"THIS Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" The #1 Diet That Will Kill You | Dave Asprey

21:05Dave Asprey:Like we're friends. And remember this. They're friends, but you can take away their money. So hiring a friend changes the nature of the friendship, especially if they have a family and you're responsible for their financial well-being. So it makes just a subtle shift in the power dynamic. Because with a true friendship that doesn't have money flowing, then it's like, you know, you just be truthful. And it creates, and I have hired friends, and it creates, I've also taken money from friends. And it's not like calling up a friend who trusts you and saying, hey man, it looked like you were going to get at least a 20x on that, and I was too.

21:48Dave Asprey:And we both just got wiped out. Right. So I've lost friendships because people gave me money and then I got wiped out too. Like I did my best. It was pretty traumatic for me. It was traumatic for my investors too. So understand as you scale and grow some of those friends, it's like, well, I don't want to tell them this because I guess my job, but he's my friend. And it just creates those little things. So I would be like super blunt and just, yeah, that's, I mean, communication was an issue in the beginning, but over, you know, some trials and tribulations, we've since learned that open communication and bluntness is the best way of doing things.

22:22And plus, I categorize them as the one and two. Like, I wouldn't say that they're three and four people. So that's why it's a hedge against that potential risk.

22:30Dave Asprey:And as you build your culture, too, it means that your whole team knows, oh, that's a three, this behavior pattern, we know it. And a working culture, whether someone comes in as a contractor, we all do it this way and if it's i think of it like a school of fish and they're all swimming right and if one of the fish kind of goes sideways the other fish kind of bring it back in right and if it doesn't work the whole thing can follow that fish that's why a narcissist can destroy a company culture relatively quickly because it makes everyone think they're crazy and it kind of scatters the cohesion but if you're aware of that and your team's aware of it then you're like okay that one's a category three right and we'll have those conversations on my executive team like oh looks like we didn't hire the right person that's a three they're out so you're saying that it's your experience as a young person as a child when you're growing up through your teens that basically determines your engine that you process information that you act by when you're older and if you're if you're determined as a category one or two by the time you're 25 that's probably who you're going to be for the rest of your life no it's entirely editable that's why I wrote heavily meditated.

23:40Dave Asprey:So here's how it works. All life runs the same operating system. And so most of our automated behaviors happen inside single celled organisms as well. And here's the algorithm. And this is kind of scary because your body follows these rules in a third of a second before your brain gets any notification of reality. And it's number one, they're all F words. Number one is fear. If something is scary, you got to run away from kill it or hide it. and your body, before you can think, is going to put an emotional weight on things that might be scary. And this is where a lot of the childhood stuff comes from.

24:18Dave Asprey:Because if someone yelled at you and it felt scary when you were three, when someone yells at you in a meeting, you're going to get a fear response and you're going to act emotionally instead of like an adult, right? So fear is first. Second is food. Eat everything, because there's been famines everywhere. A third of the average person's thoughts are about tacos every day. Literally. a third of our thoughts what's for lunch it's crazy but that's there and then the third F word all life has to do to stay around forever can you guess that one all life has to do is stay around forever to stay around for multiple generations oh I would just say habits like their main thing is to F it's an F word fear, food four letters fornicating yeah fertility I was gonna yeah fear yeah fear is pretty much the other F word but it's fear, food and fertility so every single thing in reality all of the time your body is filtering is it scary do i need to kill it can i eat it and can i hump it before your brain knows what's happening now is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that isn't one of those three things i have to think i mean yeah that would take a long time to there there isn't it always comes down to one of those three every single time it's not you it's an automated protection system to keep your meat alive as if your brain wasn't in there.

25:38Dave Asprey:And that is why all the childhood experiences, the bullies, the teachers, all the stuff that happens to us, you know, falling off a bike, it doesn't have to be a big thing. That sets up reactivity. And it's just your body trying to present reality in a way that will make your brain do what it wants you to do. So I developed something called the reset process. After 10 years of working with more than a thousand entrepreneurs at my neuroscience company, sitting down for five days and teaching them how to reprogram the operating system to not be triggered by things that are stupid. It creates incredible freedom.

26:11Dave Asprey:And I've had billionaires go through there. I've had all kinds of people, spiritual gurus, and it always works. And that's why I wrote the book because it costs 20 grand to come and glue electrodes to your head and have the whole team work with you. Or you can do the process that I'm giving away in the book at home. And what you do for that is saying, you know what? every time someone criticizes me, I stay up at night, you know, it really gets in there and I just ruminate on it. Great. You have a trigger, right? So someone criticized you and they're in charge because if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun.

26:43Dave Asprey:That means you're not in charge of yourself, right? So if I can make fun of something about you and it bothers you at all, you're just not in charge of yourself. You could think of your nervous system and the mitochondrial networks in your body, they're like a Labrador. Okay. This big floppy dog comes in, eats your couch, pees on the rug, chews up your shoes, barks and slobbers, right? And eats all the food on the table. Or that same dog, you put them through service dog school, comes in and sits there. You put a piece of popcorn on his nose and he just sits there and waits to tell. Your nervous system is one of those two things or somewhere in the middle.

27:17Dave Asprey:And the people who are most successful in life don't waste energy on flopping around and peeing on the couch and all that other stuff because they train their nervous system. And that is so much more elegant and efficient than what most of us are doing, which is you're sitting in the meeting and someone criticizes you or does something that pisses you off. But instead of reacting and swearing at them or punching them, which is what sometimes we might want to do, you smile. And you're like, oh yeah, that's okay. But it's like the fake smile, right? And everyone knows that you don't have congruence.

27:51Dave Asprey:Your inner state doesn't match your outer state. but at least you behaved yourself, which allows society to happen. And that works. It just takes a ton of energy and your life sucks. And you're like totally thinking about all these things that you don't want to think about because things didn't go the way you wanted. If you go through and instead of learning to manage emotions, learning how to turn off the alerts in the first place, you have a ton of energy. And then someone during an interview can't manipulate you. You can't be programmed. What percentage of problems with your mind can be solved with training the way that you respond to things, your motivation, stuff that directly relates to your brain versus fixing things with your body?

28:31Wow.

28:32Dave Asprey:That's a really hard question, and here's why. You have a certain amount of energy, and you pour it into the fear bucket, and then it goes from there into the food bucket, into the fertility bucket, and then the other two words are friend, which is supporting your community, and then into forgiveness, which is evolution and retraining yourself. So if you don't have enough energy because your body and mind are broken the way mine was in the 20s when I was 300 pounds and just had all these chronic fatigue problems and a lot of sickness, fixing the hardware is most important. But once you have enough energy, then the answer shifts and all of the problems can be solved by changing the way your threat detection networks work.

29:16Dave Asprey:It's just reprogramming things. And this explains like the Buddhist stuff. It explains like the Christian forgiveness. stuff, all of the things that all the different spiritual lineages that I've studied are trying to teach you. It's that. And the important trick is there's now a technique that lets you show the body this feeling is not the right feeling. So you re-engage the feeling, you flip a switch by finding something good that happened, even if you hated it, and then you go into another state and the body goes, oh, this negative feeling can't exist with this other feeling. So they cancel out.

29:50Dave Asprey:and they remain canceled out permanently. So like a real common thing, someone cuts you off in traffic, almost everyone gets pissed off at that, right? So if you went and you ran the reset process on that, the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, you just don't care. You don't feel good or bad. Oh, maybe they're on the way to the hospital, maybe they're not. It just doesn't matter. So there was a time in my life where the most exercise, biggest muscle in my body was the one on this finger. Like I might've been a hostile driver. I just don't care if someone cuts me off anymore. It doesn't matter.

30:19Dave Asprey:but it's not that I thought that it didn't matter. It's that I changed my programming in my body so I don't get the tightness in the gut. But that would be like a mental struggle, a flaw with your brain. It's not in the brain, it's in the body. No, that would just be reframing your beliefs about being cut off, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's all cognitive. So what the emotion happens is before the thought. And I can prove this. There's one third of a second where the body picks the emotion you're going to feel and the brain doesn't get the signal of what happened until after that censorship window.

30:50Dave Asprey:So your body is interpreting reality, putting emotion on it, right? So you could say, well, I got this negative emotion and then you catch it with your mind and go, oh, I'm going to reframe it. Dude, feeling a negative feeling about something that wasn't a threat and then catching it and then reframing it, it takes energy. I want to take that energy and use it for folding proteins or something. But it's not reality itself. It's the perception, right? And the perception is created by the mind. No, it's not. So what is the perception created? Created by a network of trillions of environmental sensors studded throughout all the cells in your body, except for your red blood cells, that are actively monitoring reality.

31:28Dave Asprey:And your mind has a one-third of a second delay on reality all the time. It's not your mind. Your mind is only getting what your body gives it. One-third of a second seems like a long time, though. It's called P300D. And it's really funny. If I do this, cloud my hands. Now, you know it took some amount of time for the sound to get there, and then you heard it. Right. That's a lie from your body. If we had electrodes glued to your brain, your auditory cortex doesn't get any signal at all for one third of a second, and it takes another 700 milliseconds before your prefrontal cortex can figure out what it was.

31:59Dave Asprey:So you have about a one second delay on reality that your body and mind erase from your consciousness because it's not useful to watch it. And you know how cats move? They only have 30 milliseconds. They're 10 times faster than us. That's why they can do all that crazy stuff because their lag time on reality is much faster. than ours. So you have a sensor in there. It's called your ego, but the ego is part of the operating system that keeps your body alive. Here's another example. You ever lean on a hot stove and then go, you know, the stove is pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand. No, we do.

32:32Dave Asprey:Your hand pulls itself away and you take credit for what your hand did, but you did not decide to move your hand. All right. Your body automatically did it. That system is the same one that's making you feel all that negative stuff about the guy who cuts you off in traffic. Yeah, but I feel like that touching a hot stove is way faster than one third of a second. It is because it's not your brain doing it. It's your body doing it. And then your brain taking credit for what the body did. Right. So what really happens to you, ah, right. It's way less than a third of a second. So what's going on there?

33:01Dave Asprey:It has to be the body making the decision. And you think you did it. It's just the body tricking you into believing that what it's doing is what you're doing. It has an entirely different consciousness based on fear, food, friend and forgiveness in order all the time. and it does that constantly before you ever get a picture of reality. So the one third of a second is only your conscious thinking, like interpreting the data? Think of it like your body catching the signal and holding onto the signal, right? And then one third of a second later, the auditory cortex in the brain, it gets the first electrical signal that says the sound happened.

33:37Dave Asprey:And the sound has already been in your body for a third of a second. And then after that happens to figure out what it is, it gets routed to the prefrontal cortex and that takes around 700 milliseconds is there a way to speed that up somehow there is when you're young under let's say under 18 it's a quarter second instead of a third of a second you still have the same process fear food all that stuff but it's you're you're faster this is why you have a faster reaction time when you're very young and if you're say a formula one driver or very highly trained you can train that so my reaction time is 240 milliseconds, like it would be when you're 18, because I'm a brain hacker.

34:14Dave Asprey:But having a faster reaction time doesn't mean anything. What's important is, if you were to pick up your phone and turn on the alerts from every app, it's like, boing, boing, but you can't use your phone. So you go and you turn off the alerts. You got to turn off the alerts from your nervous system so they don't get in the way. That's the trick. This might sound stupid. Are there drugs that you could take that would shut down that reaction time so it's like immediate? it? Well, even if you shut it down to five milliseconds, understand your body's job is to create a user interface on reality that's useful for you.

34:49Dave Asprey:Right. And this is why we hallucinate time into existence. We can go to quantum physics and we can prove mathematically time is a hallucination that we create. It's just a very useful one that lets us live. Right. Even space is a hallucination. And we can prove that, too. Inside this microphone, it's mostly empty space. We just all see it and perceive it because it's useful for our meat bodies to do stuff. So you could narrow the window. And there are drugs that make you faster like that, like modafinil would probably do that. I've been on that stuff for 20 plus years. But you're still going to have the pre-processing of reality because here's the thing.

35:22Dave Asprey:Your brain cannot handle reality. Right now, if you had to pay attention to every little valve opening and closing inside your body, making sure you breathe, you blink, and being aware of all the micro stuff happening and the environment, little air currents and how it feels and the hairs on your arm and all that, you couldn't do anything. So we have a beautiful distributed processing system that keeps the body alive as if we're not in there. It's the same thing that runs a bear or a skunk or a blade of grass, fear, food, always, always. That's what keeps life alive, right? So you just have to program it so that it doesn't feel fear except when it's real.

