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Dave Asprey
Humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe. My next guest says he holds the secret to being smarter, faster and happier, and spoiler alert, it's not magic. I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine. Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do. So I started doing all the things that I didn't believe in. And shockingly, my body began to heal. The FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life. There's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible.
Jack
Dave Asprey, you've spent over $1 million on your body. You've built a multi million dollar buttered coffee brand, and you plan to live to over 180 years old. Thank you so much for coming on.
Dave Asprey
The iced Coffee Hour. You're welcome. But it's a $750 million butter coffee company.
Jack
So what would you call that? Multi deca million.
Graham
Why don't you round multi centimillion. Just gotta round up to a billion at that point.
Dave Asprey
They fired me a couple years ago. That was before they fired me. I don't know, maybe they're crossed a billion now. Who knows what happened with that?
Graham
Why did you get fired?
Dave Asprey
Some of that's in my new book, whatever I'm allowed to talk about. But venture capitalists, they're like dug hitchhikers, right? So, oh sure, we'll fill up your tank with my credit card. But as soon as you want to go somewhere they don't want to go, they stab you and kick you out of your car to take the car.
Graham
So they had the voting rights essentially just to say, hey, we want to take it a different direction.
Dave Asprey
Let's just say that it wasn't my perspective that they had the voting rights and it was their perspective that they did. So we were able to settle that legally.
Jack
So their primary concern is return on investment. Were you trying to take this company down a path that maybe was a little bit more passion sided, that they thought wouldn't yield good returns on their money or.
Dave Asprey
No, I was trying to exit the company. And in fact, we'd hired a banker when I was removed from the board. So a couple years later, I found out that some. Some people wanted to buy the company for less than 10% of what it was worth when I was there. So some things I can't talk about there, but it was not a great exit for me. And even the venture capitalists mostly got wiped out in it. So it was not a successful exit. For it was a really big, meaningful, impactful company. And that's the risk of taking outside investment. And, you know, you do your best.
Graham
What would you have done differently? In Hindsight?
Dave Asprey
Understand that VCs and governments run on exactly the same algorithm. They have a potato peeler and they start peeling away your rights, right? And when you finally get a noise, hey, that's not okay. Oh, sorry, sorry. We'll stop. They never put the potato peels back on. And then they start again, right? And then they start again. So there was one decision that I made around a board seat, and I made it, you know, in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff going on, and that was not the right decision. And there were other times where I had an executive in place and, you know, where your gut tells you, like, this person is not the right person, and then you overcome it with your mind and say, oh, no, no. But there's all these reasons, and that's what breaks companies. So part of heavily meditated my new book, I talk about the four categories of people and how to spot them. And I realized that my discernment of the team was ultimately the issue. I mean, if you're the CEO, it's on you. So there were times I could have chosen different investors. There were times I could have chosen one or two executive decisions I made that were just not the right people. And in hindsight, it's clear at the time there's good reasons for everything. And so I'm a much better advisor for companies. And I have a very clean culture in my company. Now, because we have standards for these four types of people, we got certain.
Jack
Specific questions that you ask people to try to determine if they are a person that's qualified or not.
Graham
And what are those four different types?
Dave Asprey
This comes from Lao Tzu. You know who that is. He's basically the Buddha of China. So there's one monastery in the mountains where the oral lineage of the people who protect the emperor has been held. And there's nine living grandmasters of this think Dr. Strange kind of stuff. One of them is Dr. Barry, who's a friend, and he taught me this Category one people, they're always win win. So you do a deal with them, you're going to make some money, they're going to make some money, right? They don't do deals where you lose and they win. And these are 5% of people. They're very unusual because they're always right. Then there's category two. They're usually win win. They want to be win win, but they screw up. And when they screw up and you say, hey, man, that wasn't okay, they apologize and they make it right. So you only want to hire category ones and twos. Category 3 people are people they are win lose. For them to win, someone else has to lose. But they don't know it. They have a voice in their head. They believe their own bs. So they're saying, oh, I'm a good person or I don't fail. They cannot see themselves failing. And if they are failing, they will blame everyone else but themselves and anyone who's been an entrepreneur. You know, these kind of people, they're always deflecting, they're always creating chaos, but they don't know it. And you will never spot them in an interview because they believe their own bs. They're not lying. They're looking you straight in the eye and they believe every single word. The only way you can find them is reference checks. And even then, are those real? Because everyone knows if you say something bad on a reference check, you could get sued for it. So reference checks are a little bit sketchy. And then category four people, those are sociopaths. They're win lose, and they know it. And they're experts, you're not gonna spot them. So it's reference checks. And now in the nine companies in my portfolio, we have a standard. If we have a category three that we hire without knowing it and they make it through our hiring process, 60 days to fire them. And so far there's been three of those. But my company culture is working well enough to say okay. When people are not doing what they say, when they're blaming other people, they're not working as part of a team. They're. And it's created a lot of peace in the company.
Jack
Do you screen psychologically people when you're trying to hire them for executive positions?
Dave Asprey
I have looked at various frameworks like that and I haven't found one that works yet. But I'm excited about a new one. A friend named busygold has a technique she thinks might work. I just did a podcast with her, so I'm going to try that. Out. And you've got to be careful there because you never want to use any information that would be protected. So if it's anything having to do with age or family or any of that kind of stuff, stuff, you can't look at that. And I, of course I wouldn't, because I hire within the law. So you have to look at behaviors. Right. And I have used things like the Colby test, which has been really helpful. Do you guys know that one Colby, Dan Sullivan taught me that one. Dan Sullivan has been teaching entrepreneurs for 40 years how to have frameworks for operating businesses and coached me. Very powerful guy. He's, I think about 80 now and still actively going. He's on the, the leaderboard for longevity. He's not planning to stop anytime soon. And the Colby score says, what are your natural instincts for how much information you need to make a decision? Right. Some people, they have to know everything or they can't decide. Some people will decide with nothing. And then how much follow through do you have? Some people, like you give it to them, they're going to run that project to the ground. Other people, they cannot run it to the ground. Maybe they have a framework and an operating system to do it, but it's hard for them. So if you look at those kind of things, oh, if I'm hiring an operating person and they have no follow through, that's probably not a good hire. And so there's many of these things, but a lot of them are not functional. Some of them are functional. So I'm, I'm looking for the right one. Do you guys do anything like that?
Graham
We hire based on friends.
Jack
We hire based, I would say off personality.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, yeah.
Jack
Like, and, and we, we hire for aptitude train for now hire for attitude train for aptitude.
Dave Asprey
That works when you're, when you're small. It's like when I, when I started Bulletproof. And today Danger Coffee is my new coffee thing. Just for anyone listening who thinks I'm still a bulletproof. The. The idea here is that I would hire young people who had evidence that they could figure stuff out. Right. So it's kind of funny to say, you know what, what's adulting like going to ChatGPT and asking how to do it and then doing it.
Graham
Right.
Dave Asprey
It used to be going to Google or YouTube. Right. And it's been that way throughout all. Or you're figuring out how to do stuff. But many people in their 20s, when they're affordable, don't have the ability to do something without permission. So if I'm hiring. When I did start Bulletproof, my first employee was under a thousand dollars a month and lived in his grandmother's basement. But he was willing. He was very early twenties, good guy and just willing to go out and figure stuff out, right? So I don't know how to code. So I learned like, that's what you want. You find one of those, that's a great partner. And he made a ton of money when he left the company. And the problem with hiring friends, you guys are going to run into this, is that hire a friend now, three years from now, your company is three times bigger. And that friend may not have the experience that it takes. Because if you have someone that helps, you get to 5 million. Not that many companies even get that big. But when you start getting to 10 or to 100 million, there's only 17,000 companies in the country doing 100 million. So that's rarefied air. A mistake you make in a million dollar company is not that big of a deal. You make that same mistake at a 10 or a 50 or $100 million company, it's catastrophic. So you start hiring someone who's done it before. And that means your friends, they're like, that's not fair, man. Like, I've been growing this thing. Like, yeah, but I, I can't afford to pay you to make the mistakes, to learn. I'm gonna hire someone who has the knowledge and they're gonna have to be your boss. So what I do now is if I hire someone like that, it's like, look, if this is one of the smaller companies in the portfolio, understand I'm not gonna make you a C level executive because we only have two employees, we don't need C level people. You're going to be a director, right? And understand that when we do hire someone, they will probably have 20 years of experience and they're going to teach you everything you need to know. But you're going to get us to there and you're going to get well paid for. You're going to have equity and all that. If you set expectations up front, good. If you don't, you end up losing friends when they quit because they're frustrated because they didn't get the promotion because they weren't qualified for it. Hmm. Yeah.
Graham
With our business it tends to be so intimate that we see people all the time.
Dave Asprey
That helps.
Graham
And so a lot of it is like, would I hang out with this person if we weren't working together? And if the answer is yes, and we get along and we're on the same page. That's, that's what we lean towards.
Dave Asprey
It seems you want to lean towards people that you'd like to spend time with because you're working with them. Right? You, so you want people who, you want to spend time with who also know the mistakes not to make. Right. It just depends on where you are in the scaling of the business. And having built several companies, in fact, I think all of my companies now are north of a million and some are much bigger than that I've built. Very few people have gone from zero to a hundred million plus every time. I've had to replace almost the entire executive team at least three times to get up to that 50 or 100 million. Because the people who get you up to five are probably not the ones looking at 25. Right. And they want to, they're good people, they're your friends. So what I do now is I'm like, okay, I have a portfolio. So if you're a specialist in this window of revenue, why don't you, we take over to this company where you can help it get there. But you know someone who's really focused on just like juggling, which is the early stage stuff, they're probably not going to have cash flow forecasting and financial discipline and rigor to work with the CFO within, you know, HR constraints and all the stuff that has to happen as you get big. So it's, it's a, it's one of the biggest challenges of hiring friends is, is like how do you maintain friendships when they can't do the job anymore? Not because they're bad, but because the company changed.
Graham
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Jack
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Dave Asprey
The first time anyone fires someone, it's. It's always scary. It feels terrible, and it should feel terrible. Otherwise you're probably a sociopath. But there is a hack for that, and it's this. If someone needs firing, they know that they're not working out, so they are stressed and unhappy in the business and they're taking down all the people around them who are doing the work. So firing someone is actually an act of kindness because you're setting them free to go find somewhere where it's a good fit and it's being of service to all the people on your team who are doing the work. So I do my best to be kind and to say, well, you know, we're eliminating your position. It's really nasty right now because you're not allowed to tell someone why you fire them most of the time. Because firing for cause is. Even if there is a cause, it's a thing that is fraught with legal risk. So what almost all employers do now is they say, we've eliminated the position. And then you do eliminate the position. And some employers will do that just because, like, I needed to get rid of this person because they weren't performing. But if you try to tell them they're not performing, especially if they're a category three ego, I was too performing, it's your fault, right? And then it just creates a huge amount of drama. So what I like to do is have a fair package, right? And when we eliminate a position, quite often we used to need the position anymore. And if someone is being eliminated for cause, then we tell them ahead of time. And it usually takes about six months of documenting and telling them and putting them on a plan and all that. So I have right now for my portfolio, my head of HR used to run a 10,000 person HR or 10,000 employee HR group because you have to be compliant with all the laws. It's really hard. And many small companies get taken out because they hire a category three, a narcissist, or maybe a category four sociopath. And then the person's creating drama and chaos and then you fire them. But it couldn't be their fault. It's gonna be your fault. And then they come after you. And there's specific tactics for that.
Graham
If the law wasn't the legal barrier for you asking certain Questions. What would you look for, hypothetically?
Dave Asprey
You know what I would love to do with people is say, let's be honest. Maybe even with a lie detector. That'd be fun. Let's talk about your childhood, right? Like, let's talk about bullies. Let's talk about mean teachers and mean coaches. Let's talk about parenting, right? Because all of the emotional crap we deal with as adults is just echoes of the way our operating system got set up when we were little. So it's amazing what all of my senior leaders do their first week on the job. They go do 40 years of Zen, which is my $20,000 a week brain upgrade for executives and entrepreneurs. It's up in Seattle. They come, they spend five days, and this is an investment I make in my team. And they go through and they turn off all of their triggers. Because, let's face it, if someone's emotionally regulated and they've done their personal development work, you can sit down and say, hey, man, you're failing on this, right? And you can say, I don't know if it's because you don't have the right resources, I don't know. If you don't understand what it is, maybe something's wrong. But can we talk about the fact that this isn't succeeding and that it's important? Now that's a great conversation to have. But most people will respond emotionally. They'll feel criticized, they'll feel judged. They'll drop into first grade or second grade or fifth grade or whatever, and then they yell, no, it's not. It's not. And then. And then you can't have a constructive discussion about it. So in some cultures, like the old Microsoft one or Ray Dalio kind of Bridgewater things, they're like, you know, we're going to have these kind of hard debates, and it feels like crap. I don't have that kind of culture. We have a culture of kindness, which means you have to be truthful. We're not nice, but we're kind. We're going to talk about the problem, and if someone has an emotional reaction, it's like, do you need to hook some electrodes up to your head and get some regulation of your nervous system here? Because we don't actually treat each other this way. So we're going to talk about the problem, right? And we're gonna have constructive solutions. And if you're gonna do the blame game and, you know, throw your emotions around, everyone has outbursts, that's fine. Are you a Category 2? Who says, I'm sorry. Let's make it right. Or you're a category three who blames someone else. If you're category three, you got 60 days. And that's how it is. And I just don't wanna work in an environment like that.
Graham
And you can't ask someone about their childhood when you're trying to hire them?
Dave Asprey
Nope. And I don't. Right.
Graham
What's the reasoning behind that? It seems like that would just be like a general conversation.
Jack
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Graham
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Dave Asprey
You know, people file lawsuits for all sorts of things, right? And it's it's gotten to be. I don't know. You guys have probably been sued by a former employee. No. How many employees do you have?
Graham
No one. It's really just all independent contractors.
Dave Asprey
It's. Independent contractors reduce the risk a lot. Yeah. If, if you were to build a team of. And I've hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the years and there's always people who are like, I could never have failed at this job, therefore. And they make up a long list of crap. So this is, this is why it's so expensive to hire people. It is. A lot of it just goes into nonsense. Yeah.
Graham
Our team's like maybe like five people max.
Jack
It's so.
Graham
And most of them live with Jack, so he sees them daily. So. Yeah. If that doesn't work out, it might be an awkward situation.
Dave Asprey
It would be weird. Like. Like what if one of your, your team starts sleeping with another one? They're all guys. Yeah.
Jack
But it's. That's not technically off the table, I guess.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. Okay.
Jack
I have some questions about. But no, they're. They're gonna.
Dave Asprey
Which one?
