Mastering Sleep, Biohacking & Peptides: A Data-Driven Approach to Longevity with Boris Berjan

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast what's important to understand is the concept and this is important for sleep in general. Chronotyping aside the concept of zeitgebers, this is a German term that means timekeepers. There are certain things that can more quickly align your body to whatever time zone or sleep environment that you want to create. This is especially useful information for people who travel frequently and cross multiple time zones. Yep. So a few of the more powerful zeitgebers one is light. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:35]: Your host, Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:37]: I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. I was recently interviewed by Boris Berjan on sleep, exercise, nutrition and a whole lot more. We talk about chronotypes and so called zeitgebers for optimal sleep experiential education versus traditional schooling. So yeah, we dive into some non fitness related topics. Longevity, spirituality, my thoughts on the pursuit of an extended lifespan, the hierarchy of sleep and movement and nutrition and what you should focus on the most and a whole lot more. So for all the shownotes just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/Boris that's BenGreenfieldLife.com/B O R I S. Enjoy. Ben, really nice.

Boris Berjan [00:01:37]: Ben, really nice to have you man.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:38]: Well, thanks Boris.

Boris Berjan [00:01:39]: Yeah, I want to dive into. I think this is important to unpack. I think a lot of people know your brand as bleeding edge biohacker, always on the forefront of tech. Right? But what would you say to people in a world that has fleeting focus? Right? Social media has our attention, TV has our attention, we're seeing thousands of ads a day, Family wants our attention, everything wants our attention. Right. And when you're trying to get healthy and if you're not, there's all these pockets that you could focus on. And I know you talk about a lot of things such as space around you, the body spirit, the people you know, wealth management in your opinion? Let's say I'm trying to get healthy and maybe not optimal, maybe I'm not, you know, great and trying to live forever. Where would you start? Is there an area that you specifically think is the most important starting point or is it more of a function of we need to understand what's going on with you and there's going to be pillars that we want to latch onto and optimize from there.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:43]: Quite a question in simplicity really. Three main things to focus on you're just getting started in this rank prioritized order. 1. Sleep. 2. Exercise 3. Nutrition. If you sleep well, you're going to move well.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:00]: You're also going to be less likely to cater to sugar cravings if you move well. And research has shown this that people who exercise automatically make healthier food choices throughout the day. There is such a thing as hyper compensation where some people will overcompensate for exercise by eating too many calories. But for the most part, if you start off your day with some type of movement session, you're more likely to eat healthy the rest of the day because you gain momentum. And the precursor to a good movement session is good sleep because then you have the motivation to do so. Anyone who's been short on sleep has probably recognized the lack of willpower to move and the lack of willpower around hyper palatable foods. So sleep, movement, diet, in that order. That would be first.

Boris Berjan [00:03:46]: Amazing. And what would you say to people that are like okay, I get it Ben, you know, I need to sleep better. I go to need to go to bed on time. I just can't get myself to do that. I'm awake, my thoughts are running through me, I'm stressed about my life. You know, if I can't get to that place, is there a specific and I know you have coaching and you walk through people through these problems. Right. So is there things that you've noticed that make get people into a state where they can do that easier than others?

Ben Greenfield [00:04:15]: They can do what?