36:00Dave Asprey:And if you just do that, it frees up so much energy that when people do this process, 91.7 % report massive improvements in their relationships because now your girlfriend doesn't trigger you anymore. Like, oh, she's having some emotions. Okay, that's cool. It's not that you don't care. It's that it doesn't cause you pain, right? And then food. You learn how to do some intermittent fasting. And your body believes right now that if you don't eat every four hours, you're gonna die. And it feels like that. And you say, I'm starving. Well, you just teach the body, you're not gonna starve. You learn how to fast.

36:31Dave Asprey:And the amount of stress in the nervous system goes way down from when the stomach's empty. Now you have more energy. So stop wasting energy on alerts that are going off all the time over scary things or over hunger. And then there's another whole set of practices in heavily meditated around turning what I'll call lust or OnlyFans or whatever into a source of transformative altered states work. And the way we go in and we fix all these things is altered states. And you can alter your state with meditation, with technology, with neurofeedback, with breathwork, with psychedelics, with tantric sex.

37:03Dave Asprey:There's all these different ways. And all of these ultimately are, how do I change my state so I can get into my control panel settings and I can change the settings on my nervous system so it behaves itself? So would you say you are happier than the average person? And by how much? You know, I don't compare myself to other people very much. I'd have to think about that. AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you.

37:37Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at. You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask and it'll summarize along email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours.

38:07It also searches across all of your tools so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast.

38:34Dave Asprey:I would say that I am reasonably happy. And one of the things that makes for the best entrepreneurs in the world is capacity to handle suffering without breaking. And if you read Heavily Meditated, I've gone through a lot. I mean, losing a company you built that's doing hundreds of millions of your life's work, that was a lot. So I am more resilient than almost anyone I know. And I have periods where I'm happy and I have periods where I'm less happy, but I'm not worried about either one of them. And how much longer do you think you could live based on reframing a lot of these beliefs and going into that control panel?

39:13Dave Asprey:My book on longevity, I spent about$2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. And I just publicly said I'm going to live to at least 180. 80. And I picked that number because our current best is 120. I want to do 50 % better. I have 100 years to do it. And I have AI and I have PubMed, which isn't all of the research we've ever done on medical stuff. And we have all these tools available, all this knowledge that the person who made it to 120 didn't have. So I don't think 50 % better in the next 100 years is particularly aggressive. In fact, we've already extended life by six and a half years. Do you think your life though would be you would be able to do things at that point or do you think you'd be hooked up to a computer and like some some like beeping sound would be constant and your mind would be like uploaded to a computer that feeling better than i do now at 180 yeah now here's the thing when i was working in real estate staying organized was everything because you would have inbound emails phone calls buyers listing appointments you name it staying on top of it all was half the battle But that is where our sponsor, PipeDrive, is there to help.

40:22They are the number one CRM for small to medium-sized businesses built specifically to help sales teams streamline everything in one place. PipeDrive basically takes your messy sales process and turns it into a visual pipeline. You can see exactly where every deal is, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. And the automation tools are super helpful. You can set up reminders, schedule follow-ups, and even run drip campaigns so nothing slips through the cracks. Whether you're taking notes after a meeting or just reviewing your whole funnel, It's a super clean interface and it just makes sense.

40:50It's a simple, powerful CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. Over 100 ,000 companies are using it to stay focused and close more deals. And right now, you could try it for free for 30 days when you go to Pipedrive.com slash iced. And even better, there's no credit card or payment needed. Again, that's Pipedrive.com slash iced with the link down below in the description. Pipedrive.com slash iced. You could be up and running in minutes. Thank you so much, Pipe Drive, for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the podcast.

41:22Dave Asprey:Feeling better than I do now. At 180. Yeah. Okay, so I am highly, highly, highly skeptical when I hear it. I'm sure a lot of viewers are saying the same thing. I would love to be proven wrong because that sounds awesome to feel better than I feel right now at 180. But it just doesn't seem intuitive. And usually my intuition on something like this, I feel like could be like, give me like your best sales pitch on how you think you can live to 180 and feel better than you do right now. Well, most aging comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction. We didn't know much about mitochondria until the 90s. And even now we're learning more about them.

42:01Dave Asprey:And we have top doctors at Harvard, like David Sinclair, who's a friend who's been on my show a couple of times. It's like we can reverse aging in cells. I went down to Costa Rica and I did a stem cell procedure with focused ultrasound on my brain that reverses aging in the central aging clock in the hippocampus. So I opened up my blood brain barrier, put stem cells in there, and it totally works. I've had gene therapy that takes nine years off of the average person's measured age in a single injection. And we're just getting going on all this. Will you look younger too? Because I'm trying to, because all of these like scientific, like biomarkers and lab results, lab tests and stuff like that, for most people that aren't like super in the weeds, they won't be able to actually have something to meter if someone's getting older or younger.

42:53Here's biologically speaking. Here's what matters more.

42:55Dave Asprey:Do you wake up and your brain works and you have a ton of energy and your body doesn't hurt? Like if people have that, they're generally willing to have some wrinkles, right? Right. And right now, as you age, you cut your fingernails, right? Because they keep growing. And that's considered normal. Well, your skin grows as you age. And that's something that we haven't yet, but probably will in the next five years resolve. So we need a way to get a signal into the body that says, tighten up the skin. And a way that isn't, say, creating scarring or something, which is what we do today. So this is about communication with the cells themselves.

43:35Dave Asprey:telling them what to do. And I've worked with a couple of companies that are actually figuring out how to program a single photon to do that. So bottom line, between peptides, between signaling compounds, between the magnetic stuff, the lasers and things like that, we'll probably solve the, your tissues over time grow just like your hair grows and your fingernails grow. The skin growing thing that grows over the course of decades, that's annoying. But if I feel great and my body doesn't hurt, my brain is on fire and I have some extra skin, I don't care. How much have you spent on your body? About two and a half million bucks.

44:08What would you say has the best ROI on everything you've spent money on? Neurofeedback. What real results have you achieved from neurofeedback?

44:17Dave Asprey:I tripled the amount of electrical power that my brain can make. So what does that mean? Well, when your brain is making a brainwave, there's two things that we look at. One is how orderly are the brainwaves? Like, can my brain, can all of it decide to do the same thing at the same time? It's like having an orchestra that plays the same stuff in the right order versus just all over the place. And then the second one is how loud can it play? Or think of it like a wave. Do you want to be surfing the 100-foot wave or surfing the 10-foot wave? right you want your brain to be able to on demand make 100 foot waves which is a marker of youthfulness and a marker of power so you can train your brain to do that and i have trained my brain to do that so is that just like cognitive ability because i also read that you had claimed you'd increased your iq by like 20 yeah that's really simple okay if you want to increase your iq by an average of a dozen points you can do it in a month that's a horrible kind of training called dual in back training.

45:20Dave Asprey:And it is the most frustrating thing I think I've ever done. You play this impossible video game that just frustrates you constantly. And you do it for 20 minutes a day. And if you can make yourself do it for 20 days, which almost no one does, at some time around there, all of a sudden you can do it. And it doubles working memory in your brain. So most people can remember seven numbers, maybe eight. You can remember 16 after you finish that. And that'll increase your IQ. What's the game? Like, why is it so frustrating? Because it's a grid and you have to remember which squares lit up in order and what letter or number was inside it.

45:56And then four moves ago, on the top left quadrant, where was the color four moves ago?

46:04Dave Asprey:What was the number? And it sounds impossible because what our brains are wired to do is to remember either the order of things lighting up or the order of numbers. But when you just kind of torture the brain with failure, eventually the brain says, oh, I can remember both. And it's like turning on a new skill, a light switch. When I first did this years ago, I remember I had just finished it and I was sitting with 16 people and we were taking sushi orders to go. And I remembered everyone's order for 16 people. I'm not a waiter. And this was outside of my abilities, period. and it was effortless.

46:42Dave Asprey:It was just there. But does that translate to different results on like a real IQ test? Because isn't IQ like technically just different than working memory? Like it would be, you know, problem solving and you're, yeah. Increasing working memory will reliably increase IQ. That's why I claim about a dozen points from that. So I'm curious, what does it mean when my memory seems to be sometimes so bad that I can't remember what I did last night or the night before. It means that you're clinically dumb. Seriously, I started doing this journal that every day you're supposed to fill it out. And it's like things you're grateful for in the morning, what would make today great, highlights of the day.

47:27Sometimes I'll go, by mistake, two days without filling this thing out. And then I look back and I think, I have no recollection of the day before or the day before that. And I have to think to myself, what did I do? And I have to go through text messages and we have a camera outside and I look through the camera to see, oh, I left it this time. Oh yeah, I went there. What does that mean?

47:47Dave Asprey:Well, there's two kinds of memory. There's episodic memory, which is what you're talking about. Do you remember specific episodes? And then there's a kind of memory that's how things work and for facts, right? And different people have a different mix of episodic versus factual memory. So for me, I don't care what I did yesterday. I have no idea. It's not relevant. I have systems for that. And people I know, like, oh yeah, last year on July 2nd, I was doing this. I'm like, why do you know and why do you care? But that person can't remember mitochondrial function and which supplements to do. So I have this rich internal universe of biohacking and neuroscience and longevity and esoteric spiritual stuff.

48:28Dave Asprey:Because that's what I care about. So for you, if you're a typical entrepreneur, you have ADHD anyway. And ADHD is the gift that you only pay attention to things you care about. And I would argue you probably don't really care about what you did yesterday. You'd remember it. And there's nothing wrong with that. That makes more sense. Some people organize their mental hierarchy by time, others by function, others by human network. And this is foundational. It's like the systems architecture of your processing network inside your body. See, I went down the rabbit hole of WebMD and convinced myself I might have early onset dementia.

49:02Dave Asprey:No, you do not have that. How old are you? 35. It's not impossible. I would really worry about that. Actually? No, I'm just trying to see if I'm doing it. Yeah, I don't think you have that. I think that you bring your brain to a different playing field whenever you're working. And exercising that muscle for as long as you have just makes you completely oblivious to other things that some other people might be more in tune with. such as social dynamics, such as, you know, maybe episodic memory. But that's similar to kind of what you said. It's just Graham really cares about the things he cares about.

49:43And by virtue of that, it means he could care less about the things that you don't care about. If it's anything the Chinese embassy said, Jerome Powell said, any market fluctuations and know it, it's just... Graham is someone where if you're talking to him about something that he doesn't have interest in, his eyes immediately gloss over and he's just not listening whatsoever.

50:03Dave Asprey:So you probably have ADHD. I don't think I have ADHD. You don't? He has incredible focus. Hyper focus is part of ADHD. But it's also, it's weird because it's in such a way of like, like you said, it's easy to focus when you want to be focusing. But there are lots of times where he grinds on something that he may not be particularly passionate about, but he does like the grind. So I don't know what that necessarily means. Deep focus. Deep focus is a passion of mine. Okay. Okay, so deep focus is an altered state. Correct. So what if there were technologies to help you get into deeper focus more quickly?

50:37Dave Asprey:Love that. One of those is called meditation. But meditation takes too much time. The other thing is, around 35, your testosterone is low. AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built to stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses.

51:18Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at. You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot.

51:50To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com, or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast.

52:27Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

52:31Dave Asprey:It's high. It is high. It's high. It might be lowering now. Your free tea, have you mentioned it? Free tea is in the 800s. That's total tea. Your free tea is probably not above 20. I could, oh, you know what? I could find it. Yeah, check it out. I have it online. So there's two things that happen. One is testosterone drops. And for all of us, testosterone is low right now because of plastics and lighting and fragrances and circadian disruption, all kinds of stuff. So just our species is in trouble from a testosterone perspective. testosterone drives dopamine dopamine drives desire to focus and get stuff done so you get rewarded for pursuing a goal but if your testosterone is low you don't care and this is true in men and women because women have four times more testosterone than estrogen they just have a lot less testosterone than guys do so looking at that affects brain function in a meaningful way the other thing that happens is your body makes cortisol and adrenaline which stress hormones that all entrepreneurs have and all people have, but it also makes counter stress hormones called DHEA and pregnant alone, and to a certain extent, progesterone.

