well. These ones are called Raw Optics. There's another company called BlueBlocks. But yeah, getting a good pair and preferably having one yellow pair for daytime and one red pair for nighttime. And then, I'll throw in the pro tip for you. When I'm traveling or when I get up early in the morning at home, I will wear the red pair up until the time when I want to start waking up or up until the time when I want to start flooding my body with cortisol, which is what bluish-green light does. And then, I'll take off the glasses and hit myself with sunlight and blue light. So, I sometimes wear the red pair in the morning to just ease myself into the day. Or, if I go back home and I'm off of my time zone because my body thinks it's daytime, I use the red light glasses in the morning as almost like a circadian rhythm hack.

Gosh, it's quite amazing. I think I need to follow some of that advice for my travel. I travel quite a bit and sometimes all the way to U.S. like you're traveling here and that time zone difference wreaks havoc on all the human rhythms.

Are you familiar with the term Zeitgeber? Zeitgeber is a German word. It means timekeeper. And this is especially important for people who travel a lot or who have sleep issues just because of poor sleeping habits that they're fixing. Zeitgebers are things that cue the body that it's daytime and that the sleep drive can be diminished. And the most powerful of them that you can use to get your body on the time clock or wherever you've traveled to more quickly without jet lag The first we've talked about is light, getting a lot of sunlight or like I was in Delhi when I first arrived and it's gray there. I couldn't see even that far outside of my hotel room window. So, I travel with glasses that are the opposite of these. They're glasses that you open up and they produce the bluish-green spectrum of light. I also have that on my desk at home, one of those blue light block boxes that's made for seasonal affective disorder that brightens up the room. So, light is one. Another one is food, right? If you're into intermittent fasting or skipping breakfast, that's a bad idea when you travel. Technically, a breakfast and ideally one rich with about 20 to 30 grams of protein is an excellent way to jumpstart your circadian rhythm. And then, finally, movement is a pretty powerful timekeeper. Cold would be the fourth, but doing something like, say, a movement session that you finish with a cold shower at the time of day when you want to start waking up, clock. So, if you play around with light, with a protein-rich meal at the beginning of the day, with temperature, and with movement, those are all powerful ways to kind of jumpstart your circadian rhythm.

Excellent. So, in the morning, irrespective of where you are, if you're able to give yourself some glucose and protein, I guess, move around, get your heart rate going, expose yourself to white light, blue light, and then probably a cold dip and you are up and running.

In an ideal scenario, protein-rich smoothie sitting outside in the sunshine followed by a dip in the pool, and you're going to feel good pretty quickly.

I'm going to keep that picture in mind. I think I have a travel coming up in a few weeks, so I'll try to replicate that to the extent. In fact, I want to ask you one more live advice now that you mentioned this light. I have noticed this. I mean, this is pretty— we have fairly bright light here in the studio for the recording reasons, but it's very similar to light a lot of us are exposed to during office. A lot of offices are lit up pretty brightly like this. And maybe, I don't know, definitely a lot of people are not using these blue light blockers during the day, especially second half of the day. And sometimes, I do feel as the evening comes, start feeling heavy around my eyes, is a mild headache. Definitely, if I should record for a few hours, I feel that. If you are not able to use these yellow glasses, is there anything people can do in the evening to counter the effect of whatever extra light exposure or your books. Yeah.

You can't wear the weird glasses or you don't have access to them and you're not going to convince your boss to change out all the lights or quit your job. It's kind of like what I was talking about with sleep, how you're not going to not be around Wi-Fi or not use your phone or not be around smart appliances during the day, but you at least can allow your nervous system to repair and recover during a night of sleep. And you could say the same for when you get home from a brightly lit office. If you walk into my bedroom at home in Washington State, all of the bulbs are outfitted with red incandescent lights rather than bright lights.

Does this look like a club?

Yeah. Yeah, like a nightclub. Exactly. If you walk into the bathroom, there are next to the toilet motion-detecting lights that I got off Amazon that turn on red when I walk into the bathroom at night. So, if I get up at night to pee, I don't disrupt my circadian rhythm. If you walk throughout the house, the house is— it's very warmly lit because I've used regular, not red, but regular incandescent lighting. Halogen would also work. And again, that newer form of lighting and biological LED would also work. But paying attention to the lighting in your home, at your home computer and even your office computer, you can do this. There's a software called Iris that you can install on the computer that will make the temperature of the screen more warm, less bright and harsh, and even you can reduce the screen to more of a red light when the sun sets in whatever area of the world that you happen to be in. If you own an iPhone, I don't have my phone on me. Hey, I'm following my own rules. It's in the other room. But if you Google iPhone red light trick, for example, I've outfitted my iPhone, biohacked it to override the OS. If you Google iPhone red light trick, you can do this in 2 minutes and you right-click the side button 3 times sucks all the blue light out of the screen. So, you can do—

Right-click the right-hand side button.

Yeah, the right-hand side button 3 times. But, you have to go in and adjust your color settings first. And, there's a triple-click filter that you can do that sucks all the blue light out of the screen. You do it quickly, just Google iPhone red light trick. So anyways, those are a few things that you can think about as far as the lighting is concerned. And then, because we're talking about a little bit of an inflammatory response, just making sure that you consume foods rich in polyphenols and flavonoids I think vitamin C and vitamin E are the most widely available antioxidants that are the most powerful that anybody can get. There's some like—

And any time of the day, vitamin C and E?

Well, vitamin C causes digestive distress once you exceed, depends on the person, but about 1 to 2 grams. And so, the way that I do vitamin C, especially if I'm traveling in a polluted area, for example, is I split it into 3 1-gram portions throughout the day. And then, with vitamin E, I take 4 soft gel vitamin E capsules in the morning. So, my body is constantly getting a little bit of antioxidants in it. Now, it's important to realize that this can be overdone. Here's where we get back to the biohackers who are making smoke come out their hard drives, right? Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant. Many people are getting that as an IV. Well, I mean, if you did take chemistry at some point, you remember any of it, an antioxidant donates an electron. Once it donates the electron, it becomes a pro-oxidant. So, you can do too much of an antioxidant and create a pro-oxidative scenario, which is why, like, if you get a glutathione IV, you want to take like an oral antioxidant afterwards like vitamin C or something like that. Or really, I would say, another insider tip for you, probably the most powerful antioxidant out there that you can buy in supplemental form is abbreviated PQQ. PQQ is a very powerful antioxidant. And, that would be something that you could use if you just feel kind of inflamed at the end of the day and the light has beaten you up. But, the most important thing you can do is take control of the environment that you're in after you get out of the office.