Jack
I'm only joking. But yes. I don't know. I. I don't think that there could necessarily be drama because I think that our friendships. This could be very naive of me to say, kind of supersede the, the work. And this is just based off of like, like a long time of knowing them. Like, these aren't superficial friendships.
Dave Asprey
It's. It's so, it's so helpful to have that background to. My employees have been with me for 12 years. Like, we're friends. And remember this, they're friends, but you can take away their money. So hiring a friend changes the nature of the friendship, especially if, you know, they have a family and you're responsible for their financial well being. So it makes just a subtle shift in the power dynamic because with a true friendship that doesn't have money flowing, then it's like, you know, you just be truthful and it creates. And I have hired friends and it creates. I've also taken money from friends and there's nothing like calling up a friend who trusts you and saying, hey, man, it looked like you were going to get at least a 20x on that. And I was too. And we both just got wiped out. Right. So I've lost friendships because people gave me money. And then I got wiped out too. Like, I did my best. It was pretty traumatic for me. It was traumatic for my investors too. So understand, as you scale and grow some of those friends, it's like, well, I don't want to tell him this because, like, it's my job, but he's my friend and it just creates those little things. So I would be like, super blunt and just be like, yeah, that's.
Jack
I mean, communication was an issue in the beginning, but over, you know, some trials and tribulations, we've since learned that open communication and bluntness is, is the best way of doing things.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Jack
And plus, I categorize them as the 1 and 2. Like, I wouldn't say that they're 3 and 4 people. So that's why it's a hedge against that potential risk.
Dave Asprey
And as you build your culture too, it means that your, your whole team knows, oh, that's a three. This behavior pattern, we know it and a working culture, whether someone comes in as a contractor, we all do it this way. And if I think of it like a school of fish and they're all swimming, right. And if one of the fish kind of goes sideways, the other fish kind of bring it back in. Right. And if it doesn't work, the whole thing can follow that fish. That's why a narcissist can destroy a company culture relatively quickly because it makes everyone think they're crazy and it kind of scatters the cohesion. But if you're aware of that and your team's aware of it, then you're like, okay, that one's a category three. Right. And we'll have those conversations on my executive team, like, oh, looks like we didn't hire the right person. That's a three. They're out.
Jack
So you're saying that it's your experience as a young person, as a child, when you're growing up, through your teens, that basically determines your engine that you process information that you act by when you're older. And if you're, if you're determined as a category one or two by the time you're 25, that's probably who you're going to be for the rest of your life.
Dave Asprey
No, it's entirely editable. That's why I wrote heavily meditated. So here's how it works. All life runs the same operating system. And so most of our automated behaviors happen inside single celled organisms as well. And here's the algorithm. And this is kind of scary because your body follows these rules in a third of a second before your brain gets any notification of reality. And it's number one, they're all F words. Number one is fear. If something is scary, you gotta run away from, kill it or hide it and your body, before you can think, is going to put an emotional weight on things that might be scary. And this is where a lot of the childhood stuff comes from. Because if someone yelled at you and it felt scary when you were three, when someone yells at you in a meeting, you're going to get a fear response and you're going to act emotionally instead of like an adult. Right. So fear is first. Second is food. Eat everything. Because there's been famines everywhere. A third of the average person's thoughts are about tacos every day. Literally a third of our thoughts. What's for lunch? It's crazy, but that's there. And then the third F word. All life has to do to stay around forever. Can you guess that one?
Jack
All life has to do is stay around forever.
Dave Asprey
To stay around for multiple generations.
Jack
Oh, I would just say habits, like, their main thing is to f. So.
Dave Asprey
It'S an F word. Fear, food. Four letters. Fornicating. Yeah. Fertility. I was gonna. But yeah. Yeah. Fear is pretty much the other F word. But it's fear, food and fertility. So every single thing in reality, all of the time, your body is filtering. Is it scary? Do I need to kill it? Can I eat it and can I hump it? Before your brain knows what's happening now, is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of? That isn't one of those three things I have to think.
Jack
I mean, yeah, that would take a long time to.
Dave Asprey
There. There isn't. It always comes down to one of those three every single time. It's not you. It's an automated protection system to keep your meat alive as if your brain wasn't in there. And that is why all the childhood experiences, the bullies, the teachers, all the stuff that happens to us, you off a bike. It doesn't have to be a big thing. That sets up reactivity. And it's just your body trying to present reality in a way that will make your brain do what it wants you to do. So I developed something called the reset process. After 10 years of working with more than a thousand entrepreneurs at my neuroscience company, sitting down for five days and teaching them how to reprogram the operating system to not be triggered by things that are stupid. It creates incredible freedom. And I've had billionaires go through there. I've had all kinds of people, spiritual gurus, and it always works. And that's why I wrote the book. It costs 20 grand to come and glue electrodes to your head and have the whole team work with you or you can do the process that I'm giving away in the book at home. And what you do for that is you're saying, you know what? Every time someone criticizes me, I stay up at night. It really gets in there, and I just ruminate on it. Great. You have a trigger, right? So someone criticized you and they're in charge. Because if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun, and it means you're not in charge of yourself, right? So if I can make fun of something about you and it. And it bothers you at all, you're just not in charge of yourself. You could think of your nervous system and the mitochondrial networks in your body. They're like a Labrador, okay? This big floppy dog comes in, eats your couch, pees on the rug, chews up your shoes, barks and slobbers, right? And eats all the food on the table. Or that same dog, you put him through service dog school, comes in and sits there. You put a piece of popcorn on his nose, and he just sits there and waits till you talk. Your nervous system is one of those two things, or somewhere in the middle. And the people who are most successful in life don't waste energy on flopping around and peeing on the couch and all that other stuff because they train their nervous system. And that is so much more elegant and efficient than what most of us are doing, which is you're sitting in the meeting and someone criticizes you or does something that pisses you off, but instead of reacting and swearing at them or punching them, which is what sometimes we might want to do, you smile and you're like, oh, yeah, that's okay. But it's like the fake smile, right? And everyone knows that you don't have congruence. Your inner state doesn't match your outer state. But at least you behaved yourself, which allows society to happen. And that works. It just takes a ton of energy and your life sucks. And you're like, totally thinking about all these things that you don't want to think about because things didn't go the way you wanted. If you go through. And instead of learning to manage emotions, learning how to turn off the alerts in the first place, you have a ton of energy, and then someone during an interview can't manipulate you. You can't be programmed.
Jack
What percentage of problems with your mind can be solved with training? The way that you respond to things, your motivation, stuff that directly relates to your brain versus fixing things with your body.
Dave Asprey
Wow, that's a really hard question. And here's why you have a certain amount of energy. And you pour it into the fear bucket, and then it goes from there into the food bucket, into the fertility bucket. And then the other two words are friend to supporting your community, and then into forgiveness, which is evolution and retraining yourself. So if you don't have enough energy because your body and mind are broken the way mine was in the 20s when I was £300 and just had all these chronic fatigue problems and a lot of sickness, fixing the hardware is most important. But once you have enough energy, then the answer shifts and all of the problems can be solved by changing the way your threat detection networks work. It's just reprogramming things. And this explains, like, the Buddhist stuff. It explains, like, the Christian forgiveness stuff. All of the things that all the different spiritual lineages that I've studied are trying to teach you. It's that. And the important trick is there's now a technique that lets you show the body this feeling is not the right feeling. So you re engage the feeling. You flip a switch by finding something good that happened even if you hated it. And then you go into another state and the body goes, oh, this negative feeling can't exist with this other feeling. So they cancel out, and they remain canceled out permanently. So, like, a real common thing, someone cuts you off in traffic, almost everyone gets pissed off at that, right? So if you went and you ran the reset process on that, the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, you just don't care. Like, you don't feel good or bad about, oh, maybe they're on the way to the hospital, maybe they're not. It just doesn't matter. So there was a time in my life where the most exercised, biggest muscle in my body was the one on this finger. Like, I might have been a hostile driver. I just don't care if someone cuts me off anymore. It doesn't matter. But it's not that I thought that it didn't matter. It's that I changed my programming in my body so I don't get the. I don't get the tightness in the gut.
Jack
But that would be like a mental struggle, a flaw with your brain.
Dave Asprey
It's not in the brain.
Graham
No. That would just be reframing your beliefs about being cut off. Right?
Dave Asprey
That's all.
Jack
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Dave Asprey
No, that's. That's all cognitive. So what? The emotion happens before the thought. And I can prove this. There's one third of a second where the body picks the Emotion you're going to feel. And the brain doesn't get the signal of what happened until after that censorship window. So your body is interpreting reality, putting emotion on it. Right. So you could say, well, I got this negative emotion. And then you catch it with your mind and go, oh, I'm going to reframe it, dude. Feeling a negative feeling about something that wasn't a threat, and then catching it and then reframing it, it takes energy. I want to take that energy and use it for folding proteins or something.
Jack
But it's not reality itself. It's the perception. Right. And the perception is created by the mind.
Dave Asprey
No, it's not.
Jack
So what is the perception?
Dave Asprey
Created. Created by a network of trillions of environmental sensors studied throughout all the cells in your body, except for your red blood cells that are actively monitoring reality. And your mind has a 1/3 of a second delay on reality all the time. It's not your mind. Your mind is only getting what your body gives it.
Graham
One third of a second seems like.
Dave Asprey
A long time, though. It's called P300D. And it's really funny if I do this, clap my hands now, you know, it took some amount of time for the sound to get there, and then you heard it. That's a lie. From your body. If we had electrodes glued to your brain, your auditory cortex doesn't get any signal at all for one third of a second. And it takes another 700 milliseconds before your prefrontal cortex can figure out what it was. So you have about a 1 second delay on reality that your body and mind erase from your consciousness because it's not useful to watch it. And you know how cats move. They only have 30 milliseconds. They're 10 times faster than us. That's why they can do all that crazy stuff, because their lag time on reality is much faster than ours. So you have a sensor in there. It's called your ego. But the ego's part of the operating system that keeps your body alive. Here's another example. You ever lean on a hot stove and then go, you know, the stove is pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand. No, we do. Your hand pulls itself away and you take credit for what your hand did. But you did not decide to move your hand. Right. Your body automatically did it. That system is the same one that's making you feel all that negative stuff about the guy who cuts you off in traffic.
Graham
Yeah, but I feel like that touching a hot stove is way faster than.
Dave Asprey
One third of A second it is, because it's not your brain doing it, it's your body doing it. And then your brain taking credit for what the body did, right? So what really happens? You go, ah, right. It's way less than a third of a second. So what's going on there? It has to be the body making the decision. And you think you did it. It's just the body tricking you into believing that what it's doing is what you're doing. It has an entirely different consciousness based on fear, food, friend, and forgiveness in order all the time. And it does that constantly before you ever get a picture of reality.
Graham
So the one third of a second is only your conscious thinking, like interpreting the data.
Dave Asprey
Think of it like your body catching the signal and holding onto the signal, right? And then one third of a second later, the auditory cortex in, in the brain, it gets the first electrical signal that says the sound happened. And the sound has already been in your body for a third of a second. And then after that happens to figure out what the. What it is, it gets routed to the prefrontal cortex, and that takes around 700 milliseconds.
Graham
Is there a way to speed that up somehow?
Dave Asprey
There is. When you're young, under, say under 18, it's a quarter second instead of a third of a second. You still have the same process, fear, food, all that stuff. But it's. You're. You're faster. This is why you have a faster reaction time when you're very young. And if you're, say, a Formula one driver or very highly trained, you can train that. So my reaction time is 240 milliseconds, like it would be when you're 18, because I'm a brain hacker. But having a faster reaction time doesn't mean anything. What's important is if you're to pick up your phone and turn on the alerts from every app, it's like boing, boing. But you can't use your phone, so you go and you turn off all the alerts. You gotta turn off the alerts from your nervous system so they don't get in the way. That's the trick.
Graham
This might sound stupid. Are there drugs that you could take that would shut down that reaction time so it's like immediate?
Dave Asprey
Well, even if you shut it down to 5 milliseconds, understand your body's job is to create a user interface on reality that's useful for you. Right? And this is why we hallucinate time into existence. We can go to quantum physics and we can prove mathematically time is a hallucination that we create. It's just a very useful one that lets us live right? Even space is a hallucination. And we can prove that too. Inside this microphone. It's mostly empty space. We just all see it and perceive it because it's useful for our meat bodies to do stuff. So you could narrow the window. And there are drugs that make you faster like that. Like Modafinil would probably do that. I've been on that stuff for 20 plus years. But you're still gonna have the pre processing of reality. Because here's the thing, your brain cannot handle reality right now. If you had to pay attention to every little valve opening and closing inside your body, making sure you breathe, you blink. And being aware of all the micro stuff happening in the environment, little air currents and how it feels and the hairs on your arm and all that, you couldn't do anything. So we have a beautiful distributed processing system that keeps the body alive as if we're not in there. It's the same thing that runs a bear or a skunk or a blade of grass. Fear. Food. Always, always. That's what keeps life alive, right? So you just have to program it so that it doesn't feel fear except when it's real. And if you just do that, it frees up so much energy that when people do this process, 91.7% report massive improvements in their relationships. Because now your girlfriend doesn't trigger you anymore, like, oh, she's having some emotions. Okay, that's cool. It's not that you don't care, it's that it doesn't cause you pain, right? And then food. You learn how to do some intermittent fasting. And your body believes right now that if you don't eat every four hours, you're gonna die. And it feels like that. And you say I'm starving. Well, you just teach the body you're not gonna starve. You learn how to fast. And the amount of stress in the nervous system goes way down from when the stomach's empty. Now you have more energy. So stop wasting energy on alerts that are going off all the time over scary things or over hunger. And then there's another whole set of practices in heavily meditated around turning what I'll call lust or only fans or whatever into a source of transformative altered states. Work. And the way we go in and we fix all these things, it's altered states. And you can alter your state with meditation, with technology, with neurofeedback, with breath, work with psychedelics, with tantric sex. Like there's all these different ways and all of these ultimately are how do I change my state so I can get into my control panel settings and I can change the settings on my nervous system so it behaves itself.
Graham
So would you say you are happier than the average person and by how much?
Dave Asprey
You know, I don't compare myself to other people very much. I'd have to think about that.
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Dave Asprey
Coffee I would say that I am reasonably happy and one of the things that makes for the best entrepreneurs in the world is capacity to handle suffering without breaking. And if you read heavily meditated, I've gone through a lot. I mean losing a company you built that, you know, doing hundreds of millions kind of your life's work, that was, was a lot. So I am more resilient than almost anyone I know. And I have periods where I'm happy and I have periods where I'm less happy, but I'm not worried about either one of them.
Graham
And how much longer do you think you could live? Based on reframing a lot of these beliefs and going into that control panel.
