The Ultimate Biohacking Guide for Optimal Health | Dave Asprey

26:19Yeah. I wear out by the end of the day. Like I completely wear out. And sometimes I need to function later in the afternoon or evening. And where are you living right now? You were, I turn around when I first, you were homeless when I first interviewed you, but I think you settled down. Yeah, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm a Southerner now. You can tell I'm a Southerner. Yeah, you've totally got the vibe, right? Yeah, I'm racist now. It's really changed my life completely. Yeah, I bet. So where would you start? I was going to see if you were near, I think our closest location for Upgrade Labs would be in Tennessee.

26:55We're opening one. So at Upgrade Labs, we've got 27 locations around the country in the process of opening. It's a franchise. And these are biohacking facilities where you come in, we do a cell health analysis with medical grade tech. We measure what's going on in your body. Where's the fat, the skinny fat that's around your organs that's dangerous? We get a picture of your metabolism and then we use AI to recommend what you do in the facility. But you're not near one. And by the way, guys, own and upgrade labs.com if you want to open a franchise, maybe in Atlanta, so James can come in. The idea there is, so you're not going to do that.

27:30You're going to go through Smarter, Not Harder and you're going to read the two sections that are on energy and brain. And then you're going to pick some practices. We'll pick some low-cost ones. The lowest-cost way to get your energy and your brain back is be better at sleeping. How's your sleep? My sleep is okay, but I do take things for it. Not always, but I often take things for sleep. Things like THC or Ambien or herbs? Like, what are we talking about? All of the above. And sometimes something like, in 2010, I was anxious. This is 14 years ago. And I started taking, unfortunately, I don't know if I want to say unfortunately, but unfortunately, I got prescribed Klonopin.

28:18And Klonopin is extremely addictive. Like, it's unbelievable. Like, I took it for a few months. No more anxiety. Like, it's amazing how it works. It blocks your anxiety thoughts. But then I figured, okay, no more anxiety. I'm going to get off of it. And you just can't. Like it's really addictive. And so, you know, I've been on this 14-year journey of weaning off of the clonopin, which I mostly have, but sometimes I have to take that to sleep. And that supposedly doesn't really improve the quality of your sleep though. Yeah, it doesn't that I'm aware of. I haven't gone deep on that drug, but I do know that my mother was on it for a long time because of epilepsy.

29:01So let's see. So your sleep architecture is broken, I would say. So the short version to improve your sleep would be go to sleepwithdave.com. This is totally free. It's very forward. It's just we haven't even had our first day, but okay. I mean, it was the cool hair, James. It's by far the best URL of my entire career because no one's going to forget that. It's free. It's just everything I know about how to sleep better because I was the guy... who would get five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep every night. My sleep was garbage. I get 90 minutes of deep, 90 minutes of REM in six and a half hours most nights.

29:44And I don't take anything other than some supplements like magnesium and herbal stuff that supports sleep. And the difference is not what you're trying to do. The difference is the environment around you. And it's in the very definition of biohacking. when I first was introducing this idea and this global movement. It's the art and science of changing the environment around you and then inside of you so that you have control of your own biology. Let's go back from that evolutionary perspective, James. Two billion years ago, our insane numbers of ancestors back, some cells floating around in the ocean.

30:25We don't really know what cell it was, but it's what we are now. And then these little mitochondria, these bacteria. And then we say, oh, our cells captured the mitochondria and use them as mobile power plants. A more accurate assessment is these little bacteria found a cell and they're like, check this out. It's a mobile Petri dish. We can move in and take over. Well, back 2 billion years ago, these bacteria, they were very dependent. Okay, bacteria are dumb, but they do have intelligence. They have to react to their environments, their environmental sensors, then make a decision. So they look at light.

30:58In the morning, sunrise, it's red, and it's at an angle. And then in the middle of the day, it's hot. You have bright, full-spectrum light right above you, like that LED above you right now. And then in the evening, it gets red again. In the middle of the day, there's a ton of food because they're eating algae. After the sun goes down, there's less algae. The temperature drops. It becomes dark. and then they go to sleep. They drop down in the ocean and then the next morning they rinse and repeat. So if you want to fix your sleep and get off all the stuff that's helping you go to sleep, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourselves it's morning.

