The 5 Biohacks Anyone Can Implement To Live Longer w/ Dave Asprey | EP #109

27:04I'm coming through soon. I promise myself that as a gift. Any time, Peter, have you talked in the Vienn? He just went through a general public about it. Yeah, you know, I have. And let's dive into Neutropics. So define Neutropics and what are you doing? I want me some. All right. Neutropics are compounds that enhance cognitive function. And people say, well, hold on, is that a drug or is that a nutrient? It doesn't really matter. If it makes your brain work better, it's a new tropic. So there are new tropic drugs and there are plant compounds. The two drugs that are probably most impactful, one of them is Modaphanil.

27:44This is a, they have to create a new category of drug. It's called a rousal promoting because it's not as stimulant. And it affects dopamine and something called orexin in the brain. It has a very good safety profile, safer than Advil, but about 5 out of a million people can have a genetic reaction to it. Same exact reaction that Advil can cause. It's actually a life -threatening skin reaction, but it's exceptionally rare. What is it? And full disclosure, I use Medofinil and have been for some time. And I have spoken to every neurologist that I ever speak to you. I asked the question, how do you feel about Mendoffinl?

28:28What's the downside? Is there any addictive elements? Is there any, you know, elements that are suppressed about the part of mental cognitive function? And so far, I've not received any warnings that concern me at all. The only one that might matter is it does increase histamine in the brain. Histamine is a neurotransmitter. It's not all bad. And there are some people who get hides from it, so if you have weird allergic responses when you take it, maybe no. But in terms of long -term harm, I've been on this since about 2001. And I went to Daniel Amon's clinic, and today I'm so grateful to be on the Amon Clinic and an export of directors that scanned change my brain because it documented a hardware problem.

29:13One thing that Modaphneau does, it increases blood flow in the brain and this is one of the new tropic effects that you wanna look for. How do I get blood up there? And I had brain damage from toxic mold exposure and that meant low blood flow. So when I'm a Modaphneau, that's why I graduated from Wharton Business School because I was on Modaphneau and my brain wasn't working very well at the time, it's time to fix it. The other pharmaceutical that is worth noticing, there's a class of compounds called the RASATAM, RACETAM, and Perasatam is the most famous. This was made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.

29:48It still is. And it wasn't even in the PDR, the physician's desk reference, and the US for many, many years probably still isn't. It's almost like it doesn't exist here, even though it's sold by Big Pharma in Europe. And there's an analog that's fancied by a book called Anoracetam, A -N -I -R -A -C -E -T -A -M. I have been on Anoracetam most days for 25 years. There's two reasons. One is it's neuroprotective of the brain. Two, it increases memory I -O. Peter, you and I are both engineers. You're a doctor, I'm not. But input, output, bandwidth is one of the primary performance enhancers of computing systems.

30:26I'm a network engineer by training in Silicon Valley. So, more IO, maybe I remember stuff, because I'm doping for my brain. Yes, so can you, and your brain will probably last long if you do this. So, Anorasatama, but Afinol are the two big ones. And then, from like a other cognitive enhancing function, my big book on brain function, I hit the New York Times list, sandwiched between homoduced and sapiens, which is like a huge corner ever. It's called head strong. The two big theories in that are number one, increase mitochondrial function in the brain via any means necessary. I go through those.

31:06The second one is increase BDNF and NGF. BDNF is brain -derived, neutropic factor. This is a compound that causes nerves to grow. Nerve growth factor does the same thing. It turns out there are some supplements and some practices that will cause this to happen. So if you have the neuroplasticity of a young person because your brain can change itself And you have enough energy to do it. You'll have a Neutropic effect So I even interviewed Eric Kendall who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for proving neuroplasticity was real and If I talk about an unusual guy at 94 years old still has a lab off Central Park and just you know cranking away on new ideas to this day because he gets it so So how do you raise BDNF?

31:52Well, exercise, intermittent fasting, some of the core biohacks I've been writing about for a long time and so of you. But there are also some plant compounds that raise this and some interesting pharmaceuticals. The number one plant compound is Lyons main mushroom. Problem is, it doesn't work. I got so excited when I read the studies, I took Lyons main every kind for three years and gave up on it back when I started bullet proof before I left the company. And I found out the reason is that for this to work, you have to have fruiting bodies and it has to be extracted with alcohol and hot water.

32:25So a high quality one will work, but the stuff they put in coffee doesn't do anything. And you'll know it's working because if you take Lyons main or anything that raises BDNF, you have vivid dreams. It's a very good sign that it's working. I can imagine that. Sure. Yeah. Your mental growth is going to excite functionality while you're sleeping. I actually just had a couple of PhDs in the studio about 15 minutes ago here working with a supplement called Brock Elite and they went through a bunch of research on how it increases BDNF. So this is sulforophane from specific vegetables. And the hack for listeners is if you're not going to use a supplement, if you're eating, say cooked broccoli, you need a bite of radish or a bite of raw broccoli to activate the enzyme that lets the sulforapane out of cooked broccoli.

33:16So, cooked broccoli won't affect brain function. Cooked broccoli with a little bit of raw will. How is that? I mean, I need to go into detail here, but I love broccoli, and I love sulforapane. I mean, my number one food is, if you said, okay, what's the food you would not want to eliminate from your diet right now? It's broccoli. I love broccoli with olive oil and lemon. That's what I will obsess about. But why the raw broccoli requirement? When you cook broccoli, you inactivate the enzyme that releases the sulfuric acid. And it's a present in, and just to just, if you get it a little bit up, it cascades and provides.

33:57Yes, it turns out it's a very active enzyme. So all it takes is one radish or even a slice of radish. So when you were going to the upgrade cafe in Santa Monica, whenever you had cruciferous veggies, there was always a piece of watermelon radish on top. It was. It was absolutely. That was there for a reason. And it's funny, it's so active. If you wanted to be really fancy, you would take one little stalk and just smash it because the more smashed it is, more exposed to air, the more of the enzyme is released. And then you just have one bite of that. And then your broccoli does something extra for you.