Boris Berjan [00:04:16]: Get to sleep and sleep longer.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:18]: It depends on why you're not sleeping. Yeah, there are many factors I mentioned ruminating thoughts or laying in bed awake at night thinking about things. Right. In many cases that is someone with a specific gene pathway, a COMT gene pathway that causes them to have kind of the same type of hard wiring that hundreds of years ago. What makes them good at being a sentry? Guarding the village at night doesn't really serve you that well in this day and age. And you see this a lot in entrepreneurs, hard charging high achievers, people who get a lot of ideas and unfortunately they get a lot of ideas inconveniently at like 3AM trying to fall asleep at night. So in that population usually having some mechanism in place to get thoughts out of your head and onto paper is good.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:05]: You can have like a lit pilot bend light next to the bed, a notepad, preferably not a device or a device in night mode with just notes open airplane mode via which you're able to jot down things before you go to bed, or if you wake up, get it out of your head and onto paper. You can also use certain compounds that will shut down to a certain extent. Some of those people hardwired dopamine firing pathways. This would be a lot of your traditional herbs like ashwagandha, valerian root, chamomile, any of those more relaxing type of compounds you can also use. I suppose this would be in a realm of biohacking technology, but certain forms of stimulation to gradually train your body to downregulate some of the beta brainwaves that are associated with those G pathways or with ruminating in general. So the most classic example of this would be, for example, a clinical based neurofeedback, or you're actually working with a neurofeedback practitioner over a series of sessions where you have electrodes attached to your head. And typically it's anywhere from five to 10 different meetings to do that, which sounds laborious and logistically inconvenient and expensive, which it is. But now you can use at home tools that aren't quite as powerful, but give you a pretty good response when it comes to retraining your brain how to dehabituate some of those more stressful beta brainwaves or the type of things that might keep you awake at night.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:31]: Examples of that would be like the braintap or the neurovisor light sound simulation machines which come with specific recipes that you follow, typically either before bed, during a different time of day, during the day for like a meditation session or something like that. And by using those regularly, you can gradually train your body to shift into different brainwave states without necessarily having to wear the headgear at night. It's also interesting because when you are ruminating, you're often engaged in processes that put a lot of blood more towards the frontal cortices from the apotex and brain. Now there are companies even producing headgear that cools the front section of the brain that you can wear at night. There is something to be said, of course, for keeping your room and sleeping area cool anyways, just because you're going to get better deep sleep with the lower core tap, but specifically shifting focus away from that front section of the brain. And this might sound kind of esoteric and woo, but one guy I interviewed on my podcast, Dr. Peter Martone, and this actually works. Try this multiple times.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:35]: If you are doing the recall, memory recall or recall of something that you've memorized that can actually really help you to disengage from forward thoughts and rumination. And by engaging in previous thoughts, you can shift your brain into a state where it's not constant planning id. So an example of that would be going through your entire day that you just lived or the day before if you can remember back that far. What'd you do, what'd you eat, Who'd you meet with, what were you grateful for? What type of experiences did you have? For me, I like to memorize the Bible just because it's got a lot of good truths in it. So I'm often reciting if I wake up whatever it was that I was memorizing earlier that day or earlier that week. And it sounds silly, but it's kind of like counting from 100 down to zero backwards by a breeze. Right? That's a very simple example of that. But even that process alone can keep you from thinking about other things.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:32]: Very similar to the last thing I'll share with you. And that would be something like non sleep depressed protocols. So this would be like yoga nidra, for example. This is a form of relaxation in which you're scanning your body typically head to toe or toe to head and sometimes the internal organ, you know, bringing attention to your eyebrows and then the bridge of your nose and then your jaw and then your tongue. And as you go through this process over anywhere from 20 minutes and some take up to two hours, you're simulating a sleep like state. And many people who have ruminating thoughts because their brain is forced to just be thinking about body parts, it tends to shift you into sleep or a sleep like state. Those are a few things that you can mess around with for the sleep.

Boris Berjan [00:09:17]: No. Excellent. I think you gave probably like 10 or 12 actionable pieces of advice that people could latch onto just to unpack it a little bit more. Sleep types, I forgot what they were called but like you could be a bear, dolphin, et cetera. Do you believe in those? Do you feel like there's multiple people? Some people say any hour before 12 is your reparative hours of sleep and so therefore you should be going to bed earlier. Some people say if you're a phenotype or whatever, I forgot the name, it's like. But some people wake up super early and they can do that. Some people are bears and they, they sleep 11 to 7, like kind of a regular schedule.

Boris Berjan [00:09:54]: Do you have an opinion on sleep timing in that matter or the type of person that you are? And you can either wake up super early or maybe not.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:05]: Sleep chronotype. Chronotype, that's your br. Yeah. Something that's. That's probably been popularized the most by Dr. Michael Roos. Yeah. He went by the name the Sleep Doctor for a while and wrote a book in which he described the dolphin that would wake at a variety of different hour and be able to operate in a variety of different wake time sleep cycles.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:25]: The wolf is more of a nocturnal environment animal. The lion is more like a 8, 9pm to 4 or 5am that's right. Super bears like 10pm to 6am, which a lot of people are.