Right. And, I think in general in the health longevity space, I think the role of light is generally not very well understood or not much talked about. We immediately gravitate towards fitness protocol and nutrition, these days even sleep and meditation. But I think our whole biology is very closely linked with the light around us. I guess naturally evolved around sun's circadian cycles and not only visible light, but we are also sensitive to both ultraviolet light as well as infrared lights. And just managing all of that is one big part. I'm guessing you have a chapter in the book as well about managing light around.

Yeah, I do. It's interesting because when you look at a lot of biohacking technologies, we're returning to an ancestral scenario. I would say that, yes, the sunlight and the planet Earth, and even though research is more scant on this, I would say that we're probably going to be finding out more and more about moonlight as well, that these are powerful ways to fix the human body, like a deep intimate connection with those. There's a term that many people in the biohacking or the health industry use called ancestral mismatch, also known as evolutionary mismatch, meaning that we live in a modern environment, especially in a post-industrial era, in which we are able to go open a refrigerator and have access to hyperpalatable foods or walk across the street to the grocery store when in older times, we would have had to have walked fasted for a long time and gone gardening or had to grow something and go out and collect it or gone hunting to actually secure that same amount of calories. We are in temperature-controlled environments when normally our bodies would have had to have developed stress resilience by dealing with the rigors of cold and the rigors of heat. Or we would normally have had access to things like solar radiation, the radiation from the planet Earth as mild stressors to the human body. Or even eaten a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices rather than the standard cucumber tomato ho-hum salad from the restaurant. And so, when you look at a lot of biohacking technologies, you take the things that I was just talking about, fasting is very popular. We're trying to simulate not having access to the hyperpalatable foods. Going to the gym and working in a fabricated movement scenario is popular because we're no longer farming and hunting and gardening and building fences and battling and doing all the things that we would have done for a long time. Cryotherapy chambers and cold tubs and saunas are popular because we're trying to simulate that temperature dysregulation we would have normally experienced. Infrared saunas and red light panels are selling like crazy because people want to get that sunlight inside of the box that they're living in. And, you know, people are now buying grounding sheets and earthing sheets and the stuff that we talked about because we're disconnected from the planet. I was telling you at lunch about the home I'm building in Idaho. And in that home, yeah, I'll have a lot of cool biohacks in the basement and in my office, but I also will be going outside in the sunlight and swimming in the pond that's at the edge of the property.

Pond and not the pool. Natural pond.

Right, exactly. Why not marry modern science to ancestral wisdom? Often when I travel, I travel quite a bit as you do also. I'm doing a lot of biohacking because when I travel, I'm not in the backwoods of Idaho. I'm going through Mumbai or Bangalore or Delhi, for example, here, and I've got all sorts of things that make it a lot harder to go through security at the airport, but I'm doing a lot more biohacking because I'm disconnected. I'm in more of an ancestral mismatch when I travel. And this is honestly why I think amongst entrepreneurs and executives and people who do travel a lot, biohacking does seem to have caught on because we have to figure out a way if we can't do it from an ancestral standpoint to do it from a technology standpoint.

Got it. And, we should underline that point about ancestral mismatch because I completely agree with you. And, while modern science is giving us all these tools and insights and some very novel solutions which are very relevant in the new lifestyle that we find ourselves in, but also where people grew up, what their traditional diet, traditional rituals, traditional way of living, being in touch with that and being aware of that. And just thinking about, I guess, how your great-grandparents were living and replicating some of that is probably going to be a very relevant biohack for you.

Oh, absolutely. Let's take Take Indian food, for example, right? Your ancestors would have cooked with healthy oils like ghee, sometimes perhaps mustard oil if it could be extracted, extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, and the like. And, the rise in diabetes and obesity and some other chronic diseases that are metabolically related here in India, I looked into this a few years ago. And, you and I had lunch here the last time and I I already looked into this before I traveled. It's not linked to a rise in carbohydrate consumption or more lentils or more naan or anything like that. It's linked to the replacement of many of those traditional oils with vegetable oil, which is more fragile oil that can be oxidized more easily when exposed to temperatures and repeated heating and contribute to inflammation in the body. Or, for example, we know less about properly preparing plants to unlock the nutrients and the proteins in plants than our ancestors because we're accustomed to getting them quickly or schools or parents and don't teach their children how to soak, how to sprout, how to ferment, how to take as we were discussing during lunch that quinoa or that millet and the day before rinse it and soak it overnight so that you're unlocking the nutrients and maybe in some cases having a little under-the-counter jar where you're you're sprouting it. And all of a sudden, you're getting all the proteins that you should be getting from plant-rich diet, but you're not because we've lost connection with soaking and sprouting and fermenting and all these slow food prep methods that unlock the proteins in food. And then, worse yet, we're drenching it in something like vegetable oil instead of ghee. And I mean, there are ways around this, of course. I mean, we've been shooting videos the past few days when I'm here walking through the grocery store talking about where you can find the extra virgin olive oil in glass bottles instead of plastic and how the ghee can be used as a replacement for vegetable oil. And now, you can ask at the restaurant that they not cook your food in vegetable oil or when you're at a hotel like I am and you're at the buffet, you ask for 3 scrambled eggs in ghee or ask for your vegetables to be cooked in coconut oil. And, you just have to be an aware consumer. And then, you know, then you throw in the icing on the cake, the biohacks, right? Let's say you want to maintain muscle or build muscle on a plant-rich diet and you're already unlocking some of the proteins from that food because you're learning some slow food preparation methods, then you dress that up with the type of things that you don't get from plants that would be like a modern biohack like using creatine, taurine, vitamin B, and vitamin D. Those would be 4 right there that are going to address a ton of deficiencies that that would normally exist on a plant-based diet.

