Revolutionary Wellness Through Biohacking w Dave Asprey

26:36So plants can't run away from us. So to stop us from eating them, they cover themselves with phytic acid, which means that if you eat too many of those plants, all of the minerals in your bones get leached out and then you have weak bones and you can't reproduce. So that's their way of stopping us from eating them. Well, when you're eating things like cornflakes and rice cakes and all of these nuts and seeds and grains, well, you're getting huge doses of this and is it any wonder that you're tired all the time because if you don't have enough minerals your cells you can work out all you want you meditate all you want you give your body a signal to change it says i needed manganese and zinc and you dumbass you just ate three bowls of oatmeal and i don't have any manganese and zinc right now so i'm not going to change and then you just feel anxious and you probably fart a lot because vegans fart 17 17 times more than and non-vegans and we need to address global warming from the vegan diet.

27:32Yeah, but. Is that a real stat? Vegans fart 17 times. Yes, that's a real stat. There's a PubMed study supporting that. Who is studying this stuff? And, by the way. Anyone who's dated a vegan knows it's true. Oh my gosh, man, you're killing me. I say that I was a devout vegan for like 18 months. It wrecked my health. It took me a couple of years to get it back. Oh my gosh. By the way, I can already feel like all the emails you're gonna receive when this thing comes out. So don't send me any of that. with respect and love like i don't want anyone to hurt themselves no i raise my own animals we're gonna be nice to the animals but yeah eating fake meat is not a good idea for humanity no no by the way there's no doubt when you said you dumbass that we all knew you meant it with love i knew that i felt it when you said it um so one of the things you're all in on though which you referenced here is minerals like yeah i was just like i'm like i don't know i felt like i was going to old school in the same time like being educated about right now so talk a little bit about minerals because you might as well do them together.

28:27You talk about how these essential four vitamins, basically like you better start ODing on these, which there's no such thing, and minerals at the same time. This is almost like you said, it's almost old school, but having taken every kind of smart drug there is on the planet, every sexy nootropic, I formulated lots of things. It's a passion for 20 plus years. I just realized I wasn't doing this right. so i went back and if you are going to spend money on the expensive stuff you got to have a foundation it's like you know i got the best siding for my house but i just built it on a pile of rocks it's not going to last very long so the foundation of your body is minerals and there's really four fat soluble vitamins that drive minerals and then there's a bunch of minerals you need so i'll walk you through it vitamin dake you go to vitamin d a k e.com and vitamin dake is a combination of vitamin D, real vitamin D, vitamin A, real vitamin A from animals, not beta carotene.

29:27It does not work. Vitamin K2, which comes from almost exclusively animal foods, and then a special form of vitamin E. If you have those things, those improve your performance. They make your body healthier, but they also tell the minerals where to go. So they end up in the right place. And on the same site on vitamindake.com, you'll find that there's a supplement called minerals 101 this is broad spectrum macro minerals so before you take anything even like your b vitamins which are important you can get those from liver if you want to from liver pills but start with vitamin dake it's designed to be about 22 bucks a month for the the average normal person's dose it's not expensive and then minerals 101 is three pills just to get enough minerals by the way so now you're at four pills a day but that's going to do so much more for you than some kind of fancy ashwagandha and we can talk about ashwagandha later if you want to because there's a there's a dark side to that one okay so after you get those then you have trace and ultra trace minerals and your bones have about 64 different minerals and they're not just calcium so to do that i put those minerals in danger coffee this is my new coffee company after bulletproof it's called danger coffee go to danger coffee.com and when you brew the coffee it's got a large dose of trace minerals in it.

30:44So you drink the coffee, it's got the electrolytes, it tastes like the best coffee ever. And your body loves it because your sensors in the operating system, they can feel the minerals and it just tells you to drink more. Like it just feels good and it tastes really good. So you could also get trace mineral supplements, but I just find I'm going to do it every morning if it's in my coffee automatically when I brew it. And that's become a really, a really popular product. And again, with athletes and CEOs and people like that, They just want their brain to work and their bodies to work. That's why they're doing it.