53:35Dave Asprey:And starting around 35, those go down, but the stress hormones don't. And it's worse in women than men. So in either case, if your DHEA is low, which happens as you age, well, welcome to aging. And 35 is about where you're like, oh shit, like it's not happening. So if you do the anti-aging stuff at 35, you don't have to dig yourself out of a hole by waiting until you're 40 or 45 or 50. So a major reason I started the biohacking movement is because the things that make old people young make young people powerful. And so the goal is to say, if I would have known about this when I was 20, I wouldn't have weighed 300 pounds because I would have known what to do.

54:13Dave Asprey:And I would have done all these things that are cheap and easy. And I probably would have not had all the dumb decisions I made too, if I'd have learned all the meditation stuff. So if you take a few steps now to keep your stress hormone and anti-stress hormone levels at the levels of a young person, you're going to like your life 10 years from now. And if you don't, you're going to be like, God, I have a dad bod. I said I wouldn't do that. I look, you know, I'm losing some hair and all that kind of stuff. So prevention is much easier. And it turns out that is exactly the same stuff that makes your brain work better and gives you more energy and more power.

54:46Dave Asprey:So it's like you You have nothing to lose from doing it. For those that want just a very, very quick kind of up-to-date background, you were very, very early on into tech. And you made, what was it, like$6 million by 26 and then lost it all by 28. You were also 100 pounds overweight at that time. What was, like, going on? What was your kind of life like? I used to have Asperger's syndrome. So it's on the autism spectrum. and I had ADHD and something called ODD. You ever heard of that one? Oppositional defiant disorder. It means that when someone tells you to do something, you automatically and reflexively tell them no.

55:25Dave Asprey:You can imagine by the time I graduated from high school how popular I was with the teachers and whatnot. And all of this comes down to hardware in the brain and threat networks and we'll call it the emotion and spiritual side of what's going on. So I reversed that and it took me years and a lot of money to reprogram my brain, reprogram my eyes, my ears, the way my tongue moves, the way my body moves. I had to redo all that. And then I had to learn all the emotional stuff that I never picked up as a kid, all the social interactions. Those are learned. Okay, so how did you lose Asperger's? Because isn't that kind of like a, like, you know, if you have it.

56:03Dave Asprey:It's permanent, right? People believe all sorts of weird stuff. Did you know that until Eric Kendall won a Nobel Prize in 1994, scientists believe that you were born with the number of brain cells you're going to die with and that you could never change your brain or grow it? It's funny. I still believe that. Like, you lose your brain cells and they'll never come back. I interviewed Eric Kendall when he was 84 on my show, and he's incredibly high-performance brain, happy, engaged. And yeah, he proved that neuroplasticity is real. and my cognitive enhancement book is based on that. So we believe all sorts of nonsense.

56:39Dave Asprey:Here's what's happening with autism and Asperger's, especially the higher functioning stuff. Something happens environmentally that lowers mitochondrial output dramatically and you can measure that and we find this in autistic kids. So now you have a low power brain. It just can't make enough electricity to do what a normal brain should do. And then because of autoimmune inflammatory stuff, which can be caused by many different things, the signals that come into the brain are staticky. So eyes don't work right. Ears don't work right. Touch doesn't work right. Right. So now you have a low power brain trying to make sense of the signals in the world around you, but the signals are dirty and it's low power.

57:18Dave Asprey:So you become really good at low power pattern matching. So what did I do? I fixed my mitochondrial networks and that gave me a huge amount of energy. And then I went through and I fixed my nervous system. So now I have a clean signal coming in. And then the hardest part was teaching my brain how to process the clean signal. And that took several years. And I wouldn't be able to do it without neurofeedback. Reprogramming my hearing and my eyes was so hard to do. But it is possible. It's just hard. And I know dozens of parents who've fully healed their kids from autism. It just takes a lot of work.

57:53What about for the autistic or kids with Asperger's who are just really smart, though? Yeah, I was a kid. They excel. Like maybe Elon Musk, who said that he's had Asperger's or has Asperger's.

58:04Dave Asprey:Well, you don't lose the pattern matching. See, that's the gift. So my brain evolved in a low power environment. It learned how to process that. And even studies of Einstein's brain, it's not that it was bigger. It said it was more efficient. So my brain, through suffering, learned to be hyper efficient at recognizing patterns, which is why I was able to create biohacking, why I'm a futurist. like that thing I did in my 20s I'm the first guy to sell anything over the internet like my Dave you weren't fat I'm like well here's my picture from entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23 in that article about hey guys this kid's selling t-shirts over the inter something or another have you heard of it like the words e-commerce had I knew that was happening because my brain does that I still have that but now I can make eye contact I have social networks I've got all my emotional stuff that works uh and I generally move pretty well although there's a couple little movement patterns I haven't quite hacked yet.

58:58You were one of the first people to sell something on the internet, right?

59:01Dave Asprey:No, I was the first person. The second one was the guys who ran virtual vineyards and the internet at the time was Usenet. We hadn't invented the browser yet. And you were selling the coffee t-shirt. It said caffeine, my drug of choice. It had this molecule on it. Caffeine is my drug of choice. Mine too. Exactly. I'm at least consistent on that. How did you make$6 million by$26 million and lose it by$28 million, though? Well, I knew that the internet was going to be a thing because I'd been on it since I was studying computer science and all that. First mover advantage kind of thing. So I went to Silicon Valley and I made a resume that said internet on everything.

59:43Dave Asprey:And I got two job offers. One was for the company that made the first internet data center. Google was two guys and two computers. Hotmail. started there. The Facebook was eight servers started there. I helped Salesforce when they were eight people. So we built 42 data centers and grew to, let's see, to 5 ,000 employees in three years. And the part of the business I started did a hundred million and quarter in revenue. So my stock options were worth$6 million. And that was awesome. Then there was a crash in the market because WorldCom lied about internet traffic and a bunch of financial nonsense.

1:00:18Dave Asprey:But the company went bankrupt because I attended board meetings and I was high enough up. I was blacked out. It was illegal for me to trade my shares. So I watched my wealth evaporate from$80 a share to$5 a share in less. So that was, it was horrible. But here's the thing. I was miserable and anxious all the time and had terrible brain fog. I had arthritis since I was 14. And I'm like, I just, I want to be happy. I want to do the things I'm supposed to do. So I tried being famous. I was in Entrepreneur Magazine, all these other things about early business on the internet. And then I tried getting married in my 20s.

1:00:56Dave Asprey:That didn't last very long. That was not a good thing for happiness. And then I tried being rich. And I completed all of those before I was 28. And when I had$6 million, I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And I didn't understand dopamine. I didn't understand brains. Because pursuing things makes you happy. Getting them never makes you happy. It's provable, right? So happiness is an internally generated state that's irrespective of what's happening in the world around you. So the real game that we're all playing is how do we change our state at will? Because you want to be the person who can meditate in the middle of a storm.

1:01:33Dave Asprey:You want to be able to say, you know what, the economy is doing this, social media is doing that, the government's doing this, and it didn't affect my internal state at all. So I'm going to do what I'm going to do. And you say, I like what happened. I didn't like what happened. Didn't affect my internal state because that's how you have the most power to change the world. That lets you show up for your friends and your family and your community, not being programmed, not being triggered, just being present and being thoughtful and being in charge of yourself. So why was I working 90 hour weeks back then?

1:02:06Dave Asprey:Because I was convinced it would make me free and happy. It doesn't do that. And I also was convinced that it would finally show the bullies from seventh grade that I'm better than you. That's not my motivation anymore. So what were like the next steps that actually started this healing journey of like where your body was in a rough shape, your brain was in a rough shape? What were the first things that you actually started to see made an improvement? The first thing was I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. I'm like, I wouldn't hire myself. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine.

1:02:41Dave Asprey:Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do. So I started doing all the things that, that I didn't believe in because I already tried antibiotics every month for 15 years for the stuff going on. I'd always get a strep throat and sinus infections. I had toxic mold. I didn't know it. I decided I was going to spend 20 % of my earnings, which were pretty sizable during some of that time on fixing my biology. And one of the things that happened, I was going to Warden Business School. I was failing out of my classes. So I went to a psychiatrist and I'd read Dr. Daniel Amen's first book about brain scans.

1:03:18Dave Asprey:And this is not the kind that I do at 40 years of Zen. This is a, it's called a spec scan to figure out where's metabolic activity happening. And I went into one of his doctors and said, I want to scan. And he said, oh, Tech Bro wants Adderall. I know this game. And he said, fine, we'll get you a scan. And I come back in a week later after they've injected me with radioactive sugar and he looked at my brain and he just kind of, his face is white. And he says, Dave, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me right now. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen.

1:03:50Dave Asprey:And by camouflage, what he meant was humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe. Some other animals like cats, like if they're sick, they'll run away and go die in a tree. So they'll get the other cats sick. Humans aren't like that. So there's people, you know, right now that are absolutely tapped out. They have the accelerator pinned to the floor all the time and they're slowing down and they feel helpless. There's nothing they can do. That was me. So that was the thing. And when he, when he said that, uh, I was like, finally, someone believes me.

1:04:24Dave Asprey:And I started taking smart drugs actually before that, that were helping. And he got me the drug that I actually had come to him for, which is called modafinil, which is an off-label treatment for ADHD. But I was dealing with chronic fatigue, not ADHD. And I learned what causes chronic fatigue and I learned how to reverse it. And so I don't have it anymore. And I have an incredibly powerful and fast brain that I never had in my twenties or 30s. And it's doable for anyone. It just requires curiosity, and it requires data, and it requires systems thinking, which is my gift. Was that the drug that Limitless was based off of?

1:05:02How close is modafinil to Limitless?

1:05:05Dave Asprey:When you take it, if you're paying attention, modafinil will slightly change the saturation of color. So if you watch Limitless, every time he's on the drug, everything turns kind of green. There is a shift in color perception from it. and I warn people, if you're a dick, modafinil will make you a faster dick, right? It makes you more and it makes it easy to focus and to get things done, but it's not a stimulant, even like coffee or like Adderall or something. It's a different feeling. And it is one of the most studied drugs. It actually does raise IQ. It increases reaction time, or sorry, decreases reaction time, makes you faster.

1:05:42Dave Asprey:And it has very few side effects. So if it works for you, 20 % of people don't really feel it. But if it works for you, it's kind of magic. And I've been on a low dose of that stuff pretty much every day for 20-something years now. And it's totally worth it. How do you—is it safe? Well, we've known about it since the mid-'90s. It's been very well studied. It has very few side effects. It's much safer than statins. It's safer than antidepressants. So why isn't everyone doing it? Well, there are a lot of people doing it. How many entrepreneurs do you think are not on it? I don't know. A single person is.

1:06:20Dave Asprey:I mean, maybe just they do and they just don't tell us. So I was concerned about that. So at Wharton, I'm like, guys, I don't want to be accused of doping. So I would actually put my modafinil and my Parastam, my other smart drugs, because cognitive enhancing drugs really do work. And so do the supplements. I make them today. But I put them on the desk in front of me. I'm like, guys, I'm not breaking rules, but I'm on these substances. And I don't think I would have graduated from business school without nootropics. It really made a difference. What do you think of Magic Mind? Boost energy and focus.

1:06:49Dave Asprey:Crush procrastination. See what's in here. Nootropics, matcha, adaptogens. I love adaptogens. This is really small. Let's see. Some olive oil. Cool. Ashwagandha. I like that. That's good stuff. Bacopa. Really good for dopamine. Rhodiola. One of my top all-time adaptogen favorite things. Got some turmeric, lion's mane, fossil serine. I like this ingredient list I just don't know how much of it's in there like how much rhodiol are you really getting I do a couple capsules of it and lion's mane can be really powerful L-theanine natural caffeine, vitamin C so it looks like a great list, saffron I just want to see the amounts of each one, like saffron is better than antidepressants I've heard the same thing as you, it really comes down to the amounts, and I've heard maybe something like they don't share the amounts because they don't want other people to copy their exact recipe of how they do it.

1:07:48I've been drinking these usually before the podcast. It's like an energy shot and they sponsored us and I've just been curious about it.

1:07:54Dave Asprey:It's got natural caffeine in it. It's going to make you feel good. Yeah. Unquestionably. And since you don't know how much caffeine, it could be 200 milligrams. This is 60. 60 milligrams. Okay, cool. So it's about a shot of espresso worth. Yes. So that's going to help you on a podcast. I understand the desire to have proprietary blends and I've done it myself because you're so tired of these knockoff clowns doing it. At the same time, a serious biohacker, like I know how much erodeal I take every day. And given the volume of that thing, unless it tastes really bad. Some people don't like it. I like it, but I like bitter things.