I think you touched upon a very important point. I think we import a lot of great things from America, but one of it is also this industrially processed food and lifestyle habit and fast food and so on. It's a whole different topic, I think, being selective about what are we copying from whichever part of the world and what are things which are better off being in touch with our roots. And continue to incorporate and celebrate in our lifestyle. Ben, a lot of people get interested in this whole area of biohacking and longevity for different motivations. Some people want to improve their performance. Performance can be for athletic reasons, could even be for an executive like me to just improve performance at work. Some people think about delaying onset of aging or avoiding lifestyle diseases. But, there is whole idea of lifespan increase also with David Sinclair's book, Lifespan, last 5 to 10 years. Many people have been talking about that we are finally at the cusp of a revolution where we can dramatically extend human lifespan. Dave Asprey famously talks about living up to 150. As somebody who spent a few decades thinking about it, what's your current take on this healthspan versus lifespan? Today, still mostly about enhancing healthspan or you see some light at the end of the tunnel for the lifespan increase as well?

Well, first of all, I don't have a set number of years that I plan to live. I want to take as good care of myself as I can, but at the same time that I'm doing that, I don't want to be that biohacker who's cold and hungry and libido-less and never snowboards or swims with the sharks or hikes up a mountain because God forbid I do something that could take just a few seconds off my life, nor do I want to be somebody who lives a long time but spends all those extra years trying to live a long time huddled up inside of a hyperbaric chamber or traveling to get yet another stem cell injection or what have you. I think you do need to strike a balance. And this is particularly relevant because if you look at, let's say, the Rejuvenation Olympics, which is a hot new website in the U.S. where people are submitting their test results from an aging test called the, the True Diagnostics aging test, which measures, not to get too into the weeds, but the rate of methylation, which is a rate of how quickly you're aging. Prior to that, you might have done a telomere test, which honestly was somewhat inaccurate and is just a test of how quickly the number of white blood cells in the blood spot that you submit are experiencing telomere shortening. There's even modern tests of more precise markers of inflammation than you might get from a normal blood test. One is the GlycanAge, which looks at the level of glycation in the body, which can be an indication of damage to proteins, for example. And when you look at the Rejuvenation Olympics, the rate of methylation test, the type of things that people are doing to live a long time widely varies. And sure, you have Bryan Johnson near the top of that list eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And dinner, I think, is at noon because that's the last time that he actually eats. And doing the same exercise program every day and living a highly regimented lifestyle, you know, getting laser skin treatments for the face and borrowing blood from his son for a plasma replacement. And I have nothing against what he's doing. I admire his dedication and his thirst for knowledge and the quest that he's on for himself and I think also for others. And I mean, sure, there might be some extra virgin olive oil sales and dark chocolate sales mixed into that, but I mean, I own a supplements company. I'm a capitalist. But then you see also towards the top of that list, a 45-year-old mom who spends $70 a month in supplements and plays pickleball and walks her dog every morning and has some time in the sunshine and isn't doing stem cells or peptides or exosomes or any of this stuff. And it reminds me of these Blue Zones where people are not going to great extents to biohack and do all the crazy treatments. They're living a natural lifestyle. They're eating a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices. They're drinking alcohol and enjoying meals with people and engaging in some element of religious fasting sometimes or some type of cleanse or protein restriction or calorie restriction occasionally. But yet, you've got the 110-year-old gin-chugging, cigarette-smoking grandmas who are hiking their goats up a mountain for half a life. And, it just goes to show you that there's such a wide amount of genetic variability and there's so many factors that play into lifespan that I think, first of all, you cannot make a concrete statement that human lifespan is achievable much longer than about 115 years. And I believe that is close to that. It might be 117 is the longest on record. Based on birth record data. I believe it's a woman in France, Jeanne Clément, I believe was her name, who is the longest human on record. It's usually the females, gosh darn it. So, based on that, I think that it is better to focus on some of the things that we know contribute to life happiness: meaning, purpose, human connectivity, absence of loneliness derived not through digital connections and your number of Facebook friends and Instagram followers but through the number of of real live people who you have a relationship with, who you interact, who you hug, who you handshake on a daily basis. I would say that, you know, recent book I read called "The Cancer Connection" makes a pretty good argument for the idea that human connectivity is probably one of the better things to engage in for that ideal combination of healthspan and lifespan. And I would include happiness and life enjoyment in the healthspan part of healthspan and lifespan. So, I think that you can get obsessive, you can get myopic, and you can start to chase numbers when I think it's better to chase purpose and to chase happiness, life enjoyment, adventure, a Renaissance man or a Renaissance woman approach to life in which perhaps learning guitar or piano or playing pickleball or padel or tennis might be more important to you than visiting the hyperbaric chamber at night. It's interesting because that might, for some people, be a selfish pursuit. But, I'll tell you the same thing that I tell my sons, and that is that life purpose and happiness should always be viewed at through the lens of loving others. It's not just about happiness for you. Your purpose statement isn't just about you. It's about blessing others, being with others, and using whatever skill set that you were born with to do good for as many people as you can. And so my purpose for anything I do to increase lifespan is so that I can be around this planet a longer time to be able to help people, care for people, connect with humans, foster legacy in training my own sons. And being able to play with them and hike with them when I'm 80 or 90 years old. I think that's a much better perspective than chasing a number.

Right. And so, looking at it from a more qualitative lens that at the end of the day, you're putting in all this effort to maximize the quality of life, which also means in some way similar quality of life irrespective of which decade of life you are in. If you're going to live till 80 or 90, 100, you want to retain your vitality and energy and ability to do things that you would like to do at that point in your life without having to be burden on other people or having to deal with all these diseases over last 2, 3 decades of life. Which in other words, I guess one can use the phrase healthspan. I don't know if you like the phrase or not, but I guess from Indian context, I can speak that, no, the mindset so far has been, you know, you hit 60, and our retirement age is 60 here, not 65 like US, and you mentally start acting like an old person. You see people go through this change overnight. You know, you are going to office every day, you retire, one year of loneliness, you start to lose your social connection at work, very difficult to form new connection at that age, and the rate of aging just accelerates. And by the time you're 70, you actually act, behave, look like an old person. Yeah. So, that's potentially by investing correctly in the right, whether you call them biohacks or healthy lifestyle or right protocols, one can add few more decades of high-quality life with the purpose that's meaningful to you in your own context.