Boris Berjan [00:10:39]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:39]: It's interesting. And there is something to be said for certain people being night owls or morning larks or early birds or whatever you want to call them. And some of it is genetically hardwired. Some of it is due to more of a nurture type of environment where that's just what you grew up with or how you've trained yourself to operate. Yeah. The issue with chronotyping is simply trying to split people into four different populations and require them all to sleep according to those hours is often societally restrictive and not very logistically feasible. Like what if you have a family and dad's a dolphin and mom's a little friend, Billy's a bear and Jill is a lion. It doesn't work that well once you take it to the streets.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:26]: So what's important to understand is the concept, and this is important for sleep in general. Chronotyping aside, the concept of zeitgebers is the German term that means timekeepers. There are certain things that can more quickly align your body to whatever time zone or sleep environment that you want to create. This is especially useful information for people who travel frequently and cross multiple time zones. So a few of the more powerful zeitgebers. One is light. Let's say that you have been waking up at 4am consistently and that annoys the heck out of you because you really need that extra hour of sleep. You want to wake up at 5am but you've also been back east for the past week.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:08]: And so you live in the Pacific time zone in your body at 7:00am Eastern Time is waking up at 4:00am Pacific Time. What you would do if you wanted to use light as a zeitgeber is you would wait until 5am you could get up at 4am because you actually really don't want to spend time in bed laying awake thinking. That trains your body to spend time in bed laying away thinking. So you can get up, but you generally want to do things like wear blue light blocking glasses, keep your phone in night mode, keep the screens dimmed, don't turn off or turn on a lot of lights in your home or at least if you are using red light like I travel, it's just like a red light headlamp, so different on the lights in my hotel room. And you're essentially simulating sunrise or a very early morning environment without bright light until the time arrives, at which point then you want to start waking up. And that's when you would do something like go look at sunlight or flip the screen out of night mode or look at your computer monitor or even use like one of those seasonal affected disorder boxes that they use for, for light there, like very bright light on your office desk or in your living room or whatever. So in a similar way you can also shift your circadian rhythm forward or backwards in the evening, right? Like let's say you've been getting really tired at 8pm and maybe you are hardwired to be a lioe and your entire family are bears and you really don't have the option to go to bed at 8pm you want to stay up till 10pm well, whereas a lot of people would say, well put on the blue light blocking glasses and dim the lights whenever sun's starting to set in whatever area of the world you happen to be in.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:41]: You might wait to do that, right? You might actually add extra light in later in the day to shift your circadian rhythm forward. Or alternatively, let's say it's the opposite scenario, you would actually bust out meaning blue light blocking devices earlier in the day to send your body a message earlier in the day that it's nighttime. So light's an example of a zeitgeber. Food is protein rich meal when you wake. So the idea of intermittent fasting can be good for metabolism. It isn't so great for circadian biology in terms of sending your body a message that it's supposed to slowly begin to increase the sleep drive that accumulates during the day, right? So if you have been staying up very late at night, you've been intermittent fasting, maybe you're not even your first meal until 11am or noon or whatever that is going to shift your circadian biology forward by getting up and having, let's say protein rich meal, 20 to 30 grams of protein, and maybe you're having some sweet potatoes and eggs and a cup of coffee with some collagen in it or whatever, you're actually going to have that, let's say 8am or 7am or closer to waking compared to what you might do if you were just engaged in intermittent fast. And you have to choose which is more important. My sleep or maybe shifting my body into fat burning mode.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:56]: Or some of these planes made around intermittent fasting. Yeah, another zeitgeber is temperature. Exposure to a cool environment earlier in the day can shift the circadian rhythm or backwards again. Meaning, like if I were to jump in the cold bath at 5am and I have been staying up really late and going to bed at like 11pm or 10pm, I want to stop staying out that late. I realize 11pm or 10pm is normal for a lot of people. Late for me, I'm an old fuddy duddy. But getting into something cold, taking a cold shower earlier in the day would help you go to bed earlier at night. So when you travel, you know, let's say you arrive in London at 5pm, right? And so maybe it's 10am back home where you are, you would begin to engage in light restriction pretty early so that you're shifting your body into the evening of London time zone.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:51]: You would wait until let's say 7pm or 8pm or whatever the normal dinner time is in the final destination to actually eat. You would do something that cools the body a little bit. And that's how you kind of play with some of these zeitgebers to take whatever chronotype that you're naturally hardwired for and kind of tweak it forwards or backwards a little bit.

Boris Berjan [00:16:11]: Amazing, amazing points. I, I resonate with that a lot because I used to fly to Asia all the time and one guy literally solved all my life problems. He's like, you fly at midnight and you sleep the first eight hours and then it takes another 12 hours to get there. You get there around 2pm, go outside right away, get the sun in and then cool yourself down in a cold shower. And then by the time it's like 9pm you're ready to go on their time zone. You sleep probably at least 10 hours and you're good.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:40]: Right.

Boris Berjan [00:16:41]: Before that I was flying in. It was like midnight there. It was daytime here and I could not, you know, it took like three days to just.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:48]: Yes, that's where people start messing with Valium and copious amounts of coffee.

Boris Berjan [00:16:52]: Oh, everybody would take Valium and just. Yeah, just be out for the whole flight. And I'm like, but that doesn't resonate with me, right. I don't want to just take drugs all the time. Especially flying over like 20 time zone.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:03]: Right, right.

Boris Berjan [00:17:05]: Awesome. And the point of look, there's lots of variables. You can just be one of these four types because I don't know about you, but like sometimes I get a surge, you know, in the evening and I'm like, I really am feeling creative. I want to go for it. You know, we went out and we're natural, both of us, everybody wanted to go out. I went to bed a little bit later. I personally felt that if I can get seven and a half hours in, it doesn't. You know, depending if it's 9pm or 1am sure it's more optimal if it's earlier because then that's kind of like the, the circadian rhythm doesn't get blown off.