1:08:28Okay. So I would say it's kind of like a mixed bittersweet. I like it. It tastes very, like kind of a little sour, like very probiotic. Pungent.

1:08:36Dave Asprey:Okay. I would like that kind of a taste. list. And so it's a great ingredient list. I would just want to know, am I taking too much of one of those with all the other stuff I take, or is it the right amount? So what I would like to see them do is if someone reached out to customer support or something, most companies will say, all right, here's what's in there. And guys, if the people making magic minds hear this, anyone who wants to copy it can take it to a lab and break it down easy enough. So it's a pro and con thing, but for people who are going to be taking things, I worry, like people throw vitamin B6 in everything.

1:09:11Dave Asprey:I didn't see B6 in that, which is good. The form of B6 that we use is not even good for you. It creates problems for people because it's an unnatural form. But if it's in every supplement and every energy drink, you're going to get like numb feet and hands from that because you don't know how much you're getting. So I like to know what I'm taking, but I really like their ingredient list. Cool. Yeah, we've been taking this. I usually take it with us when we travel and sponsor the podcast. So if you guys are interested, we do You have a link in the description and I'll reach out to him. I'll see if we can find out the doses.

1:09:39It's a good idea.

1:09:40Dave Asprey:I like it. And I understand not putting it on the bottle. Just if someone asked their customer support, I would hope that they would say what it was. And just third time saying it, I didn't see anything on there I don't approve of on the ingredients list. So it looks like it's a good combination. What's the craziest biohack that you've tried? I've had my bone marrow taken out while I'm awake to get my stem cells. How painful is that? It's not very painful. I've heard that's like the most painful thing. They put lidocaine on it. The reason people say it's painful is it's scary, but it's not really painful.

1:10:14Dave Asprey:So like being burned is painful. This isn't like that. The weird thing is, you know, that that fingernails on a blackboard sound. Yeah. Imagine that coming from your skeleton, all of your skeleton. It's so creepy, but it's not pain. It's just the weirdest sensation you've ever felt. And you could easily like freak out about a weird sensation. But it's it wasn't that there was that. What did you do with the marrow? Blended it into my coffee, obviously. No. We got the stem cells. Put it on top of the steak. Yeah, I got the stem cells out and injected them into old injuries for longevity. And did it work?

1:10:46Dave Asprey:It helped. However, there's much more powerful stem cell stuff. I go down to a place in Costa Rica called RMI now, and they're the ones who reset my central aging clock. And I've had every joint in my body injected with stem cells twice because I would like to have those same joints when I'm 180. So preventative maintenance. When is the right time to start injecting stem cells? What makes a leader stand out? It's not just about taking charge, but about setting new standards and embracing bold moves. If you lead by example and live with passion, the Range Rover Sport is for you. Every model of the Range Rover Sport offers a unique blend of dynamic sophistication and sporting luxury.

1:11:22It's where refined elegance meets visceral power. With focused on-road performance and world-renowned off-road capability, this vehicle rises to every occasion. Experience the adaptive off-road cruise control that adjusts to your terrain and dynamic air suspension for superior agility and control. Plus, adaptive dynamics ensure smooth, composed handling by minimizing unwanted body movements. For those who elevate their desires and lead by example, the Range Rover Sport is so much more than just a luxury vehicle. It's a statement. And you could build your Range Rover Sport today at Range Rover.com slash US slash Sport.

1:11:55Again, that is Range Rover dot com slash US slash sport with the link down below in the description. Thank you, Range Rover, for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the podcast. A fun little story here. But when Jack and I started the iced coffee hour, we had to figure out everything ourselves from the best audio equipment to use, the best cameras, how to book guests. It was a challenge. Every day was a unique experience that we had to figure out ourselves. That's why if you're starting your own business, you know just how relevant today's sponsor is. And that would be Shopify. Shopify is basically your all-in-one business partner.

1:12:27They power millions of businesses worldwide, from major brands like Mattel and Gymshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. And here's a fun fact. If you shopped online in the US, there's a really good chance it was through Shopify, because they power about 10 % of all American e-commerce. Plus, what's great about Shopify is that you get access to a complete design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates to build a beautiful online store that perfectly matches your brand. And there's no coding needed. Not to mention their AI tools even help you write product descriptions or enhance your product photos.

1:12:56Shopify also makes marketing extremely easy with simple email and social campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling. Plus, they handle literally everything from inventory to shipping to returns. Basically, all of the complicated stuff you do not want to deal with. If you're ready to sell, you are ready for Shopify. Turn your big business ideas into... So sign up for the$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash ICH, all lowercase. Guys, it is just$1 per month. If you have a business idea, you want to turn it into a real thing. Shopify is the best way of doing it. And it only costs$1 per month with the link down below in the description or Shopify.com slash ICH all lowercase.

1:13:32Thank you so much, Shopify, for sponsoring this episode.

1:13:34Dave Asprey:When is the right time to start injecting stem cells? The right time to harvest and bank your stem cells is right now, because if you get your stem cells and you freeze them, they can grow new stem cells from your 35 year old stem cells. And then when you're 135, you still have young stem cells. That is a gift if you do that. And do you need to do it? If you have an injury, you should start, you should use the stem cells to heal the injury. So most of the time you're 35, there's a time you're playing soccer or biking and your shoulder got injured, your knee or something. Those things that are just like annoying now, if you don't do something about them, if you wait 15 years, those are the things that are likely to stop you from having functional movement over time.

1:14:16Dave Asprey:So you've got to really be aggressive about healing. How many times do you need to collect stem cells? Just once if you bank them. And what does it mean banking? How much does it cost? Where do you go? You go down to RMI. The reason that I go there is that procedure where they suck it out of your marrow. That is a big deal. RMI developed a procedure where they can use a pharmaceutical that causes the stem cells to go into your blood and they just take them out of your blood. So I have 2 billion of my marrow cells banked, which is way more than we could have sucked out of my marrow anyway, and we'll be gene editing those and reintroducing them with superpowers so that I can get even younger and more power.

1:14:52Dave Asprey:That sounds expensive. You'd be able to fly. It's going to, if you wanted to inject every injury you had and do your brain and do your face and while you're at it, might as well do your dick, it's going to run about 50 grand. For everything? Yep. And you said they can take it from blood? They can now, yeah. So they don't need to drill in a bone. They could just drop blood. No, the drilling in the bone was definitely an experience. Is one more or less effective than the other, like marrow versus bone or versus blood? Those actually are marrow cells in the blood. You can also get stem cells from your fat.

1:15:26Dave Asprey:It's just a different kind of stem cell. So if you go down there in one week, it's actually five days, they do all of that stuff. They'll get your fat cells, they'll get your marrow cells without going into your marrow. So you take a drug, makes your bone marrow, spit the stem cells out into your blood, then they just harvest them from your blood, which is easy. They filter it out. And that's safe. It's totally safe. It seems like that's not safe to have your bone marrow excreting stem cells into your blood while they extract that. Oh, it's totally safe. So your bone marrow is supposed to be making stem cells all the time.

1:15:56Dave Asprey:That's its job. So they just have a pharmaceutical protocol with a well-known drug that does that. Can you use someone else's stem cells? It's really sketchy to do stem cells in the U.S. because they usually take umbilical cells from like eight random women. And they say, oh, we tested them. And I know someone who's active in that industry who used his own product and almost died, couldn't walk for six months. So I'm concerned about viral stuff. So I don't use other people's stem cells unless it's from a single person and its culture expanded. And that's illegal in the U.S. The FDA won't let you do it.

1:16:32Dave Asprey:So I go to Costa Rica and I get it done. Why is it illegal in the United States? Because the FDA hates you and wants you to die. At least they did before RFK came in. Why? What's the benefit for the FDA not to allow or... As a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma, the FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And it's been that way for a very long time. So what do you think are the most over-prescribed drugs right now? Statins and antidepressants. How could you cure depression? Well, one of the easiest ways to cure many types of depression would be darkness.

1:17:12Dave Asprey:Get rid of bright lights at night and get some sunshine in the morning in your eyes. Circadian disruption is behind a huge amount of depression. And the second thing would be ketamine, which is one of the chapters in Heavily Meditated. Even a single dose of ketamine under medical circumstances with integration, it works on treatment-resistant depression. That's why about almost a year ago, we added ketamine to 40 Years a Zen. It's the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program where optionally you can come out, spend five days. We use a little bit of ketamine to create neuroplasticity in the brain so your brain can form new connections more quickly while you're doing this training to reset your operating system.

1:17:51So I want to give you some biohacks and I want you to tell us how effective they are from one to 10. 10 being very effective, one being not at all. It's not even worth it. Infrared light therapy. 10. Keto diet.

1:18:06Dave Asprey:Six. Sleep tracking. Just tracking it? Four, but hacking it's a good thing. Grounding. That's surprisingly a seven. Stem cells. Those are a 10 if they're done right. Cryotherapy. That's about a seven. Electrodes in your head for neurofeedback. In your head or on your head? On your head. Okay, yeah. So not Neuralink. So neurofeedback, if it's the right protocols, like the stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10. It's the most effective thing I've ever done. But there are some types of neurofeedback that don't do anything. Meditation. Four and a half. IV drips. Depends what's in it, but they can be 10 or they can be one.

1:18:45Dave Asprey:Cold plunges. Seven. Intermittent fasting. That's probably an eight. If someone wants the 80-20 and just get 80 % of the results with 20 % of the effort, what would your recommendation be in terms of biohacking? All right. A little bit of self-serving here. Yeah. You should come in to Upgrade Labs. This is my company that does that. We've got 30 locations opening, nine already open across the U.S. and Canada. And we have someone come to your house and draw blood and get your labs. And you come in and we get 187 million data points over the course of the year. And based on what your goals are, which are different for different people, and based on the state of your biology, we recommend a bunch of different biohacks in the right order to get you the results.

1:19:28Dave Asprey:A combination of supplements and red and infrared light therapy with specific frequencies or cryo or a bunch of things people haven't even heard of. And the results we're seeing are profound. It's just, it's not the same for everyone. Here's an example. If I were to ask you, what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to you? I would say waking up energized, feeling happy and energetic throughout the day, and then falling asleep quickly at night. So for you, it's energy and sleep. Really, yeah. What does healthy mean to you? I would say motivation and energy levels. Motivation and energy.

1:20:10Dave Asprey:Got it. So if I would ask another person, they'd say, I just want my knees to stop hurting. Right? And for someone else, it could be, I want my libido back. And someone else, I need to manage stress better. Or I want to lose the weight. Or I want to put on muscle. Or I want cardiovascular endurance. I don't have that anymore. are and it turns out that after starting the first biohacking center under Arnold Schwarzenegger's office about 11 years ago now which is now Upgrade Labs there's buckets and we use a survey because the problem is if you wanted to buy a laptop right now you want a laptop with a 500 inch screen that weighs one ounce and has a two-week battery life and infinite memory but it's not possible right So we all want all of those goals, but you want some of them more than others, and you don't know which ones you want more than others.

1:21:00Dave Asprey:So we use statistical analysis and AI to figure out your actual stack of prioritization. And we use that as the inputs to say, okay, if your true goals are these, what are we going to do to personalize it? And since you're both different biologically, your starting points are different, and it's the personalization that makes it happen. So it could be that for your energy, we're like, oh, you've got some nutritional stuff that was easy to pick up. So let's get you on some vitamin Dake and some minerals and all of that. And then we're gonna affect your energy with one set of technologies. And for you, we might say, you know, you actually have pretty good mineral levels right now.

1:21:40Dave Asprey:We don't need to worry about that for you. So we're gonna do this tech and then this tech. And you're both gonna get your goals, right? But if yours is more motivation, we're gonna recommend something like, I have a dopamine supplement called Motivation 101. I'd be like, that should be the one for you. For you, I'm not going to do it. Because what we talked about earlier, I'm going to put you on Brain 101 because you're working more on your memory. So different goals, different starting points, and this rich set of technologies. So for people listening, you'll never do all of the biohacks. I have done almost all of them because it's my job and because I'm willing to spend unlimited amounts of money on this.