Yeah. And then, not to get too esoteric, but what you just said, life purpose is important because if you have life purpose, if you've studied up and gone through a book like "Values Factor" by John Demartini or Ikigai, a free workbook I've taken my sons through that you can find at the sloww.co website, S-L-O-W-W.co, or you've gone through— I even talk about "Life Purpose and Boundless" and you have one single succinct purpose statement for your life that, yes, might change through different chapters of your life, but is always driving you and is always keeping you connected to what things that you're naturally good at, what things make time go by quickly, what author Mark Manson says makes you forget to eat and poop, and you're constantly connected to that, then retirement is not a palatable or attractive thing because, yeah, you might not be making money in the same way when you're 60 or 65, but you're constantly seeking out ways to make your career and what you do for a living relevant to life purpose. And if you can unlock that, then I think that getting old and eventually fading away as soon as you reach a certain age becomes something that's far less likely to happen. But again, I realize it's kind of a little bit more of an esoteric topic, but I think that it begins with being connected to your life's purpose. And mine has changed throughout the years right now because I'm in an era of wanting to be a good leader for my team and for my family. I'm wanting to embrace humility to a certain extent, and I'm wanting to learn how to listen to my heart and to listen to my gut more. My current life purpose is to be a wise teacher. I'm sorry, a wise human, a humble leader, and a gracious teacher. I mean, wise human, a humble leader, and a gracious teacher. And that was the life purpose that I developed on January 1st of this year as I recognized that I was stepping into a new phase of my life. As a matter of fact, typically during Christmas break is when I reanalyze, step back, and look at my purpose statement. And, I like to be able to come back to that when life's flying at you and you're stressed out and you wake up in the morning and you're a little down and you need something to get you out of bed in the morning, you have to be able to return to that purpose statement.

And, this purpose statement you craft for yourself, in the past you have seen typically last for 5 years, 10 years, you know, how do you see it evolve? I'm guessing you probably have a routine to go back around Christmas, New Year time to go back and reflect. Yeah. So how does that play out? And, you know, maybe before you answer, I'll just quickly share. I very deeply believe having the purpose statement in personal life or in an organizational setting is amazing. You know, I think Simon Sinek's Start With Why, I think it applies enormously, you know, corporate setting, companies will have that deep purpose and mission, you know, go the distance, we'll say. And same, you know, applies for individual human life. At some point, I defined my purpose in two words, you know. There's really this word I like called conciliance, like unity of all knowledge. So I'm driven by this quest to really learn. I want to understand things. For me, that, you know, in and of itself is a purpose. And second, you know, impact. I mean, I'm quite privileged, have actually a lot of resources, just somehow figure out a way to be useful to the world at large. And I've stayed with this for 10+ years, you know, things probably evolve with time. But coming back to it, you know, how does one think about crafting this purpose statement and how long can it last?

Mine tends to kind of vary every couple of years. It always comes down to something that involves teaching people, educating. I have the heart of a teacher and an educator. I've always loved to learn at the autodidactic pace that we talked about earlier and not just learn for my own sake but learn in a way that I can turn around and teach that to others. Typically, at least for the past few decades, that's been in the realm of health and health education. And so, there's always mild variants of it, but it changes every couple of years. There is one thing that you said though that's important, and that's the idea that you're branding yourself yourself as a person in the same way that you'd brand a business, in the same way that a business would have a mission statement and core values and a purpose, a human being should have the same. I think that it's important for people to realize that a family should also have that. And that's something that I've really focused on developing for about the past 5 years with my family, a sense of legacy, a sense of raising not just your children but your children's children And so, our family has a purpose statement, a mission statement that hangs on the living room wall, a core set of values that's within that mission statement, a family crest hanging above the fireplace, a family logo with each of the families symbolized in that logo. And, the logo is on throw pillows and pickleball paddles and the family pepper shaker. And, it's on the family flags that are on each side of the door when you come in. In the same way that you might have an old crest for a family and it's on our hats and our t-shirts and we go out to dinner on the weekends and we all wear our family logo hoodies and our family hats. We're that weird family, but my sons know what it means to be a Greenfield and we have a multi-hundred-page book for the family. Here's what we do on Thanksgiving. Here's what we do on Christmas. Here's what we do at night before we go to bed. Here is what time we gather in the family living room for morning meditation. Here's each family member's hex color for their logo and their text and their font. And here's the structure of the weekly marriage meeting that my wife Jessa and I have. So, when my sons eventually start their own family and marry and move out of the house, I'll be able to hand them this book that they will then be able to build upon as they continue to develop the Greenfield legacy because this is relevant to what we were talking about when it comes to tradition, the way that food is traditionally prepared, for example. You're no doubt familiar with and probably talked before about the rags-to-riches-to-rags phenomenon or this idea that children will inherit wealth from their parents, not have a sense of identity and connection to the family, and go off and squander that wealth because they haven't been raised with a sense legacy and generational wealth. And so I think that in the same way that you develop yourself and your purpose and your business and your purpose, family also has to have purpose.

That's amazing. I mean, that's— thanks for sharing. First of all, I think that's very interesting. I have never heard of something like that, but it makes so much sense that, you know, as a group of people who are living together closely, have this shared life context, to articulate the collective purpose. So, as a group also, you're moving towards something, you know, stemming from some core values that deeply believe in, rituals, and that you do together as a group, and a visual identity that you have created and stay into next level. And, these things can last for a very long period of time. I think I'm going to have this conversation with my kids. Yeah.