Boris Berjan [00:17:40]: But do you feel like that if it was like the simplest thing on earth, it was like just get past seven to eight hours. Or do you, do you still feel like. No, we should be optimizing sleep to, to be the best there is, not just time frame.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:54]: You mentioned it and you are correct to note the small amount of data that suggests that the sleep time between 10pm and midnight for this pretty important that you may miss out on optimized sleep cycles and have more light sleep than deep sleep if you're going to bed after midnight..

Boris Berjan [00:18:10]: Okay, perfect. I did want to dive into. You have a very unique way, and I'm going to tie this back to health of raising your kids. You know, I know that you, you've talked about this a lot where you say, hey, we're going to go build something or we're going to do work with our hands to get the end outcome. Have you seen a correlation of that type of approach being them in a healthier state than you know, and in many different ways, like not just like are they healthy that day but like their brain development is better. They're going to be able to critically think more. I think there's a lot of parents that are going to be listening to this and be interested in that approach. So I'd love to unpack a little bit of what you've seen or patterns that you've noticed it that way.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:57]: You're asking me have I seen patterns in terms of the way that my children act or operate during the day based on building something?

Boris Berjan [00:19:07]: Or the way that you're approaching education in general.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:09]: Education in general.

Boris Berjan [00:19:11]: Yeah, because I, I know you've mentioned a bunch of times I've listened to you say, you know, we're going to go build this thing and, and really focus on it and you have to problem solve. Whereas I think most kids Just like just go to school, take eight classes a day.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:25]: Yeah.

Boris Berjan [00:19:26]: Try to memorize math and then science and then this and yeah, do their homework. Right. And I, and I felt like your approach was a lot more unique and you're a guy that is so heavily focused on, you know, family and your health. So I, I was just wondering if, if you've seen that your approach to parenting has made them healthier outside of the normal. Like, I'm sure their diet is awesome. I'm sure you guys focus on, you know, sleep, hygiene and stuff like that, but I'm trying to unpack some of the things that are more not. Not so commonly talked about in other content that you have.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:00]: I think what you're getting at is the value of an experiential based education. Exactly. The difference between that and the education philosophy largely adopted in most Western societies is that if you need to accomplish a task repetitively or repeat information, or engage with information in such a way that you have it memorized or in your head, then you would operate pretty successfully in an industrial or even a post industrial era that is somewhat void of computerized technology and automation. We don't live in an era void of computerized automation and AI anymore. So the idea of teaching a human being to be something other than a robot, in my opinion has some value. Meaning, would you rather learn geometry equations or would you rather go build a tree fort in which you're having to calculate angles and do wood cutting measurements? Or go and learn how orthopedic surgery and bone cutting works to see that the screw is placed at a specific angle, then you're able to fix a knee better or something like that? If you are going to learn chemistry, would you rather learn salts, acid, sugar, heat, fats, et cetera, via culinary experiences in the evening, or you're preparing dinner or from a textbook in which you're memorizing equations? There are pretty few situations now where memorizing a host of equations or facts and then spitting them out via a test is going to serve you very well versus life based experiences. There is value to memorization. It grows the brain.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:50]: I talked about how I memorize the Bible, for example, and that gives me something positive to draw on, how it sits on my heart and in my head. Some people memorize Shakespeare or philosophy, or some people are weird into differential equations. I don't think that the utility of those from a work and productivity standpoint are that high. There might be some personal development and brain growth type of benefits, but the idea of something like what I call what I and my wife do with our sons is fun school. Just surrounding the child with as many passions and interests and dreams and desires as possible that allow them to with a hands on format experience and do things right. Cooking, woodworking, animal husbandry, gardening, wilderness survival, et cetera, Learning about key concepts through that lens, I think you're going to create a more dynamic human who could be a little bit more resilient and also create able to think outside the box. Because for me as an employer, I do work with a lot of folks who are more Generation Z who have been educated in traditional public schooling or traditional westernized schooling environment. And sometimes it is difficult to get people to think creatively, think outside the box, not, you know, basically have smoke come out their ears if they're required to create rather than just manage or inventory or check boxes.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:22]: Yeah. So I have been most impressed with the homeschooled or unschooled or alternatively schooled people, including employees who I work with because they're able to think outside the box. And I think to directly answer your question, that has improved my sons in a similar fashion. Right. And they may not actually have as high an SAT score as someone who went through a traditional school and environment. But I care a lot less about SAT scores and I care a lot more about being able to balance a budget, start a business, write something creatively, et cetera. All the way down to someone who can creatively use automation. Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:58]: Like how, how good a job can you do prompting AI for us here. If you haven't learned to write effectively, you might not be able to do that. How good of a job have you done learning key concepts such as rhetoric and programming and logic and persuasion and simulating information at a rapid pace and reading. And these are all skills that don't necessarily have to be taught in a traditional school environment, which I think is largely a thing of the past when it comes to its efficacy and utility.