Dave Asprey
My, my book on longevity, I spent about $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. And I just publicly said I'm going to live to at least 180. And I picked that number because our current best is 120. I want to do 50% better. I have a hundred years to do it. And I have AI and I have PubMed, which is all of the research we've ever done on medical stuff. And we have all these tools available, all this knowledge that the person who made it to 120 didn't have. So I don't think 50% better in the next hundred years is particularly aggressive. In fact, we've already extended life by six and a half years.
Graham
Do you think your life though would be you would be able to do things at that point or do you think you'd be hooked up to a computer and like some, some like beeping sound would be constant and your mind would be like uploaded to a computer.
Dave Asprey
That feeling better than I do now at 180. Yeah.
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Dave Asprey
Feeling better than I do now at 180. Yeah.
Jack
Okay, so I like I am highly, highly, highly skeptical when I hear and I'm sure a lot of viewers are saying the same thing. I would love to be proven wrong because that sounds awesome to feel better than I feel right now at 180, but it just doesn't seem intuitive. And usually my intuition on something like this, I feel like could be like, give me, like your, your. Your best sales pitch on how you think you can live to 180 and feel better than you do right now.
Dave Asprey
Now. Well, most aging comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction. We didn't know much about mitochondria until the 90s, and even now we're learning more about them. And we have top doctors at Harvard, like David Sinclair, who's a friend who's been on my show a couple times. We can reverse aging in cells. I went down to Costa Rica and I did a stem cell procedure with focused ultrasound on my brain that reverses aging in the central aging clock in the hippocampus. So I opened up my blood brain barrier, put stem cells in there, and it totally works. I've had gene therapy that takes nine years off of the average person's measured age in a single injection. And we're just getting going on all this.
Jack
Will you look younger, too? Because I'm trying to. Because all of these, like, scientific, like, biomarkers and lab results, lab tests and stuff like that, for most people that aren't, like, super in the weeds, they won't be able to actually have something to meter if someone's getting older or younger.
Dave Asprey
Here's biologically speaking, here's what matters more. Do you wake up and your brain works and you have a ton of energy and your body doesn't hurt? Like, like if. If people have that, they're generally willing to have some wrinkles, right? And right now, as you, as you age, you cut your fingernails, right? Cause they keep growing, and that's considered normal. Well, your skin grows as you age. And that's something that we haven't yet, but probably will in the next five years resolve. So we need a way to get a signal body that says tighten up the skin and a way that isn't, say, you know, creating scarring or something, which is what we do today. So this is about communication with the cells themselves, telling them what to do. And I've worked with a couple companies that are actually figuring out how to program a single photon to do that. So bottom line, between peptides, between signaling compounds, between the magnetic stuff, the lasers and things like that, that will probably solve the. Your tissues over time grow, just like your hair grows and your fingernails grow. The skin growing thing, that grows over the course of decades. That's annoying. But if I feel great and my body doesn't hurt and my brain is on fire and I have some extra skin I don't care.
Jack
How much have you spent on your body?
Dave Asprey
About two and a half million bucks.
Jack
What would you say has the best ROI on everything you've spent money on?
Dave Asprey
Neurofeedback.
Jack
What real results have you achieved from neurofeedback?
Dave Asprey
I tripled the amount of electrical power that my brain can make.
Jack
So what does that mean?
Dave Asprey
Well, when your brain is making a brainwave, there's two things that we look at. One is how orderly are the brain waves. Like can my brain, can all of it decide to do the same thing at the same time? It's like having an orchestra that plays the same stuff in the right order versus just all over the place. And then the second one is how loud can in play or think of it like a wave. Do you want to be surfing the 100 foot wave or surfing the 10 foot wave? Right. You want your brain to be able to, on demand, make 100 foot waves, which is a marker of youthfulness and a marker of power. So you can train your brain to do that. And I have trained my brain to do that.
Jack
So is that just like cognitive ability? Because I also read that you had claimed you'd increased your IQ by like 20.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, that's really simple. Okay. If you want to increase your IQ by an average of a dozen points, you can do it in a month. That's a horrible kind of training called dual in back training. And it is the most frustrating thing I think I've ever done. You play this impossible video game that just frustrates you constantly and you do it for 20 minutes a day. And if you can make yourself do it for 20 days, which almost no one does at some time around there, all of a sudden you can do it and it doubles working memory in your brain. So most people can remember seven numbers, maybe eight. You can remember 16 after you finish that, and that'll increase your IQ.
Graham
What's the game like? Why is it so frustrating?
Dave Asprey
Because it's a grid and you have to remember which squares lit up in order and what letter or number was inside it. And then four moves ago, on the top left quadrant, where was the color four moves ago, what was the number? And it sounds impossible because what our brains are wired to do is to remember either the order of things lighting up or the order of numbers. But when you just kind of torture the brain with failure, eventually the brain says, oh, I can remember both. And it's like turning on a new skill, a light switch. When I first did this years ago, I remember I had just finished it. And I was sitting with 16 people, and we were taking sushi orders to go, and I remembered everyone's order for 16 people. I'm not a waiter. And I'm like, this was outside of my abilities, period. And it was effortless. It was just there.
Jack
But does that translate to different results on, like, a real IQ test? Because isn't iq, like, technically just different than working memory? Like, it would be, you know, problem solving. And you're.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. How Increasing working memory will reliably increase iq. That's why I claim about a dozen points from that.
Graham
So I'm curious, what does it mean when my memory seems to be sometimes so bad that I can't remember what I did last night or the night before?
Jack
It means that you're clinically dumb.
Graham
Seriously. I started doing this journal that every day you're supposed to fill it out. And it's like, things you're grateful for in the morning. What would make today great highlights of the day. Sometimes I'll go by mistake two days without filling this thing out. And then I look back and I think, I have no recollection of the day before or the day before that. And I have to think to myself, what did I do? And I have to go through text messages, and we have a camera outside, and I look through the camera to see, oh, I left at this time. Oh, yeah, I went there. What does that mean?
Dave Asprey
Well, there's two kinds of memory. There's episodic memory, which is what you're talking about. Do you remember specific episodes? And then there's a kind of memory. That's how things work. And for facts, right? And different people have a different mix of episodic versus factual memory. So for me, I don't care what I did yesterday. I have no idea. Like, it's not relevant. I have systems for that. And people I know, like, oh, yeah, last year on July 2, I was doing this. I'm like, why do you know and why do you care? But that person can't remember mitochondrial function and which supplement to do so. I have this rich internal universe of biohacking and neuroscience and longevity and esoteric spiritual stuff. Stuff. Because that's what I care about. So for you, if you're a typical entrepreneur, you have ADHD anyway. And ADHD is the gift that you only pay attention to things you care about. And I would argue you probably don't really care about what you did yesterday. You'd remember it. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Graham
That makes more sense.
Dave Asprey
Some people organize their mental Hierarchy by time, others by function, others by human network. And this is foundational. It's like the systems architecture of your processing network inside your body.
Graham
See, I went down the rabbit hole of WebMD and convinced myself I might have early onset dementia.
Jack
No, you do not have that.
Dave Asprey
How old are you?
Graham
35.
Dave Asprey
It's not impossible. I would really worry about that, actually. No, I'm just trying to see if I can.
Jack
Yeah, I, I don't think you have that. I think that you, like, you bring your brain to a different playing field whenever you're working and like it kind of just. It like exercising that muscle for as long as you have just makes you completely obl. Oblivious to other things that like, might. Some other people might be more in tune with, such as social dynamics, such as, you know, maybe episodic memory. But that's similar to kind of what you said. It's just Graham really cares about the things he cares about.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Jack
And by virtue of that, it means he could care less about the things that you don't care.
Graham
If it's anything the Chinese embassy said, Jerome Powell said any market fluctuations and know it.
Jack
It's just someone, if you're talking to him about something that he doesn't have interest in, his eyes immediately gloss over and he's just not listening whatsoever. So it's.
Dave Asprey
So you probably have adhd.
Graham
I don't think I have adhd.
Dave Asprey
You don't?
Jack
He has incredible focus when hyper focus.
Dave Asprey
Is part of it.
Jack
But it's, it's, it's also, it's weird because it's in such a way of like, like you said, it's. It's easy to focus when you want to be focusing, but there are lots of times where he grinds on something that he may not be particularly passionate about, but he does like the grind. So I don't know what that necessarily means. Deep focus.
Graham
Deep focus is a. Is a passion of mine.
Dave Asprey
Okay, so deep focus is an altered state. Correct. So what if there were technologies to help you get into deeper focus more quickly? Love that. One of those is called meditation. But meditation takes too much time. The other thing is around 35, your testosterone is low.
Graham
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Dave Asprey
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Graham
It might be lowering now, but your.
Dave Asprey
Free tea, have you measured it?
Graham
It was in the eight hundreds.
Dave Asprey
That's total tea. Your free tea is probably not above 20.
Graham
I could. Oh, you know what, I could, I could find it.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, check it out.
Graham
I have it online.
Dave Asprey
So, yeah, so there's, there's two things that happen. One is testosterone drops. And for all of us, testosterone is low right now because of plastics and lighting and fragrances and circadian disruption, all kinds of stuff. So just our species is in trouble. From a testosterone perspective, testosterone drives dopamine, dopamine drives desire to focus and get stuff done. So you get rewarded for pursuing a goal. But if your testosterone is low, you don't care. And this is true in men and women because women have four times more testosterone than estrogen. They just have a lot less testosterone than guys do. So looking at that affects brain function in a meaningful way. The other thing that happens is your body makes cortisol and adrenaline, which are stress hormones that all entrepreneurs have and all people have. But it also makes counter stress hormones called DHEA and pregnenolone and to a certain extent progesterone. And starting around 35, those go down, but the stress hormones don't and it's worse in women than men. So in either case, if your DHEA is low, which happens as you age, well, welcome to aging. And 35 is about where you're like, oh shit, like it's not happening. So if you do the anti aging stuff at 35, you don't have to dig yourself out of a hole by waiting till you're 40 or 45 or 50. So a major reason I started the biohacking movement is because the things that make old people young make young people powerful. And so the goal is to say, if I would have known about this when I was 20, I wouldn't have weighed 300 pounds because I would have known what to do and I would have done all these things that are cheap and easy. And I probably would have not had all the dumb decisions I made too, if I'd have learned all the methods med the meditation stuff. So if you take a few steps now to keep your stress hormone and anti stress hormone levels at the levels of a young person, you're going to like your life ten years from now. And if you don't, you're going to be like, God, I have A dad bod. I said I wouldn't do that. Look, you know, I'm losing some hair and all that kind of stuff. So prevention is much easier. And it turns out that is exactly the same stuff that makes your brain work better and gives you more energy and more power. So it's like you have nothing to lose from doing it.
Jack
For those that want just a very, very quick kind of up to date background, you were very, very early on into tech and you made, what was it, like $6 million by, by 26 and then lost it all by 28. You were also 100 pounds overweight at that time. What, what was like going on? What was your kind of life like?
Dave Asprey
I used to have Asperger's syndrome, so it's on the autism spectrum. And I had ADHD and something called odd. You ever heard of that one? Oppositional defiant disorder. It means that when someone tells you to do something, you automatically and reflexively tell them no. You can imagine by the time I graduated from high school how popular I was with the teachers and whatnot. And all of this comes down to hardware in the brain and threat networks and we'll call the emotion and spiritual side of what's going on on. So I reversed that and it took me years and a lot of money to reprogram my brain, reprogram my eyes, my ears, the way my tongue moves, the way my body moves. I had to redo all that. And then I had to learn all the emotional stuff that I never picked up as a kid. All the social interactions, those are learned.
Jack
Okay, so how, how did you lose Asperger's? Because isn't that kind of like a, like, you know, if it's permanent, Right.
Dave Asprey
People believe all sorts of weird stuff. Did you know that until Eric Kendall won a Nobel Prize in 1994, scientists believe that you were born with the number of brain cells you're going to die with and that you could never change your brain or grow it.
Graham
It's funny, I still believe that like you lose your brain cells and they'll never come back.
Dave Asprey
I interviewed Eric Kendall when he was 84 on my show and he's incredibly high performance, brain happy, engaged. And yeah, he proved that neuroplasticity is real. And one of my cognitive enhancement book is based on that. So we believed all sorts of nonsense. Here's what's happening with autism and Asperger's, especially the higher functioning stuff. Something happens environmentally that lowers mitochondrial output dramatically. And you can measure that. And we find this in autistic Kids. So now you have a low power brain. It just can't make enough electricity to do what a normal brain should do. And then because of autoimmune inflammatory stuff, which can be caused by many different things, the signals that come into the brain are staticky. So eyes don't work right, ears don't work right, touch doesn't work right. So now you have a low power brain trying to make sense of the signals in the world around you. But the signals are dirty and it's low powered. So you become really good at low power pattern matching. So what did I do? I fixed my mitochondrial networks and that gave me a huge amount of energy. And then I went through and I fixed my nervous system, so now I have a clean signal coming in. And then the hardest part was teaching my brain how to process the clean signal. And that took several years and I wouldn't be able to do without neurofeedback. I'm reprogramming my hearing and my eyes was so hard to do, but it is possible. It's just hard. And I know dozens of parents who've fully healed their kids from autism. It just takes a lot of work.
Graham
What about for the autistic or kids with Asperger's who are just really smart though? Yeah, like they excel. Like, like maybe Elon Musk who said that he's had Asperger's or has Asperger's.
Dave Asprey
Well, you don't lose the pattern matching. See, that's the gift. So my brain evolved in a low power environment. It learned how to process that. And even studies of Einstein's brain, it's not that it was bigger, it said it was more efficient. So my brain, through suffering, learns to be hyper efficient at recognizing patterns. Which is why I was able to create biohacking, why I can. I'm a futurist. Like that thing I did in my 20s. I'm the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. Like my Dave, you weren't fat. I'm like, well, here's my picture from Entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23. And that article about, hey guys, this kid's selling T shirts over the enter something or another. Have you heard of it? Like the words e commerce had. I knew that was happening because my brain does that. I still have that, but. But now I can make eye contact. I have social networks, I've got all my emotional stuff that works. And I generally move pretty well. Although there's a couple of little movement patterns I haven't quite hacked yet.
Jack
You were One of the first people to sell something on the Internet.
Dave Asprey
No. Right. I was the first person. The second one was the guys who ran virtual vineyards. And the Internet at the time was Usenet. We hadn't invented the browser yet.
Jack
And you were selling the coffee.
Dave Asprey
T shirt said caffeine. My drug of choice. It had this molecule on it. It.
Jack
Caffeine is my drug of choice.
Dave Asprey
Y.
Graham
Mine, too.
Dave Asprey
Exactly. I'm. I'm at least consistent on that.
Jack
How. How did you make 6 million by 26 and lose it by 28, though?