31:15So that combination gets everything in there. And from there, you can take your, you know, nootropics and things. I take 150 pills a day, but those are the first four I take. Okay, this is so good. By the way, I love having you on because, like, there's just tangible value on, like, every answer. Oh, thanks, man. No, it's just true. There's no fluff. Let's go there for a second on food, and then I want to move to what we were just talking about. So, like, you don't like the green stuff. You don't like the nuts. You actually - I'll eat arugula. I'll eat lettuce. I just don't eat kale and spinach or chard or beets.

31:46You also don't love a lot of fish. So talk about fish and then what the heck should we be eating then? All right. So fish is generally good for you, but not if it's farmed. Farmed fish is some of the most polluted food on the planet. So you just can't do that as a regular source of protein. Some people say, well, I was vegan. I don't know why I thought it made me like maybe a better person than someone else. But then they realized it was making him sick. So then they say, well, I still want to identify as a vegan, but not be one. So I'm going to eat fish. And then, well, you can't get enough protein from fish.

32:24Fish is very watery. If you're going to get the amount of protein you need, which is one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight, I weigh 200 pounds. You know, what's 200 grams of fish to get like, that's that's more than 200 grams of fish that's 200 grams of protein from fish it's going to be like a pound or two depending on the type of fish it's going to be very expensive and then i'm going to get all the mercury and all the micro plastics that are now present in fish so i recommend sockeye salmon or a wild caught fish a smaller fish and i would do that once or twice a week have some sushi but doing it every day as your primary protein source you will be protein deficient, you will be hungry all the time and you won't have very many muscles.

33:04Okay. So should I be eating red meat? Yes. Grass-fed beef and lamb are the most nutritious, most important food sources for human beings. If you can't get those, the other proteins that work but are less beneficial but still better than any plant protein would be chicken. And you want lean chicken because chicken fat is pretty much similar to soybean oil and canola oil. It's not very compatible with our body and then pork and pork is unfortunately poorly treated and poorly fed but if you can get good pastured pork pork protein is okay it's not as good as beef protein so if you were to say well i'm going to do what dave suggested i'm going to figure out how much meat i need to get to get 200 grams whatever kind of meat you want you can buy it online from a local rancher and they'll send it to you frozen put it in your freezer or you can buy the ground stuff you go to most grocery stores and have grass-fed ground it is more expensive but it's not that much more expensive and if you're on a tight tight budget okay do your best get the lean industrial meat that's not grass-fed and it's still better than any fake meat or some bozo who tells you that rice and beans is a complete protein without telling you it's full of lectins and phytic acid and 500 grams of carbohydrate in order to get a little bit of protein like no that is not a protein food.

34:25Nuts are not a source of protein. They're a source of fat and carbs and trace amounts of protein. So the fact that some vegan activists influenced big food companies to tell you it was healthy, it doesn't change reality. Dude, this is so good. And by the way, I feel a little bit better about how I've been eating for a long time too. And I'm serious. It may explain my strength and vitality and energy level. Look at your chest, man. Same thing. I'm about 6.8 % body fat right now. I'm never hungry. I'm doing 20 minutes a week of the exercise that's in that thing. I'm not as big as you in the shoulders, but I'm plenty muscular.

35:02It's ridiculous. I'll compliment you. You said that about me. I'm going to tell you when we met at that thing we were at together, I was struck by that because I don't think on camera you look that way. Number one, he's a big man, right? He's a big dude. And he's, I think I'm like reasonably You are. You are. I have a caffeine tattoo. He's big. He's big and lean and strong in person. He really is. And he's also got very nice hair. So, and I was going to ask you there, I'm like, what are you doing for your hair? Because you look great. But I'm just going to tell you something. It's, the evidence is sort of when we all get over whatever it is, 45 or 50 years old, this stuff starts really showing up.