Boris Berjan [00:24:27]: Totally bringing that back to health. You talked about your employees and your sons. I know you do coaching with people. Are you seeing notoriously, I'm going to assume and correct me if I'm wrong, there's going to be experimentation and thought processes to approaching your health. Your microbiome could be a certain way. You talked about DNA. You might have grown up in Eastern Europe, now you're living here. So soils were different.

Boris Berjan [00:24:50]: Like there's all these variables, right? You live in New York versus you live at the water. Like so there's. It's not like we could just say, here's your exact protocol and we just follow it and you'll be good. In those scenarios, are you seeing the same correlation of there's people that just can't think critically or experiment with you and you need to do a lot more work with them, or are you guys really good at just understanding where somebody is and then helping them from there?

Ben Greenfield [00:25:19]: As far as coaching goes, I'm pretty data driven in my approach, meaning everybody I work with, I'm monitoring their HRV, their sleep. They're typically coming in, doing urinary hormone measurements, stool based biome measurements, blood work, you know, micronutrient panels, food allergy and genetic testing. If I've got all those variables to play with, I've got a pretty good view of what someone, a blueprint is doing and what's going on, the environment that somebody's in. It kind of depends. You know, I certainly have executives who I coach who live in big cities or in cultures who have large amounts of drinking, like the UK or Australia. It's a bigger uphill battle for me when I'm having to control toxins, alcohol, you know, the mass amount of dirty electricity in big cities, the large amount of artificial light, et cetera, versus somebody who's living and say, like a slightly less urban whatever, Ohio or Idaho, something like that. For the most part though, I think that with the right information, you can tweak and customize somebody's diet, exercise, planning a lifestyle, finding them in such a way that, you know, I don't, I don't fight that big enough field battle depending on whether somebody's like in the city or in the country.

Boris Berjan [00:26:36]: Okay, makes sense. Are you finding when they work with you, they're already all in, they're bought in, or do you feel like again, going back to. There's so many variables and inputs that people are prone to. Right, like this is the best diet and this is the best diet. And then you should try this. No, these supplements are the ones you should go after. Are you finding that you need to really get somebody mentally in a state? Like, these are all the data points that I'm collecting. This is the exact plan we need to follow.

Boris Berjan [00:27:08]: And then they do it. Or are you still seeing pushback or do they come back to you and say, I saw this diet, Should I try it? Ben? Like, what's been that overall experience in the coaching process?

Ben Greenfield [00:27:19]: I encourage my clients to ask a lot of questions. They're required to listen to all my podcasts, so I'll get a lot of check Ins. Hey, Ben, you know, I heard this podcast and whatever, blood glucose monitoring or some new peptide or, you know, or this new exercise gadget, is this right for me? And I encourage that. At the same time, I won't beat around the bush. I'm not inexpensive to work with. And by the time someone has actually, like put forward the money out of their pocketbook to work with me, they're pretty willing to do just about anything I tell them to optimize. And because I work with a lot of hard charging high achievers, celebrities, actors, athletes, executives, et cetera. These are people who like to treat their body like a Ferrari and are willing to do what I say to actually get it done.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:03]: I think the biggest uphill battle I face is often either a spouse who's not on board, who's still filling the house with the type of foods that make it hard for my client to follow the diet plan, increasing that willpower that's necessary to follow that plan. Or typically, social variables like the businessman or businesswoman who just has a lot of dinners out in the town and is variable for them to adhere to the diet. It's a constant uphill battle against sleep and alcohol. And yeah, I want to be that weird person at dinner who's asking for the sauce on the side of the steak because I don't want vegetable oils that eat, blah, blah, blah. But for the most part, you know, people figure it out. And yeah, you know, I don't, I don't require 100% adherence to anything, but folks can hit about maybe It feels pretty good.