34:28And I would put that in the realm of neutropics. And interestingly, almost every psychedelic, I'm working on these for my book that'll come out later sometime in 2025, don't know the title yet. Almost every psychedelic increases BDNF meaningfully. And the one that I'm most intrigued with is ketamine because it's legal and well studied. So I just hired Dr. Mark Bronstein to be the medical director for me at 40 years of zen. So we're using ketamine as an optional add -on on top of intense personal development neurofeedback because every dose of ketamine, even a low dose, not the kind where you're gonna go see aliens.

35:09This is a low, it's called a psycholytic dose. It causes 72 hours of profound brain plasticity, so that if you're gonna be doing some resetting of old patterns, you might as well have a brain that's ready to receive a reset with less work. And so ketamine, DMT, LSD, and psilocybin work, I'm even an investor in Paul Stamins' company where he said, well, what happens if you stack lion's mane and psilocybin and a B vitamin called niacin that causes basal dilation. Well he's showing whole brain nerve regeneration. Right now lion's mane and all the other ones, they only do hippocampal regeneration.

35:45So he's fixing things that are brain injuries and things like that. And if you stack that with hyperbaric and I've got a hard -sided oxy -health chamber, the medical grade one downstairs, that also will regrow things in the brain. So if you stack your hacks in the right way for your goals, there's an argument. But there's two other new tropics that we just have to talk about because of the most common ones out there. And some people are already triggered going, you can't talk about new tropics. That's cheating. 90 % of the population has this one. This is caffeine. Yes. Okay. Caffeine is a well -studied...

36:20I love that you tattooed caffeine on your arm. It's funny, right? Because I talk about the reason I memorized caffeine structure and name is... Yeah, it's important to know what drug you're addicted to when you end up on an alien planet so you can recreate it there. Okay, that is awesome, Peter. I loved you before, but I love you even more now because you're such a nerd. I love this. Like, this one, I need this one. The reason I tattooed it there is way back in 1991 or 1992, I sold a t -shirt with that molecule printed on it. It was the first product ever sold over the internet before the web browser was invented.

36:55Okay. So the first e -commerce on the planet was a caffeine t -shirt. Love it. And I sold it to 16 countries out of my dorm room. So this is like, plus bullet proof is a big company, and now danger coffee is getting big. So it's like caffeine has served me well, and so how can I not have fun with it? If I had a tattoo on the other arm though, it would be nicotine. And this is the controversial one. You wanna talk about a well studied smart drug. You'll type 15 % faster on a metaphneal or nicotine. Almost every great work of literature was written on caffeine and nicotine, And not very often alcohol or THC that they're not good for cognitive enhancements.

37:27I get that. Are you doing nicotine and doffinil at the same time? Yeah, you want to have a great day. So here's the thing about nicotine. Smoking and vaping will shorten your life. They are bad for you. Right? So when I say nicotine, everyone hears tobacco. No, this is pharmaceutical nicotine extracted from tobacco. When cigarette has 20 milligrams, I'm talking one to five milligrams of nicotine delivered either orally or through the skin. How do you deliver your nicotine? I usually use a nicotine spray and you can buy it in Mexico, Canada, all of Europe, all of the Middle East and Australia, but it's not approved in the US.

38:10It's from Nicolette. God knows why. So in the US you can get little sachets, Lucy gum is good, but watch out for artificial Lucy gum. You don't want that. What's it called Lucy gum? Yeah Lucy, chew Lucy dot com or dot co or something like that. And full disclosure, I'm a small investor advisor, but I just wanted a nicotine without neutrosuite in it because neutrosuite is not good for brain function. So why would I want to take a cognitive enhancer that also punched my synapses in the face? That seems rude. I love I love this store. I love this study done years ago in university students, they stayed a whole slew of drugs to determine what increased their test scores.

38:47And there were two particular molecules that increased their test scores. The most. And it was glucose and caffeine. Yeah. Coca -Cola. I actually write about this for college students. I'm like, guys, if you really want to use the test, you need to test yourself ahead of time so you know dosing. But it's probably double espresso with sugar and one to two milligrams of nicotine. And you go into this hyper -focus mode and just you can do anything and everything is easy and it's all right there and Problem is nicotine is addictive and when you're young, I don't think you want to use it regularly At about age 40 I recommend one to three milligrams a day the reason for this is research out of vendor built Dr.

39:29Andrew Newcombe I believe his name I call him Dr. nicotine He's been publishing study after study showing that nicotine stops Alzheimer's disease in Parkinson's. You don't want neurodigineration. So is it possible that we threw the baby out with a bath water and that smoking is bad for you, chewing is bad for your tobacco is bad for you, but a tiny dose of pure nicotine is cognitively enhancing so you feel good now and you don't have an aging brain. I think so. It's part of my recommended stack for people, but it's controversial. I remember reading about Medofinil Provisual, as the other name it goes by.

40:02Yeah. And reading that it was developed for fighter pilots to be sharp during long missions. And if you decide to try it, it is a prescription drug. Typically, those 200 milligram, I usually do 100 milligrams. Yeah. And so you don't want to be drinking alcohol along with that. I know a lot of people who drink alcohol with it, If you did that, you might want to take some glutathione because of liver pathways. It's not particularly hard on the liver, but it could have a longer action in the body. So I don't drink alcohol. It gives you weird dreams. If you're doing that and you don't want to take any of these things later in the day, sleep is important.

40:42Yeah, they used to use amphetamine for the military. And it turns out amphetamine makes you want to kill people, which is bad if you're flying $100 million a jet. So they replaced it with motofinil. and I tried and fed a mean when I was in Wharton, just prescription. And I did focus better, but it hurt my brain. I felt horrible afterwards, even on low doses. And when I switched to my abdominals, I was like, wow, the lights came on. But all Neutropics have this problem. Everyone around you feels slow. And if you have personal development work to do in your angle all the time, you're going to be a bigger jerk if you're already a jerk.