1:22:16Dave Asprey:And what I want people to understand, you read any of my books, especially heavily meditated, you're going to go through it and go, there's like 75 different things here, but that one stood out. And that's what intuition is about. You can say, oh, that makes sense. I want to do that. Right. So for you guys, I'd be like, you better get your testosterone and your thyroid levels. Everybody needs those just as a starting point. That's probably the easiest thing to do for most people. The amount of people with subclinical hypothyroidism right now is insane. And that means your body won't make enough energy.

1:22:46Dave Asprey:No wonder you're stressed and tired and anxious. and you can't sleep. Your thermostat has turned too low and you try to push the accelerator and there's nothing in there because you're limited. So you fix that. And then we look at your testosterone. Oh, that's low because you're alive. For almost all of us, it's low. So then we fix that with lifestyle or with medications or with nutritional supplements, whatever it takes to get your levels where they should be for a healthy 25-year-old. And we pin them there. So when you're 125, you still have a 25-year-old's level of energy and motivation. And from there...

1:23:15AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at.

1:23:46You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com.

1:24:17Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast.

1:24:45The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

1:24:56Dave Asprey:This guy's the limit. Do you want to train your brain, right? Do you want to train some other thing in your body? Let's just say, though, that you're a viewer with maybe like 200 bucks and you're like, you know what? I really just want to spend some money to get the right supplements, to get a red light or maybe a sleep mask. Gotcha. Okay. $200 budget. it. First thing you do is go to Amazon and you buy some cheap red LED light bulbs. And then at night, as soon as the sun goes down, the lights in your house are red. And you take another 20 bucks and you buy blackout curtains. And in your bedroom, it needs to be pitch black, no light leaking around the curtains and no LED lights.

1:25:34Dave Asprey:Tape them over inside your bedroom. There's a study out of Japan that shows that the amount of street light that leaks around curtains in the average city increases depression by 69%. So we have a circadian problem. These are one-time changes you make. Okay, I have dimmer switches and or red lights in the evening, and I have a blacked out bedroom. And you will find your entire life changes. Because now when you sleep, your body actually does what it's supposed to do. And right now, if you look at a bright screen, you have the bathroom lights on for five seconds, it doesn't matter. The timing system in your brain, in all of history, there's never been bright white lights in the middle of the night.

1:26:13Dave Asprey:We had a full moon and we had fire and that was it. And so when you turn on those bright kitchen or bathroom lights or whatever, the timing system goes, it must be daytime. And then it starts turning things on that are supposed to be turned off. And it's driving depression and anxiety and drops in hormones and all kinds of weird stuff. It's easy to fix and it's way less than 200 bucks. So you're saying optimizing sleep basically. Optimizing light is more important than sleep. And don't wear sunglasses during the day outdoors. They're bad for you. And that's just because you don't want to trick your brain into when you should be on or off or alert or not.

1:26:47Dave Asprey:Light is a nutrient that's as important as food. And it's like we just put junk lighting everywhere. It's like we replaced all of your food with Twinkies and that's what LED lights are. Why did you say that people that sleep for six and a half hours live the longest? Because that's what the data shows in three large studies of more than a million people over multiple years. How would the data show that? A lot of like I feel the best when I get like eight and a half hours of sleep, maybe nine hours of sleep. Like the next day, my mental acuity, my CPU is functioning at a quicker pace and I just feel better.

1:27:19I can hit the gym harder.

1:27:22Dave Asprey:That makes absolute sense. I am not recommending that you cut your sleep to six and a half hours. That's terrible. What the data really shows is that healthy people need less sleep to recover. So if you wake up fully recovered in six and a half hours, great. If you need eight and a half hours to fully recover, either you're working out really hard or some systems aren't optimized. So if you just wake up fully refreshed, feeling like your CPU got the upgrade, and you did it in six and a half hours, that would be better than eight and a half, right? That would be the goal. But do not cut your sleep back to try and live longer.

1:27:54Dave Asprey:That's a terrible strategy. The data is very clear, though. It's more causation then. It's like if you are healthy, then you just need less sleep. Correct. The sleep is kind of the metric that they use to reverse engineer. Exactly. Okay. Right. The data is very clear, though. People who sleep eight hours, eight and a half hours, they die more from all cause mortality, meaningfully more than people who sleep seven hours. So how do you get the perfect night of sleep? This is awesome. The short answer to that is free. It's just go to sleepwithdave.com. And everything I know about sleep is there. I just needed a URL.

1:28:28Dave Asprey:What sort of website is this? It's my only fence. No, it's just the most memorable marketing URL of my entire life. And it makes me laugh every time I say it. But yeah, Sleep With Dave has all this stuff on it. And again, I'm not selling anything. Jack has sleepwithjack.com. Nice. It's just a form you could fill out. It's$10, guys. Nice.

1:28:46The short version to get good night's sleep, have dinner before the sun goes down.

1:28:51Dave Asprey:That's critical. Don't have any calories after that. And then have darkness after the sun goes down. And I'm staying in a hotel here in Vegas. So I have glasses that we created for sleep that tell the brain it's nighttime, even though we can see it. So I was out at a casino last night. I'm wearing glasses. They look like they're red, but there's multiple layered optical filters. It's called True Dark. And those things we published in a medical journal that 15 minutes of wearing those shifts the brain into the same state as advanced meditation. So if you want to go get a good night's sleep, you need darkness or red light before bed.

1:29:26Dave Asprey:You need a lack of food before bed. And when you lay down for sleep, you want to set your thermostat to 68 or less because cold is a signal to tell your body that it's time for sleep. And then you want to take a few deep breaths before you go to sleep. And your out breath needs to be twice as long as the in-breath. So you fill the lungs completely like, and then another one. So it's really full. And then you breathe out through the nose really slowly and do that three or four times. and that will cause your heart rate variability to be higher at night. If you do those things, you're probably gonna get a good night's sleep and there's a handful of sleep supplements that I talk about on that site that work for some people more than others.

1:30:08Dave Asprey:If you wake up at three or four in the morning routinely and you can't go back to sleep, you have a blood sugar issue, a little bit of raw honey and or MCT and or collagen before bed will fix that. So I was about to ask, I get up, it seems like almost every single night at like two to two 30 in the morning and it's usually I got to go pee. And or I'll wake up briefly and I'm thinking to myself, I would feel better if I just went to the bathroom so I don't have to think about having to go to the bathroom. And then I do when I go back to bed. But it's such a recurring thing. Why is that? When you go back to bed, do you have racing thoughts or you just go back to sleep?

1:30:43Dave Asprey:Usually go right back to sleep. Okay, good. So you just have a pee problem and you may have a little bit of prostate inflammation. So one thing is don't drink so much before bed. That would be a good thing, right? That could solve the problem. Right. And in order to do that, having electrolytes in your water, having more salt. Yeah. So I do LMNT in my water and I do one of those hydrogen tablets. Perfect. Mixed with creatine. Great. And then I. That might be the issue. Creatine before bed is a big problem for some people. That's usually when I do it. It's too stimulating. So I do creatine in the morning and there's great evidence for creatine.

1:31:15Creatine does wake me up a little bit. Really? Yeah. Usually I forget. If I take it before the gym, it can actually hype me up a little bit before the gym. So I was looking online and said, no, there's not really any correlation between when you take it. I think it depends on the person.

1:31:28Dave Asprey:It's funny when they do correlation studies versus mechanistic studies, I tend to like to know how things work. So because you have more ATP, what happens with creatine in many people, but not all, is it reduces sleep drive. So if I take creatine, I'm going to wake up at 4 a.m. and I don't want to go back to sleep and I get up. Now, that's not a good thing unless I got enough sleep. But if I don't take creatine that night, I won't do it. And there's ways to overcome that with supplements and things like that. But just shift your creatine timing. Drink less water before you go to bed. Usually what it is, not all the time, but usually between 8 to 10 p.m., I'll realize I didn't drink any water throughout the day.

1:32:08Oh, okay. And so then I have a big glass. That's your issue. But it's not all the time. And so even when I don't do that, I'm still waking up at 2 something.

1:32:14Dave Asprey:What you may find is that if you're waking up some nights having to pee urgently, not others, there's two things that are causing that. One of them is if you're eating plants that have high amounts of oxalate, oxalate causes razor sharp calcium crystals in your urinary tract and it makes you have to pee. If you're getting toxins in your food, your body's like, let's eliminate those. It makes you have to pee when your bladder's not full. So if you wake up and you have to pee and you only pee like a cup, that was dumb. That was your body getting rid of toxins. If you wake up and your bladder is full, then that was really having to pee.

1:32:48Dave Asprey:So toxins are what makes you have to pee before you really have a full bladder. I always experience like, I feel like I have to pee so bad. And then I go and I like hardly pee. I'm like, okay, this is weird because. That happens all the time. Every road trip we take, he's got to pee twice. That's not true. On the road trips, it's because I just, I just, I'm always drinking something. So you're like the woman on the road trip? That's not true at all. He's worse because he doesn't drink anything. Like he's like a camel. It's actually, the amount of things this guy needs to survive is incredible.

1:33:20Very little. Yeah. He maybe, he could survive probably on like 700 calories and like half a pint of water a day. Wow. It's probably true. Yeah. That's hilarious. But for me, like, so you're saying it's releasing toxins?

1:33:32Dave Asprey:Well, if you were to drink moldy coffee, let's just say. So I'm kind of famous for making coffee without molding it. The mold that's found almost universally in American coffee is called OTA. It's the toxin. It survives roasting and brewing. I got 36 studies I didn't pay for that support what I'm saying. So that makes some coffee people mad. Sorry, guys. So if you drink coffee and then you have to pee an hour later and your bladder is empty, it's because OTA is a specific toxin for the kidneys and bladder. and the body is pulling water out of your blood and it's diluting the toxin and it's giving you a signal to pee.

1:34:07Dave Asprey:And then you pee and there's nothing in there, right? If you drink coffee that doesn't have mold in it, you don't have to pee afterwards. That's your signal. So one of them is mold. The other one is this oxalate thing. If you were to eat two big bowls of raspberries, some almonds, some spinach and kale, you're gonna have to pee really urgently because you just sliced up your urethra. and I've worked with so many people who have this problem. And it happened to me too. Back when I was a raw vegan, I was eating one or two baskets of raspberries every day. I had to pee 20 times a day urgently and it drove me crazy.

1:34:42Dave Asprey:I went to a bunch of doctors. Finally, one stuck a camera in a place where cameras should not go on men. And they were like, we don't know. And I tracked it down after a year. It's oxalate and raspberries. So this is a common plant toxin and all these superfoods that people are eating, they're not superfoods. I'm very suspicious of plants. I do eat some plants. I just know which ones don't have the ability to make razor-sharp crystals inside my urethra because that sucks. So what are the worst foods that people could eat or that do eat? Aside from ultra-processed nonsense and omega-6 oils and all that, beets, spinach, most nuts, kale, raspberries, and this pains me because I love them, sweet potatoes and white potatoes.

1:35:22Why sweet potatoes and white potatoes?

1:35:25Dave Asprey:They're high in oxalate and white potatoes are high in lectins. And unfortunately, sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes, but they're both very high in oxalate. So if you're going to eat a little bit of those on occasion, fine. But most people get such a large burden. Oh, and green tea and dark chocolate are also very high in oxalate. So most people are taking in so much that it's building up crystals throughout their bodies. Like, oh, my body hurts all the time. My muscles 80 % of people at autopsy today have calcium oxylate crystals in their thyroid. So this is something, I wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet in the first chapter.

1:35:59Dave Asprey:I under-indexed how important this is for aging and for function, for cognitive function, for having joints that work. So calcification of your tissues over time is something that's crappy as you age. This is a major driver of that, and it's easy to fix. Don't eat so many stupid plants. So what's the best food for someone to eat if they're going to have a diet seven days a week, what would you do? Grass-fed ribeye. So I'm not a carnivore supporter in that I don't think most people should eat only meat for long periods of time. But I would say for someone listening, if you were to go carnivore for two to four weeks and watch all the things that improve in your life, that's a pretty clear signal that some of those plants are not good for you.

1:36:40Dave Asprey:So what do you do? then you ask your favorite AI tool which of the plants are lower in oxalate or other plant toxins, and it'll tell you. So I'll eat arugula. I'll eat lettuce. I'll eat some celery, but not too much, right? And I'll eat white rice, which has very low toxins in it. What about broccoli? Broccoli's okay. I wouldn't eat massive tons of it unless you have a problem with sulfur metabolism, which a lot of people do. So if you eat broccoli and it doesn't make you fart, you're probably fine. What about things like peppers, mushrooms, turkey, chicken? Peppers, I wouldn't eat them. They're delicious, but they're a nightshade vegetable.