31:32The number one thing they listen to is light. And within light, there's five aspects of light. There's multiple colors they need to see. Like blue light wakes you up. It's not bad for you in the morning, but intense blue light with no red and infrared is bad for your eyes and your brain. And that's what you get if you're indoors. So wake up, go outside, take off your glasses so they don't filter out the ultraviolet that your body needs, and then walk around or sit there for at least 10 minutes, ideally 20 minutes in the morning. For you, probably at noon is a good idea as well. So, hey, look, it's the middle of the day.

32:04And then in the evening, seeing sunset's good. After that, you dim your lights. And since you can't dim lights in hotel rooms and you have a life, I started one of the first circadian glasses companies. It's called True Dark. It's something I don't talk about that much because I do a lot of stuff. And we actually filed a patent on these, but there's glasses that control all the colors of light and the angle of the light and the intensity of the light, which is what your body listens to. So I wear those in the evening if I'm going to be under bright lights or if I'm flying. We have a study that's about to be published showing that those glasses, the True Dark sleep glasses, they cause the same changes in your brain waves that you get from advanced meditation.

32:49So in 15 minutes, they drop you into a sleep state so that you're just, oh, I'm ready to relax. So at night, keep them on at night, dim the lights. And oh, that thing about food. The number two thing after light is when was there the majority of your food? Don't eat after the sun goes down, except you probably will. Just eat as early as you can. and don't eat within three hours of bedtime. Those two things, along with maybe lowering your thermostat at night, are probably enough for most people to fix your sleep as long as you do the other thing. And this is unplug everything that has a light or tape it over and get blackout curtains.

33:29A study in Japan found that the amount of light from streetlights that leaks around curtains is enough to increase depression by 69%. Wow. So what I think you have, James, is you have a circadian biology problem masquerading as a sleep problem. And I just taught you, you know, 20 % of what's on the Sleep with Dave program. And again, I don't want any money for that. That is just free knowledge. It also includes the glasses and all the tools that I use. But everything that you can do, you can do it for free. You can put aluminum foil in your windows instead of spending$40 on blackout curtains on Amazon.

34:04Like, it's up to you, right? Aluminum foil is just uglier. Well, okay. I'm going to do all that. I think with food, I tend to, I follow that advice. I do no food three hours before I'm going to go to sleep. And I tend to go to sleep pretty early. But I, and I've spoken to Andrew Huberman about the going outside first thing when you wake up, but I don't really, I find that I don't really do it. I need to really do it. All right, here's what to do. I lived in Canada for 13 years. And it's funny, I've been teaching the circadian biology thing since my very first blog post in 2011. And I love that Andrew Huberman's bringing in the university aspect.

34:47And he's a master teacher and structurer of knowledge. Before we started his podcast, we talked about this when he was on The Human Upgrade on my podcast. And I'm like, this guy's doing really cool stuff. And then now he's got this giant podcast. And I'm so happy because when we have Stanford professors talking about biohacking, What we're doing is we're now validating best practices that we can figure out just by looking at our own data. I've tracked my sleep every night for 15 years. I used to wear a headband when I'd go to sleep because you couldn't have a ring. And I was CTO and co-founder of the first company to get heart rate from your wrist, the way your Apple phone does now, because I was so broken from a circadian perspective.

35:29So you're not going to go out in the morning? When I lived in Canada, I could go out in the morning, but it didn't matter because it was dark and gray and gross. just raining. No offense to Canadians out there. Well, I mean, sorry, there's a reason that all Canadians dream of retiring in the Palm Desert. So guys, I'm a Canadian citizen. So like everyone who can afford it in Canada, I go somewhere south during the winter because it's part of maintaining your health. So what did I do when I was up there? You get really bright lights, Halogen are best. You get halogen work lights still. LEDs are not as good, but bright light in the morning that is at eye level, not above you.