41:26So the worst thing you do is take someone with lots of trauma, lots of triggers, lots of hyperreactivity, give them 100 milligrams of Modaphanil and coffee, then they run around just acting like a jerk. It'll make you more of what you are. So your job, if you do use Neutropics, is to be more self -aware because self -awareness plus a faster brain equals kindness. And a faster brain without self -awareness equals a big asshole. We don't want that. Yeah. Yeah, the other benefit of Medaphine, for me, is the dopamine element. It makes me feel happy and joyful and filled with energy. So anyway, it's something which...

42:01Keep here. Thank you for openly talking about Modaphine and testosterone. Yeah, I'm sure you know controversy about these at all. These are life -enhancing anti -Age. These are powerful drugs that let you show up better in the world. And I've been so open about it and see if you'll get really mad. And like, you're cheating. You're thin because you're on thyroid. I'm like, you're fat because you're not on thyroid. It's okay. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love.

42:31Company's called Fountain Life. And it's company I starred years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day, when you have a pain in your side, You go to the physician and they burn into your room and they say listen I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and And you know it didn't start that morning It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time But because we never look we don't find out so what we built at fountain life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers we have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vascular, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup.

43:28It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AI's and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com -slash -peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships.

44:15If you go to FountainLife .com, Backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to FountainLife .com, Backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. You know, one of the things which I'm excited about in the future, and I'm working on it right now with Fountain Life, is it should be absolutely possible.

44:54You do this because you're so extraordinarily brilliant and constantly consuming data and constantly experimenting, and I just, I know nobody who does it to the level of success and abilities that you do, Dave. you're amazing. I say that with full, with full love. I feel the same. Where I want to go and working on it is can we build an AI system that is able to have your genetics, which play some part, that have your desires? Like, is it longevity, is it is it cognitive clarity, is it weight loss? What is it you desire to achieve? And then how many different meds or supplements you're willing to take per day?

45:45Like I'm probably taking 80, how many are you taking? About 150 pills. Probably 100 substances. All right, about the same. So, you know, a lot of people can't do that. Some people are like, you know, I can't deal with more than, you know, small handful. I've gotten really good at being able to consume lots of pills in a handful. But there should be, so today if you go to your physician and you say these are my goals, here's the last labs I did, maybe they have your genome screen, your whole genome scan, and you ask them recommendations. Every physician you go to will give you a different set of recommendations.

46:25different. Yeah. And based upon what they happen to have read, what they happen to have heard, you know, a whole set of cognitive biases, recency bias and so forth. But there is actually a optimal set of meds and supplements. And so the my moonshot within Fountain Life is I want the AI system that has my all my metabolomics and all of my, you know, biomarkers and all my genomics, I'm able to pick from a list of, you know, maybe they're 20 Mac, you know, objective functions I want and then the number of pills, drugs, whatever I want to take per day and it will spit out for me every single time the exact set that are right for me independent of who my physician is or where I did this in the world.

47:12There is an optimization function that's possible. So we're not there yet. The data is going to get us there. And I think that's that level of large data AI integration is next two to five years. But that will be great. It will be. And when people come into upgrade labs, which is a non medical franchise, where is the medical grade gear, but it's not, we take in their wearable data and we take in all the stuff we can get there and we make similar recommendations. Like, well, what was your goal? Because maybe you should focus on recovery or you should focus on cardio just to expand what you want.

47:55And we look at the supplements they take, and we'll incorporate basic lab value from lab data, right, in order to make recommendations of the right biohacks for it. But end of the day, we should be putting, like you and me and all of us working on this, we should be putting 90 % of doctors out of the business they're in today and into a much better business. I agree. The three -minute visit is so horrifying for doctors and for patients. So all that should be handled. So you go to the doctor when you're actually sick and then they have time to treat you with a real expertise instead of just like going in and arguing about whether you really need a vitamin D or a thyroid test.

48:36You shouldn't have to ask permission for that. It should be just built into your system and it says, hey, you need some thyroid. You don't go talk to your doctor because clearly your labs are off, but you shouldn't have to go ask. Let's talk a little bit more about the psychedelics. We just recently had a little bit of a setback where the FDA did not approve. I don't remember the constitution given the FDA right to tell me what I can do with my own body. Did you see that in there? Did I miss that? I hate this. I hate this part of it. I have a, I get angry that the, There's an extreme case I'm most angry about, which is if God forbid you or loved one is suffering from a fatal disease and there is some chance that this drug under development that hasn't been approved by the FDA could help you.

49:29Being told no, I can't try that, just obliterates me. It means rich people can leave the country and do whatever the hell we want. Yeah, and the rest of Americans are completely screwed and it's it's Unconsciously so Peter before we met in 2008 I co -founded a Medical lab testing company. I think we're the second people to do direct to consumer marketing for lab testing But all we did was a white blood cell a radioactive cell counting to figure out what toxin Talked metals you were allergic to it was called the maliza test And we could tell people were allergic to their hypoallergenic implants that contained 2 % nickel that wasn't labeled.

50:10And there was a boy somewhere around 8 or 10 who had the condition where your ribs grow inward and it kills you. So they put a chest splint in. It's a genetic thing. Well, as soon as the chest splint, which was titanium went in, he started dying. And his position just went crazy and found us late at night on the internet. that we ran out lab tests, and the poor kids white blood cells proliferated like crazy in the presence of titanium, even without antibodies. So we had to apply to the FDA. It took a couple of weeks to get a compassionate exemption to allow a zirconium brace in. And the day they implanted it, the kids' health conditions all turned around and he lived and became healthy.