And, in the same way that your purpose statement constantly evolves, the family book constantly evolves. Like, recently, both my father and my mother experienced some significant health issues. And, we realized that as we walk them through potential end-of-life scenarios that we hadn't talked about that much as a family. So, 2 months ago in the family booklet, now my sons who are 15 years old, they're twin boys, they and my wife and I both have our memorial service mapped out. We've written our eulogy. We've planned out our funeral. We have all of that in the Stanley book. Lino, whether people want to have organ donation or cremation or what songs they want sung at their funeral, what they want people to wear and what they want the ambiance to be like. And that alone is a powerful process for a young human to think about their own death. You know, I used, back when AI first launched, the, the face aging app to create a 75-year-old photo of myself that hangs in my office.

You don't look like you're 75.

It looks kind of like Harrison Ford meets Gandalf. But, I walked into my office every morning and I see the old me and there's something about that that drives me to not want to squander time. Am I going to dink around with a YouTube video and chasing comments on Instagram or am I going to do something that fulfills my purpose statement? Because time is finite. I'm not going to be here forever. I doubt I'll be here 115 years. If I actually look at my genetics and I'm realistic and I do the very best I can. I realize this relates to mind over matter and biology belief and the retirement statement that you made earlier. You don't want to think yourself into an early death, but being realistic looking at this as a statistician or an epidemiologist, I'll be lucky to go to them in my mid-80s. And so, having that at the back of your mind and planning on that is a good way to keep yourself on track when it comes to impact.

It's interesting in the biohacking episode, instead of talking about becoming immortal and living forever. We are talking about this whole idea of Memento Mori, right? You know, remember you have to die, but such a powerful concept. I'm sure you have read, you know, tons around that.

Yeah, we, we are immortal if we think of ourselves from a legacy standpoint. Well, I say we are immortal, but what I mean specifically by that is anyone who has children is immortal, right?

Right.

You have the choice for the impact that you're going to make based on the way that you raise your children.

Right. I think this whole broader idea of, I think, social connection, emotional health, why do I even need good health for, right? Because good health is also an asset that I'm going to use for some purpose. And I think integrating all of that into longevity conversation, I think makes it that much more richer and meaningful. I want to come back to the world of more sciencey world of biohacking and longevity. I was recently, I was telling you earlier, at a conference a couple of weeks ago where some of the top longevity researchers were there and talking about where are we with metformin clinical studies or where rapamycin is. A lot of these guys are taking rapamycin, but also obviously, we know that there are no human clinical trials. And NMN, you know, should humans already start taking it or not, how much we can extrapolate from animal models to human models. What is your process to look into some of these emerging molecules which get a lot of press these days? Sometimes, they're touted as, you know, be-all and end-all of everything longevity. But what I might take away from this conference was, you know, it's deeply gray area.

There is— Very gray area.

Yeah. But we all read about these headlines, so what should we know as a normal user interested in longevity process these days?

Yeah, yeah. Expense and anecdotal observations are probably my two primary metrics when I'm looking at something like, let's say, rapamycin or metformin or there's another one that you just saw, niacinamide. And probably in addition to the expense and the anecdotal observation, I would say a third would be the alternative options that might offer me similar results with a little less hassle. So, let's say for example, Metformin. Metformin, right? Diabetic drug being used off-label by longevity enthusiasts to live a long time because of its impact on glucose regulation. When I look at that and I look at anecdotal data, I've used metformin. It lowers my blood sugar. I don't think anybody would be surprised if that's the case. It's also expensive. There's also the hassle in that it can impact the mitochondrial response to exercise and cause gut issues in some people. Yet, when I take a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal or even berberine, which works fantastically for me for blood sugar control or bitter melon extract or Ceylon cinnamon or if I lift weights or I walk for 5 or 10 minutes before a meal or, you know, the number one thing that keeps my blood glucose low even before I go out to a cocktail dinner where I'm having the bread basket and a drink and maybe a couple of drinks and a sweet potato with a piece of meat that's insulinogenic, cold. Cold shower, cold bath, cold soak beforehand. And, that's a daily practice for me because of the impact I see on my glucose variability.

Let me get this right because I want to replicate this. So, let's say I have an evening dinner which I try to avoid these days because I'm worried about all those things. It'll come to that. But, you're saying I take a cold dip at, I don't know, 45, 50°F or 6, 7°C. 2, 3 times and then go back and it will as if I'm not having that bread basket. Exactly.

Even hot cold. For example, this morning I flew here and I knew that with a 9:30 AM flight and walking through the airport and waiting in the airport and walking, making phone calls in the airport, I wasn't getting on the plane fast until I'm here. Just call me weak, but I knew I'm going to eat something. I also knew that I'm not going to be lifting weights or you know, having a shot of apple cider vinegar or something like that on the airplane. This morning, the very last thing I did before I left the hotel was I put on a podcast in the shower and I did 5 minutes of 20 seconds cold, 10 seconds hot, 10 times through. And that fluctuation of hot and cold, or maybe also call me a wimp, I just enjoy hot-cold contrast more than cold, and it has a similar impact.

Don't call you weak and wimp. I think it's going to worry a lot of people. I think you're staying—