36:10That's as good as you can get indoors. All right. I'm going to do all this. Okay. And you also want red light in the morning. So red light's another really common biohack. People thought I was insane when I started the biohacking movement. Like, you guys, wear these cool glasses. And I also started one of the first red light therapy companies. And these are very small compared to what I was doing at Bulletproof. But I'm like, I can't buy what I want. How do I make it available so I can have it and others can have it that's cost-effective? Tell me about the red light therapy. My wife does this.

36:45She stands in front of some board and it shoots red light at her. It could be even the true light board that I make. You can buy this stuff on Amazon. There's stuff everywhere now. There's a lot of people just buying red LEDs from China, putting them out there. And they all reasonably work. You want red and infrared. And ideally, I've added amber to the stuff I make because amber is also a waking up frequency that helps with small blood vessels. But red light, it doesn't just help your skin look better, and it really does do that. It helps to set your circadian biology. Your body wants red in the morning and wants red at night.

37:21You can't go to sleep. Take that same red panel. Don't necessarily shine it in your eyes. Shine it on your body from the neck down. And just watch what happens. Your body just relaxes. It's a signal that you can't see that your body sees. And your body goes, oh, I guess I should go to sleep now. And then you do. All right. So I'm going to do all this. So that's sleep. And do you have a sleep tracker, an Apple Watch, an Oura Ring, a Whoop, anything like that? We have the, what is it, the Eight Sleep mattress? Yeah, Eight Sleep is good. Yeah. I haven't used the tracking facility yet, but I should do it.

37:56I should do that. James, I mean, I remember from our interview, you're pretty good at understanding the track what you hack ethos. Sure. It's harder, not harder. So get the data. Are you waking up 15 times a night you don't know it? Do you have apnea? There's so many things you can do. And chilling your mattress, which is what H-Sleep does, it's a pretty good idea. But chilling your mattress in a room that has blinky lights from your phone charger is not going to work the same. So you want to line up your sleep environment so that you really get a signal to your body that says it's time. And then you're not going to want the content.

38:35Yeah, that's the goal. Okay. The other thing you can do is another biohack. This is towards the end of Smarter, Not Harder. And I've been teaching for now 11 years. I've been taking senior executives and entrepreneurs and celebrities and people through a five-day intensive brain training thing. The company is called 40 Years of Zen. And we're expanding that right now. So about 1 ,500 people have had these transformative experiences that are on par with the psychedelic journey just from looking at their own brainwaves and reordering it. At home, you can do something called heart rate variability training.

39:13And in fact, I used to advise this company back in 2008. It's called HeartMath. And this is different than what you get from your eight sleep or from one of your tracking devices. It's a little thing you put on your ear, and then it teaches you how to breathe. You're like, oh, breathing? I know how to do that. But when you're breathing and you do something, it feels like it's in your heart. It's consciously learning what it feels like when your body goes into fight or flight versus rest and reset. Once you learn the feeling, there's something you can do when you take a deep breath and you exhale that changes the spacing of your heartbeat that causes your body to want to go to sleep.

39:55It's been really transformative for me. So now I've learned the signal of my body kicking into anxiety the second it happens. It's a feeling that I didn't know how to name. And then I've learned how to go, God damn it, stop. And then put myself consciously like training a dog. You know, okay, no, no, you're not allowed to do that. Come back, start over, come back. And eventually, your nervous system, it is trainable. It has its own consciousness. It is not you. You're writing around in hardware that has automated stuff in it, and you can train your hardware to behave itself. And when you do that, if you have racing thoughts at night, well, maybe just chilling out your nervous system consciously is what you want to do.

40:35Or maybe they're there because you have a problem with adrenal hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline. And then you would address that nutritionally or with circadian biology or with supplements. And so there's a device to monitor your heart so you know, like what were you describing about the device? It's called the HeartMath device. And it's a little, I don't have it on my desk right now. It's a little clip that goes on your ear and it talks to your phone by Bluetooth. And you just look at the phone and take a deep breath and breathe out. And when you breathe out, the light is either red or green.

41:09And you're like, I don't do anything different. Sometimes it's green, sometimes it's red. But eventually you go, oh, I am doing something. It's just something that doesn't have words. It's hard to describe. It kind of feels like you're filling your heart up. You're turning on this very specific relaxation state. And it turns out you have the ability to replay any felt sense that you've ever experienced. So if you think about that one time when something cool happened and you felt the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, You can, if you just tune in, oh yeah, I remember that. And the hairs on the back of your neck will stand up.