Dave Asprey
Well, I knew that the Internet was going to be a thing because I had been on it since I was studying computer science and all that first mover advantage kind of thing. So I went to Silicon Valley and I made a resume that said Internet on everything. And I got two job offers. One was for the company that made the first Internet data center. Google was two guys and two computers. Hotmail started there. The Facebook was eight servers started there. I helped Salesforce when they were eight people. So we built 42 data centers and grew to, let's see, to 5,000 employees in three years. And the part of the business I started did 100 million a quarter in revenue. So my stock options were worth $6 million. And that was awesome. Then there was a crash in the market because WorldCom lied about Internet traffic and a bunch of financial nonsense. But the company went bankrupt because I attended board meetings and I was high enough up, I was blacked out. It was illegal for me to trade my shares. So I watched my wealth evaporate from $80 a share to $5 a share and less. So that was horrible. But here's the thing. I was miserable and anxious all the time and had terrible brain fog. I had arthritis since I was 14. And I'm like, I just. I want to be happy. I want to do the things I'm supposed to do. So I tried being famous. I was in Entrepreneur magazine. All these other things about early business on the Internet. And then I tried getting married in my 20s. That didn't last very long. That was not a good thing for happiness. And then I tried being rich. And I completed all of those before I was 28. And when I had $6 million, I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And I didn't understand dopamine. I didn't understand brains. Because pursuing things makes you happy. Getting them never makes you happy. It's provable, right? So happiness is an internally generated state that's irrespective of what's happening in the world around you. So the real game that we're all playing is how do we change our state at will? Because you want to be the person who can meditate in the middle of a storm. You want to be able to say, you know what, the economy's doing this, social media is doing that, the government's doing this. And it didn't affect my internal state at all. So I'm going to do what I'm going to do. You say, I like what happened. I didn't like what happened, didn't affect my internal state. Because that's how you have the most power to change the world, that lets you show up for your friends and your family and your community. Not being programmed, not being triggered, just being present and being thoughtful and being in charge of yourself. So why Was I working 90 hour weeks back then? Because I was convinced it would make me free and happy and it doesn't do that. And I also was convinced that it would finally show the bullies from seventh grade that I'm better than you. That's not my motivation anymore.
Jack
So what were like, the next steps that actually started this healing journey of like, where your body was in a rough shape, your brain was in a rough shape. What were the first things that you actually started to see made an improvement?
Dave Asprey
The first thing was I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. I'm like, I wouldn't hire myself. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine, Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do. So I started doing all the things that I didn't believe in because I already tried antibiotics every month for 15 years for the stuff going on. I'd always get strep throat and sinus infections. I had toxic mold. I didn't know it. I decided I was going to spend 20% of my earnings, which were pretty sizable during some of that time, on fixing my biology. And one of the things that happened, I was going to Wharton Business School. I was failing out of my classes. So I went to a psychiatrist and I'd read Dr. Daniel Amen's first book about brain scans. And this is not the kind that I do at 40 years of Zen. This is a, it's called a SPECT scan to figure out where is metabolic activity happening. And I went into one of his doctors and said, I want a scan. And he said, oh, tech bro wants Adderall. I know this game. And he said, fine, we'll get you a scan. And I come back In a week later, after they've injected me with radioactive sugar. And you looked at my brain and he, he just kind of, his face is white and he says, dave, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me right now. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. And by camouflage, what he meant was humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe. Some other animals, like cats, like, they'll, if they're sick, they'll run away and go die in a tree. So they get the other cat's sick. Humans aren't like that. That. So there's people, you know right now that are absolutely tapped out. They have the accelerator pinned to the floor all the time and they're slowing down and they feel helpless. There's nothing they can do. That was me. So that was the thing. And when he, when he said that, I was like, finally someone believes me. And I started taking smart drugs actually before that that were helping. And he got me the drug that I actually had come to him for, which was called Modafinil, which is an off label treatment for adhd. But I was dealing with chronic fatigue, not adhd. And I learned what causes chronic fatigue and I learned how to reverse it. And so I don't have it anymore. And I have an incredibly powerful and fast brain that I never had in my 20s or 30s. And it's doable for anyone. It just requires curiosity and it requires data and it requires systems thinking, which is my gift was that the drug.
Graham
That Limitless was based off of. How close is Modafinil to Limitless?
Dave Asprey
When you take it, if you're paying attention, Modafinil will slightly change the saturation of color. So if you watch Limitless, every time he's on the drug, everything turns kind of green. There is a shift in color perception from it. And I warn people, if you're a dick, Modafinil will make you a faster dick, right? So it makes you more and it makes it easy to focus and to get things done. But it's not a stimulant, even like coffee or like Adderall or something. It's a different feeling. And it is one of the most studied drugs. It actually does raise iq. It increases reaction time or, sorry, decreases reaction time, makes you faster. And it has very few side effects. So if it works for you, 20%, people don't really feel it. But if it Works for you. It's kind of magic. And I've been on a low dose of that stuff pretty much every day for 20 something years now. And it's totally worth it.
Graham
How do you is it. It's safe?
Dave Asprey
Well, we've known about it since the mid-90s. It's been very well studied. It has very few side effects. It's much safer than statins. It's safer than antidepressants.
Graham
So why isn't everyone doing it?
Dave Asprey
Well, there are a lot of people doing it. How many entrepreneurs do you think are not on it?
Graham
I don't know a single person is. I mean, maybe just they, they do and they just don't tell us.
Dave Asprey
So I, I was concerned about that. So at Wharton I'm like, guys, I don't want to be accused of doping. So I would actually put my modafinil and my Perilous 10, my other smart drugs, because cognitive enhancing drugs really do work. And so do the supplements. I make them today, but I'd put them on the desk in front of me. I'm like, guys, I'm not breaking rules, but I'm on these substances. And I don't think I would have graduated from business school without nootropics. It really made a difference.
Graham
What do you think of magic mind?
Dave Asprey
Boost energy and focus. Crush procrastination. See what's in here. Nootropics. Matcha. Adaptogens. I love adaptogens. This is really small. Let's see some olive oil. Cool. Ashwagandha. I like that. That's good stuff. Bacopa, really good for dopamine. Rhodiola, One of my top all time adaptogen favorite things. Got some turmeric, lion's mane, fossil serine. I like this ingredient list. I just don't know how much of it's in there. How much rodeo are you really getting? I do a couple capsules of it and lion's mane can be powerful. L, theanine, natural caffeine, vitamin C. So I, it looks like a great list. Saffron. I, I just want to see the amounts of each one. Like saffron is better than antidepressants.
Graham
So I've heard the same thing as you. It, it really comes down to the amounts and I've, I've heard maybe something like they don't share the amounts because they don't want other people to, to copy their exact recipe of how they do it. I've been drinking these usually before the podcast, just like an energy shot. And then they sponsored us and I've just been curious about it.
Dave Asprey
It's got natural caffeine in it. It's gonna make you feel good. Yeah, unquestionably. And since you don't know how much caffeine it could be. 200 milligrams.
Graham
This is 60.
Dave Asprey
Okay, cool. So it's about a shot of espresso worth.
Jack
Yes.
Dave Asprey
So that's gonna help you on a podcast. I understand the desire to have proprietary blends, and I've done it myself. Because you're so tired of these knockoff clowns doing it at the same time. A serious biohacker. Like, I know how much rodeo I take every day, and given the volume of that thing, unless it tastes really.
Graham
Bad, some people don't like it. I like it. But I like bitter things.
Dave Asprey
Okay.
Graham
So I would say it's kind of like a mixed of bittersweet.
Jack
I like it. It tastes very, like, kind of a little sour, like, very probiotic.
Graham
It's pungent.
Dave Asprey
Okay. I would like that kind of a taste. And so it's a great ingredient list. So I would just want to know, am I taking too much of one of those with all the other stuff I take, or is it the right amount? So what I would like to see them do is if someone reaches out to customer support or something, most companies will say, all right, here's what's in there. And, guys, if the people making magic minds hear this, anyone who wants to copy it can take it to a lab and break it down easy enough. So, like, it's a pro and con thing. But for people who are going to be taking things, I worry, like, people throw vitamin B6 in everything. I didn't see B6 on that, which is good. The form of B6 that we use is not even good for you. It creates problems for people because it's an unnatural form. But if it's in every supplement, in every energy drink, you're going to get, like, numb feet and hands from that because you don't know how much you're getting. So I like to know what I'm taking, but I really like their ingredient list. Cool.
Graham
Yeah, we've been taking this. I usually take it with us when we travel sponsor the podcast. So if you guys are interested, we do have a link in the description, and I'll reach out to them. I'll see if we can find out the. The doses.
Dave Asprey
It's a good idea. I like it and I understand not putting on the bottle. Just if someone asked their customer support, I would hope that they would. They would Say what it was and just third time saying it. It is a. I didn't see anything on there I don't approve of on the ingredients list. So it looks like it's a good combination.
Graham
What's the craziest biohack that you've tried?
Dave Asprey
I've had my bone marrow taken out while I'm awake to get my stem cells.
Jack
How painful is that?
Dave Asprey
It's not very painful.
Jack
I've heard that's like the most painful thing.
Dave Asprey
They put lidocaine on it. The reason people say it's painful is it's scary but it's not really painful. So like being burned is painful. This isn't like that. The weird thing is, you know that. That fingernails on a blackboard sound? Yeah. Imagine that coming from your skeleton. All of your skeleton. It's so creepy. But it's not pain. It's just the weirdest sensation you've ever felt. And you could easily like freak out about a weird sensation, but it's. It wasn't that. There was that. I also was.
Jack
What did you do with the marrow?
Dave Asprey
Blended into my coffee, obviously. No, I. We got the stem cells. Yeah, I got the stem cells out and injected them into old injuries for longevity.
Jack
And did it work?
Dave Asprey
It helped. However, there's much more powerful stem cell stuff. I go down to a place in Costa Rica called RMI now and they're the ones who reset my central aging clock. And I've had every joint in my body injected with stem cells twice because I would like to have those same joints when I'm 180. So preventative maintenance.
Graham
When is the right time to start injecting stem cells?
Jack
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Graham
Episode when is the right time to start injecting stem cells?
Dave Asprey
The right time to harvest and bank your stem cells is right now. Because if you get your stem cells and you freeze them, they can grow new stem cells from your 35 year old stem cells. And then when you're 135 you still have young stem cells. That is a gift. If you do that and do you need to do it? If you have an injury you should start, you should use the stem cells to heal the injury. So most of the time you're 35, there's that time you're playing soccer or biking and your shoulder got injured, your knee like annoying. Now if you don't do something about them, if you wait 15 years, those are the things that are likely to stop you from having functional movement over time. So you've got to really be aggressive about healing.
Jack
How many times do you need to collect stem cells?
Dave Asprey
Just once. If you bank them.
Graham
And what does it mean, banking?
Jack
How much does it cost? Where do you go?
Dave Asprey
You go down to rmi. The reason that I go there is that procedure where they suck it out of your marrow, that is is a big deal. RMI developed a procedure where they can use a pharmaceutical that causes the stem cells to go into your blood and they just take em out of your blood. So I have 2 billion of my marrow cells banked, which is way more than we could have sucked out of my marrow anyway. And we'll be gene editing those and reintroducing them with superpowers so that I can get even younger and more powerful. It's gonna. If you wanted to inject every injury you had and do your brain and do your face and while you're at it, you might as well do your d. It's going to run about 50 grand for everything. Yep.
Graham
And you said they can take it from blood.
Dave Asprey
They can now. Yeah.
Graham
So they don't need to drill in a bone. They could just.
Dave Asprey
No, the drilling in the bone was definitely an experience they don't need.
Jack
Is one more or less effective than the other like marrow versus bone or versus blood?
Dave Asprey
Those actually are marrow cells in the blood. You can also get stem cells from your fat. It's just a different kind of stem cell. So if you go down there in one week, it's actually five days. They do all of that stuff. They'll get your fat cells, they marrow cells without going into your marrow. So you, you take a drug, makes your bone marrow, spit the stem cells out into your blood. Then they just harvest them from your blood, which is easy. They filter it out.
Graham
That's safe like test it seems like that's not safe to like have your bone marrow excreting SEM like stem cells into your blood while they extract that.
Dave Asprey
Oh, it's totally safe. Increase. So your, your bone marrow is supposed to be making stem cells all the time. That's its job. So they just have a pharmaceutical protocol with a well known drug that does that.
Graham
That can you use someone else's bone marrow.
Dave Asprey
Not bone marrow, but stem cells. It's really sketchy to do stem cells in the US because they Usually take umbilical cells from like eight random women and they say, oh, we tested them and I know someone who's active in that industry who used his own product and almost died, couldn't walk for six months. So I'm concerned about viral stuff. So I don't use other people's stem cells unless it's from a single person and it's culture expanded. And that's illegal in the U.S. the FDA won't let you do it. Costa Rica and I get it done.
Graham
Why is it illegal in the United States?
Dave Asprey
Because the FDA hates you and wants you to die. At least they did before RFK came in.
Graham
Why? What's the benefit for the FDA not to allow or.
Dave Asprey
As a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma, the FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And it's been that way for a very long time.
Graham
So what do you think are the most over prescribed drugs right now?
Dave Asprey
Statins and antidepressants.
Graham
How could you cure depression?
Dave Asprey
Well, one of the easiest ways to cure many types of depression would be darkness. Get rid of bright lights at night and get some sunshine in the morning in your eyes. Circadian disruption is behind a huge amount of depression. And the second thing would be ketamine, which is one of the chapters in heavily meditated. Even a single dose of ketamine under medical circumstances with integration it works on treatment resistant depression. That's why about almost a year ago we added ketamine to 40 years of Zen. It's the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program where optionally you can come up, spend five days. We use a little bit of ketamine to create neuroplasticity in the brain so your brain can form new connections more quickly while you're doing this training to reset your operating system.
Graham
So I want to give you some biohacks and I want you to tell us how effective they are from 1 to 10. 10 being very effective, 1 being not at all. It's not even worth it. Infrared light therapy.
Dave Asprey
10 Keto diet 6. Sleep tracking, just tracking it. 4 But hacking, it's a good thing.
Graham
Grounding.
Dave Asprey
That's surprisingly a 7. Stem cells, those are a 10 if they're done right. Cryotherapy, that's about a 7.
Graham
Electrodes in your head for neurofeedback.
Dave Asprey
Neurofeedback in your head or on your head?
Graham
On your head.
Dave Asprey
Okay, yeah. So not neuralink. So neurofeedback if it's the right protocols, like the stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10. It's the most effective thing I've ever done. But there are some types of neurofeedback that don't do anything.
Graham
Meditation, four and a half IV drips.
Dave Asprey
Depends what's in it. But they can be 10 or they can be one.
Graham
Cold plunges, seven, intermittent fasting, that's probably an eight. If someone wants the 8020 and just get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. What would your recommendation be in terms of biohacking?