Boris Berjan [00:28:49]: Awesome. In those two scenarios, you did mention family unit not aligned and potentially busy professional in environments consistently where the goal is not aligned with what that restaurant or society is deeming is available to them. Is there certain maybe tactical things or strategies that you've been able to implement with them that make it easier? Like, is there like a, hey, here's a cheat sheet that you can talk to about with your spouse and say, hey, you know, these things are important to me. I'm working with Ben, can you please back me on this? Or I'm going out to dinner and then shoot a text and say, hey, listen, I'm really on this health kick. I'm gonna order these things. Don't think it's weird because that's not what you're used to because there's things that you could unpack there a little bit.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:37]: All my clients have 24/7 access to me. Even though my phone's not on at 2am I'll often wake up with some text from somebody in New Zealand or whatever. But I would say the most important things are that anytime they are traveling, they reach out to me. They let me know where they're traveling, if it's an Airbnb, if it's a hotel with a gym, if they're out in the woods and not going to have access to anything at all, they let me know if they are going to a certain restaurant or have a certain scenario in which they need to be like, correct food choices. And usually once I have that conversation with them once, any other conversations about how to choose healthy meals at restaurants is typically less necessary. You know, like, look for these proteins as the cleanest proteins.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:17]: If you don't know the source of the meat, try not to choose shellfish or pork because those would be the two most toxic. Ask for sauces and dressings on the side. If you can, avoid anything fried. You know, choose wines from Italy or New Zealand or France, because those are the cleanest. Choose a bitters for cocktail with less sugars. You know, something like Mezcal Tequila or Janitorbolic has a clear spirit. And, you know, use a. Use a full spectrum salt that you might have in your wallet or your bag rather than the iodized table salt, et cetera.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:43]: Once they kind of understand how to make the right choices, it just becomes like brushing your teeth. So that's not too difficult. And the same with movement. Like, once I coach somebody, you know, how you work out in an airport and how you, you know, what BFR band or elastic band or suspension training you bring to an AirBnB or, you know, what you do if things get derailed. You know, I have a chance to work out during the day. You know, walk 10 minutes before or after breakfast, lunch and dinner, and all you gotta do is squeeze in 50 burpees by the end of the day. Whatever. All of my clients do have a checklist that they fill out that gets submitted to me at the end of each week.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:17]: And there are questions on my checklist that are yes, no questions like, did I take 8,000 steps today? Did I get 20 minutes of sunlight today? Did I get twenty minutes of either earthing or grounding or PEMF in today? Did I connect with my relationships and my spouse at some point? Beginning of the day and at the end of the day, did I eat X amount of protein, et cetera? So it's kind of like a checklist that allows them to quickly say, yes, no, yes, no. And that way I can kind of keep tabs beyond What I'm monitoring from an HRV or sleep or a wearable standpoint.

Boris Berjan [00:31:49]: My belief, and I don't know, so I'm going to ask you is I feel like day to day people get busy and so just having a quick check in to go. I didn't actually talk to my wife or I didn't bring the salt. So next time I have to do it. My assumption would be that's extremely powerful and motivating for the clients because then they're like I actually know what to do even if Ben's sleeping. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:10]: People like to check boxes than notes.

Boris Berjan [00:32:12]: Yeah, right, right. Exactly. Awesome. The last couple things I want to dive into, number one was peptides. Lots of controversy around them. Lots of people will have an opinion that's strong one way or the other. I know you talk about peptides, have used peptides. Use peptides A.

Boris Berjan [00:32:33]: Could you just unpack a little bit? What exactly are peptides? And then we can get into what your opinions are around them and maybe if, if there's better ones than others.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:43]: Peptides, the sequence of amino acids on which most people are familiar with those the building blocks of proteins. But amino acids can also basically act as signaling agents to turn on or out specific signaling pathways or organ functions of the body. So a peptide could have an anti inflammatory effect or immune cell stimulating effects or act on a certain organ like the pancreas or beta cell function, or act on mental function or crossing the blood brain barrier to cause seeing something like increased expression of brain grab neurotroping factor. And so they're very precise molecules. They're difficult to patent. Most of them are natural and biological. They are not something that is looked down upon. To harken back to what you said about them being controversial.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:35]: They're something that probably due to some amount of pharmaceutical lobbying or give them increasing scrutiny by the FDA is more difficult to get your hands on. Good efficaceous peptides. Most are delivered via like a subcutaneous injection. Insulin being probably one of the more commonly known peptides for blood glucose. But they have a variety of effects. They're very efficacious. You don't have to get them as an injectable. Many are bioavailable in oral form.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:02]: I like them. I think they're kind of like a Swiss army knife when it comes to tackling specific issues. It's just that they are. They're not the cheapest product on the market and they're increasingly difficult to get a hold of when it comes to good pure clean versions.

Boris Berjan [00:34:15]: Yeah. Do you think the, you touched upon it a little bit. Do you think the most of the controversy is around hey look, people are trying to patent this and so they're trying to put red tape around them so they're not, they're not that available so that people don't know what they actually are and it's causing some confusion. Is that the, the majority of the reason it's being held back in your opinion?

Ben Greenfield [00:34:39]: I think it greatly competes with pharmaceutical drugs and you know if someone were going to take like a pharmaceutical anti inflammatory versus say BPC157 or TB500 or something like that, there's a sort of threat to the bottom line revenue pharmaceutical company. So I think that certainly something that I think is a sectic the way that the FDA is treating.