41:44So you have replay abilities. You learn how to replay the sense of peace that I'm talking about. And then anytime you notice that you've left that state, just go, hang on. And then magically, you're back. So this is a skill. It's one that changed my entire life. And that led me down this great path of neurofeedback to the point that, you know, I have a$16 ,000 five-day huge brain upgrade thing with neuroscientists and four patents, and we make our own hardware for reprogramming your brain. That's the ultimate expression of teaching your nervous system and your brain how to do it. But what I'm talking about is a couple hundred bucks that you could do.

42:22You could also take up a breathwork practice. This is free. It'll work similarly, but not as quickly. And I just interviewed an expert on Yoga Nidra who was on my show. This is a practice I've written about for many years, and it's a basic breathwork practice. And Andrew Huberman calls it the physiological sigh, but it's essentially an old yogic technique for breathing that puts your body in a similar state. So breathwork alone or do a heart-mouth device, those are ways to get control of the anxiety response. The other thing that may be happening. I doubt it is with you. Are you having a hard time going to sleep or staying asleep?

43:05Staying asleep. So if I wake up, I'll go to sleep right away. But if I wake up at 2am, I have a hard time getting back. Got it. Racing thoughts? I don't know. Not really. I mean, I feel like that I had and I don't have any more for whatever reason. Most people who wake up between, it's usually 3 to 5am and just can't go back to sleep, that is a crash in your blood sugar. And what you do to find out if that's causing your problem, you get one of the CGMs. Levels is the company that I've worked with. I'm an investor in Levels. You get a little device, you stick it on the back of your arm. I've worn one for almost two years.

43:49And it tells you in the middle of the night, did your blood sugar crash? Most people who wake up feeling that way, oh, look, my blood sugar dropped to 70. And the body said, oh, I needed some glucose to power my brain to do its cleaning process at night. I'm out of glucose. Here's an answer. How about cortisol and adrenaline? Because those release sugar real quickly. Problem is, cortisol and adrenaline wake you up. So the brain's like, yeah, thanks. I got what I needed. And you're going, I didn't get my sleep. This is not cool. So if you're one of those people, you have a small snack before bed, either raw honey or collagen or MCT oil or just mix all three together.

44:29Wow, I totally did not know that. That's very interesting. Yeah, it's a really big thing and a lot of people run into that problem. I mean, do you have a version of your coffee that is not caffeinated, that has all the MCT oil and all that stuff in it? Danger Coffee has a decaf that's fully mineralized and there are lots of studies that show the longevity benefits of coffee work even with decaf. There are even more studies that show that caffeine itself is beneficial for you in normal doses for all kinds of reasons, even longevity. So you don't want caffeine after two o 'clock. So what do you do?

45:01Decaf danger, but you still have to put your own stuff in there. So you can squirt some MCT in from any brand you like. C8 MCT works better. And I definitely made MCT a billion dollar category along with collagen and functional coffee through my work at at Bulletproof. So a lot of people are making that stuff now and you can buy it at Whole Foods or on Amazon. It's all over the place. Just squirt some in there and spin it around in a blender with a little hand frother and you're good to go. And as long as your body has energy, when you are asleep, you're probably not going to wake up nearly as much as you did before.

45:52so i i want to i want to learn a little bit more also about just exercise and then get into the food stuff because the food is always confusing everybody says something different but let's talk about exercise first i do not like going to the gym now that doesn't mean i'm not willing to like work out or exercise i just can't stand going to the gym you know you sound like you might be lazy. I am lazy. Okay. So what I just did there, I triggered everyone listening to the show. And so did you. And you and I share that in common. We don't mind triggering people. And one of the mistakes I made with Smarter Not Harder was using the laziness principles.

46:34Look, people like to talk about lazy as much as they like to talk about death. So here's what laziness means. And it's not what people think. It's that your body has its own intelligence and it thinks before you can think. So your body, it's tricking you. It's filtering reality. And a third of a second after your body sees something, it will show it to your brain. And we can measure this. And if you're 18 to 20 or you have a brain that's a little upgraded, it might be a quarter second instead of a third of a second. But there's this huge delay. And that's when the body goes, let's see here. There's the gym and there's a couch with cheesecake and Netflix.