Dave Asprey
All right, Little bit of self serving here. Yeah, you should come into Upgrade Labs. This is my company that does that. We've got 30 locations opening, nine already open across the US and Canada. And we have someone come to your house and draw blood and get your labs and you come in and we get 187 million data points over the course of the year. And based on what your goals are, are which are different for different people, and based on the state of your biology, we recommend a bunch of different biohacks in the right order to get you the results. A combination of supplements and red and infrared light therapy with specific frequencies or cryo or a bunch of things people haven't even heard of. And the results we're seeing are profound. It's just, it's not the same for everyone. Here's an example. If I were to ask you, what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to you?
Graham
I would say waking up energized, feeling happy and energetic throughout the day and then falling asleep quickly at night.
Dave Asprey
So for you it's energy and sleep, really?
Graham
Yeah.
Dave Asprey
I would say, what does healthy mean to you?
Jack
I would say motivation and energy levels.
Dave Asprey
Motivation and energy. Got it. So if I would ask another person, they'd say, I just want my knees to stop hurting. Hurting. Right. And for someone else it could be I want my libido back. And someone else I need to manage stress better or I want to lose the weight or I want to put on muscle, or I want cardiovascular endurance, I don't have that anymore. And it turns out that after starting the first biohacking center under Arnold schwarzenegger's office about 11 years ago now, which is now Upgrade Labs, there's buckets and we use a survey. Because the problem is if you wanted to buy a laptop right now, you want a laptop with a 500 inch screen that weighs 1 ounce and has a 2 week battery life and infinite Memory, but it's not possible, right? So we all want all of those goals, but you want some of them more than others, and you don't know which ones you want more than others. So we use statistical analysis and AI to figure out your actual stack of prioritization. And we use that as the inputs to say, okay, if your true goals are these, what are we going to do to personalize it? And since you're both different biologically, right, Your starting points are different, and it's the personalization that makes it happen. So it could be that for your energy, we're like, oh, you've got some nutritional stuff that was easy to pick up. So let's get you on some vitamin D and some minerals and all of that, and then we're going to affect your energy with one set of technologies. And for you, we might say, you know, you actually have pretty good mineral levels right now. We don't need to worry about that for you. So we're going to do you this tech and then this tech, and you're both gonna get your goals right. But if yours is more motivation, we're gonna recommend something like, I have a dopamine supplement called Motivation 101. I'd be like, that should be the one for you. For you. I'm not gonna do it because what we talked about earlier, I'm gonna put you on brain101 because you're working more on your memory. So different goals, different starting points, and this rich set of technologies. So for people listening, you'll never do all of the biohacks. I have done almost all of them because it's my job and because I'm willing to spend unlimited amounts of money on this. And what I want people to understand. You read any of my books, especially heavily meditated, you're going to go through it and go, there's like 75 different things here, but that one stood out. That's what intuition is about. You're going to say, oh, that makes sense. I want to do that, right? So for you guys, I'd be like, you better get your testosterone and your thyroid levels. Everybody needs those. Just as a starting point. That's probably the easiest thing to do for most people. The amount of people with subclinical hypothyroidism right now is insane. And that means your body won't make enough energy. No wonder you're stressed and tired and anxious and you can't sleep. Your thermostat has turned too low, and you try to push the accelerator and there's nothing in there because you're limited. So you fix that and then we look at your testosterone. Oh that's low because you're alive. For almost all of us it's low. So then we fix that with lifestyle or with medications or with nutritional supplements, whatever it takes to get your levels where they should be for a healthy 25 year old and we pin them the there. So when you're 125 you still have a 25 year old's level of energy and motivation. And from there, what's one thing you.
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Dave Asprey
The sky's the limit. Do you want to train your brain? Right? Do you want to train some other thing in your body?
Jack
Let's just say though that you're a viewer with maybe like 200 bucks and you're like, you know what, I really just want to spend some money to get the right supplements to get, you know, red light or maybe a sleep mask.
Dave Asprey
You know, okay, 200 budget. The first thing you do is you go to Amazon and you buy some cheap red LED light bulbs. Helps. And then at night, as soon as the sun goes down, the lights in your house are red. And you take another 20 bucks and you buy blackout curtains. And in your bedroom, it needs to be pitch black. No light leaking around the curtains and no LED lights. Tape them over inside your bedroom. There's a study out of Japan that shows that the amount of street light that leaks around curtains in the average city increases depression by 69%. 60. So we have a circadian problem. These are one time changes you make. Okay, I have dimmer switches and or red lights in the evening and I have a blacked out bedroom. And you will find your entire life changes because now when you sleep, your body actually does what it's supposed to do. And right now, if you look at a bright screen, you have the bathroom lights on for five seconds. It doesn't matter the timing system in your brain. In all of history, there's never been bright white lights, lights in the middle of the night. We had a full moon and we had fire and that was it. And so when you turn on those bright kitchen or bathroom lights or whatever the timing system goes, it must be daytime. And then it starts turning things on that are supposed to be turned off. And it's driving depression and anxiety and drops in, hormones and all kinds of weird stuff. It's easy to fix and it's way less than 200 bucks.
Jack
So you're saying optimizing sleep, basically optimizing.
Dave Asprey
Light is more important than sleep. Oh, and don't wear sunglasses during the day outdoors. They're bad for you. You.
Jack
And that's just because you don't want to trick your brain into when being. When you, when you should be on or off or alert or not.
Dave Asprey
Light is a nutrient that's as important as food. And it's like we just put junk lighting everywhere. It's like we replaced all of your food with Twinkies. And that's what LED lights are.
Jack
Why did you say that people that sleep for six and a half hours live the longest?
Dave Asprey
Because that's what the data shows in three large studies of more than a million people over multiple years.
Jack
How would the data show that? A lot of like I feel the best when I get like eight and a half hours of sleep, maybe nine hours of sleep like the next day. My mental acuity, my, my CPU is, is functioning at a quicker pace and I just feel better. I can hit the gym harder.
Dave Asprey
That, that makes absolute sense. I am not recommending that you cut your sleep to six and a half hours. That's terrible. What the data really shows is that healthy people need less sleep to recover. So if you wake up fully recovered in six and a half hours. Hours, great. If you need eight and a half hours to fully recover, either you're working out really hard or some systems aren't optimized. So if you just wake up fully refreshed feeling like your CPU got the upgrade and you did it in six and a half hours, that would be better than eight and a half, right? That would be the goal. But do not cut your sleep back to try and live longer. That's a terrible strategy. The data is very clear though.
Jack
It's more causation then is like if you are healthy then you just need less sleep. So the sleep is kind of the metric that they use to reverse engineer.
Dave Asprey
Exactly. Okay. Right. The data is very clear though. People who sleep eight hours or eight and a half hours, they die more from all cause mortality meaningfully more than people who sleep seven hours.
Graham
So how do you get the perfect night of sleep?
Dave Asprey
This is awesome. The short answer to that is free. It's just go to sleepwithdave.com and everything I know about sleep is there. I just needed a URL for it.
Graham
What sort of website is this?
Dave Asprey
It's my only fence. No, it's. It's just the most memorable marketing URL of my entire life and it makes me laugh every time I say it. But yeah, sleep with Dave has all this stuff on it. And again, I'm not selling anything Jack as sleep@jack.com. nice.
Graham
It's just a form. You can.
Dave Asprey
10 bucks.
Graham
Guys, the.
Dave Asprey
The short version to get good night's sleep. Have dinner before the sun goes down. That's critical. Don't have any calories after that. And then have darkness after the sun goes down. And I'm staying in a hotel here in Vegas. So I have glasses that we created for sleep that tell the brain it's nighttime even though we can see. So I was at out at a casino last night. I'm wearing glasses. They look like they're red. But it's multiple layered optical filters. It's called TrueDark. And those things we published in a medical journal that 15 minutes of wearing those shifts the brain into the same state as advanced meditation. So if you want to go to get a good night's sleep, you need darkness or red light before bed. You need a lack of food before bed. And when you lay down for sleep, you want to set your thermostat to 68 or less. Because cold is a signal to tell your body that it's time for sleep. Sleep. And then you want to take a few deep breaths before you go to sleep. And your out breath needs to be twice as long as the in breath. So you fill the lungs completely like and then another little one so it's really full. And then you breathe out through the nose really slowly and do that three or four times. And that will cause your heart rate variability to be higher at 9. If you do those things, you're probably gonna get a good night's sleep. And there's a handful of sleep supplements that I talk about on that site that work for some people more than others. Others. If you wake up at three or four in the morning routinely and you can't go back to sleep, you have a blood sugar issue, a little bit of raw honey and or MCT and or collagen before bed will fix that.
Graham
So I was about to ask. I get up, it seems like almost every single night at like 2 to 2:30 in the morning. And it's usually I gotta go pee and, or I'll wake up briefly and I'm thinking to myself, I would feel better if I just went to the bathroom so I don't have to think about having to go to the bathroom. And then I do and I go back to bed. But it's such a recurring thing.
Dave Asprey
Why is that when you go back to bed, do you have racing thoughts or you just go back to sleep?
Graham
Usually go right back to sleep.
Dave Asprey
Okay, good. So you just have a pee problem. And you may have a little bit of prostate inflammation. So one thing is don't Drink so much before bed, that would be a good thing. Right. That could solve the problem. Right. And in order to do that, having electrolytes in your water, having more salt.
Graham
So yeah, so I do L LMNT in my water and I do one of those hydrogen tablets.
Dave Asprey
Perfect.
Graham
Mixed with creatine.
Dave Asprey
Great.
Graham
And then I.
Dave Asprey
That might be the issue. Creatine before bed is a big problem for some people. That's usually when I do it, it's too stimulating. So I do creatine in the morning and there's great evidence for creatine.
Jack
Creatine does wake me up a little bit.
Graham
Really? Yeah, usually like forget.
Jack
If I take it before the gym, it can actually hype me up a.
Dave Asprey
Little bit for the gym.
Graham
So I was looking online and said nah, there's not really any correlation between when you take as long as I.
Jack
Think it depends on the person.
Dave Asprey
It's funny when they do correlation studies versus mechanistic studies, I tend to like to know how things work, work. So because you have more ATP, what happens with creatine in many people but not all is it reduces sleep drive. So if I take creatine, I'm going to wake up at 4am and I don't want to go back to sleep and I get up now that's not a good thing unless I got enough sleep. But if I don't take creatine that night, I won't do it. And there's ways to overcome that with supplements and things like that. But just shift your creatine timing. Drink less water before you go to bed.
Graham
Usually what it is, not all the time, but usually between 8 to 10pm I'll realize I didn't drink any water throughout the day and so then I have a big glass, but it's not all the time. And so even when I don't do that, I'm still waking up at two something.
Dave Asprey
What you may find is that if you're waking up some nights having to pee urgently, not others, there's two things that are causing that. One of them is if you're eating plants that have high amounts of oxalate. Oxalate causes razor sharp calcium crystals in your urinary tract and it makes you have to put pee. If you're getting toxins in your food, your body's like, let's eliminate those. So it makes you have to pee when your bladder's not full. So if you wake up and you have to pee and you only pee like a cup, that was dumb. That was your body getting rid of toxins. If you wake up and your bladder is full, then that was really having to pee. So toxins are what makes you have to pee before you really have a full bladder.
Jack
I always experience, like. Like, I feel like I have to pee so bad, and then I go and I, like, hardly pee. I'm like, okay, this is weird because.
Graham
Because that happens all the time. Every road trip we take, he's. He's got appealing twice true.
Jack
On the road trips. It's because I just. I just. I'm always drinking something.
Dave Asprey
So you're like the woman on the road trip.
Jack
That's. That's not true at all. He's. He's worse because he doesn't drink anything. Like, he's like a camel. It's actually the amount of things this guy needs to survive is incredible.
Graham
Very little.
Jack
Yeah, he. Maybe he could survive probably on, like, 700 calories and, like, half a pint.
Dave Asprey
Of water a day. Wow.
Graham
It's probably true.
Dave Asprey
Yeah. That's hilarious.
Jack
But for me, like. So it's. You're saying it's releasing toxins?
Dave Asprey
Well, if you were to drink moldy coffee, let's just say so. I'm kind of famous for making coffee without mold in it. The mold that's found almost universally in American coffee is called ota. It's the toxin. It survives roasting and brewing. I got 36 studies. I didn't pay for that support what I'm saying. So that makes some coffee people mad. Sorry, guys. So. So if you drink coffee and then you have to pee an hour later and your bladder's empty, it's because OTA is a specific toxin for the kidneys and bladder, and the body is pulling water out of your blood, and it's diluting the toxin, and it's giving you a signal to pee, and then you pee, and there's nothing in there. Right. If you drink coffee that doesn't have mold in it, you don't have to pee afterwards. That's your signal. So one of them is mold. The other one is this oxalate thing. If you were to use eat two big bowls of raspberries, some almonds, some spinach and kale, you're going to have to pee really urgently because you just sliced up your urethra. And I've worked with so many people who have this problem, and it happened to me, too. Back when I was a raw vegan, I was eating one or two baskets of raspberries every day. I had to pee 20 times a day urgently, and it drove me Crazy. I went to a bunch of doctors. Finally one stuck a camera in a place where cameras should not go on men. And they're like, we don't know. And I tracked it down after a year. It's oxalate and raspberries. So this is a common plant toxin and all these superfoods that people are eating, they're not superfoods. I'm very suspicious of plants. I do eat some plants. I just know which ones don't have the ability to make razor sharp crystals inside my urethra because that sucks.
Graham
So what are the worst foods that people could eat or that do eat?
Dave Asprey
Aside from ultra processed nonsense and omega 6 oils and all that? Beets, spinach, most nuts, kale, raspberries. And this pains me because I love them. Sweet potatoes and white potatoes.
Graham
Why? Why sweet potatoes and white potatoes?
Dave Asprey
They're high in oxalate and white potatoes are high in lectins. And unfortunately sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes but they're both very high in oxalate. So if you're going to eat a little bit of those on occasion, fine. But most people get such a large burden. Oh, and green tea and dark chocolate are also very high in oxalate. So most people are taking in so much that it's building up crystals throughout their bodies. Like, oh, my body hurts all the time, my muscles hurt. 80% of people at autopsy today have calcium oxalate crystals in their thyroid. So this is something. I wrote about this in the bulletproof diet. In the first chapter I under indexed how important this is for aging and for function, for cognitive function, for having joints that work. So calcification of your tissues over time is something that's crappy as you age. This is a major driver of that and it's easy to fix. Don't eat so many stupid plants.
Graham
So what's the best food for someone to eat if they're going to have a diet? Seven days a week, grass fed ribeye.
Dave Asprey
So I'm not a carnivore supporter in that I don't think most people should eat only meat for long periods of time. But I would say for someone listening, if you were to go carnivore for two to four weeks, weeks and watch all the things that improve in your life, that's a pretty clear signal that some of those plants are not good for you. So what do you do then? You ask your favorite AI tool which of the plants are lower in oxalate or other plant toxins and it'll tell you. So I'll Eat arugula. I'll eat lettuce. I'll eat some celery, but not too much. Right? And I'll eat white rice, which has very low toxins in it.