35:36Yeah. And I feel it. And I got to tell you, I compare like, and I've done some things with peptides and other things as well that I know you have. But I got to tell you, these things actually work. Like some of us have become pretty good evidence of the fact. There were like evidentiary studies of a lot of these things that Dave's talking about. But even for me in the book, there were things that – there's things I've never done, so I want to ask you about them because I'm afraid of them. I'm going to be honest with you. You started to go there for a minute. I think you've done – like tell me about psychedelics.

36:04This is just like me and you now, right? Tell me about ayahuasca, psychedelics, these other things. Because I've also had friends of mine say, hey, man, I had a dark experience. And I'm not, you know, you had a crazy upbringing, Milet. I'm not sure. So I've sort of like, anything like exogenous I'm putting in me, I'm always really afraid of, right? And like that stuff, to be honest with you, I'm incredibly curious. And when I say this with my like really, I don't know, modern friends, whatever you want to call them, they're like, bro, you haven't done any of this yet? What's wrong with you? You're like a cutting edge guy.

36:37You've got access to this stuff. Why haven't you tried? And so I'm frankly, I'll tell you why I'm somewhat afraid and I'm somewhat afraid of what it could be. So talk to us about it. Respect for, for calling it out that way. It's, it's actually justified right now. People have fetishized things like ayahuasca and I've written about this in a couple of my books in 1999. I went down to Peru. I sought out a shaman and I said, I want to do ayahuasca. This was before anyone could spell it. And I went there and they looked at me and they said, you're white. And I said, yeah, I noticed, but like, I've done my research.

37:09I'm coming here to find that. And so eventually they agreed to do it for me, even though it was only for locals. And I had a beneficial, energetic experience. It was big. And I was very well protected by a person who had trained in the jungle for many years. And you fast forward now and you have a lot of people have done ayahuasca five times and they think they're a shaman and they're serving it without adequate training. And I think that is the most dangerous of the psychedelics that you could do. I've done it twice in my life, both with exceptionally well-qualified people. So people do have very dark experiences.

37:45Not always. People have wonderful, transcendent, life-changing experiences too. But you want to make sure that that's what you're going to get instead of the dark stuff. and so what i recommend for people who've never done psychedelics is that you put ayahuasca at the very end of your list and before you do psychedelics you should go to a therapist and do something called emdr and emdr is a type of trauma release work that's very very fast and that'll actually strangely feel a bit psychedelic when you do it right but you'll drop a lot of the heavy stuff that could have been an issue and after you've done that, you should learn breathwork, like holotropic breathwork, which is very similar to taking acid or maybe kind of ayahuasca, but ayahuasca has a certain vibe to it.

38:30And then if those still didn't get you there, then you should learn either tantra or conscious kink because a good orgasm with a conscious partner will put you in an altered state. 20 % of people say they've met God from coming. Yep. And that's in the book, isn't it? I think you say something like that in the book. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't like go into a lot of detail on that. But look, if you're looking for a way to open your operating system, which is what all these do to look inside at what's really going on, it's trippy in there. But these are ways without drugs to get in there. And after that, there's neurofeedback.

39:01My 40 years of Zen place in Seattle, someone just got out of there and said, this is the best plant based journey I've ever done without the plants because they were tripping on just their own brainwaves. There's no medicines at all. Right. So these are states you can get into with advanced meditation. It just takes many years. And most of us don't have the years and the time. So the goal of smarter, not harder is how do you get there faster? Those are all ways to do it. And then if that's not enough, your best bet is probably MDMA after that, or better yet, MDA, which is less ampy and more heart opening.

39:34And you can do that with a therapist now in some places. And after that, you get into things like mushrooms. And after mushrooms, you would look at something like LSD. And after LSD, you do DMT. And if you still haven't found it, find someone with feathers in their hair who trained with the Shipibo people in the jungle for at least eight years and do ayahuasca. And do it once or twice. I always feel bad. I hear guys like Aubrey Marcus. He's like, I've done ayahuasca 87 times. I'm like, when do you notice it's not working? You shouldn't be doing this 87 times unless you are in shamanic training.