Yeah, saving your cold soak for after the sauna. Same thing, you don't have to start, you know, you don't have to jump straight into the cold, you know, as you're waking up in the morning. You do sauna first and then cold. Yeah, but it impacts the blood sugar for hours and hours the rest of the day. So if you told me right now after dinner you and I are going to go out, then we're going to have like a huge basket of naan and we're going to have this enormous, you know, wonderful buffet feast and we're going to have a couple glasses of wine, I'd say, all right, let's go jump in the pool first and swim around a little bit or get cold or do a cold shower because that's the most impactful. But, back to the root of your question, based on that, I don't take metformin because for me, there are more affordable, easier, potentially less for me as an athlete harmful options out there. You look at something like NAD or niacinamide. Sure. There are ways that I could get that naturally. Fermented foods, sauna, exercise, limiting carbohydrates, or even getting into a state of ketosis with carbohydrate limitation or the use of ketone supplements or both can all raise NAD+. The vitamin B complex niacin that is a precursor to NAD+ is found in avocados. It's found in dairy. It's found in many fat-rich foods from the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. And so, yes, I could get that naturally. But now, down to anecdotal observation, there is nothing for me that beats sleep deprivation and a supplement for jet lag like combining NAD+ with creatine. That's like my pro tip for sleep deprivation. So, for me, yeah, I can sit in aging research convention all day long and hear about the gray area of NAD+, but all I know is that if I take around 300 mg of niacinamide or if I take an NAD supplement, I feel great in a sleep-deprived state. So I use NAD, right? Uh, and then if you look at rapamycin, I didn't take that until about 6 months ago. I was concerned about the immune suppression that you see with rapamycin. Yet when I realized that the data, albeit the data on yeast and fruit flies and models that you know, rodent models, not humans, mammalian. Yes. I'm pretty convinced that we will see evidence that a very, very small dose of rapamycin— I take 5 milligrams once a week as a way to inhibit mTOR, which is a potentially age-accelerating pathway— is a good idea. And now I step back and I say, well, if it were the $3,000 a month prescription rapamycin, The data isn't strong enough for me to do that, but weak data combined with the fact that here in India you can get a pharmacy pretty dirt cheap. I can get Rapamycin Pro generic off-label version or generic version for about $60 for around a 2-month supply at home. I take 5 milligrams of rapamycin once a week, but you have to be informed. You know, this comes back to the education piece that we were talking about earlier. The only time you hit an mTOR you inhibit the ability of being able to build muscle. So, I only take rapamycin on Sundays, which are my recovery day, so that I'm not putting something into my body that keeps me from gaining muscle on the same day where I'm lifting weights. So now, we get into some of the subtle nuances, but that's generally my approach. How much is it going to cost me? How do I actually feel when I take it? And are there other options that might result in less discomfort or damage to my body?

Got it. So, some of these molecules are interesting. There's promising data in animal studies, definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence. And then, it's a cost versus benefit trade-off. And benefit, eventually, you have to somewhere in tune with what's happening in your body and how does this particular intervention makes you feel.

Yeah, you need to be in tune with your body and preferably quantify. I wouldn't know anything I just told you about Ben Greenfield versus metformin versus cold versus walking if I wasn't wearing this patch on the back of my arm that's continuously monitoring my blood glucose. So, sometimes you do have to quantify and be willing to do that to know some of these things.

Actually, we earlier in this podcast with another guest, we talked about CGM patch that you're wearing. What's your recommendation? I mean, CGM, I think people in India have heard about it. Some people have tried. I think Ultra Human has a very good product people use. In my own experience, I've seen that after I tried CGM for a few weeks and then coming back to it every 6 months is enough. I'm somehow not able to find usage week over week or long period of time. How do you recommend, you know, what's a— or is it a good idea to wear this patch for a long period of time?

You mentioned Ultra Human. I'm wearing the ring and I'm wearing the patch. And I wasn't even familiar with the name Ultra Human 3 days ago and someone gave this to me. So, I can't say I'm advertising them or endorsing them. I just happen to have been given one. So, I'm experimenting with it. However, at home, I do use Freestyle Libre patch 2 weeks every 2 months. Okay, got it. Right, so the— they technically send you every month, so by the end of the year I usually have a surplus that I give away to people of blood glucose sensors. Uh, but I find that if I'm testing 2 weeks every couple of months, I'm able to keep my finger on the pulse of how my lifestyle and my diet and my exercise are affecting my blood glucose values. Stress, sleep, a lot of things can affect without necessarily having to keep the patch on all the time because frankly it's just yet another thing to do, to scan and hold the phone up. It doesn't take much time, but sometimes I like to not have to worry about it.

And, some of these things also add to the accountability framework. And, just to share one of my experiences with Oura Ring similar to Ultra Human Ring. When I started wearing this, I noticed that whenever I'll have a drink or two, my scores will be terrible next day. Yeah. And at some point when you start, you get used to getting, you know, 85, 90, and suddenly you get 60. One is the whole psychological drama of that, you know, the whole different ballgame. Park that for a second. And then I started looking into, you know, the impact of alcohol on the sleep quality, especially REM sleep. And a lot of people started talking about it. You know, Huberman had a whole episode on the impact of alcohol on sleep, and his basic, I guess, the whole episode takeaway was alcohol is bad. Now, we know alcohol is a big social element. Bangalore is, you know, the beer capital of India. There's so many, you know, breweries everywhere in every street. I have now stopped, you know, alcohol. I think I just said data was adding up to be too much, and now I get much better score. But what's your take and recommendation on just how the approach to alcohol for someone who is frequent drinker?