Graham
What about broccoli?
Dave Asprey
Broccoli? Broccoli is okay. I wouldn't eat massive tons of it. Unless you have a problem with sulfur metabolism, which a lot of people do. So if you eat broccoli and it doesn't make you fart, you're probably fine.
Graham
What about things like peppers, mushrooms, turkey, chicken.
Dave Asprey
Peppers? I wouldn't eat them. They're delicious. But they're a nightshade vegetable. They have oxalates and they have very high levels of lectins. Some people tolerate them better than others, but they're not an ideal food. In fact, for most of recorded history, we believe that peppers and even tomatoes were deadly to even touch. So they were ornamental plants. Oh, we can eat those. So the cool thing about being human, you can eat all sorts of crap and survive, which is great during a famine. But if you regularly eat famine foods, toxins build up in your body and it takes a toll over time. I prefer to have animals detoxify the plants for me and then I eat the animals. So grass fed meat should be number one dairy protein if you tolerate it. I do sheep because I don't tolerate cow very well. Dairy fat, olive oil and some plants. And like I just listed some of the common ones and some carbs. Eat some fruit, but not all fruit's great. Raspberries are not good. Blueberries are very good. Pineapple's not a great choice because of oxalate. Kiwi's not a great choice. If you eat one of them, it's probably not a problem. But a lot of people are eating huge amounts of fruit that never existed. What about all the bananas history? They're moderate in oxalate, relatively high in starch. They're not great.
Graham
So it sounds like the ideal diet is really just grass fed beef with rice, blueberries, some, add some arugula, lettuce.
Dave Asprey
Add a bunch of oregano and rosemary and herbs that are really good for you. If you ate that, you would live a very long time and be very happy.
Jack
What about, I would say 75% of my day, days I eat, I go to Chipotle, I get a bowl with white rice, black beans, double chicken, pico cheese and lettuce. That's it.
Dave Asprey
Ditch the black beans. They're full of omega 6 fats.
Jack
What about pinto? Could I get the refried or the pinto?
Dave Asprey
Pinto are Better than black. Black beans are one of the highest plant toxin forms of beans. I would stay away from those, but I wouldn't want to eat very many beans either. I don't think they're pressure cooking them already, are they? If you're going to eat beans, they need to be pressure cooked, otherwise they just, they shred your biology. Most restaurants do not know how to cook that stuff. And beans are poverty food, they're great to survive on. But look at where beans were invented. Go down to Peru. I've been down there. The average height is like five feet because like you can survive on it. But it, it's not enough protein. It's not a complete protein. I like your double chicken, but I'd rather do double steak.
Graham
Have you ever done anything that was dangerous in terms of biohacking that you later found out or maybe wanted to push the, the limits a bit?
Dave Asprey
Oh yeah, I've almost died a couple times. How? Well, one time I did something called a hydrodissection of my vagus nerve. It's when they inject lidocaine around the vagal nerve in your neck and it floats it so it's not stuck to your tissues. And this is good for your sympathetic nervous system. But on we'll say the doctor had me leave the clinic much earlier than I should have. And on the way to the airport I seized up in the back of an Uber, passed out and would have died if I didn't have an ER doctor riding in the car with me who stabbed me with an EpiPen and saved me. And yes, I did pee the Uber seat that was uncomfortable.
Graham
What about anti aging products? Are those mostly a scam or what's good, what's worth it?
Dave Asprey
When you look in the world of longevity and anti aging, I mean, I've, I've run a longevity nonprofit, I think from about 27ish till about 32 in Palo Alto. Learning from like the masters of the field before, before longevity was as big of a thing as it is now. There are enormous numbers of products that really work. And there are enormous numbers of products that work for some people, but maybe not for you because of the personalization. And there are a bunch of scammers out there making stuff. So you really can't say anti aging products. It's like saying does breathing work well? Are you breathing exhaust or are you breathing clean air? They're different things, right? So I would say that there are profoundly effective longevity products with clinical studies that back them. One of my favorite companies there is called Qualia Qualia has way more researchers and scientists than most supplement companies. And I've helped on some of their formulations. And their stuff works. I mean, take it, you measure it. And they only launch a product after they have clinicals that show it works. So I'd say there are legitimate products that truly work. And there are some people who are saying, well, I threw this crap together and I have a third party white label manufacturer and I'm going to pretend like it's a good product. And this is a problem in every industry. Somebody makes something good and then somebody makes a crappy disposable version of it that looks about the same and sells a knockoff.
Graham
And it's what's worth it for people to buy. Then like what specific things if they want to either stay or reverse aging.
Dave Asprey
What age are you? Me? Well, I mean the, the, the person we're asking for because someone who's 65 and someone who's 25 should allocate their resources very differently, right? So the lowest return or, or the lowest cost, highest return on investment would be put some sea salt or some electrolyte in your water and have some creatine because those are so cheap. Take Vitamin dake and that's vitamindake.com D, A, K, E. And that's a, a specific mix of fat soluble vitamins that direct minerals into yourselves. And on that same site, take Minerals 101. Because if you're deficient in minerals and fat soluble vitamins, nothing else works. You go to the gym, you can't make muscle because you don't have zinc, right? So you just need to get these as foundational. And everyone is deficient in minerals today because our soil is deficient and because superfoods suck minerals out of your bones and it's dumb. So those are foundational for everyone and those are cheap, right? And you're saying, okay, what am I going to work on next? So you might want to look at a cognitive enhancing supplement like the brain 101 or like the Qualia product called Qualiam Oxygen Mind, right? And then you might want to look at a sleep product, right? Because what is it you're trying to optimize? And the, the mistake people make is they just say, oh, I'm getting overwhelmed. There's just too many things to do. Pick a goal and work on that, right? And take some supplements that do that. If you want foundational longevity stuff, my book Superhuman goes through the seven different systems in the body that need maintenance. If you want to live a long Time and which supplements or practices to use for each one. But some of them are very cheap, like intermittent fasting. It's cheaper than eating breakfast to not eat breakfast. There you go. That's gonna create autophagy in your cells. Right. So I'm very respectful of the amount of energy, the amount of suffering, the amount of time and the amount of money that people are willing to do in order to get a benefit.
Graham
And what about when it comes to something like tap water? When you're at a restaurant and they say do you want tap or you know, bottled?
Dave Asprey
I just say I want the glass bottle bottled water water, because that has no microplastic in it to speak of.
Graham
How bad is tap water for you?
Dave Asprey
It's really bad.
Graham
I've always been told it's good for you because it has like all this minerals in it. It's not like totally filtered. It has things in it that would be beneficial for you. I've always just drank tap water.
Dave Asprey
So if we were to measure the tap water you're drinking, it does have dissolved minerals from hundred year old plumbing with lead in it. With all the stuff from the pvc, there's abundant levels of atrazine, which basically makes frogs into hermaphrodites. And it messes with your testosterone in a major way. It has birth control pill residues left in it, it has antibiotics left in it.
Graham
But are those in any amounts that will actually make a difference to you?
Dave Asprey
Unfortunately they are.
Graham
So why, why can't that just be taken out by these tap water companies and they just run it for.
Dave Asprey
If they take it out at the central plant, it'd be very expensive and then the pipes are not at all clean. So the best thing to do is get a reverse osmosis unit and take it out before you drink it. And if you're going to a restaurant, that's one of the many reasons not to go to restaurants. But if you're going to go to restaurant, don't drink the tap water. Right. Either don't drink any water, which seems to be your thing, or drink bottled water.
Graham
I drink very little water, but then the water I do drink is tap water, so is that worse?
Dave Asprey
It's not a good call to do it that way. Drinking water is good, but most people like eight glasses a day. Day. Did anyone ever tell you how big glasses are?
Graham
I was assuming it would just be like a cup.
Dave Asprey
They never tell you it's complete made up bullshit. And many people, they drink water because they think they're supposed to and they're actually Harming their performance. I don't drink water without salt or minerals in it ever. And it means I need less water, and it means my brain works all the time. But if I drink two big glasses of water with no electrolyte in it, I can feel a difference in my performance. My body's like, you bastard, you just diluted all the salt in my cells. And we're essentially salt batteries, arteries. So salt is profoundly good for you. And if you're going to drink tap water, you should filter it, man. Why take the toxic hit?
Graham
What do you think of Brian Johnson?
Dave Asprey
I knew Brian before he got into longevity because of his work with kernel and neuroscience. And it's funny, my big campaign for my longevity book was I spent $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. I'm going to live to 180. And he's come out, and I'm very happy that he's spent reports say $25 million on marketing the longevity movement. We need lots of voices in longevity. So generally, I like Brian. I don't do all the things he does, and I don't know that I like all the metrics he uses that I have some different ones. But generally inspiring people to do things that make them live longer is a really good thing.
Jack
How do you eat when you're traveling?
Dave Asprey
I bring a hundred grams of animal protein powder with me when I travel because it's hard to get enough protein on the road. And then I usually intermittent fast in the morning. I make danger coffee in my own hotel room and I have that for breakfast. Sometimes I'll put protein in it, which doesn't taste great, but I don't care. And then I'll eat one or two meals a day. Like today. I've had nothing but coffee and it's. What is it, like 2:30. So I've had nothing but coffee today, too. Before I get on.
Jack
I've had nothing but a new tonic today.
Dave Asprey
Oh, there you go. There you go. Before I get on the airplane, I'm gonna find somewhere that has stuff steak. And I'm going to go eat probably a pound of steak and I'll get on the airplane and fly home. So that's my most important food is protein and fat and everything else is optional.
Graham
How bad is alcohol for you?
Dave Asprey
Alcohol is really bad for you. It is so pro cancer, pro aging. It's. It's just not a good choice. So I have a rule for alcohol. I only drink alcohol that's older than I am. That means it gets progressively more expensive and harder to find as I get older, older. So it's rate limiting the reality though, if I'm going to have sushi and I have a couple shots of high end sake with it, who cares? But if you're having it once a week, it's actually affecting your performance for multiple days. And everyone I know is like, you know, I'm going to go a month without it. Like, wow, my life really did get better. But if you're going to drink, there's a bunch of stuff I've put out there over the years. I put out a big infographic on alcohol. Distilled spirits are much less toxic than wine and beer because you're relying on technology to get out the impurities. But wine and beer, you're relying on your liver and kidneys to do it. And if you're going to do it, you want to take glutathione, which is a supplement that protects the liver from alcohol induced toxicity. 20% of the toxic byproduct of alcohol comes from liver metabolism. The other 80% comes from your gut bacteria. To fix the that, there's a genetically engineered probiotic called zbiotic. And you take a little shot of that and for 24 hours after you take that, your gut bacteria won't make those toxins from alcohol. So if you're gonna drink number one, it's not a great idea, but drink the hard stuff. Take zebiotic, take glutathione and take some extra electrolytes and you'll be fine.
Jack
You do that after you drink, you.
Dave Asprey
Do the zebiotics ahead of time. Time you do the glutathione before, during and or after. And the electrolytes should be before, during and after.
Graham
And how much of this is in your control versus genetics? Because some people just seem to have zero effect on alcohol. They, they, they could just drink whatever they want to and they are fine the next day.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, they call them alcoholics. So with those people, I mean there are people like that, like they can't function without, you know, a few, oh.
Graham
No, I'm not saying can't function without, but like if I have more than two drinks, yeah, I feel it the next day I am tired, I'm leth, I, I lose my motivation. It's not worth it. But other people could have 10 drinks.
Dave Asprey
When you were 26, could you do that?
Graham
Not really. It really started affecting me early, like way earlier than anyone else.
Jack
I still feel fine. Like I maybe get hungover one out of every ten times I drink.
Dave Asprey
Most people until their mid-20s handle alcohol, really? Well, it's still ruining your brain, and there's plenty of studies about, about that, but you don't feel it yet because you have just a lot of resilience. So there is a genetic difference. And there's also just a how good is your body at clearing toxins? And some of that's genetic, some of that is what else is in there. So let's say you stopped drinking tap water and you rehydrated your body so that your cells were better. Like, if you came into upgrade labs, we'd look at your cell hydration and be like, ugh. And we, we'd show you what was going on and make it a. A performance enhancement goal for you. So let's say you start doing your electroly in water three times a day. You might be much more resilient to alcohol. So there's a lot of environmental variables, but you might be Asian. You're not going to tolerate it because there's an Asian gene that makes you not do it. You might have mthfr, which I do, or some other things that make it harder to process toxins. You could have a leaky gut. So the more problems you have, the worse alcohol is for you. But if you have no problems, you drink alcohol, it's still causing damage that we can prove and increasing your risk of cancer. So I would say instead of alcohol, you should do what we do in Austin and, like, eat half a gram of mushrooms at a party. It's probably good for your brain. It's certainly better than alcohol for your brain and has much less of a downside.
Graham
How bad are fried foods for your brain?
Dave Asprey
Depends what you fry them in. If they're fried in canola, soybean, and corn and vegetable oils, they are so bad for your brain. I would actually smoke a cigarette before I'd eat a plate of french fries because the cigarette, even though it's burning stuff and is bad for your lungs, that only creates about eight hours of inflammation. And you're gonna get two days of inflammation from the french fries. I just don't eat fried stuff unless I fry it in my own oil.
Graham
But why are so many people using those sort of oils then?
Dave Asprey
Because they're cheap. Right. Back in about. Was it the early 90s, there's a big campaign from the canola oil and soybean oil companies like Crisco, and they're like, let's compete with tropical hard fats. Everyone used tallow because it was a very stable oil. And tallow is really good for. Gets rid of fatty liver. So all the french fries were made with that and people were fine and they switched to these crappy oils and the obesity rates just been going up ever since. So they do it because it's cheap. I invested in a company called Zero Acre Farms about five years ago that's doing a fermentation based oil that's entirely heat stable, that costs less than, costs less than soybean and canola oil. And assuming that their plan works, we should be able to free up millions of acres of prairie land in the US and return it back into just being nature instead of being row after row of corn with dead soil. So we have a big challenge ahead of us to fix our food supply. And one of them is we need a source of oil that doesn't go rancid when you cook it. And that means it needs to be saturated or at least monounsaturated. And we can do it with tech. We just have to have the motivation, which means we talk about the problem, what the big food industry does. They just try to say there's no problem, despite all the evidence. And thank God there's enough other people sharing this Vani Hari food. Babe's a good friend. RFK is out there doing this. Cali means Jason Karp. These are all friends and we're out there changing the food supply right now. They just pulled all these petroleum dyes that had no business in food. They just announced they're going to fix that. So I'm a part of that small group of people who's just pushing and pushing and pushing on how do we fix this and that oil has to change.