50:47Why did I need a compassionate exemption from the government I pay to keep me, basically, away from violent criminals? Why did it? That is unconscionable, and that two weeks of suffering that kid went through, like some bureaucrat right now, you're going to hell for that. Yeah. The old adage is they're not happy till you're not happy, but let's not go there. So there is a model here, Dave, and I don't know if we've discussed this before, if I know we haven't discussed in the podcast, which is the idea of a, you know, if you want to make an investment today, if you're investing in a public company where enough lawyers and enough financial experts have analyzed it so that if you're a widow or a kid you can invest in it.

51:34But if you want to invest in a company that's risky you have to be an accredited investor, right? Defined as having $250 ,000 or more or income of a million dollars or more. And it's basically saying the SEC, the Security Exchange Commission is basically saying, if you have enough money, you're intelligent enough to lose it. But if you're an orphan or a widow, we don't want you having the ability to invest in these risky companies. And so they're trying to protect you from yourself. And I get that. I mean, there are scams out there. The - Like Bernie made off because all those accredited investors who invested in that were smart, right?

52:12Oh, wait. Oh, yes, oh, wait. So my objective would be we should have an accredited patient program that basically says if you get your spouse and your physician or whomever if you're of right mind and you get one or two people close to you to say yes we looked at it and you should you know we want to take this risk with you that you should be accredited to go and try the trial not in Mexico a Costa Rica, but at your home. And I just think this protecting us against ourselves has got more downside than upside. And by a huge marginal. One of the reasons, so my new coffee is called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do.

53:05And this idea that being afraid of risk as an excuse to take away your freedom is a bad thing, I'm doing this for your own safety. No one who's ever said that had your best interest at heart. It's by design. It's they're saying, I rule you, my will is better than your will. And honestly, I mean, that's what we have free speech. And we have all these other amendments to protect ourselves from people trying to keep us safe by starving you or, you know, burning you at the stake or whatever other story they're telling you to keep you safe. Like, not okay. I own my biology and no regulatory authority on earth has the right to do that.

53:47This is a built in right as much as freedom of speech or anything else. So recently, I'm, that's not political, but I believe in that. I believe in freedom. I believe in data. I believe in science. I believe in the ability of intelligent people to read the data, especially now with AI in the loop, right? You can give a large language model a very complicated medical and say, OK, this is me, this is who I have, This is what I have. Is this risky to me? What are the risks? And explain to me like I'm five, right? Right. And get that. So anyway, recently, MDMA, which was under trial, was expected to be approved for PTSD was turned down.

54:32And that was a sad day. The data looks to have been extraordinary. Thoughts? Well, you have to look at who's funding the people who are doing things for our own safety and seems to be like MDMA would cause a drop in the sales of a lot of the antidepressants and other addictive tools that are sold regularly by the people funding the NIH and NIA and FDA. You got to follow the numbers there, Peter. You and I both know them. There is corruption in the system in the US, which is why our healthcare is the most expensive in the world and ranks somewhere around 50th in terms of outcomes, because there's people skimming off the top.

55:08Okay. Yeah.

55:15Psychedelics. I have had extraordinary experiences on DMT and Ken. I win. You know, those are two of my favorites. I'm so happy that you're willing to talk about that. I'm not running for president or any political office ever. even if you did it might not hurt you. I've had dinner with Bobby and he's not afraid to talk about that stuff because he's a former addict. But I did it under care. I did, I did, I did the DMT with a therapist and it was some of the most joyful, love exploding transformative and tightening. I've seen a shift in you. So, since you did that, Peter, you're happier at a very base level.

56:04There used to be a little line of, like, a little bit of stress that was in there. And you're still positive, but there was a little line of stress. And you just seem softer in a good way. And I think that's what they do. I think one of the things for me, you know, it's very interesting because I am as are you in the longevity business. I want to see as much of life, I think this most amazing time ever. I want to see where Starship takes me into the cosmos. I want to meet my great -grandkids. I want to look myself all of those things. And the experience I had from a Di -Methyl -Tripped -A -Fan and DMT journey was complete loss of fear of death.

56:44A connection with the universe that made me feel extraordinary. And it's not for everybody. You have, it's a, it is literally a shedding and letting go of the ego. And it's a very powerful experience. And I don't think I would have been ready for it younger in life, but I was definitely ready to shed a lot of the bullshit to call it. That had accumulated over decades. I believe that the ego is an emergent phenomena from our mitochondria. They're distributed intelligence running a distributed network of compute nodes in environmental sensing nodes and I can prove all of that. We know how they make decisions that do what the same way advanced crypto does via core and sensing.

57:33And the ego is just the mitochondria trying to keep the petri dish alive as if you're not in there. And you are the petri dish, your body is. So what that means is that if you can lose the fear of death, you're reprogramming your operating system, these very fast parts of your body to be less reactive to it. And when you're less reactive to fear, your body naturally allocates energy into things that matter more, like folding proteins right or my topology or autophagy or happiness. But if you're stuck with old pattern matching recognition, this is a very fast system designed to keep life alive with no brain in there.

58:09So it's reactive. So if your mother -in -law criticism is pushing an old network designed to keep you alive I have until you undo that, you will be sitting in your ego because it thinks you're threatened. So losing fair of death is just critically important. You don't wanna die, but it just means that when you do, I look at death and birth, same thing. We all do it. You can't avoid it, the end of the universe is going to happen. I just asked Brian Johnson that on stage in my conference, he goes, we haven't proven the end of the universe to happen, but I'm like, okay, fine. I don't want to end a universe.

58:41I'm so excited. Yes. Yeah. So, have you experienced and made use of microdosing of any of these? I have. And in 1999, it went down to Peru and I sought out a shaman to do Ayahuasca. And they said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. And they said, you won't like it. It wasn't a risk to hold against his unknown. And I actually think Ayahuasca is one of the more dangerous of the ones out there. Not my favorite in the jungle. I'm low in my list. Yeah. It should be low on most people's list. You want to do it with a shaman. It's very, very well trained. So I think there are some spiritual risks there that are hard to go into.