I drink almost every day. I have about 6 to 7 drinks a week. Okay. The reason for that is because, first of all, if you look at the data that Dr. Huberman, who's very intelligent, wonderful public health educator, by the way, cites, it doesn't differentiate between the 1 to 2 drinks of alcohol alcohol in an almost microdosing way that many of the Blue Zones engage in besides Loma Linda and having all 6 to 7 drinks on a Saturday night and overwhelming your body with acetaldehyde and ethanol. There's a big difference between me saying running is healthy and running 2 miles a day versus running 27 miles on Saturday as far as how much my body is able to handle at a time. That's the first thing to realize. The second thing to realize is not all alcohol is created equal. Gin, vodka, tequila, particularly mezcal tequila, an organic biodynamic glass of red wine, sausage you'd find from Italy or New Zealand or France is going to be far lower in toxins and sulfites and preservatives than getting a margarita mixed with high fructose corn syrup or Manhattan made with jaggery at the, at the bar or at the restaurant. Uh, the next thing you need to realize is that in the Blue Zones, the bitters and herbs and spices that are frequently consumed are tonics for the liver and help the liver to be able to upregulate its antioxidant pathways that would assist with the detoxification of the alcohol. I go a step further than that. Before I drink alcohol, I will take a supplement. Particularly, there's two that I like. One called DHM, dihydromyricetin. You can find it just about any pharmacy or health food store. It actually breaks down acetaldehyde, I'm not going to break down 6 or 7 drinks, but 1 or 2 drinks breaks it down. So, you're removing the toxic byproduct of alcohol. A new genetically engineered probiotic called ZBiotic. It's a tiny little liquid shot. I mean, you can get it in the U.S. I don't know if you can get it here, but it will act similarly. In addition to that, after I've had alcohol next to the bedside later on at night, I'll take a binder. Why later on at night? Because a binder will bind anything including that DHM or that ZBiotic or whatever else. Digestive enzyme I might be having with dinner. So, before I go to bed at night, I'll take some activated charcoal or some chlorella to bind the alcohol. So, I take a binder before bed at night anyways because since I'm going to have a bowel movement the next morning, it's like a daily detox. And, if you've had mold, mycotoxins, even chronic coinfections like Lyme or Epstein-Barr, it's a really good way to move stuff through and out of the body. So, it's all contextual. Like, a little bit of alcohol on a regular basis almost like microdosing accompanied with things that help you to process the potentially toxic byproducts of that alcohol, I think is an okay approach. Not only is it an okay approach because it does lend itself to a little bit of the social enjoyment that you about. Not only is it an okay approach because for me, it keeps me from getting drunk. I haven't been drunk in 15 years because I never feel like, "I haven't had alcohol in a month. I'm going to go out and have a six-pack." And then, finally, if you look at the plant kingdom, plants don't have teeth and claws and antlers and sharp nails like animals do. So, they've developed their own plant defense mechanisms. That allow them to, when consumed by a mammal, cause mild irritation to that mammal. In high amounts, you know, bloating and digestive distress that would allow the seed of that plant to be pooped out by the mammal so it can grow elsewhere. It's an evolutionary survival mechanism of a plant. Well, in small amounts, this induces an endogenous antioxidant production in the human body that results in the human becoming more resilient. Which is why a high intake of a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices can be good for you. Now, this might seem paradoxical to what I was saying earlier about quinoa or millet and the soap-like irritants in quinoa or say the lectins in grains and some of the problematic compounds that can make you sick if you're say eating enough plants to get all the protein that you need. There's a difference between microdosing with small amounts of plants and herbs and spices and a little bit of alcohol and like on a regular basis eating huge amounts of plant defense mechanisms that haven't been deactivated through soaking and sprouting and fermentation and the like. So, we could even draw an analogy between another popular habit amongst biohackers these days, microdosing with psychedelics. Big difference between dropping 100 micrograms of acid at the beginning of the day and taking 10 micrograms for focus or creativity. Big difference between eating a 5-gram psilocybin truffle and taking like minuscule amount of magic mushroom for creativity during the day. So, it all comes down to the dose is the poison, what do you accompany it with, and how is it actually affecting you and your propensity to do more or less of it.

Got it. Amazing. I think that's a really good mental model. I think that's also going to make a lot of people very happy listening to that because alcohol is vilified a lot these days. I might have done my own bit. I have a nice wine collection I started to give away slowly. I'll reconsider it. When you say microdosing of alcohol, what does it mean? You take a glass of wine and sip it slowly for next 2 hours?

It doesn't necessarily mean that you're consuming it in tiny microdoses when you're having it. It means you're drinking a very small amount every day.

I see.

So, I might have a glass of wine, maybe a little bit more than that, around 4 ounces. With or right before dinner. Or I might take less than an ounce of a hard alcohol like gin or like gin or vodka, tequila, and put that in soda water with a little bit of lemon and bitters. So, just a very small amount. And frankly, again, maybe I'm a weakling, but my tolerance is low enough to where if I do that before a meal, again, I break the rule. I don't have my alcohol with food, I have it before because I kind of want to feel it. If I'm going to get that social lubrication, I want to be able to do it. On less by having it on an empty stomach. So, that's what I mean by microdosing, like not your fishbowl-sized glass of wine or your massive Las Vegas curly straws drink of Jungle Juice, just like a little bit of a good clean alcohol as a tonic, as a bitter, as a digestive.

I think everything has a nuance and moderation in general, I guess, with ideas as well as substances, I guess, work really well. Before we wrap up, Ben, I want to ask you, I mean, I know your book has probably thousands of biohacking inputs and people can go through the whole book. Hopefully, there's a new one also on the way. But, if you would just go through your morning till night and just recap some of the biohacks that work for you for a long period of time, which are simple, cost-effective, easy to get access to, just if you run through your morning till night. I saw you doing something which looked like stretching or jumping jack during the break. But yeah, let's run through your day and see what are some things some of us can copy from your routine.

Sure. So, some of the key things. Don't worry, you don't do all this stuff and then officially start work at 5:00 p.m. These are just little things that I would sprinkle in throughout the day. I always, at some point in the first hour when I wake, engage with the production of what I call young muscle, meaning I've got a collection of little foam rollers and massage guns and little exercise balls and things like that in the basement. And typically, I'll put on some hot water for coffee or tea and I go down to the basement and I kind of do my own self-inflicted massage, get the blood flowing. I'll usually listen to something that's kind of easing me into the day, typically something spiritual like a devotional or scripture reading or something like that. And I'm just kind of working my body and moving almost like to where it stretch when it gets up or Baloo the bear would rub his back against the tree in The Jungle Book. I'm kind of like doing that type of thing. So, I figured by the end of the week, I have amassed 75 to 90 minutes of deep tissue work without actually getting a massage working out the crosslinks and the adhesions and muscle. I also like it because some days I just don't have time to work out, but I'm moving all day long. This is another hack of mine. I got a kettlebell on the floor of my office. I've got a walking treadmill. I got a pull-up bar going up the stairs. Uh, and so I like to know that at any point during the day I can move without injuring myself. All the more important as I get older. Yeah. So starting off my day with some form of movement just kind of creates momentum for me the rest of the day, just to stay metabolically active, which is great to reduce your risk of chronic disease and lower the blood sugar that we talked about. So start my day with that. Most days I do some form of heat and cold. If I don't have the time to do it in the morning, I'll do it in the evening. I'm traveling, I'm in a hurry like this morning, I'll do the hot-cold contrast in the shower, play a podcast or an audiobook while I'm just in there wasting water. But, I'm cognizant of water use, but sometimes that shower is worth it. At home, I like to do a sauna followed by about 2 to 3 minutes of cold, like a cold bath or a cold soak. Literally like in—

Dry sauna versus steam?