Graham
Yeah, I saw that bill that they're trying to ban. Food dyes?
Dave Asprey
No, just petroleum based food dyes and some other toxic ones.
Jack
What is that?
Dave Asprey
Nicotine?
Jack
So what is the. I, you know, it's so funny. I see a lot of people like Alex Horozi. Yeah, he likes chewing nicotine gum because he says it, it helps him. I focus. Like it's so funny because growing up, everybody learns that nicotine is like, well, maybe not nicotine in a vacuum, but like, you know. Yeah, we all assume that nicotine is.
Graham
Just really, really, really bad.
Jack
So what do you have to say to like that?
Dave Asprey
Ten years ago, I found a guy named Dr. Nicotine. At least that's what I call him. His name's Andrew. He's from Vanderbilt University. He published the first study in 1986 showing that pharmaceutical nicotine but not smoking reverses Alzheimer's disease. And he's come out with like a dozen papers since then. And I've been sharing on the podcast. It's in my brain book. It's in my longevity book book. Nicotine is neuroprotective. Nicotine mimics exercise in the body by enhancing PGC1 alpha. Nicotine was protective against Covid for a very specific reason. Nicotine helps with pericarditis. Nicotine reduces your risk or treats Parkinson's and Ms. In addition to Alzheimer's. It's a mitochondrial stimulant. And if I was going to get another tattoo, if this one's caffeine, this one would be nicotine. I don't smoke. Tobacco's not good for, for you. Low dose pharmaceutical nicotine is an amazingly effective longevity molecule and it's a major nootropic.
Graham
Are there any downsides?
Jack
Yeah. And do you feel like addicted to it? Like if you don't chew nicotine gum for like six hours, you're like, ah, you know, I kind of need to get my nicotine gum out.
Graham
Like the scratch.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, you got scratching.
Jack
Yeah, neck scratch.
Dave Asprey
So cigarettes are terribly addicted addictive and that's because they add a bunch of different compounds that increase addiction dramatically. Nicotine itself in multiple studies has a three day physiological washout period, same as caffeine. So you will feel physiological brain fog and nastiness. If you're used to taking nicotine and you just stop cold turkey, if you want to stop, you just taper down. And I've done this, I don't know, five or six times. I go off it for a couple months. My brain works so much better with nicotine. I love this, this stuff and I consider it just part of my performance enhancement stack.
Jack
So I don't do nicotine. I've never really tried nicotine.
Graham
No.
Jack
There was one time where, where I was like I was at a party and someone had this thing called snus.
Dave Asprey
Oh yeah.
Jack
And they offered me some of that and I tried it and it was just way like, like it. I took it out after 45 seconds because it felt like it was burning a hole in my lip. And then I felt nauseous, like I felt like I was going to get sick. And then I kind of started getting.
Dave Asprey
Nervous and it was just a horrible, horrible experience. That's hilarious.
Jack
And so like that's coming from someone. I've never tried a Zen, never had a cigarette. Like I've tried a couple cigars and stuff, but it was way too much. And every experience that I've had really with nicotine, like, it's not Been pleasant one.
Dave Asprey
You may be someone who just doesn't benefit from it. There are a few people like that. It's also dose dependent. And snus is just. That's just a power couch. It's just the Swedish or Norwegian word for it.
Jack
And I got it from a Swedish person.
Dave Asprey
There you go. I was married to a Swede for a long time. So what's going on with that stuff is you were probably getting 6 or 8 milligrams, which is a big dose for a first timer. And what I'm using right now is a 3 milligram and I take half of it. So I'm getting 1 1/2 milligrams of nicotine. A cigarette has up to 20 milligrams, so this is low dose. And if I quit taking it, I would feel tired for a few days and my brain likes it. It literally protects your neurons.
Jack
What do you think about taking small doses of Adderall?
Dave Asprey
That's really not good for you. Microdosing Adderall is just going to mess with your neurotransmitters. It's just not a good beneficial drug. You're much better off to use Modafinil.
Graham
Where do you buy it?
Dave Asprey
Modafinil, it's a prescription drug. So you go to the doctor and say, I have shift worker sleep disorder because I have to stay up all night for my podcast and can you please write and a good doctor will do it. If not, you just buy it from India. Like everything is that safe.
Jack
Don't buy it from India.
Dave Asprey
Like go to India. No, no. You can buy any pharmaceutical you want online from India. Well, India or Canada or somewhere. There's multiple sites.
Jack
How do you like? Doesn't it get, you know, don't they stop it at the border?
Dave Asprey
And the law in the US says really clearly you can import a 90 day supply of any medication that's not illegal for personal use from anywhere on the planet.
Jack
So it's not illegal.
Graham
I think it's more of a quality issue. I looked at this when I was getting finasteride and I looked at how much it costs from India. It was like a fraction of what they're selling it for here. And I never wanted to do that just because I'm like, well, I'd rather pay more and at least know I'm getting the actual thing. And not like, because I'd have no idea.
Jack
You could have got some like thick Indian hair.
Dave Asprey
That would have been nice. Maybe that wasn't a good thing.
Graham
That would have been a good thing.
Dave Asprey
Man, I gotta warn you about finesse Asteroid. Do you know about the side effects there?
Graham
I've seen some of the side effects, but I've not experienced a single thing.
Dave Asprey
So I'm glad you're not experiencing them. A meaningful percentage, maybe as high as 5% of people who go on that stuff get chemically castrated. Like, their sex hormones just go away, and it doesn't come back when you quit taking it.
Graham
So, yeah, see, I. I went down that rabbit hole.
Dave Asprey
Yeah, I tried it, and you're fine. Zero difference. So I. I would just say topical minoxidil and caffeine is a better choice. And there's a new thing called One Skin that has a new peptide. They just launched it. Like, I interviewed them about it two weeks ago. 40% more hair and 40% thicker hair in six months from their peptide that you just put on topically. So I would just be careful. When I. Years ago, I tried a finasteride derivative and I used it just topically on my hair for. For two weeks total. Ed. After two weeks, I was like, what? I didn't know what it was. I'm like, what is going on here? And so I stopped it and took about six months to come back. It was. It was scary. I was like, is this ever gonna come back? So just for anyone listening, if you try finasteride and you have any changes in erections, you should stop that right away because you just don't wanna be one of those 5%. There's whole Reddit forums full of people who are damaged by that. So it's risky, but you're okay.
Graham
I. I went through the same thing, the same Reddit stuff, and then I talked to so many people who said they're on it, and not a single person knew anyone that had a side effect.
Dave Asprey
Y.
Graham
And it's just these online stories.
Dave Asprey
Oh, it's hap. It does happen. It's actually documented in clinical studies. Like, I know doctors who treated people like that, and I had that effect happen. It's real. And the actual incidents, it's hard to know the reporting. So up to 5% seems real. So if you know. If you know a hundred people on it, do you think you even know that many people on it?
Graham
I know probably 20.
Dave Asprey
Right. So maybe one person. Right. Maybe that's me. Right? Could be that one. Yeah, I'm just. I'm just saying, like, that's a hellish side effect. So for anyone who's listening, you should probably start with Medox, with Minoxidil and caffeine in adenosine. There's a bunch of stuff or one skin you put on your head and then if it's still not working, add, add that new finasteride and then see if you have any changes.
Graham
It's called one skin.
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
Graham
And do you just buy that over the counter or is it like an India sort of.
Dave Asprey
No, they mail it to you. It's not even prescription. But the, the research is incredible.
Graham
And that's safe?
Dave Asprey
Oh, it's totally safe. It's a peptide. Like it's a signaling molecule. Very safe.
Graham
So why aren't more people using it?
Dave Asprey
Because it just got launched two weeks ago.
Graham
So then I feel like I'm being a guinea pig for this thing that just got launched.
Dave Asprey
No, it's been, it's been in testing for two years. And the peptide they're using has been used topically for about five years, years now. And I've interviewed their PhD biochemist a couple times on my show over the years. And what, what's happening is there's all these breakthrough innovations in longevity and you just don't hear about them. But they're happening. It's all happening at the same time. So for that peptide to be discovered, they used AI and they used just their background in biochemistry. They came out with 600 candidate molecules for stimulating collagen synthesis. Synthesis. They tested them on gene cell chips, like where they have actually skin cells growing on chips to see what happens when you do this. And they found this one peptide that they predicted would work, was the top performer of 600. Then they ran clinical trials for a couple years. Then they launched like facial stuff in body lotion. And then they ran clinical trials for two years on hair. So the best longevity companies are treating this almost like a pharmaceutical dev process. But they're not the only one. There's like dozens of companies looking at doing this internally, doing this all whatever. That's why this is the renaissance for longevity, for cognitive enhancement, for biohacking. Right. And that's just one little example. And if I can get a peptide with 40% more hair and 40% more thickness, or a drug that might chemically castrate me, well, the drug industry is going to be pissed. I don't want their drug. Right. But I'd rather do a peptide. And so this innovation is just being unlocked. And then when it comes to the drugs, why do you have to go to a doctor to get a permission to slip for something that you already want or that you already take and you pay the doctor and you're inconvenienced and the doctor's inconvenienced because it's a waste of their time too. But at least they get paid by the insurance company. Then you go to the pharmacist and beg for permission for the pharmacist to agree with whatever the doctor said to give you a little bottle of that you could have just had sent to your house. So right now we're just breaking the chains of medical mafia behavior because you have a right to buy any drug you want because your biology is yours and you don't need your daddy or your mommy to tell you what you're allowed to take. Like, that's a absurd.
Jack
How important is strength training or cardio for longevity?
Dave Asprey
Strength training is really important for longevity. VO2 max is important for longevity. But VO2 max doesn't mean you need to do cardio. And that's how right now at the Home Depot, you'll find storage solutions made to fit your needs. Grab an HDX tough tote to protect your tools, or keep your sports equipment contained with reinforced snap fit lids. Or stack up and make better use of your space with bins and totes built to last. Whatever your story, we've got the gear to keep it organized and protected at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. It's a little bit weird. What I do for cardio is based on AI. It takes 15 minutes a week and that's three five minute sessions. And in them you never sweat. It's not hard. That gives you six times better results than an hour a day of cardio. So cardio respiratory fitness is important, but not as important as muscle strength and then muscle mass. Right. And there are some people out there who are saying, oh, VO2 max. You have to do zone two training for six hours a week. Those are actually the same people take statins still for longevity, which is is nuts. So what you'll find is that raising VO2 max is simple if you know the algorithms and we use AI for that and strength training once or twice a week, put on some muscle mass, be strong and those are really important. But going to the gym for an hour a day every day is probably not even good for you. Most people over train and go to the gym every day. I see it over and over. This guy's like, I've been going for 20 years and I've had both shoulders replaced and I have a big pot belly. I'm like, yeah, that's a cortisol belly.
Jack
I think that's a very small percentage of People that, that go to the gym that often that like that actually, you know, break down their muscles and.
Dave Asprey
Oh, it's not because very few people go to the gym that often. The ones who do, that's what happens. Right. That happened to me too. I went 18 months, six days a week. At the end of it, I'm still fat. Right. And so over training is a major thing. So people either under train or they overtrain. And one of my, my goals here is to tell people, here's the minimum effective training that you can do in an hour or two a week. That hits all of the things for longevity, including training your brain, training your strength, training your cardio in very small amounts of time. And it's all powered by AI. That's what upgrade labs does. Because I don't want to spend my time in the gym. I got shit to do, but I will if necessary.
Graham
What about doing a dopamine detox?
Dave Asprey
Oh, those are fun.
Graham
Is there actually a benefit to doing this?
Dave Asprey
Yeah, the guy who invented that is a friend Cam, who runs Maximus, one of the testosterone enhancement companies. And manipulating dopamine is one of the things in heavily meditated that's particularly important. You could do you no caffeine, no nicotine, no spicy or delicious foods and no stimulation for a week. You might as well go fast in a cave if you're going to do that. And there's benefits to it. But there's another hack that's new to the world of biohacking that I'm introducing and heavily meditated. And it's called bicep. And it's not like this kind of bicep on your arm. Brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And this might be better than a dopamine fast monks used to whip themselves. Your self flagellation of your. Heard of this? Yogis lay on beds of nails. And I used to think, well, the monks think they're sinners, they're punishing themselves. The yogis are laying on beds of nails to prove they're good yogis. That's not why they do this at all. It's because brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain for one to three minutes. If you do that without harming your body, it resets your dopamine sensitivity by about 250%. It means it takes less dopamine to motivate you for the rest of the day. So the monk was self flagellating because it made it easier to stay in monk mode. And the yogi did it because he was a better yogi, because it took less Dopamine to motivate him. And biohackers. We take a cold shower, get in ice water or Texans, which I also am. You eat some spicy peppers. Humans have been doing this forever and there's a rich history in all the different lineages I've studied. So doing something that's painful for two or three minutes, it works.
Graham
So is your recommendation recommendation the cold plunge of like something painful or should you like actually just be like just whipping yourself?
Dave Asprey
I like to hire people to whip me because it really just is more fun that way.
Graham
Do you. Are they a type one or two person?
Dave Asprey
You definitely want a win win scenario there. So you type one. I just ask my girlfriend. Yeah, yeah. If you have a friend, you can help. No. Um, there's other benefits from cold plunges. There's metabolic benefits and there's a separate dopamine benefit that no one's talked about in cold plunges. So if you're like, I'm not motivated today, do something that hurts. Right? Intentionally hurts. And it's funny, cold plunge is a great way to do it. One tribe even uses eye drops that are super painful and you put em in like, ah, really hurts. And then you get really clear vision from it. But the exposure to pain is what caused the neurochemistry to change. So eat a habanero, like do whatever's gonna work for you.
Graham
Would you ever wanna freeze yourself if they had the ability and then come back 500 years from now?
Dave Asprey
You know, I saw the movie Idiocracy. Have you seen that? No, I have. God, you have to see this. It's the best documentary ever. It's about a guy who does that accidentally and he's the dumbest guy on earth, but when he comes back 100 years later, he's the smartest guy on earth. And it's just incredibly, incredibly predictive. But no, I don't want to freeze myself. I have a lot of friends who do. And I have no fear of death. I understand what happens when you die. I know that people come back. I didn't believe in afterlives or reincarnation until I started doing the work. And even if I'm wrong about it, choosing to believe in reincarnation is the only rational thing to do.
Graham
All right, so what happens when you die?