59:23But I've just seen too many people with a negative reaction. And there's a lineage and a respectfulness that maybe is missing in some places. But the acts of ingredient, DMT, you don't microdose that stuff. Maybe if you're doing do, it just spends a breath work. You're getting a little bit of it. but DMT can be incredibly potent and a similar experience is just shorter. Microdosing ketamine will be a bad idea. So when microdosing came out, James Fatiman is well known for creating a protocol on microdosing for LSD or mushrooms. And it's about 5 % of an active dose. So I decided to microdose LSD every day for 30 days.

1:00:02And I put it, you know, tab in a drop of water. So you get a drop of water is a fifth of a dose, all that kind of stuff. or a couple drops. And when I was traveling, I didn't want to bring liquid because of TSA. So I chopped up a tab into 20 things. And I was given a speech in LA on front of a room full of entrepreneurs. And I was just making all these jokes and no one was laughing. I was like, oh my God, that piece of the paper was a little bit more than a microdose. And I'm telling that story because most people who think they're microdosing at least here in Austin, oh, it's a microdose chocolate bar.

1:00:34I'm like, do that's a 25 % dose party dose. That is not a microdose. So microdosing causes neuroplasticity and a little bit of creativity and performance enhancement, but it's below the perceptual threshold. And it's just a very different dose. I think most people microdose wrong, but I've done mushrooms and I've microdose LSD. The other one that I would really, really not microdose would be eyeball gain. And I spoke with Tim Ferris on my podcast about that, I think right before he launches podcast. And I began to reset neurotransmitters and doing that every day is probably not a good idea. So I began another very risky drug.

1:01:11You need to be under a doctor's care because you can have a heart attack from it. I haven't tried it. It's on my list of things I probably will do. But I think there's great value to it. But honestly, try, even if you're doing ketamine once every week or two with a loss in, you're going to get more neuroplasticity from that than you do for microdosing. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA?

1:01:47Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome in the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700 ,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members' critical health guidance like, what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights.

1:02:24And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following, a 36 % reduction in depression, a 40 % reduction in anxiety, a 30 % reduction in diabetes, and a 48 % reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viom for three years. I know that my oraling health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viom is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to Viom .com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jane, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viom to give my listeners a special discount.

1:03:08You'll find it at Viom .com slash Peter. You've started diving into P300. Let's chat about that. What is P300 neuroscience? Why are you focusing there? What are you learning and what should people care about? Well, P300 is something called evoked potential. And what this means is if I do this and I clap my ears, you and I are both engineers, you know that there was a signal transmission delay when I'm converting the signal. There was a latency on the internet. It came out through your speakers and there was a latency before it hit your brain. But you heard it as soon as the sound was delivered.

1:03:45But what the science and neuroscience shows is that you didn't hear it. A third of a second after the sound was delivered to your tissues, your auditory cortex got activated. So who's in charge for the third of a second? It's actually like when they do a broadcasting on TV, there's an eight -second delay in case someone says poop or whatever they're supposed to not say. Well, your brain and your body has this built in. So your body gets to decide what parts of reality are worth showing to you. And it will filter them out reliably based on fear and based on programming. And this is not your subconscious.

1:04:20This is in your body. It's before it gets to your subconscious. And when the signal gets to your brain, it takes you additional time to figure out was that a voice or a clap or what was that and to become aware of it and do the processing. So what happens during that delay? Well, number one, young people, teenagers, about 18, have about 240 milliseconds of delay. And as you age, it goes up to about 350 milliseconds. It levels off. And if it goes much above that, you're starting to get an early sign of Alzheimer's or Cognitive dementia. So we can do this for visual inputs and we do this for auditory inputs.

1:04:59So this is actually a marker of aging. I still have the response time of 18 year old, 240 milliseconds. Is it the Modaphanil? Is it the way I've trained my brain for six months with neurofeedback or the fact that meditators have a lower p3nd or d? I couldn't tell you because I do all of that stuff and then some. But what I can tell you is that the existence of this system, that's where the ego takes action. It will give you an environmental signal and an emotion at the same time and the emotion will feel real. Even worse, there are studies showing that inside your brain, all of your memories are queued to emotions.

1:05:35So you remember something by imagining how it felt and then you come up with the word. And you do enough meditation or other neurofeedbacker probably work with psychedelics and you start Developing the awareness of how this system is affecting you and how It's entirely possible for someone who's intelligent and smart when their body doesn't want them to hear something They won't hear it. I've seen it straight up when I'm doing facilitation with people at 40 years as in You know PhDs and very very smart people. There's something they don't want to hear their body will not let them hear you ask them a question and it'll answer a different question.

1:06:09It gets edited in real time. This is what the ego really does. And so, in the Buddhist kind of, or any meditation framework, they say, well, emotions will happen. Allow it to come through you. Feel your heart rate, feel it, and just let it pass. Like, okay, that took a lot of electrons, guys. I could have been folding proteins. I could have been making body heat. I could have been getting shit done, right? And see, yes, but it's just going to happen until eventually you calm this storm. Well, yes, I love all that. I've been in a poll in Tibet and ancient China. Like there's so much value in knowledge.

1:06:45I've done breathwork with Sri Sri for years, like all of this. But what if you just reprogrammed the mitochondrial network so that in that P300 window, it wasn't triggered. So you didn't have to have it come through. And what I've done in my life, Peter, is I've gone through everything that's ever triggered me. And I've run a structured reset process with basically a light detector test at 40 years then on my brain, where I re -experience whatever discomfort I had. And then I create a very specific state that you can teach someone afterwards. And that state cancels out the signal and it cancels out permanently.

1:07:22So you're just no longer triggered because it's less work. And if it's less work, then you can have more expansive views of the future. And you stack that with some adopinals, some nicotine, some caffeine, and good God. Like the amount of wasted effort we have on fear and hunger. I don't have hunger signals either. I know the difference between a craving and hunger. So all of a sudden I'm not afraid of death. My body doesn't react to the things that should make me reactive, that would have made me reactive 10 years ago. And the amount of energy left over for living longer, I think this is one of the most important parts of longevity, and it turns out when you look at the data, people who are more stressed do die sooner from all Cosmortality.