I like infrared.

Okay.

Just because you're getting all that photonic light absorption that I talked about earlier that's beneficial for charging up the battery. The photons of light penetrate the skin a little bit more deeply resulting in a deeper sweat and more detoxification. Yes, you need to be in there slightly longer than a dry sauna. You got to warm it up, which you got to remember to do. Dry sauna, you can just walk into. Steam sauna, I get nervous about the mold. I get nervous about whether or not the water that you're breathing in, whether that vapor has been filtered. And so, if I use a steam sauna at a health club, I literally ask them kind of like how I ask if the food's been cooked in ghee or vegetable oil, "Do you use a water filter on the steam sauna?" And if they don't or if they don't know, I usually don't do this type. So, I love the way it makes you feel, but I'm careful about what I'm breathing in in the steam sauna. So, hot and cold is an element. Mobility is an element. I would say that I'm typically doing some form of strength training throughout the day, either a formal trip to the gym in my backyard or in my basement, or again, the kettlebell on the floor of the office. On a day where I'm just looking at my schedule, I'm like, "I'm not going to be working out today," just every time I go in and out of my office, I'll do 30 kettlebell swings, 20 push-ups, 10 air squats. So, I just kind of make mini workouts throughout the day. In the afternoon, I always take some form of a nap or a siesta. The reason for that being that I like to have my nice quiet private mornings, but it usually requires me getting up around 4:30 or 5:00. And, because I've got a family and I'm usually not going to sleep until 9:30 or 10:00, that builds up to long-term sleep deprivation or a little bit of tiredness and not being in a great mental place by dinnertime. So, always after lunch, I make sure that my team keeps the schedule clear from about 1:30 to 2:30, which allows me time to slip into the basement and to do a nap. I have a hyperbaric chamber. I love to nap in that because I zip myself up and I breathe pure oxygen. The world can't get to me and I just lay back. And I either meditate or I take a nap or I do one of the non-sleep deep rest protocols like yoga nidra. Play around with some kind of a relaxation device I'm supposed to be testing and trying out anyways. And my wife's going to kill me if I'm in bed every night with a bunch of wires attached to me. So I've used my lunchtime, you know, my post-lunch siesta to even like try out new devices. That's kind of my job as an immersive biohacking journalist to do some of that stuff. And that's the time of day I've identified as being able to do that. And another key for me is Towards the end of the day, as the day winds down, it would be some of the things we talked about earlier like limiting red light exposure, starting to step away from business, heavy spicy meals, things that would warm up the body. For bed, I typically will take a little bit of magnesium. I'll take, if I'm traveling, melatonin. I use usually the GABA-based supplement, gamma-aminobutyric acid. It is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. And, there's a variety of supplements, natural ones like, say, lemon balm or valerian root that have it in there. On this trip, I'm traveling with a little bit of topical cream called Somnium that I'll put on the back of my neck. And so, it's usually that, melatonin, magnesium, and occasionally CBD that I'll use for sleep. And then—

CBD oil form or injected?

I use an oil. There's a company in Florida that uses an organic full-spectrum CBD called Element Health. I don't do gummies or smoke weed. And the main reason for that is THC, it does relax you, but it impairs your REM sleep. You don't dream. You don't engage in memory consolidation or emotional processing or a lot of the things that are part of a good night of sleep. It also results in a lot of free radical damage to the mitochondria. And so, paradoxically, because inflammation of mitochondria is linked to chronic fatigue from stress. Many people will use marijuana to relax at the end of the day because they're stressed out and create this negative feedback loop where they're getting more fatigue and as a result more stress. So, the only time I'll use something like that is, for example, I think it's great as a sex drug. I think THC is kind of like one of the plants of love. And so, that would be an example. Example of a way that I'd use something like that. Anyways though, at that point, I'm in bed by around 9:30 or 10:00, lights down, room is nice and cold. I sleep on a grounding mat. I've typically got a little bit of mouth tape on, which is great because it forces you to nasal breathe as you sleep, which helps a ton with that. And, the very last thing I do before I go to bed at night, I've been married for 21 years. In addition to weekly marriage meeting with my wife that I talked about, which is split into 4 parts: expressing gratitude to each other, talking about household duties and chores that we need to discuss and review, talking about problems or blockers that we're experiencing either personally or with each other. It's bugging me that you started drinking all the hot water in the morning and not making extra, or I've been meaning to talk with you about you know, I notice you've been more grumpy with the kids at night or something like that. And then, finally, family calendar, like what's coming up that we need to talk about and plan for. Well, in addition to that, we also have every night for about 5 minutes before we go to bed, we pray together. And, I think that one element for us of the strength of our relationship is we do something that's spiritual and sacred together every night. And sure, sex is spiritual and sacred, but believe it or not, we're not having having mad hot wild love every night. So, we pray in the evening right before we go to bed and we're praying for our day and for our children and for our lives and for our home and for people who we've told we would pray for. And then, I put on the mouth tape and fall asleep.

Outstanding. I think your last one, this family ritual is probably the ultimate bio and life hack that I think a lot of people who are listening this can consider. I think it's probably save lot of emotional and social trouble following this hack, but many others. I think you've been very generous with your time, Ben, as well as all the various hacks and signs you sprinkled throughout. But I also noticed the sense of measure. It's not extremes, it's about being calibrated, thinking about things, and slowly experimenting, seeing what works for you. But the whole world of longevity and health is fascinating. I think you've done an incredible job as an educator to talk about it, experiment on yourself, sharing your learnings with the world. I'm glad you're able to find time to visit India second time. Hopefully next visit will not take 4 more years. I think, you know, the work you're doing is outstanding. I think a lot of people in India would love to hear from you, learn from your experience, and please keep doing the outstanding work. I look forward to your next book.

I love this country. I Love these people. I wish I'd come back sooner than 3 years and I will be back. So, thank you so much for having me.

Thank you. We look forward to it.

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