40:14This is an occasional use, like once every six months, to really go deep with yourself and then process for months and meditate on it and journal on it. And to work with facilitators and work with spiritual people on understanding the real nature of your own reality and on healing old traumas and turning on superpowers. So I feel like we're disrespecting the ancient practices. And I've been through shamanic training. I'm not a full shaman. but from what I've seen and what I understand and what I've learned I don't think some of those plant medicines are very happy with the way we're treating them either so I tend to treat them with respect I'm fine with the chemicals they don't care LSD doesn't care what you do to it but ayahuasca and mushrooms do care is there any let me ask you one more thing about my fears by the way that was a big answer does any of that lead okay please forgive me because I think I know what you're going to say but I'm asking questions for those of us that you know are never gone anywhere near this stuff.

41:12Okay. Is any of that a gateway to anything bad? Like, do you start going now? I need all these chemicals all the time. I'm going to start vaping weed seven times a day, or I need some other hallucinogenics or like, I'll be honest with you. I played with a guy who went and I played golf once in a while with a guy who went and did his ayahuasca thing. He's, he's gone, you know, a couple of times. And now like he used to smoke a vape pen when we, I smoked my cigar, He'd smoke a vape, Pam, and there was a little weed in there every time we'd play, and we would joke about it. Like 15 years ago, it was funny.

41:43Now, it's like normal, right? But back then, it wasn't. Now, though, he's on mushrooms when we play golf, and it's almost like a daily thing he does. He microdoses, but then he'll take actual mushrooms when we're golfing. So I've always wondered, is there the potential to slip into this chemical abyss, or is that a non-starter? They're not correlated at all. LSD is one that's not very addictive. That's one where there's very little evidence of addiction. But there are people who use any psychedelic as a way to escape and disassociate. By the way, I didn't mention ketamine in my list. Ketamine is a very potent way, and you could do that very safely at a clinic to do ketamine.

42:24That maybe should be there right there around the MDMA level in my answer. Just because it's so well understood and it's legal. So you know what you're getting. There's no fentanyl, none of that stuff to deal with. So when it comes to things like mushrooms, I'm an investor in Paul Stamets' company that's using psychedelic mushrooms plus lion's mane plus niacin to regrow the entire brain. It's a profound thing. And especially for professional athletes, right? Do that and then do some neurofeedback. And you can do amazing things with a brain injury. I've had a couple of good brain injuries. And I'll tell you, those protocols along with hyperbaric and stuff, they work really, really well.

43:02What if I just want to start with horizon gazing? can i do you can certainly start out with that i mean that that'll work it's not going to make you trip and it's probably not going to get you inside your operating system but it will increase your power but when it comes to these drugs like mushrooms if you're micro dosing mushrooms properly you won't feel it it means it's a it's a sub noticeable dose so i'm here in austin and there's all kinds of people with microdose chocolate like that's a third of a gram That's not five or 10 % of a dose. That is like, you're going to see little sparkles in the corners of your eyes.

43:37And if that's how you want to feel, that's okay. I don't think you want to do it every day. I don't think it's necessarily bad. And if you're golfing for three hours, it probably makes the golfing a lot more fun. It's also a little known secret that many, many of the ultra endurance runners, like a hundred mile races, they're doing microdose LSD because it makes them much more effective and you just go into a certain zone. So it's, these are known things and I don't worry about microdosing very much, but the people have to have a little bump of ketamine three times a day. You have a problem because overusing ketamine can mess up some of the NAMT receptors in the, you know, NDMA receptors in the brain.

44:15So you can overuse them, but if every weekend you did a little bit of psychedelics and you didn't have alcohol every night during the week, you'd still be better off at the end of the year. Okay. Okay. So it's funny that you just said that I was, I just second something just because he's such a brilliant man. I happened to be at something this weekend with one of the most famous, uh, ultra marathon runners. Like one of the most. Just ask him about it. Well, it came, I said, what do you, I knew this. He's like, I listened to your stuff when I'm running. And, uh, by the way, there's a few of them that do.