1:37:20Dave Asprey:They have oxalates and they have very high levels of lectins. Some people tolerate them better than others, but they're not an ideal food. In fact, for most of recorded history, we believe that peppers and even tomatoes were deadly to even touch. So they were ornamental plants. Oh, we can eat those. So the cool thing about being human, you can eat all sorts of crap and survive, which is great during a famine. But if you regularly eat famine foods, toxins build up in your body and it takes a toll over time. I prefer to have animals detoxify the plants for me and then I eat the animals. So grass fed meat should be number one.

1:37:56Dave Asprey:Dairy protein, if you tolerate it. I do sheep because I don't tolerate cow very well. Dairy fat, olive oil and some plants. I just listed some of the common ones. And some carbs. Eat some fruit, but not all fruits great. Raspberries are not good. Blueberries are very good. Pineapple's not a great choice because of oxalate. Kiwi's not a great choice. If you eat one of them, it's probably not a problem. But a lot of people are eating huge amounts of fruit that never existed in all human history. They're moderate in oxalate, relatively high in starch. They're not great. So it sounds like the ideal diet is really just grass-fed beef with rice, blueberries add some arugula add a bunch of oregano and rosemary and herbs that are really good for you if you ate that you would live a very long time and be very happy what about I would say 75 % of my days I eat I go to Chipotle I get a bowl with white rice black beans double chicken pico cheese and lettuce that's it ditch the black beans.

1:39:07Dave Asprey:They're full of omega-6 fats. What about pinto? Can I get the refried or the pinto one? Pinto are better than black. Black beans are one of the highest plant toxin forms of beans. I would stay away from those, but I wouldn't want to eat very many beans either. I don't think they're pressure cooking them, are they? If you're going to eat beans, they need to be pressure cooked. Otherwise, they just shred your biology. Most restaurants do not know how to cook that stuff. And beans are poverty food. They're great to survive on, But look at where beans were invented. Go down to Peru. I've been down there.

1:39:36Dave Asprey:The average height is like five feet because you can survive on it, but it's not enough protein. It's not a complete protein. I like your double chicken, but I'd rather do double steak. Have you ever done anything that was dangerous in terms of biohacking that you later found out or maybe wanted to push the limits a bit? Oh, yeah. I've almost died a couple times. How? Well, one time I did something called a hydrodissection of my vagus nerve. It's when they inject lidocaine around the vagal nerve on your neck, and it floats it so it's not stuck to your tissues, and this is good for your sympathetic nervous system.

1:40:17Dave Asprey:But we'll say the doctor had me leave the clinic much earlier than I should have, and on the way to the airport, I seized up in the back of an Uber, passed out and would have died if I didn't have an ER doctor riding the car with me who stabbed me with an EpiPen and saved me. And yes, I did pee the Uber seat. That was uncomfortable. What about anti-aging products? Are those mostly a scam or what's good? What's worth it? When you look in the world of longevity and anti-aging, I mean, I've run a longevity nonprofit, I think from about 27-ish till about 32 in Palo Alto, learning from like the masters of the field before longevity was as big of a thing as it is now.

1:40:59Dave Asprey:There are enormous numbers of products that really work. And there are enormous numbers of products that work for some people, but maybe not for you because of the personalization. And there are a bunch of scammers out there making stuff. So you really can't say anti-aging products. It's like saying, does breathing work? Well, are you breathing exhaust or are you breathing clean air? There are different things, right? So I would say that there are profoundly effective longevity products with clinical studies that back them. One of my favorite companies there is called Qualia. And Qualia has way more researchers and scientists than most supplement companies.

1:41:33Dave Asprey:And I've helped on some of their formulations. And their stuff works. I mean, take it, you measure it and they only launch a product after they have clinicals that show it works so i'd say there are legitimate products that truly work and there are some people who are saying well i threw this crap together and i have a third-party white label manufacturer and i'm gonna pretend like it's a good product and this is a problem in every industry somebody makes something good and then somebody makes a crappy disposable version of it that looks about the same and sells a knockoff and so what's what's worth it for people to buy then like what specific things if they want to either stay or reverse aging what age are you me well i mean the the person i'm asking for because someone who's 65 and someone who's 25 should allocate their resources very differently right so the lowest return or the lowest cost highest return on investment would be put some sea salt or some electrolyte in your water and have some creatine because those are so cheap.

1:42:35Dave Asprey:Take vitamin Dake. And that's vitamindake.com, D-A-K-E. And that's a specific mix of fat-soluble vitamins that direct minerals into your cells. And on that same site, take minerals 101. Because if you're deficient in minerals and fat-soluble vitamins, nothing else works. You go to the gym, you can't make muscle because you don't have zinc. So you just need to get these as foundational. And everyone is deficient in minerals today because our soil is deficient and because superfoods suck minerals out of your bones and it's dumb. So those are foundational for every one of those are cheap, right? And you're saying, okay, what am I gonna work on next?

1:43:07Dave Asprey:So you might wanna look at a cognitive enhancing supplement like the Brain 101 or like the Qualia product called Qualia Mind, right? And then you might wanna look at a sleep product, right? Because what is it you're trying to optimize? And the mistake people make is they just say, oh, I'm getting overwhelmed. There's just too many things to do. Pick a goal and work on that, right? And take some supplements that do that. If you want foundational longevity stuff, My book, Superhuman, goes through the seven different systems in the body that need maintenance if you want to live a long time and which supplements or practices to use for each one.

1:43:42Dave Asprey:But some of them are very cheap, like intermittent fasting. It's cheaper than eating breakfast, so not eat breakfast. There you go. That's going to create autophagy in your cells, right? So I'm very respectful of the amount of energy, the amount of suffering, the amount of time, and the amount of money that people are willing to do in order to get a benefit. And what about when it comes to something like tap water? When you're at a restaurant and they say, do you want tap or, you know, bottled? I just say I want the glass bottle bottled water because that has no microplastic in it to speak of.

1:44:14How bad is tap water for you? It's really bad. I've always been told it's good for you because it has like all the minerals in it. It's not like totally filtered. It has things in it that would be beneficial for you. I've always just drank tap water.

1:44:29Dave Asprey:So if we were to measure the tap water you're drinking, it does have dissolved minerals from 100-year-old plumbing with lead in it, with all the stuff from the PVC. There's abundant levels of atrazine, which basically makes frogs into hermaphrodites, and it messes with your testosterone in a major way. It has birth control pill residues left in it. It has antibiotics left in it. But are those in any amounts that will actually make a difference to you? Unfortunately, they are. So why can't that just be taken out by these tap water companies? Well, if they take it out at the central plant, it'd be very expensive.

1:45:09Dave Asprey:And then the pipes are not at all clean. So the best thing to do is get a reverse osmosis unit and take it out before you drink it. And if you go to a restaurant, that's one of the many reasons not to go to restaurants. But if you're going to go to a restaurant, don't drink the tap water. Either don't drink any water, which seems to be your thing, or drink bottled water. I drink very little water, but then the water I do drink is tap water. Wow. So is that worse? It's not a good call to do it that way. Drinking water is good, but most people, like, eat glasses a day. Did anyone ever tell you how big glasses are?

1:45:41Dave Asprey:I was assuming it would just be, like, a cup. They never tell you. It's complete made-up bullshit. And many people, they drink water because they think they're supposed to, and they're actually harming their performance. I don't drink water without salt or minerals in it, ever. and it means I need less water and it means my brain works all the time. But if I drink two big glasses of water with no electrolyte in it, I can feel a difference in my performance. My body's like, you bastard, you just diluted all the salt in my cells and we're essentially salt batteries. So salt is profoundly good for you.

1:46:11Dave Asprey:And if you're gonna drink tap water, you should filter it, man. Like why take the toxic hit? What do you think of Brian Johnson? I knew Brian before he got into longevity because of his work with Kernel and neuroscience. And it's funny, my big campaign for my longevity book was I spent$2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. I'm going to live to 180. And he's come out and I'm, I'm very happy that he's spent reports say$25 million on marketing the longevity movement. We need lots of voices in longevity. So generally, I like Brian, I don't do all the things he does. And I don't know that I like all the metrics he uses that I have some different ones, but generally inspiring people to do things that make them live longer is a really good thing.

1:46:57How do you eat when you're traveling?

1:46:59Dave Asprey:I bring a hundred grams of animal protein powder with me when I travel because it's hard to get enough protein on the road. And then I usually intermittent fast in the morning. I make danger coffee in my own hotel room and I have that for breakfast. Sometimes I'll put protein in it, which doesn't taste great, but I don't care. And then I'll eat one or two meals a day. Like today I've had nothing but coffee. And it's, what is it? Like 2.30? So. I've had nothing but coffee today too. I've had nothing but a new tonic today. There you go. There you go. Before I get on the airplane, I'm going to find somewhere that has steak and I'm going to go eat probably a pout of steak and I'll get on the airplane and fly home.

1:47:38Dave Asprey:So that's my most important food is protein and fat and everything else is optional. How bad is alcohol for you? Alcohol is really bad for you. It is so pro-cancer, pro-aging. It's just not a good choice. So I have a rule for alcohol. I only drink alcohol that's older than I am. That means it gets progressively more expensive and harder to find as I get older. So it's rate limiting. The reality though, like if I'm going to have sushi and I have a couple shots of high-end sake with it, who cares? but if you're having it once a week, it's actually affecting your performance for multiple days. And everyone I know is like, you know, I'm gonna go a month without it.

1:48:20Dave Asprey:Like, wow, my life really did get better. But if you're gonna drink, there's a bunch of stuff I've put out there over the years. I put out a big infographic on alcohol. Distilled spirits are much less toxic than wine and beer because you're relying on technology to get out the impurities, but wine and beer, you're relying on your liver and kidneys to do it. and if you're going to do it, you want to take glutathione, which is a supplement that protects the liver from alcohol-induced toxicity. 20 % of the toxic byproduct of alcohol comes from liver metabolism. The other 80 % comes from your gut bacteria.

1:48:54Dave Asprey:To fix that, there's a genetically engineered probiotic called Z-biotic, and you take a little shot of that, and for 24 hours, after you take that, your gut bacteria won't make those toxins from alcohol. So if you're going to drink, number one, it's not a great idea, but drink the hard stuff, take Z-biotic, take glutathione, and take some extra electrolytes, and you'll be fine. You do that after you drink? You do the Z-biotics ahead of time. You do the glutathione before, during, and or after. And the electrolytes should be before, during, and after. And how much of this is in your control versus genetics?

1:49:32Because some people just seem to have zero effect on alcohol. They could just drink whatever they want to, and they are fine the next day. Yeah, they call them alcoholics. So with those people, I mean, there are people like that, like that can't function without, you know. Oh, no, I'm not saying can't function without, but like if I have more than two drinks, I feel it the next day. I am tired. I'm lethargic. I lose my motivation. It's not worth it, but other people could have 10 drinks. When you were 26, could you do that? Not really. It really started affecting me early, like way earlier than anyone else.

1:50:06I still feel fine. Like I maybe get hung over one out of every 10 times I drink.

1:50:14Dave Asprey:Most people until their mid-20s handle alcohol really well. It's still ruining your brain, and there's plenty of studies about that. But you don't feel it yet because you have just a lot of resilience. So there is a genetic difference. and there's also just a how good is your body at clearing toxins and some of that's genetic some of that is what else is in there so let's say you stopped drinking tap water and you rehydrated your body so that your cells are better like if you came to upgrade labs we'd look at your cell hydration and be like and we'd show you what was going on and make it a performance enhancement goal for you so let's say you start doing your electrolytes in water you know three times a day you might be much more resilient to alcohol.

1:50:56Dave Asprey:So there's a lot of environmental variables but you might be Asian, you're not gonna tolerate it because there's an Asian gene that makes you not do it. You might have MTHFR, which I do or some other things that make it harder to process toxins. You could have a leaky gut. So the more problems you have, the worse alcohol is for you. But if you have no problems to drink alcohol it's still causing damage that we can prove and increasing your risk of cancer. So I would say instead of alcohol you should do what we do in Austin. Like eat half a gram of mushrooms at a party. it's probably good for your brain.