47:16The couch with cheesecake and Netflix is always going to look sexy and attractive and easy. And that's because the body is like, hey, I don't know about that guy living in the head. He's really slow and stupid. So I need to make sure he doesn't starve to death. So just don't waste any energy by moving and eat everything. If you'll just do those, you won't die of a famine. So that's the body's goal. And it's wired in and it's worked for 2 billion years. And there's nothing wrong with you if you don't want to go to the gym and you want to eat everything. That's your hard word doing its job to survive.

47:48Now, there is something wrong with you if you think that that is you doing that and then you feel guilty over the fact that you want to do that. No, there's nothing wrong. It means your body is correct. Now, I'm willing to work hard. And I've worked really hard. I just don't want to work any harder than is necessary. So now that you know your body is the one that's trying to make you eat everything and do nothing, that means your body over-prioritizes savings. And the laziness principle is a new technique in human motivation, as far as I can tell. And it's one of the big nuggets from Smarter Not Harder.

48:25And it goes like this. if the body's motivation is to save and you want to make yourself want to go to the gym don't try to motivate yourself to go to the gym motivate yourself by saving time going to the gym so do any of the hacks that are in smarter not harder for cardio for weights that work better than a normal workout and then instead of saying i'm going to go spend an hour sweating in the spin class, you're going to tell yourself, I'm going to spend five minutes instead of an hour, and I'm going to get six times better results. So your body's like, even I'm going to save 55 minutes today and I don't have to sweat, I'm in.

49:06And then it doesn't feel like work. But if instead you say, well, I'm going to go do five minutes of working out, the body's going to say, no, that sounds like a lot of crap. Have you seen potato chips? So the companies who understand this are the ones who give you a coupon. How many times have you gone to the trouble? You go to a website, you get your email and they send you a coupon code. You open it and they spam you for a while and you get, you save four bucks on something. It wasn't worth your time to save four bucks, but your body was like, no, I'm saving money, man. This$4 means a lot to me.

49:38Well, this is why we're willing to, it feels like you're saving a lot more than$4 in that. So you motivate yourself by saving time and energy, not by expending it. So let's say you were only going to work out for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is, whatever small number you want to pick. Here's my entire weekly workout, 20 minutes for the entire week, not per day, 20 minutes for the entire week. And I am ripped. You are, I can see. In fact, people are saying, Dave, you look old. I'm like, dude, I used to have 300 pounds of fat. I have extra skin because I don't have any fat in my face, but the veins are everywhere.

50:16It's insane. And as a 300-pound computer hacker, this is unprecedented. But I don't work at this. It's just natural from learning how to eat and how to sleep and how to get exercise that actually works instead of 90 minutes a day, six days a week, which was my practice. So what do I do? I do an AI cardio called ReHit. And this is part of what we do at Upgrade Labs. And what you do for that is 15 minutes a week of cardio. you never sweat and most of the time is moving so slowly it's boring. And three studies out of the University of Colorado show you get a 12 % improvement in your VO2 max. That's equal to adding about two years onto the length of your life from the studies around VO2 max and longevity.

51:06You could instead say, I'm going to do an hour a day, five days a week. So that five hours a week versus 15 minutes a week. and that's going to get you 2 % improvement. So what happens in the re-hit that makes up for all the time in the gym? Well, it turns out, and you would know this because you've studied the way your brain works and psychology and all. Our brains, they also can use a little bit of energy to make a decision or they can use a lot of energy to make a decision. So you could look at something and go, well, if I know water's good, more water's better, right? And then you're going to be fully confident or pretty confident in that.

51:48You're going to go ahead and it's going to feel like you're right. Now, the reality is too much water will kill you because either you'll drown or you'll dilute the salt, something called hyponatremia, which kills people in marathons every year who are overhydrating without electrolytes. So more is not better for anything. It just feels like more is better. So with exercise, if you want to get in shape for your cardio, more cardio is better and it feels 100 true it's bs what your body listens to is not the amount of cardio you did in fact that probably is a negative signal for improvement it is how quickly did you have to do the cardio and this is the most important teaching from the entire book how quickly did you return back to baseline and did you have adequate nutrients like minerals and things like that, and protein from animals.