Dave Asprey
Well, let me finish the point about why you should choose it. Then I'll tell you what the reason you want to choose it. If you're right, you're going to live a good life, but you'll be less afraid of dying if you're wrong. You'll be less afraid of dying and you'll live a better life with less fear. So it doesn't matter whether reincarnation is real or not, just choose to believe it because it turns down the amount of energy your body puts into fear of stupid shit. You're going to die because you're alive. Like being born is a life threatening condition, period. The planet will come to an end, the universe will come to an end, we will all die. And losing your shit about that is dumb. So let's just tell ourselves a story that reincarnation is real. But is it real? I think so. I've had plenty of esoteric, mystical experiences and I've worked with hundreds of people who have them. When they just turn off fear, like, oh my God, like, what's going on? So what happens when, when you die, your energy continues. And if you want like a really good scientific based perspective on that, read a book on biocentrism. Have you heard of this? Biocentrism is something that comes out of the field of quantum physics. Mark Gober writes some really good books about it, Robert Lanza does. But you can look at quantum physics and prove that time is a fact fantasy that we make up in our meat bodies, right? And the implications of this, which is provable with hard science, is that death is also just a change of state, but it isn't the end. So your energy has to go somewhere. And the perspective that we have is you go to what in Buddhism we call Bardo called the afterlife, and you kind of review what you did and then you come back if you're dumb enough to come back. And that's my perspective now. I've trained in shamanism. I've studied with gurus from many different lineages and all that sort of stuff. There's some disagreement about small details there, but that's what most of it is. And the Christians will say, you know, you go to heaven or hell or things like that. Those are, those are reflections of a similar system. I'll put it that way. You know, in the, in the Buddhist teachings they say, oh yeah, there's, you know, 74 kinds of hell actually, because 72, but they're different hells, right? So you can get stuck when you die, but when things work, you don't get stuck. When, when you get stuck, you get stuck. So there's all kinds of, of stuff that isn't readily apparent to most people. But there are some percentage of people who regularly see things like that and they agree. So I Don't believe any one person. But when you have someone who says, you know, let's take a hundred people, let's teach them how to leave their body at will, Will. Let's not have them talk to each other. Let's have them all go out and explore the world they see in these altered states and come back and compare notes if they all see the same thing. I think the word for that is science. And there's multiple people who've done that kind of experiment all over the world and they come up with the same results. So I'm just going to go with what the data shows.
Graham
What's a question that you wished more people would ask you?
Dave Asprey
Not a lot of people ask about why I do what I do. I think they think that it's because of money or because of some kind of like an ego thing. And I'm not motivated by, like, I want to feed a billion people or whatever. I started my blog and started sharing all this information. I just wanted five people not to go through all the suffering I went through. And that's been my motivation. I didn't make a list. I didn't do any of the stuff you were supposed to do. I'm like, I'm just going to share this stuff because people need to. To know. And it was like two decades of accumulating all this knowledge, both the spiritual stuff and heavily meditated, as well as all the physiological longevity stuff. And that's still what motivates me today. I mean, I can probably stop it. I'm like, so many people are just walking around feeling like. And treating each other like. Because they don't know how good they could feel. Right? And sometimes it's a harder problem, sometimes it's a softer problem. It's just not that hard anymore. So I'm motivated because I think we need an upgrade as a species and that it's not that hard to do it. So I just keep doing it because I think it matters, but it isn't because I'm seeking recognition. I tried the fame thing in my early 20s and it doesn't do anything. It's actually inconvenient. So, yeah, the motivation thing is really interesting. I have suffered greatly and I would prefer other people not go through all the crap I went through because I is. It's. It's not fun and it's totally avoidable. So that, that's why I do what I do.
Jack
So why do you think a lot of the claims that you make are so controversial?
Dave Asprey
Everyone has a lens on reality. That is functional for them. And we do that to make ourselves feel safe. So anytime someone penetrates your lens on reality, it creates cognitive dissonance, which makes you feel unsafe and doesn't make you think you're unsafe, it makes your body feel unsafe. Like, oh, that, that shift in my worldview, the number of people who got outra when I told them to put butter in coffee is insane. Okay, butter is a safe food. But people literally thought they were like putting it in the blender. Like, oh my God, can I really do that? The first time I'm walking on. It's like, what? We've been programmed. So the other thing is people get really mad when I say I'm gonna do something hasn't been done before. You know who else really pissed people off? The Wright brothers. We're gonna fly. And then, in fact, I have a video I made where you have all these people saying it's never gonna happen. Then they do it. In fact, every great leap in human capability starts with the people who are from the old generation saying it can't be done. I have the audio of the chairman of the FCC saying that satellites will never be used for communication. We have Einstein saying that the power of the atom will never be harnessed to make electricity, Right? So what happens is humans are usually backwards looking and it's always been that way. But we are entering a world where it's not just exponential, it's double exponential. So the future looks very different than the past. And people get mad because there are rules that they've been following their whole life. And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. And how dare this computer hacker come in and say something different. And I'm like, how dare you not be curious? Because the way science works is if you have one data point that disproves your theory, the theory is still useful. It's just not accurate. But what's happening in the world now is you have this belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's anti science. Science says a claim requires the same amount of evidence, no matter if it's extraordinary or not. If you think it's extraordinary, maybe it's because you're in an idiot, right? No claim is extraordinary. The data is the data. So when I come up there and I say I have data, if you blend butter in your coffee, it really does something for you. I was right. It works. About seven years later, I funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollock for 50 grand. And he's been studying basic water chemistry inside cells. And he said, huh? We just determined that butter oil and MCT oil create the largest amount of structured water, water called exclusion zone water in cells. Now, there's a whole bunch of nonsense structured water, stuff that's out there. This is stuff you can see on a microscope. For your cells to function, to make ATP, they need to change the viscosity of water a little bit. It turns out the Tibetans who came up with this idea, they would churn butter and tea in a butter churn for a while before they would drink it. And I'm like, why would they do that? Well, it doesn't work if you don't blend it. So could I make the claim based on an observation and a testable observation without knowing why it works? Yes, I could. Why did it make people mad? I don't know, but I think it's because they felt unsafe because the world might have been different than the safe little story they had. The reality is our bodies cannot sense 99.9999% of the actual reality happening out there. You gotta be comfortable with that.
Jack
So if you're to explain in 30 seconds, someone with an unlimited budget, that feels fine, that wants to just go out and get every single piece of data that they can possibly want to improve their health, what would, what should they do?
Dave Asprey
Well, you're going to spend about 10,000, maybe even $50,000 on lab tests just to get all the data right. You'd want to do a whole body MRI for sure. You want to do a full genetic, a full human genome, not just the 23andMe stuff, stuff. And then you want to get your cardiorespiratory fitness and things like that done. And once you have that stuff, you want to get a QEEG, which is part of what we do at 40 years of Zen, to what's going on inside your brain. And the combination of those things are going to give us a really good picture of your toxin load, your mitochondrial function, your hormone levels, your inflammatory molecule levels, whether you have an aneurysm or any other thing going on in your body that you don't know about. Early stage cancer. And based on that, what are your goals? And once we have the data, we're going to sit down and say, okay, is your goal, you want a brain that's way better, right? Do you want more stress management, more capacity, more resilience? Do you want to live longer? Do you want to increase your bone density? Whatever it is, there's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous. What's possible. I had surgery, surgery on my foot for an old yoga injury. And they had to cut through the bone on the foot, all the way through it. And so I was awake for it because it was interesting and it was numb anyway. And you hear the bone saw. It's like. And the doctor looks and he goes, I'm having a hard time cutting through his bone. Like, is this guy even human? And I did a podcast with him about it. And afterwards, he's like, dave, what. What is up with your bone density? I've never seen this. He said, I operate on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter, and I can't even get through your bones with my saw. Well, that's biohacking. Bone density is one of the biggest indicators of a healthy metabolism, and they're gonna live a long time. And it comes from the right nutrient intake, avoiding toxins and then exposing the body to things that make it harder and stronger. So if you have a big budget, you can totally add 20, 30 years to your lifespan, and they'll be really good years. And you see these cowardly people in the field of longevity saying, oh, it's not about extending human life. It's just about health span. You're going to die at 86, the same way you were, but at least you'll be healthy until you die. And I'm like, why? How dare you call yourself a longevity doctor and say you can't extend human life. The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life both. And people say, you can only extend the quality of your life and you're going to die at the same age as everybody, everyone else. Why? They never have an answer. So let's set the goals, right? Double lifespan and feel way better when you're 150 than you do when you're 50. Why not? We have the technology, we have the tools. It's possible. And there are people doing it, including me. I love it.
Graham
Thank you.
Dave Asprey
Cool.
Jack
Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dave Asprey
Thanks for the long interview. That was fun.
Graham
Yeah, absolutely. We'll link to your information down below.
Dave Asprey
In the description and check out Heavily meditated. This is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It is just coming out now, and people spend $20,000 to five days with me to learn this stuff, and I put it in the book.
Jack
Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you to everyone for watching this show. It means so, so much.
Dave Asprey
Until next time.
Jack
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Dave Asprey
For those seeking to combine traditional markets.
Jack
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Podcast Summary: "THIS Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" The #1 Diet That Will Kill You | Dave Asprey
The Iced Coffee Hour hosted by Graham Stephan and Jack Selby delves deep into the multifaceted journey of Dave Asprey, a renowned biohacker and longevity expert. In this episode, Dave shares his tumultuous experiences in the business world, his innovative approaches to team building, and his extensive exploration into biohacking for enhanced longevity and cognitive performance.
Dave Asprey opens the conversation by recounting a challenging period in his career. At the age of 25, grappling with severe health issues that standard medical professionals couldn't diagnose, Dave took unconventional measures to heal his body. This journey led him to invest heavily in his well-being, ultimately transforming his health and paving the way for his future endeavors.
A pivotal moment came when he was fired from his multimillion-dollar butter coffee company. "Some of that's in my new book, whatever I'm allowed to talk about... So we were able to settle that legally" (02:02).
Post-exit, Dave reflects on the importance of discerning team members to foster a healthy company culture. He introduces a categorization system inspired by Lao Tzu and teachings from a group of grandmasters:
Category 1: Always win-win, making 5% of people who are exceptionally cooperative.
Category 2: Aim for win-win but occasionally make mistakes, promptly apologizing and rectifying them.
Category 3: Unaware win-lose individuals who deflect blame, often undetectable without thorough reference checks.
Category 4: Sociopaths who knowingly operate on a win-lose basis.
Dave emphasizes the significance of hiring primarily Category 1 and 2 individuals to maintain a harmonious and productive work environment. "If you're the CEO, it's on you... And I have a very clean culture in my company" (04:14).
Transitioning into cognitive enhancement, Dave discusses the role of neurofeedback in optimizing brain function. He explains how neurofeedback can reorganize brainwave patterns to increase mental clarity and performance:
"Neurofeedback in your head... if it's the right protocols, like the stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10. It's the most effective thing I've ever done" (76:26).
Dave shares his personal success with neurofeedback, highlighting its impact on his cognitive abilities and overall mental health.
A significant portion of the discussion centers on longevity and the various biohacks Dave employs to extend his lifespan and enhance quality of life:
Stem Cells: Dave advocates for early stem cell banking, emphasizing its benefits for future regenerative therapies. "I have 2 billion of my marrow cells banked... It's going to run about 50 grand for everything" (72:18).
Dietary Adjustments: He critiques conventional diets high in plant toxins like oxalates, recommending a predominantly animal-based diet supplemented with specific fruits and herbs. "Most people are eating so many stupid plants... So don't eat so many stupid plants" (93:14).
Supplements and Nootropics: Dave underscores the importance of targeted supplements, such as vitamin D, minerals, and cognitive enhancers like Modafinil, which he swears by for increasing IQ and overall brain performance.
"When you take it, if you're paying attention, Modafinil will slightly change the saturation of color... it increases reaction time" (63:05).
Dave delves into the detrimental effects of high-oxalate foods, linking them to various health issues:
Problematic Foods: Beets, spinach, most nuts, kale, raspberries, sweet potatoes, and white potatoes are highlighted as high in oxalates, leading to kidney and bladder issues.
Diet Recommendations: He recommends a carnivore diet for short periods to reset the body's toxin levels, followed by the selective reintroduction of low-oxalate plant foods.
"If you were to go carnivore for two to four weeks... that's a pretty clear signal that some of those plants are not good for you" (95:10).
Sleep emerges as a critical factor in Dave's biohacking regimen. He offers actionable advice for achieving optimal sleep quality:
Light Management: "Have dinner before the sun goes down... have darkness after the sun goes down" (86:38).
Environmental Controls: Utilizing red light glasses and maintaining a cool bedroom temperature to enhance sleep quality.
Breathing Techniques: Deep, controlled breathing exercises to increase heart rate variability and promote restful sleep.
"The short answer to that is free. It's just go to sleepwithdave.com and everything I know about sleep is there" (86:07).
Dave introduces his "Reset Process," a method to reprogram the body's emotional responses:
Fear, Food, Fertility: He explains how these primal responses dictate much of human behavior before conscious thought takes over.
Techniques: Through practices like meditation, neurofeedback, and exposure to controlled stressors, individuals can reset their emotional responses, leading to enhanced resilience and mental clarity.
"If you can make yourself do it for 20 days... all of a sudden you can do it and it doubles working memory in your brain" (44:13).
In the realm of cognitive enhancement, Dave emphasizes the importance of personalized approaches:
Upgrade Labs: His company offers comprehensive testing and personalized biohacking strategies based on extensive data analysis.
Prioritizing Goals: By identifying individual health and performance goals, Dave tailors biohacks to maximize effectiveness and efficiency.
"The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life both... it's possible" (121:44).
Dave Asprey on Team Dynamics:
"There were times I could have chosen different investors... and I have a very clean culture in my company." (04:14)
On Neurofeedback:
"Neurofeedback in your head... if it's the right protocols, like the stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10." (76:26)
Regarding Longevity:
"We have AI and we have PubMed, which is all of the research we've ever done on medical stuff. And we have all these tools available... it's ridiculous what's possible." (02:51)
On Diet Choices:
"Most people are eating so many stupid plants... So don't eat so many stupid plants." (93:14)
Sleep Optimization Advice:
"Have dinner before the sun goes down... have darkness after the sun goes down." (86:38)
Dave Asprey's journey exemplifies the intersection of personal adversity and innovative health solutions. His experience with severe, undiagnosed health issues led him to pioneer biohacking techniques that not only restored his health but also reshaped his entrepreneurial endeavors. A recurring theme throughout the episode is the importance of personalized health strategies—tailoring diet, supplements, and biohacks to individual needs to optimize longevity and cognitive performance.
Dave's emphasis on understanding and reprogramming the body's primal responses to fear, food, and fertility underscores a holistic approach to health. By addressing these foundational aspects, individuals can achieve heightened mental clarity, resilience, and overall well-being.
Moreover, his insights into team dynamics highlight the critical role of selecting the right people to foster a productive and harmonious work environment. Balancing personal growth with effective team management emerges as a cornerstone for sustained success.
In essence, this episode serves as a comprehensive guide for those interested in biohacking, offering actionable strategies backed by Dave's extensive personal and professional experiences.