1:51:25Dave Asprey:It's certainly better than alcohol for your brain and has much less of a downside. How bad are fried foods for your brain? Depends what you fry them in. If they're fried in canola, soybean, and corn, and vegetable oils, they are so bad for your brain. I would actually smoke a cigarette before I'd eat a plate of French fries because the cigarette, even though it's burning stuff and is bad for your lungs, that only creates about eight hours of inflammation and you're gonna get two days of inflammation from the French fries. I just don't eat fried stuff unless I fry it in my own oils. But why are so many people using this sort of oils then?

1:51:57Because they're cheap, right?

1:51:59Dave Asprey:Back in about, was it the early 90s? There was a big campaign from the canola oil and soybean oil companies like Crisco. And they're like, let's compete with tropical hard fats. Everyone used tallow because it was a very stable oil. And tallow is really good for you. It gets rid of fatty liver. So all the French fries were made with that and people were fine. And they switched to these crappy oils and the obesity rates have been going up ever since. So they do it because it's cheap. I invested in a company called Zero Acre Farms about five years ago that's doing a fermentation-based oil that's entirely heat-stable that costs less than soybean and canola oil.

1:52:41Dave Asprey:and assuming that their plan works, we should be able to free up millions of acres of prairie land in the U.S. and return it back into just being nature instead of being row after row of corn with dead soil. So we have a big challenge ahead of us to fix our food supply. And one of them is we need a source of oil that doesn't go rancid when you cook it. And that means it needs to be saturated or at least monounsaturated. And we can do it with tech. We just have to have the motivation, which means we talk about the problem. What the big food industry does they just try to say there's no problem despite all the evidence.

1:53:14Dave Asprey:And thank God there's enough other people sharing this. Vani Hari, Food Babe, is a good friend. RFK is out there doing this. Callie Means, Jason Karp. These are all friends. And we're out there changing the food supply right now. They just pulled all these petroleum dyes that had no business in food. They just announced they're going to fix that. So I'm a part of that small group of people who's just pushing and pushing and pushing on how do we fix this and that oil has to change yeah i saw that bill that they're trying to ban food dyes no just petroleum-based food dyes and some other toxic ones what is that nicotine so what is the i you know it's so funny i see a lot of people like alex hormosi yeah he likes chewing nicotine gum because he says it it helps him i focus like it's so funny because growing up everybody learns that nicotine is like well maybe not nicotine in a vacuum but So like, you know, the way by which.

1:54:08Yeah, we all assume that nicotine is just really, really bad. So what do you have to say to like that?

1:54:14Dave Asprey:10 years ago, I found a guy named Dr. Nicotine. At least that's what I call him. His name is Andrew. He's from Vanderbilt University. He published the first study in 1986 showing that pharmaceutical nicotine, but not smoking, reverses Alzheimer's disease. And he's come out with like a dozen papers since then. and I've been sharing on the podcast, it's in my brain book, it's in my longevity book. Nicotine is neuroprotective. Nicotine mimics exercise in the body by enhancing PGC-1-alpha. Nicotine was protective against COVID for a very specific reason. Nicotine helps with pericarditis. Nicotine reduces your risk or treats Parkinson's and MS in addition to Alzheimer's.

1:54:57Dave Asprey:It's a mitochondrial stimulant. And if I was gonna get another tattoo, if this one's caffeine, this one would be nicotine. I don't smoke. Tobacco is not good for you. Low-dose pharmaceutical nicotine is an amazingly effective longevity molecule, and it's a major nootropic. Are there any downsides? Yeah, and do you feel addicted to it? If you don't chew nicotine gum for six hours, you're like, I kind of need to get my nicotine gum out. Like the scratch. Yeah, you got to scratch your neck a little bit. Yeah, like deep neck scratch. Cigarettes are terribly addictive. And that's because they add a bunch of different compounds that increase addiction dramatically.

1:55:38Dave Asprey:Nicotine itself in multiple studies has a three-day physiological washout period, same as caffeine. So you will feel physiological brain fog and nastiness if you're used to taking nicotine and you just stop cold turkey. If you want to stop, you just taper down. And I've done this, I don't know, five or six times. I go off it for a couple months. my brain works so much better with nicotine i love the stuff and i consider it just part of my performance enhancement stack so i don't do nicotine i've never really tried nicotine no there was one time where where i was like i was at a party and someone had this thing called snus oh yeah and they offered me some of that and i tried it and it was just way like like it i took it out after 45 seconds because it felt like it was burning a hole in my lip and then I felt nauseous.

1:56:23Like I felt like I was going to get sick and then I kind of started getting nervous and it was just a horrible, horrible experience.

1:56:30Dave Asprey:That's hilarious. And so like that's coming from someone I've never tried a Zin, never had a cigarette. Like I've tried a couple cigars and stuff, but it was way too much in every experience that I've had really with nicotine. Like it's not been a pleasant one. You may be someone who just doesn't benefit from it. There are a few people like that. It's also dose dependent and snus is just that's just a pouch um it's just the Swedish or Norwegian word for it and I got it from a Swedish person there you go I was married to a Swede for a long time so um what's going on with that stuff is you're probably getting six or eight milligrams which is a big dose for a first timer and what I'm using right now is a three milligram and I take half of it.

1:57:14Dave Asprey:So I'm getting one and a half milligrams of nicotine. A cigarette has up to 20 milligrams in it. So this is low dose. And if I quit taking it, I would feel tired for a few days. And my brain likes it. It literally protects your neurons. What do you think about taking small doses of Adderall? That's really not good for you. Microdosing Adderall is just going to mess with the neurotransmitters. It's just not a good beneficial drug. You're much better off to use modafinil. Where do you buy it? Modephanil? Yeah. It's a prescription drug. So you go to the doctor and say, I have shift worker sleep disorder because I have to stay up all night for my podcast and can you please write it?

1:57:50Dave Asprey:And a good doctor will do it. If not, you just buy it from India, like everything. That's safe? You buy it from India. Like go to, like how do you? No, you can buy any pharmaceutical you want online. From India? Well, India or Canada or somewhere. There's multiple sites. How do you, like, doesn't it get, you know, don't they stop it at the border? The law in the U.S. says really clearly you can import a 90-day supply of any medication that's not illegal for personal use from anywhere on the planet. So it's not illegal for personal use? I think it's more of a quality issue. I looked at this when I was getting finasteride, and I looked at how much it cost from India.

1:58:26It was like a fraction of what they're selling it for here. And I never wanted to do that just because I'm like, well, I'd rather pay more. At least know I'm getting the actual thing and not like, because I'd have no idea. You could have got some like thick Indian hair. That would have been nice. Maybe that was going to get a good thing, man.

1:58:43Dave Asprey:I got to warn you about finasteride. Do you know about the side effects there? I've seen some of the side effects, but I've not experienced a single thing. So I'm glad you're not experiencing a meaningful percentage, maybe as high as 5 % of people who go on that stuff, get chemically castrated. Like their sex hormones just go away. And it doesn't come back when you quit taking it. Yeah, see, I went down that rabbit hole. Yeah. I tried it. And you're fine. Zero difference. So I would just say topical minoxidil and caffeine is probably a better choice. And there's a new thing called One Skin that has a new peptide.

1:59:23Dave Asprey:They just launched it. Like I interviewed them about it two weeks ago. 40 % more hair and 40 % thicker hair in six months from their peptide that you just put on topically. So I would just be careful. when I, years ago, I tried a finasteride derivative, uh, and I used it just topically on my hair for two weeks, total ED after two weeks. I was like, what the, I didn't know what it was. I'm like, what is going on here? And so I stopped it and took about six months to come back. It was, it was scary. I was like, is this ever going to come back? Um, so just for anyone listening, if you try finasteride and you have any changes in erections, you should stop that right away because you just don't want to be one of those 5%.

2:00:05Dave Asprey:There's whole Reddit forums full of people who are damaged by that. So it's risky, but you're okay. I went through the same thing, the same Reddit stuff. And then I talked to so many people who said they're on it and not a single person knew anyone that had a side effect. And it's just these online stories. Oh, it does happen. It's actually documenting clinical studies. Like I know doctors have treated people like that and I had that effect happen. It's real. And the actual incidents, it's hard to know the reporting. So up to 5 % seems real. So if you know 100 people on it, do you think you even know that many people on it?

2:00:41Dave Asprey:I know probably 20. Right. So maybe one person, right? Maybe that's me, right? Could be that one. Yeah, I'm just saying like, that's a hellish side effect. So for anyone who's listening, you should probably start with minoxidil and caffeine and adenosine. There's a bunch of stuff or one scan you put on your head. and then if it's still not working add that new finasteride and then see if you have any changes it's called one skin and do you just buy that over the counter or is it like an India no they mail it to you it's not even a prescription but the research is incredible and that's safe it's totally safe it's a peptide it's a signaling very safe so why aren't more people using it because it just got launched two weeks ago So I feel like I'm being a guinea pig for this thing that just got lost.

2:01:30Dave Asprey:It's been in testing for two years. And the peptide they're using has been used topically for about five years now. And I've interviewed their PhD biochemist a couple of times on my show over the years. And what was happening is there's all these breakthrough innovations in longevity. And you just don't hear about it, but they're happening. It's all happening at the same time. So for that peptide to be discovered, they used AI and they used just their background in biochemistry. They came out with 600 candidate molecules for stimulating collagen synthesis. They tested them on gene cell chips, like where they have actually skin cells growing on chips to see what happens when you do this.

2:02:10Dave Asprey:And they found this one peptide that they predicted would work was the top performer of 600. Then they ran clinical trials for a couple of years. Then they launched like facial stuff and body lotion. And then they ran clinical trials for two years on hair. So the best longevity companies are treating this almost like a pharmaceutical dev process. But they're not the only one. There's like dozens of companies looking at doing this internally, doing this all over. This way, this is the renaissance for longevity, for cognitive enhancement, for biohacking. right and that's just one little example and if i can get a peptide with 40 percent more hair and 40 percent more thickness or a drug that might chemically castrate me well the drug industry is going to be pissed i don't want their drug right but i'd rather do a peptide and so this innovation is just being unlocked and then when it comes to the drugs why do you have to go to a doctor to get a permission slip for something that you already want or that you already take and you pay the doctor and you're inconvenienced and the doctor's inconvenienced because it's a waste of their time to, at least they get paid by the insurance company.

2:03:08Dave Asprey:Then you go to the pharmacist and beg for permission for the pharmacist to agree with whatever the doctor said to give you a little bottle of shit that you could have just had sent to your house. So right now we're just breaking the chains of medical mafia behavior because you have a right to buy any drug you want because your biology is yours and you don't need your daddy or your mommy to tell you what you're allowed to take. Like that's, that's absurd. How important is strength training or cardio for longevity. Strength training is really important for longevity. VO2 max is important for longevity, but VO2 max doesn't mean you need to do cardio.

2:03:44And that's how AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets on boarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, of Superhuman Go is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at.

2:04:16You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com.

2:04:46Again, that is superhuman.com, or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast.

2:04:54Dave Asprey:It's a little bit weird. What I do for cardio is based on AI, it takes 15 minutes a week, and that's three, five minute sessions. And in them, you never sweat. It's not hard. That gives you six times better results than an hour a day of cardio. So cardio respiratory fitness is important, but not as important as muscle strength and then muscle mass, right? And there are some people out there who are saying, oh, VO2 max, you have to do zone two training for six hours a week. Those are actually the same people take statins still for longevity, which is nuts. So what you'll find is that raising VO2 max is simple if you know the algorithms, and we use AI for that.

2:05:34Dave Asprey:And strength training, once or twice a week, put on some muscle mass, be strong, and those are really important. But going to the gym for an hour a day every day is probably not even good for you. Most people overtrain and go to the gym every day. I see it over and over. This guy's like, I've been going for 20 years and I've had both shoulders replaced and I have a big pot belly. I'm like, yeah, that's a cortisol. I think that's a very small percentage of people that go to the gym that often that like that actually, you know, break down their muscles. Oh, it's not because very few people go to the gym that often.

2:06:05Dave Asprey:The ones who do, that's what happens, right? That happened to me too. I went 18 months, six days a week. At the end of it, I'm still fat, right? And so overtraining is a major thing. So people either undertrain or they over train. And one of my goals here is to tell people, here's the minimum effective training that you can do in an hour or two a week that hits all of the things for longevity, including training your brain, training your strength, training your cardio in very small amounts of time. And it's all powered by AI. That's what Upgrade Labs does. Because I don't want to spend my time in the gym.