1:08:02Sure. Maybe being triggered all the time because you never dealt with that time, your teacher was mean to you in first grade. It's actually important. I think it is for longevity. It's underrated as a longevity thing. And so I for 11 years I've run 40 years of zen. It's changed my life. I think being able to let go and not hold on to triggers is one of the the blessings I have. I just, it's like zero time for that. Let's move forward. What's next? Where are we going? You are one of the happier people just in general. I just finished my big 3200 person event. And it was amazing success, but your brain is fried.

1:08:40And I've seen you at a blend of 360 for almost 10 years when I come there. And you're the man of the hour. Everyone wants a piece. You're almost talking to you. You're running around. You're managing the stage. You're doing all this stuff. It is so much work. But even though you're tired, you're still happy in a place of service, Peter. And that's the hard thing to not just be so pegged out that you remember our moment. I was like, it was late. I'm trying to get to sleep by 9 .30 at my bedtime and I'm walking by and I see, there's Dave. I don't like stop, go over, run, give you a hug. It's like, you're here.

1:09:14You remember what I said? I said, go take your your conference, we'll talk later. Yeah, because we both go through that. That's crazy. It's that being of service all day long, even though it's powerfully good for you. In fact, it also raises BDNF and puts you in a flow state. End of the day, if you don't get that sleep and you're going to be up the next morning, at my event this year, I was picking my kids up at 9 .45 at night from the airport in Dallas. And I hit something on the road, two flat tires, along with 25 other cars. We all got two flats. Wow. And I don't know what happened Peter, but I'm meditating all that stuff I was the first car to get a tow truck.

1:09:50I had new tires on the car and was back though telling an hour and 20 minutes At 10 o 'clock at night. How's it even possible? I had to this day. I have no idea But even then the next day I showed up and it was the best conference I've ever had Because of the resilience everything we've talked about here is about resilience And did I wake up and take my Modaphanol and my Anarasanemia? I did did I have some coffee with some noodles and maybe some MCT oil in it. Yes, I did. Because that's what works for me. But for someone else, if green juice is your thing, you should do it. Just watch for the kidney stones, right?

1:10:20Like you got to find your stack. All right, buddy. 40 years of zen. I have been hearing about this. I've been reading about this. I've had incredible friends going through it. It sounds like the most transformational experience you can have in a condensed period of time. Tell us about it. I've always been a little bit uncomfortable talking in about 40 years of Zen, because I feel like when people are called to it, they just come. I'm called to it and tell me what I'm going to make your story there. I'm called to it. 100%. I started this about 11 years ago because I knew that I had a weird brain.

1:10:52I had Asperger syndrome as a kid. I had brain damage from toxic mold. I've worked with Daniel Aiman and I fixed it. Part of this was I would go do neurofeedback, but with people who are trying to make my brain average, because that's what we're trying to normally. I don't want an average brain. I want my weird brain just better. So I finally ended up hiring neuroscientists and facilitators and putting together this mix of personal development that comes from a whole bunch of different bodies of work on forgiveness. And forgiveness is actually the thing you do to drop the triggers. It's not about saying something is okay, it's just about how do I drop my own triggers.

1:11:28And there's a very specific recipe for that. That's called the reset process. And I'm disclosing the whole thing in the new book that will be out next year. But it turns out your body will not let go of an old trigger unless you experience a state of awe and gratitude first So what I do is I I do a QEG brains game So we know how your brain does compared to our sample set and compared to the standard sample set called the FATRA database So now we've got your strengths and weaknesses opportunities and threats But we spend three days cleaning out your triggers Because if you're, if you can be triggered, you're carrying a loaded gun and that process, it's intense.

1:12:06And you go in there and you run the structured reset process and you re -experience something that was scary and you experience this exalted state that is probably closest described as loving kindness, but it's got more to it and it has to be in the right order. And when you do this, suddenly whatever that trigger was, everything that's ever been involved with that trigger goes away. So you fix a trigger, it just stops being a part of your life. And I've had some pretty heavy stuff happen in the last few years. And this has been just so helpful. I'd consciously uncoupled with my wife. Our total legal bill combined is less than $50 ,000.

1:12:43Which is extraordinary. It's an herd of. Extraordinary. And we genuinely want each other to win. And I couldn't have done that. And I don't think she could have either if we didn't have access to just turn off our triggers so that you can step back and see things as they are instead of through the emotional lens that your body and soul's when you're not looking. And I also had bullet proof I was sold to an investment bank for 10 % of what it was worth when they let me go a few years ago. Well that was not a good outcome for me or for any of the people who believe in me. Again, I went through this reset process.

1:13:18And so anything that's been a really big bump for me, and I've already gone through, for six months I've gone through everything in childhood, everything I can think of, even birth -related trauma. The number of people of PTSD from being born, like I was with a quarter -aptor on my neck, I'd let go of that. And what it means is I can be non -reactive much of the time. I'm not perfect, but I'm 1 % as reactive as I was. And I find most execs come through there, and they come out and go, wow, I'm a much better leader because it's easier if things have less friction in the world because your body was created in the friction before you ever even got to think about it.

1:13:54And there are so many of us who are intelligent, so we always try to bring it into our brain, but it's the pre -processing that needs to reprogramming not the brain. And then we do specific things to help you remember, and we do specific things to increase neuroplasticity when you're there. And the latest iteration is we're adding psycholytic doses of ketamine under a doctor's care, so you're not tripping. Do you remember or lose to remember when I've done ketamine as a as a psychotherapeutic And it's it's a you know experience over the last 45 minutes and then is a Recovery to period, but you know you're there's very little post Downside you know 90 minutes a two hours total, but for me it was I think was a 60 milligram injection another fall on a 40 milligram and then we'll be back in the room, ejection about half an hour later.