Boris Berjan [00:35:07]: Totally. How do you personally use them and how do you see the future of peptide adaption into the future of healthcare? What's, what's kind of your thought process around that?

Ben Greenfield [00:35:17]: Around that regarding the future of peptides? I don't know what, I don't know. I don't know which are going to stay legal and which aren't and if you got to go get them on the black market or some random online, you know, international website, I don't know. But how do I use them? I mentioned BPC and TB500 which are great for injury. There's a company out of Australia called Level Up Health that has good orally bioavailable peptides for things like testosterone, inflammation, gastric health, et cetera and then a few other interesting notable peptides. I would say there are a couple for the brain that work pretty well, especially intranasal form Selank and Semax are a couple of Those. The newer GLP1 agonists for appetite control and to curb cravings, even when given very small doses, much less than what a physician might prescribe, can be very efficacious and even help out with things like gastritis, brain function, lipid management, et cetera. There are some that seem to be very promising for mitochondrial health like Epithalon or MOTS-C and those also seem to have an impact on longevity. Probably because one of the causes of accelerated aging is mitochondrial dysfunction or degradation. So they can help out with that.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:40]: And then I would say there's some also that seem to have some efficacy for gut health. LL37 is one that seems to be very good for gut issues. The small intestine bacterial overgrowth. There are others that can be used pretty effectively for sexual health or erectile dysfunction like PT141 or Melanotan, which was also interesting because it's a tanning agent as well. So, I mean there's literally dozens and dozens and dozens of peptides with different effects. And I'm not necessarily always on one specific peptide protocol, but for example, I always have some BPC157 and TB500 around if I'm beat up, if I'm injured, if I've hurt a joint, I mess around a little bit with the GLP1 agonist like Tirzepatide, Semaglutide, Leslie Vasom effect if I happen to be going out of the town wanting UVs that day. And then I would say a couple others I've tried successfully. There's one called deep sleep inducing peptide which works pretty well for sleep even though you get used to it pretty quickly.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:48]: You're just trying to kind of reset your circadian rhythm. And then for muscle growth or fat loss using some of these growth hormone stimulants or precursors like Tesamorelin or Ipamorelin. Usually Ipamorelin is combined with something called CJC 1295. You can do like a 12 week cycle of five days on two days off with those two usually taking supply Ipamorelin and CJC in the morning, Tesamorelin in the evening or vice versa. And by running a couple of 12 week cycles during the year with that stacked, we get pretty good results from a, from a growth hormone stimulation. You have an anabolic standpoint without necessarily using growth hormone per se.

Boris Berjan [00:38:26]: Amazing. Very, very thorough. And thank you for that breakdown. The last thing I did want to get into was there's now movement of don't die backed by Brian Johnson. He's putting on events, et cetera. I think miscontrued. A lot of people miscontrue the message and they feel like, hey, you're being arrogant. If it's time to go, it's time to go.

Boris Berjan [00:38:50]: Die gracefully, sure. But like why are we trying to play God? Etc. Some people are saying it's why should we die, right? It's we become more wise the older we get, we become smarter, we have more neural neurological connections, there's more technology that we can utilize and build cool things as a species. We're obviously optimistic. We're sitting in a high rise building right now that a thousand years ago didn't even have fire. Right. What, what's your thought process around this specific topic? And, and where is your head at in terms of dying or not dying.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:26]: I think that that a transhumanistic approach to life extension that is myopically focused on living as long as possible because this is the only chance that you've got is to me a bit fatalistic. Because no matter how much work you do, you are going to reach a point where the muscles break down and the bones deteriorate and the organs fail. And maybe you are able to figure out how to make that 150 years old rather than 120 years old. But I'm not sure that that is going to result in a significantly greater amount of happiness or satisfaction or fulfillment compared to accepting the fact that you are going to die at some point and engaging in practices that help you have as healthy an existence as possible up until the time it is that you're genetically programmed to begin to die. Paired with the idea that we have an unending, undying, immortal soul or spirit inside each of us that for better or worse, will go on to exist for eternity. The most hopeful, happiest, fulfilled and satisfied people who I know have some kind of a spiritual life or spiritual belief that allows them to think beyond the temporal and into the eternal. All the way back to philosophers and authors like C.S. Lewis or Pensis or Aristotle, who taught that we have in us this craving for something that as the Disney Princess might say, something greater than this, something outside of me, something bigger.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:12]: And you can try and dump as much life extension strategy and cars and homes, sex and money and whatever else into that hole. But until that hole that is eternal is built with something eternal, there will always be a gnawing of unfulfillment. And so let's just say theoretically that we reset the maximum lifespan to 150, which in my opinion would take many, many more years. Because we've barely been able to push it beyond what 117 is the maximum lifespan. And I raise an eyebrow, people who say that we're on the verge of immortality. A lot has to happen for us to address all of the different pathways of aging effectively. Short term and even then, like we're barely even making a dent. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:00]: So this idea of extending lifespan and putting all of your energy into that versus say spiritual health, relationships, meaning, purpose, making impact by keeping yourself healthy, but not necessarily myopically focused on life extension. I think that that's a much more happy and fulfilling way to live versus just trying not to die. Because at some point you are going to die. I would rather accept the fact that yes, in this flesh I will die, but my spirit will go on to live forever as long as I can tend to that spiritual fire during my fleshly life on this earth, to keep that burning bright and beautiful with, you know, focusing on relationships and my walk with God and my belief in forgiveness and salvation and eternal life and the fact that this world was made perfect. We broke it, but we have the opportunity to fix it and to go on to live forever. That's part of my own Christian belief. And to me, that's a very. It's a very healthy way to live and hopeful way to live versus this idea that we're all just a bunch of chunks of flesh and blood floating on this planet and at some point we kick the can and then game over.