52:36So if you go, oh, look, I was moving real slowly. Look, there's a tiger. You run away for 20 or 40 seconds from the tiger, like you're going to die. Now you turned on the stress really fast. And then once the tiger's gone, you do deep breathing exercises and you calm yourself down. And you calm yourself really rapidly because the signal that causes the most transformation in your biology is a stressor that came on quickly, a stressor that went away quickly. So now I'm safe and I have nutrients. If you're safe and you have nutrients, your body will put the nutrients into making you stronger. And if you do what they do in a spin class, you got away from the tiger, but now it's the next hill.

53:17And they put on some more Taylor Swift. And then the person at the front of the things is stand up and you look around it. If you're not the only one sitting down, you feel like an idiot. So they use shame to make you pretend like there's another tiger. An hour later, you're sweaty, you have endorphins, but your body's like, I just got hunted for an hour. I'm not going to lower my heart rate for another hour. And I don't have enough energy right now because I almost died. I'm not going to improve. And this is why you get 2 % better in five hours or do it my way, get 12 % better in 15 minutes. Like it's just easier.

53:47So this is really interesting because it's probably is related to the, you know, the problem with modern society, if you call it a problem is that we're just sitting at our desks and we're being chased by tigers. So we get this fighter looking at social media, we get this fight or flight reflex. And I wonder if it helps if you practice training the body to reduce from that stressor state as quickly as possible. I wonder if that practice helps naturally for the kind of fight or flight that we get during the day, you know, just normally looking at the screen. A hundred percent. In fact, if you have conscious control over your fight or flight response and you put your body out of it, the safer your body feels, the more it's willing to invest in getting younger, getting stronger, making hormones, running repair processes.

54:33And the more your body feels like there is a tiger just waiting around the corner, the less it's willing to invest in your longevity, in your cognitive function, in having healthy hormone levels. So if you use exercise to essentially whip yourself over and over at the end of a really long stressful day because it's how you burn off stress, the body's like, I never get any time without stress. Why would I do anything but get old? I'm not going to repair. I'm going to get ready for more stress. This is why a meditation practice or a breathwork practice, a neurofeedback practice, it's so important.

55:10You will get more out of your exercise if your body is relaxed. And the guy who's the biggest example of this, who I've ever interviewed, is not a neuroscientist, actually. It's Frank Zane, Mr. Olympia. Now, this guy has one of the most studied physiques and storied physiques in the bodybuilding world. And when I interviewed him, look, there's a stereotype for bodybuilders that a lot of people have. And it's like, they're going to be kind of a meathead, right? This guy was like a meditation master. He's like, oh no, what I do now, he's in his seventies and still ripped. He's like, you know what I do?

55:47I play the flute for an hour a day. And I write poetry. And he said the reason he was so successful was that he was calm and he meditated even back when he was in his competitive days, because it was the ability to return to a calm, rested, safe, peaceful state that drives your body's willingness to improve. It's not how hard you can whip yourself. It's how hard you can hug yourself. But how do you build the muscle? Because muscle also creates energy for the body. That improves your stamina? Muscle won't necessarily improve your stamina, but it'll improve your metabolism. Stamina is kind of a different metric.

56:25So how do you build the muscle? Number one, eat one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight. Per day? Yeah, every single day. And this is hard to do. You have to measure it. And you just realize, wow, that's a lot of protein. And when you do it, your body will put on muscle much more quickly. So you said you're 198 pounds. How do you eat 198 grams of protein? steak. It's literally a couple pounds of steak. So I'll eat a pound of steak and I'll use protein powder. But I don't use plant-based protein powder because it doesn't work. The studies all show it doesn't work. It's just not as available.

57:00If I wanted to do this as a vegan, I would need 400, at least maybe 500 grams of plant-based protein. And not only would I have room clearing gas, I would probably get gout from all the plant toxins in there. Like plant-based protein is what you feed peasants when you can't afford to feed them high quality animal protein. The big companies know that.