1:14:45It's IM kind of mean, or is it Los Angeles? It's Los Angeles. We went back and forth and because we're personalizing the doses every day, Los Angeles have the same effect, but it takes about four times as much. So we have a medical care provider there, but in order to be able to customize at each day -based on your response, we are going with, after testing IM and Los Angeles, we've realized Los Angeles work better for this thing. The psychedelic dose isn't the journey that you go on. It almost acts like a truth serum. It just makes it so you're less resistant to seeing your own bullshit. Got it.

1:15:17And then on two days, we do a heavier dose for increased neuroplasticity and a soft journey. We'll call it. But as you're coming out, your brain is hooked up to electrodes and we're guiding your brain to experience more awe and more gratitude and more forgiveness. And then you store that sensation of just profound, profound, just amazingness in the world. And when you use that state to unlock the door of resetting a trauma, it's so fluid and smooth that if anything pisses me off these days, I go and I run a reset. Unfortunately for me, since I'm CEO and we have four patents and neuroscience, but I have the gear downstairs.

1:15:57I can just hook myself up and maybe breathe some hydrogen or something first just to be fancy about it. And then I go to the reset and my relationship today with a girlfriend, it's so cool. Because I don't generally get triggered. And if I do, I'm willing to apologize because I don't feel any shame about it because I work through my shame issues, right? And - That's beautiful. I'm not perfect, but that's what it does. Listen, being able to identify your own bullshit and let go of it is such a gift. Such a gift, right? And smarter you are, the better you're going to be at bullshit yourself. There's somebody that don't teach you, but they should.

1:16:32So the most genius people oftentimes suffer greatly because my belief in talk is about 30 when I started on this personal development path I was feeling something in my body and I didn't know what it was and I was just really uncomfortable and Therapeutic asking well, do you have any feelings anybody? I said yeah, I'm angry because this is dumb And she said well, there must be another thing. I say my stomach feels weird and she said there's a name for that I go, what is it? She goes, it's fear. And I said, there's nothing here to be afraid of. Therefore, it isn't fear. And she just laughed. She was in her 80s, a beautiful woman, Barbara von Dyson was her name.

1:17:11And she goes, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be logical. And I was like, my mind blown. You mean my body's gonna do stuff that doesn't make any sense? And I'm simultaneously irrational and rational at the same time. And that's unlocked a huge part of the biohacking movement. I wanna know what's actually happening. I wanna follow the data, right? And the data shows me that my body does weird stuff before I can think about it. And that window of 350 milliseconds at P300, that is real. And that is where the meat on the bone for personal development is. How long is the 40 years end program?

1:17:43And where is it? 40 years end is five days. It runs Monday through Friday, every week in Seattle. And it's going to take about eight to 10 hours a day. And it can give you like running a marathon with your brain every day. I have to have an executive chef and a handful of supplements. Or you can't even do that much meditation in a day. We're trying to cram 20 to 40 years of daily meditation into five days. When you're done, your brain waves will look like that of an advanced in meditator. And we've shown that we can up -regulate parts of the brain function that generally are believed to be untrainable.

1:18:13And when we get exactly the right brain waves for your brain and we train to that, even alpha, there's a lot missing from the research on the alpha brain wave. In fact, the peak alpha that everyone trains to is not the right number. And I've got great evidence to support that. So we trained to the right number. There's a lot of proprietary tweaks. Anyone can do neurofeedback anywhere, but most neurofeedback is designed to make your brain look like an average healthy brain. So F students become C students, which is great, but A students become C students, which is bad. I never want to do that. We want to enhance the things.

1:18:47And the last two days of the program after you get your triggers handled, that's the performance enhancement part of these, where we're doing a 24 channel AI -powered training of specific networks that are under -overactive. And there you get to pick. Do I want more focus, more executive function, more social connectivity, less of something that isn't serving you? But you get to choose it. It's like you take your BMW into the Dynand Performance Mechanic, did you want acceleration or braking or steering? Like let's tune this, in which mechanism, you can do that for your brain. It's just not about fixing a broken brain.

1:19:23It's about enhancing brain that already got you there. Web site for this. 40 years of Zen .com. 40 years of Zen .com. And like I said, I kind of have a hard time talking about it because it's like a spiritual thing, but the people who have come through there, these are people who are affecting thousands or even sometimes millions of lives with the decisions they make. And if you can be 1 % more conscious, you need to do that. And this is not a 1 % shift. It's much more than that. And I've had many many friends many of them are CEOs. They're successful individuals who've gone through this and this is not typically what any entrepreneur any executive anybody encounters during the course of their lives and I think being able to step back and have this pattern interrupt in your life so you can actually look and see what's going on and how to optimize it so important.

1:20:18I can't wait I tried it myself. It reduces suffering so much. And you and I are both CEOs. We hang out with them a lot. There's a lot of suffering in CEOs because it's lonely. You have your team, but you can fire any of them. So they're your friends, but they're also your friends who always know you can fire them. There's something you just can't share. Also, I mean, there are people like Elon who is just so extraordinarily driven. And I've had late night conversations where he's just in pain and not happy. and he's, can not let go of what he has to do. And he feels like, in many times unfortunately, it's true, he's the only person who can actually make it happen.

1:20:56Unfortunately, it is true sometimes. His biography was so profound. And I would love to get a look at his brain waves someday. And I could probably predict what's going on in there. And he probably has no of the very unusual, it gets shit done brain waves. But the trigger ones that cause the suffering there, I mean, what a what a amazing human being and what if you get it done with more joy and less suffering Right, I hope that what if I truly I truly hope that for him. I truly do yeah I do too I have so much respect there and and his his business mind aside from his engineering mind it it's unusual My job is to look at unusual minds and people who have just unusual abilities to do things and like what's the secret sauce in there So we can make it more teachable at 40 years of zen It's collecting the database.

1:21:45Let's close out with a simple subject, consciousness.