44:44So don't try to figure out who it is everybody. Okay. And I said, you do anything else? And he's like, uh, a little LSD. I'm like, what did I know? I said, what did you just say? LSD? Yeah. Like, I'm just so old school. He's like, yeah, a little bit, man. Like, I said, like, what percentage of the races? He goes, oh, 100 % of the races. But I kind of vary the dose at different races. I'm playing with it. I'm like, wow. So he's actually right with what he just said, everybody. It sounds a little bit freaky, but microdosing LSD or mushrooms, you can almost feel at doses, they increase neuroplasticity.

45:19And I did LSD. This was seven, eight years ago. microdosing every day for a month just to write about it for my blog. And I was doing it with liquid drops. And then I was traveling. I didn't want liquids. So I chopped a tab into tiny, tiny little pieces. And I was taking one of those little pieces every day. And I guess one of the pieces was bigger than the others because I found myself on stage making jokes that no one else laughed at. And I'm like, oh, God, I'm high right now. That was at Ken Rutkowski's metal group. And I kind of felt like a jerk afterwards. It's also kind of funny. I love you, man.

45:52This is such great stuff. All right, a couple more things. By the way, the book is Smarter, Not Harder, The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want. By the way, and we're covering a lot of stuff here today, like a ton of this stuff. There's a lot more in there, though. No, no, there's a ton. And by the way, he has words like equanimity in the book that I have in my other book. Like, there's just stuff, right, like that you're going to love. I want to ask you, though, something that's not in the book because I'm in this world. And by the way, I'm still not over on the LSD, Ayahuasca world, guys.

46:18I just want to vet the topic with someone who's an expert, which is Dave. I'm still like really figuring that out myself. Do ketamine with a therapist, man. That's all you need. It'll be safe. It'll be effective. It's good for depression. It'll make you feel integrated in the world. And it's just so low risk. We have 75 years of experience with that drug. It's legal to prescribe in every state. And I did it on my podcast with a therapist in San Diego about seven years ago. and it's a potent psychedelic and it's just like it's available. You can even do it at home now. There's places that'll send you a tab and you do it at home and then you get on Zoom with the therapist.

46:57Wow. Okay, okay. One thing I do do is some peptides and it's not anything that... What about you? Like are you a MOTC guy? Do you do GH? Do you... Are there any peptides you're regularly taking or have you like you're out of that world now? I go in and out of peptides. I know you do. That's what I ask. I know. Yeah, like in my longevity book called Superhuman, I went out really deep into peptides and all the different longevity compounds. And I do a lot of that. So I tend to use them based on what I'm trying to get done. So right now, I just used melanotan 2 or MSH. And this is a peptide that gives you a tan in about 20 minutes.

47:40And the side effect is it reduces aging of reproductive organs. It keeps your prostate healthier. When you shoot it, not only do you get a tan, you get really like 12th grade horny. So that's a beneficial side effect, at least if you're in a relationship, it is. And I'm single now, so maybe that was a problem.

48:04But that's one that matters, not just because you get a tan because it looks good. A tan actually makes you healthier. It makes you more resilient. A tan is basically part of how your body interacts with the world. so to get a tan normally you need to get a little bit of sun damage but if you get a 10 and 20 minutes now you have protection from sun damage so that's one of my favorite ones another one that most people have heard of is pineal on and this is something that helps the pineal gland function better wow and this is part of the russian bioregulator peptides that i i wrote about in that earlier longevity book and so i use that let's see what's open right now i have some uh bpc157 um do you take them every day do you take them every day like me i'll be honest with you i got a i got a refrigerator full of stuff i just start forgetting to take and it sits in there and i'm like god it's four thousand dollars worth of peptides sitting in my fridge i haven't used in six months you're not the only one so i i'll do it like for a month i'm just all over i do it really really well and then um i will just be like oh i just don't feel like it and honestly this is your body intuitively telling you what to do.

49:11Like as a, so I built a regenerative farm on Vancouver Island and you watch the sheep, they want that blade of grass, not that blade. And they want one bite of this plant. They know what their body needs. And if you feel like not taking a peptide, there's probably a reason. So I use my intuition when I'm using peptides as well. I'm also trying right now trying, I just went on it maybe a couple of weeks ago is MK677, which is an oral peptide. Those are just a lot less work. And that's good for your metabolism. It seems to, I don't know, I probably take it for a month and see what happens, but I'm up for that.