Boris Berjan [00:43:09]: Yeah, no, Very, very well said. And I, I actually, really, really resonate and agree with the fact that every year I hear we're on the. We're on the brink of living forever. And I'm like, nobody has shown me. I have a tech company in health, so I'm definitely looking at these things. And I was like, nobody has shown me other than like DNA editing or microbes inside your body that are repairing every cell always on. If we actually get to that point, I will say, okay, we.

Boris Berjan [00:43:38]: I think we've nailed it, right? But to, to, to today I had these conversations. I'm like, if you get rid of diabetes, obesity, heart attacks and strokes, which are the number, the top four things that kill us, you gain four years of life back. That's it. So you might be 85 instead of 80, right? I'm like, that's not. You're not solving for longevity. You're solving for. Sure, Maybe the last 20, 30 years of my life. I'm not a vegetable.

Boris Berjan [00:44:05]: I'm not on 17,000 machines that are breathing for me. Of course nobody wants that, right? But it's like, let's not, let's not pretend that we're always on some breakthrough if we haven't had it. It's naive, and I think we shouldn't be basically marketing to people that we're almost there for whatever gain there is to be had. And I'm an optimist, right? Like, I'm a. And so are you, right? Like you've. You built an empire and what's it called? You're on the bleeding edge of these things, and you're basically sitting here saying, look, guys, we don't have it yet. You know, the only thing I did want to touch on was let's say you are 150 and you are fulfilled and your body of work keeps growing, and maybe at that point you even have great, great grandchildren.

Boris Berjan [00:44:50]: Right. In that scenario, would you still be in the position that you are right now saying, you know, if it's my time to go, it's my time to go, because your caveat. The only thing that I'm touching on here is your caveat was at some point, it's time. But the caveat to you was if you're not fulfilled or you've kind of done everything you wanted to do, but what if you're still doing things that, that are exciting and with technology expanding the way that it is? Right. I think there's going to be new and more interesting things. Let's just go all the way to what if we're now colonizing Mars and we can go back, back from Earth to Mars? And I know I'm going way out there, but I just wanted to unpack that thought process. Like, what if you're that old, but you don't actually want to go?

Ben Greenfield [00:45:35]: That depends on whether you believe, if you do believe, that there is a spiritual life after this life fair, that heaven is sitting on a fluffy cloud with a harp and a set of cool wings forever, which to me sounds pretty boring. Or heaven is simply everything as it was originally created, made perfect, which is my belief. So not only do I believe in immortality and a new and restored body in a new heaven and new earth, but I believe with that, new heaven and new earth will include forever. As long as I want to read as many books as I want and play as much guitar as I want, and throw as many footballs as I want, and play as much sentence as I want, and make as many ribeye steaks as I want, and do all of the things that human beings were originally intended to do. Although the death of cows and creation of rib eye steaks might create some controversy. I don't know if cows die in heaven, but you get the idea. So I have immense patience and I don't have FOMO. And if I am 120, I have the opportunity to go to Mars.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:41]: And then I feel unfulfilled because, gosh, I don't have the time down. I'm 125 or whatever, no skin off my back. Oh, plenty of time. Yeah.

Boris Berjan [00:46:49]: Beautifully said, Ben. Where can people find you to either work with you, check out your content? I know you, you post a lot. You're always on the cutting edge of things. Let us know.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:00]: You can find me wherever the internet is found. BenGreenfieldLife.com.

Boris Berjan [00:47:06]: We'll link all the ways the Internet can find it. Thank you Ben. It was an absolute pleasure man.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:11]: Thank you. Good to discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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