1:21:53I believe, referring to what we talked about a little bit earlier, that your body sees the world as it is, but your brain cannot possibly handle that level of complexity. In fact, we know it can't. So it filters, and it filters, and it filters, and what your brain's really doing, based based on Jeff Hawkins' work. The guy who invented the Palm Pines. I know him and I always work, yes, it's amazing. It's amazing, but he says your brain predicts the future of microseconding. And then checks the living notes, valines. Yeah, it just says, you only notice things that don't match what you predicted.

1:22:27So if you've been trained to predict suffering, fear, plague, disaster, shame, grief, guilt, that's what you're gonna see because your body is programmed to do that, not necessarily the brain. And then when you reset those systems in the body, and sometimes in the brain, suddenly things that were in front of you all the time, you become aware of them. And when you go into these altered states, whether it's from breathwork, neurofeedback, extended fasting, extended darkness, and psychedelics, and some of the other things that I share, suddenly now you're seeing the world without filters, and it looks pretty freaking weird, but it also looks awesome and amazing and sometimes scary.

1:23:10Usually when you're seeing scary stuff, you're replaying an old trauma. But a lot of consciousness is just learning how to see the world with the filters you choose instead of the filters that your body chose for you when you were a little kid or in the womb or some other time. You know, I think people don't really Gurok appreciate the cognitive biases that we have. All right, and what you said is absolutely correct. we have so much information coming into all of our senses all the time That you cannot process it all right, so you know everybody Hopefully has had that experience where when you're asked did you hear the person?

1:23:51Speaking down the hall or did you hear that background music and when you're in a conversation? You're not and your brain filters and there's if you go and just Google cognitive biases, you find hundreds of them. I wrote about them in my first book of abundance with Stephen Kotler. We talk about, you know, there's negativity bias, which is unfortunate, right? You give 10 times more attention to negative news and information. And positive, there's a recency bias, what you just heard recently, you give more way to familiarity bias, you know, if you look and sound and feel like somebody, you're to give their words more credence than someone who looks different from you.

1:24:30And we don't realize that we're processing all of this biased information all the time. One of my hopes and expectations from AI, from some version of Jarvis and AI wrap around Shell is that I'm going to turn on Biasolert and have it just make me aware when I am giving improper weight to data based upon my biases. It turns out our brains are lazy, and your brain doesn't want to use more electricity than is necessary to get a good enough answer. So any answer it gives you is going to feel 100 % true, including all the biases, including the most toxic one is if something is good more as better. And this is why a marathoner's diet drinking too much water.

1:25:18Right. It more wasn't better. I didn't want to electrolyte in there. They do because they get hyponitremia, which is diluting their electrolytes too much, which is why you should put some salt in your water. But it's profound that we do this for exercising at the beginning of our conversation.

1:25:39And in fact, in lots of studies, not just in my own experience, but there's also no exercises bad. So it turns out there's an ideal amount, but for you and me to sit down and think about something and look at all the day, it's a lot of work. So our brain says that's too much work. Don't do it. Just make a good enough assessment and then argue to the ends of the earth that you All right, that's the toxic part. I know my brain does it right? Yeah, that is so true Yeah, and and once your ego gets in the loop and you're you know You're defending you're gonna die in that hill whether or not you have actual evidence to support or not Because it does really really truly feel true and just understanding that this is a part of human nature and the advances and masters and all, they talk about three states that are important for consciousness.

1:26:24The first one is empathy. Can you feel other people's pain? But empathy is not a very high vibe thing because now you're picking up everyone else's negativity and you're suffering along with them. So the next step of development of your spiritual practice, your consciousness, is compassion. And this means you automatically wish other people well before you have a chance to think about it. Yeah. Right, so you look at someone, I don't like them because they're fat. I don't like them because they're successful. Whatever your biases are, you replace that with, I hope that person's successful, even if they're actually not a good person, or loving kindness meditation.

1:27:02Loving kindness. But the highest level that they teach about, in the West we call it resilience, in the East they would call it equanimity, and it's part of the path to enlightenment. And this is, you choose your state and no force on earth can take you out of your state. This is the monk meditating in a hurricane and that's what I'm working on. It's what it feels like you're working on is how do I choose to be happy joyful of service Even if things didn't go my way Even if I lost some money even if I got injured even if someone I care about isn't doing well my heart goes out to them I do what I can but I don't feel like I'm gonna die and I don't lose my state and Half of that challenge is biological Peter if your mitochondria are screwed up from toxins they will feel anxiety.

1:27:45And it's really hard to be in a state of equanimity when you're making half the electricity you're supposed to. So you practice your longevity, practice mitochondrial enhancement, take your cognitive enhancers, and then be as resilient as is humanly possible. And I think you're gonna be more conscious as a side effect. And that's been my experience. What do you think? I think you are brilliant. And I could spend countless hours in this conversation. And I hope we will. I hope we'll have more time together. and I'm looking forward to booking my time with you up in Seattle in 40 years. When you get booked, I will come up there.

1:28:18I don't do a lot of the facilitating personally just because of the travel and the time. But when you're up there, I want to spend five days hanging out with you. I would love that. It'll be fun. Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only, the biohacker, original, Dave Asprey, Dave, tell us where we can find you. Tell me the last three books that you that you recommend from your series, smarter, not harder, is your last book out just before then? Smarter, not harder. The one before that was fast this way to correct some misconceptions about fasting, mostly people over fasting. And then the one before that was, I think that was super human.

1:29:02Yep, that was my big longevity book. Yeah, amazing. And I'm at DaveAspree .com, upgrade labs is own and upgradelabs .com. And the human upgrade my podcast has only 1200 episodes with world leaders and longevity. So there's something to be gained from that. I love it. I love it. And I've been honored to be a guest on your on your podcast multiple times. Yeah. But Peter, thanks for your work in the world tonight. I appreciate you so much. Abundance has really helped me just have a positive Thank you. Thank you. See you soon.