49:47He's just hacking away. I love it. How long can someone live? Well, my goal is to live to at least 180. What? Yeah. 180. 180. And here's the rationale. And I laid this out in the book before this one called Superhuman. But today, our current best is 120. And that 120-year-old person, they went through World War I and World War II. They couldn't spell DNA. They didn't have antibiotics for half their life. I mean, they completely survived without the benefit of any of the knowledge that we have now. So if that's our current best, and we can't do better by 50 % over the next 100 years, it's because a comet hit the planet.

50:36It's in the bag. And right now, the amount of knowledge on our planet about biology and medicine, it's doubling every 73 days. It used to take 50 years to double. so that means pretty much every three months we double what we know about biology about how it works that's why in fact back in 2016 i wrote about getting gene therapy and about de-aging stem cells and it turns out i just got gene therapy yesterday and uh they also have the ability to edit stem cells so they can do things that your own stem cells can't do and i've had hundreds and hundreds of millions of my own stem cells taken out and put in every joint in my body twice.

51:19I've had it in my hair, my face, my reproductive system, everything. And it's a, it's a whole new world right now. So that episode where I explained all the details about gene therapy and what it's going to do for us, that one injection with a tiny little needle will take nine years off my biological age. So I'll probably be about 30 biologically when that stuff kicks in all the way. That's 20 years younger than what the calendar says. Wow. Is that why your hair looks so good? No, my hair looks so good because I cheat. So I did an episode on, uh, on the human upgrade in my podcast, uh, with Alan Bauman down in Florida.

51:57So I'm doing pretty well. All the guys in my family are, uh, are bald by the time they're 25. So I did pretty well, but it was getting a little thin and moved back a little bit. So I had 10 ,000 hairs individually moved from here to the front. So some of this is my, it's all my hair, but some of this stuff here, it was removed around to do what I wanted. Part of biohacking is you get to change your biology however you want. So I have no problems with using lasers to make my skin better or to improve my hair. And I use things like caffeine and adenosine and aspirin on my hair topically, which actually work as well as minoxidil.

52:35Because it increases circulation. Laser. He's a laser cap thing. Yep. For circulation. Yeah. Yeah. I may or may not relate to every single thing you just said. Some people are like, how dare you? I'm like, how dare I not? Like, if you have a problem with it, like follow someone else without hair. I just don't care. Like, I'm going to look and feel exactly what I want. And if, if it triggers you and you should unload your gun, like, it's fine. I just don't care. I'm in, I'm inspired and feel more normal now that you just said that. So I appreciate it. Um, today was one of my favorite conversations ever on the show because it flew by.

53:07I literally just look up at the clock. We've been doing this for an hour. Oh, wow. And I feel like we haven't even scratched the surface. I want to have you back. I, I, I'm just grateful. There's really very few people in the world pushing the envelope forward on this stuff. There's really a handful of them. It's really true. There's a handful of human beings trying to push the human experience forward, whether that That'd be wellness, energy, longevity, strength. There's a handful of these folks. And I think Dave is like the godfather. He's like, thanks, man. I just, it's true. And he's been out at the longest.

53:43And a lot of the things he said back in the past, we're like, this dude is nuts. Now has become relatively mainstream stuff. And I hope the biggest one is that we're going to live to 180 at a minimum. And that in 15 years, people go, he wasn't nuts. I'm about to announce a longevity venture fund where I'll be participating. And we're targeting a number much higher than that. So hopefully I'll be able to disclose that soon. Okay, we'll disclose it here. I enjoyed today, bro, so, so much, man, so much. Smarter, not harder. Go get it. Dave Asprey, thank you for being here today. And we'll have you back here soon.

54:21All right. Thanks, Ed. All right, everybody. God bless you. Max out your life. Share this episode. Take care. This is the Ed Milad Show.