2:06:34Dave Asprey:I got shit to do, but I will if necessary. What about doing a dopamine detox? Oh, those are fun. Is there actually a benefit to doing this? Yeah, the guy who invented that is a friend, Cam, who runs Maximus, one of the testosterone enhancement companies. And manipulating dopamine is one of the things in Heavily Meditated that's particularly important. You could do no caffeine, no nicotine, no spicy or delicious foods, and no stimulation for a week. You might as well go fast in a cave if you're going to do that. And there's benefits to it. But there's another hack that's new to the world of biohacking that I'm introducing and heavily meditated, and it's called bicep.

2:07:13Dave Asprey:And it's not like this kind of bicep on your arm. Brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And this might be better than a dopamine fast. monks used to whip themselves you know your self-flagellation have you heard of this yogis lay on beds of nails and i used to think well the the monks think they're sinners they're punishing themselves the yogis are laying on beds of nails to prove they're good yogis that's not why they do this at all it's because brief intentional conscious exposure to pain for one to three minutes if you do that without harming your body it resets your dopamine sensitivity by about 250 50%.

2:07:48Dave Asprey:It means it takes less dopamine to motivate you for the rest of the day. So the monk was self-flagellating because it made it easier to stay in monk mode. And the yogi did it because he was a better yogi because it took less dopamine to motivate him. And biohackers, we take a cold shower, get in ice water. Or Texans, which I also am, you eat some spicy peppers. Humans have been doing this forever. And there's a rich history in all the different lineages I've studied so doing something that's painful for two or three minutes it works so is your recommendation the cold plunge of like something painful or should you like actually just be like whipping yourself um i like to hire people to whip me because it really just is more fun that way you're in vegas you ever tried that how do you do you are they a type one or two person um you definitely want a win-win scenario there so you type one i just ask my girlfriends Yeah, the win-lose is easier.

2:08:41Dave Asprey:Yeah, if you have a friend who can help, no. There's other benefits from cold plunges. There's metabolic benefits, and there's a separate dopamine benefit that no one's talked about in cold plunges. So if you're like, I'm not motivated today, do something that hurts, right? Intentionally hurts. And it's funny, cold plunge is a great way to do it. One tribe even uses eye drops that are super painful. And you put them in, you're like, ah, it really hurts. And then you get really clear vision from it. But the exposure to pain is what caused the neurochemistry to change. So eat a habanero. Like, do whatever's going to work for you.

2:09:18Would you ever want to freeze yourself if they had the ability and then come back 500 years from now?

2:09:23Dave Asprey:You know, I saw the movie Idiocracy. Have you seen that? No, I haven't. God, you have to see this. It's the best documentary ever. It's about a guy who does that accidentally. He's the dumbest guy on earth. But when he comes back 100 years later, he's the smartest guy on earth. and it's just incredibly, incredibly predictive. But no, I don't want to freeze myself. I have a lot of friends who do and I have no fear of death. I understand what happens when you die. I know that people come back. I didn't believe in afterlives or reincarnation until I started doing the work. And even if I'm wrong about it, choosing to believe in reincarnation is the only rational thing to do.

2:10:04Dave Asprey:So what happens when you die? um well let me finish the point about why you should choose it and i'll tell you what the reason you want to choose it if you're right you're going to live a good life but you'll be less afraid of dying if you're wrong you'll be less afraid of dying and you'll live a better life with less fear so it doesn't matter whether reincarnations will not just choose to believe it because it turns down the amount of energy your body puts into fear of stupid shit you're going to die because you're alive. Like being born is a life-threatening condition, period. The planet will come to an end.

2:10:38Dave Asprey:The universe will come to an end. We will all die. And losing your shit about that is dumb. So let's just tell ourselves a story that reincarnation is real. But is it real? I think so. I've had plenty of esoteric mystical experiences and I've worked with hundreds of people who have them when they just turn off fear. Like, oh my God, look what's going on. So what happens when you die? Your energy continues. And if you want like a really good scientific-based perspective on that, read a book on biocentrism. Have you heard of this? Biocentrism is something that comes out of the field of quantum physics.

2:11:17Dave Asprey:Mark Gober writes some really good books about it. Robert Lanza does. But you can look at quantum physics and prove that time is a fantasy that we make up in our meat bodies. Right. And the implications of this, which is provable with hard science, is that death is also just a change of state, but it isn't the end. So your energy has to go somewhere. And the perspective that we have is you go to what in Buddhism we call Bardo, called the afterlife, and you kind of review what you did, and then you come back if you're dumb enough to come back. and that's my perspective now i've trained in shamanism i've studied with gurus from many different lineages and all that sort of stuff there's some disagreement about small details there but that's what most of it is and the christians will say you know you go to heaven or hell or things like that um those are those are reflections of a similar system we'll put it that way you know in the in the buddhist teachings they say oh yeah there's you know 74 kinds of hell actually i think it's 72 um but they're different hells right so you can get stuck when you die but when things work you don't get stuck when uh when you get stuck you get stuck so there's all kinds of of stuff that isn't readily apparent to most people but there are some percentage of people who regularly see things like that and they agree so i don't believe any one person but when you have someone who says you know let's take a hundred people let's teach them how to leave their body at will.

2:12:47Dave Asprey:Let's not have them talk to each other. Let's have them all go out and explore the world they see in these altered states and come back and compare notes. If they all see the same thing, I think the word for that is science. And there's multiple people who've done that kind of experiment all over the world and they come up with the same results. So I'm just going to go with what the data shows. What's a question that you wished more people would ask you? Not a lot of people ask about, uh, like why I do what I do. I think they, they think that it's because of money or because of some kind of like an ego thing.

2:13:20Dave Asprey:Um, and I'm not motivated by like, I want to feed a billion people or whatever. I started my blog and started sharing all this information. I just wanted five people not to go through all the suffering I went through. and that's been my motivation i didn't make a list i didn't do any of the stuff you're supposed to do i'm like i'm just going to share the stuff because people need to know and it was like two decades of accumulating all this knowledge both the spiritual stuff and heavily meditated as well as all the physiological longevity stuff and that's still what motivates me today i mean i could probably stop it i'm like so many people are just walking around feeling like shit and treating each other like shit because they don't know how good they could feel right and sometimes it's a harder problem sometimes it's a softer problem it's just not that hard anymore so i'm motivated because i i think we need an upgrade as a species and that it's not that hard to do it so i just keep doing it because i think it matters but it isn't because i'm seeking recognition like i tried the fame thing in my early 20s and it doesn't do anything it's actually inconvenient it.

2:14:25Dave Asprey:So yeah, that the motivation thing is really interesting. It's just, I, I have suffered greatly and I would prefer other people not go through all the crap I went through because it's, it's not fun and it's totally avoidable. So that, that's why I do what I do. Why do you think a lot of the claims that you make are so controversial? Everyone has a lens on reality that is functional for them. And we do that to make ourselves feel safe. So anytime someone penetrates your lens on reality, it creates cognitive dissonance, which makes you feel unsafe and doesn't make you think you're unsafe. It makes your body feel unsafe.

2:15:01Dave Asprey:Like, Oh, that, that shift in my worldview. The number of people who got outraged when I told them to put butter in coffee is insane. Okay. Butter is a safe food, but people literally thought they were like putting it in the blender. Like, Oh my God, can I really do that the first time. Like I'm walking on call. It's like, what? We've been programmed. So the other thing is people get really mad when I say, I'm going to do something that hasn't been done before. You know who else really pissed people off? The Wright brothers. We're going to fly. And then, in fact, I have a video I made where you have all these people saying it's never going to happen.

2:15:34Dave Asprey:Then they do it. In fact, every great leap in human capability starts with the people who are from the old generation saying it can't be done. I have the audio of the chairman of the FCC saying that satellites will never be used for communication. We have Einstein saying that the power of the atom will never be harnessed to make electricity, right? So what happens is humans are usually backwards looking, and it's always been that way, but we are entering a world where it's not just exponential, it's double exponential. So the future looks very different than the past. And people get mad because there are rules that they've been following their whole life.

2:16:19Dave Asprey:And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. And how dare this computer hacker come in and say something different? And I'm like, how dare you not be curious? Because the way science works is if you have one data point that disproves your theory, the theory is still useful. It's just not accurate. it. But what's happening in the world now is you have this belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's anti-science. Science says a claim requires the same amount of evidence no matter if it's extraordinary or not. If you think it's extraordinary, maybe it's because you're an idiot, right?

2:16:58Dave Asprey:No claim is extraordinary. The data is the data. So when I come up there and I say, I have data. If you blend butter in your coffee, it really does something for you. I was right. It works. About seven years later, I funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollack for 50 grand. And he's been studying basic water chemistry inside cells. And he said, huh, we just determined that butter oil and MCT oil create the largest amount of structured water called exclusion zone water in cells. Now, there's a whole bunch of nonsense structured water stuff that's out there. This is stuff you can see on a microscope for your cells to function to make ATP, they need to change the viscosity of water a little bit.

2:17:38Dave Asprey:It turns out the Tibetans who came up with this idea, they would churn butter and tea in a butter churn for a while before they would drink it. And I'm like, why would they do that? Well, it doesn't work if you don't blend it. So, could I make the claim based on an observation and a testable observation without knowing why it works? Yes, I could. Why did it make people mad? I don't know. But I think it's because they felt unsafe because the world might have been different than the safe little story they had. The reality is our bodies cannot sense 99.99999 % of the actual reality happening out there.

2:18:09Dave Asprey:You got to be comfortable with that. So if you're to explain in 30 seconds, someone with an unlimited budget that feels fine, that wants to just go out and get every single piece of data that they can possibly want to improve their health, what should they do? Well, you're going to spend about $10 ,000, maybe even$50 ,000 on lab tests just to get all the data, right? You'd want to do a whole body MRI for sure. You want to do a full genetic, a full human genome, not just the 23andMe stuff. And then you want to get your cardiorespiratory fitness and things like that done. And once you have that stuff, you want to get a QEEG, which is part of what we do at 40 Years to what's going on inside your brain.

2:18:58Dave Asprey:And the combination of those things is going to give us a really good picture. You have your toxin load, your mitochondrial function, your hormone levels, your inflammatory molecule levels, whether you have an aneurysm or any other thing going on in your body that you don't know about, early stage cancer. And based on that, what are your goals? And once we have the data, we're going to sit down and say, okay, is your goal? You want a brain that's way better, right? Do you want more stress management, more capacity, more resilience? Do you want to live longer? Do you want to increase your bone density?

2:19:30Dave Asprey:Whatever it is, there's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible. I had surgery on my foot for an old yoga injury and they had to cut through the bone on the foot all the way through it. And so I was awake for it because it was interesting and it was numb anyway. And you hear the bone saw, it's like, and the doctor looks and he goes, I'm having a hard time cutting through his bone. Like, is this guy even human? And I did a podcast with him about it. And afterwards, he's like, Dave, what is up with your bone density?

2:20:03Dave Asprey:I've never seen this. He said, I operate on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter and I can't even get through your bones with my saw. Well, that's biohacking. Bone density is one of the biggest indicators of a healthy metabolism and they're going to live a long time. And it comes from the right nutrient intake, avoiding toxins, and then exposing the body to things that make it harder and stronger. So if you have a big budget, you can totally add 20, 30 years to your lifespan and there'll be really good years. And you see these cowardly people in the field of longevity saying, oh, it's not about extending human life.

2:20:38Dave Asprey:It's just about health span. You're going to die at 86 the same way you were, but at least you'll be healthy until you die. And I'm like, why? Like, how dare you call yourself a longevity doctor and say you can't extend human life? The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life, both. And people say you can only extend the quality of your life and you're going to die at the same age as everyone else. Why? They never have an answer. So let's set the goals right. Double lifespan and feel way better when you're 150 than you do when you're 50. Why not? We have the technology. We have the tools.

2:21:14Dave Asprey:It's possible. And there are people doing it, including me. I love it. Thank you, man. Dave, thank you. so much for coming on the show. Thanks for the long interview. That was fun. We will link to your information down below in the description. And check out Heavily Meditated. This is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It is just coming out now and people spend$20 ,000 to spend five days with me to learn this stuff and I put it in the book. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you to everyone for watching this show. It means so, so much. Until next time.

2:21:50You matched on Hinge. You're vibing. Then her energy completely changes. What do you do? I'm Raven Smith and I wrote and read a real love story about this exact sitch. Listen to the free audiobook now.