57:46right? And then you lower it and your body says, oh, it's gravity. I understand. But because it's gravity, it knows that if it drops the weight or it wobbles a little bit, gravity makes the weight way more. So it holds back a lot of capacity. You can pick up more than you think you could, but the body won't let you because it knows you might break your elbow if you just wobble a little bit. So we use technology that changes the load on the muscle without any gravity involved whatsoever. The way to do this at home is resistance bands. They actually work differently than gravity, and the body will put on muscle up to three times faster just from using a resistance band.

58:27And then I talk about other hacks in the book that are really interesting. There's one called blood flow restriction. If you restrict some but not all of the blood flow going into your muscles, you can put on muscles without lifting more than a one-pound pink dumbbell. So instead of changing weight, which is a danger for your joints, you change blood flow and lactic acid builds up and all of a sudden you get ripped with very little weight involved. So there's all these technologies that work. There's electrical stimulation. And what we do at Upgrade Labs is called the AI cheat machine. And this uses AI to vary the load on your muscle in a way that mother nature never could.

59:06So your body says, oh, I guess I need to adapt in a different way. you do it and you put on muscle very quickly. Like I said, 20 minutes a week. And I've never been this lean and ripped. Okay. Well, which brings me to food. So, you know, in the book, you really go through a lot of different myths about food and what's good and what's bad. And you know, it was interesting to see which foods, you know, you talk about this thing called sulfidic acid that I had never heard about and that it basically does a lot of harm to your system. And it's kind of hidden inside all these foods that people commonly eat that I would never think were bad.

59:48Well, a lot of this comes because I started a regenerative farm on Vancouver Island where I lived for 13 years. And when you have sheep and pigs and cows and chickens, you learn a lot about what they eat and what makes them sick and what doesn't make them sick. Ranchers all know this. When you feed chickens or sheep, it doesn't really matter. You feed them these grains, corn and soy and things like that. It has so much phytic acid that it steals minerals away from the animals and then they lose their fertility and they start getting sick and their hooves fall off and they get mange or they die.

1:00:29And that's expensive when you're trying to raise chickens. So you realize pretty soon, if I'm going to feed these crappy things like corn that the animals really didn't evolve to eat, that it's high in phytic acid, I'm going to have to add special enzymes so the animals can handle it. It just so happens that all of the animals I just mentioned, they have on-board enzyme manufacturing. They can digest some of those foods. We don't. So when we eat chicken food, it steals minerals from our bones and from our cells, and we get mineral deficient. And this is well known amongst vegans. And I raised my hand, guys.

1:01:03I was a devout raw vegan. I had salad bowls bigger than my head. I blended, I chopped, I sprouted, and I shattered three teeth and gave myself an autoimmune condition and made my thyroid worse. And after oh, about 18 months of doing that, I gave up. Thank God I went to Tibet where you couldn't get anything raw because eating raw yak would be kind of gross. So it's one of those things where I lived it. And the reason I shattered teeth, even though I was a very well-trained guy doing all the seaweed and all the stuff you're supposed to do, sea moss, which actually shreds your gut, all those things, I just realized, wow, I did myself great harm.

1:01:43And the reason you see me online railing against kale, I've been doing that forever, is that kale and spinach and even beets, almonds, these are high either in phytic acid or oxalic acid, and oxalic acid is even worse. The bottom line is plant babies, which is what seeds and nuts are, plants really don't want you to eat them. And since plants can't run away or punch you in the face, they just put chemicals in their babies. So if you eat very many of their babies, you can't have babies, which means over time there will be balance. And this is fascinating because this is where you overlap with, So I've had on a couple of times, Dr.

1:02:20Stephen Gundry, he talks all about the lectins you mentioned in the book, you mentioned Gundry in the book. And basically his point is the same as yours, which is that seeds, like you say, it's a good way to put it, they're plant babies. And so they have poison to protect them. If you go back, my first big book was called The Bulletproof Diet. People lost a couple million pounds on the diet. And chapter one, I'm like, hey, there's five things plants are doing to you that you don't know about. There's lectins, there's phytates, there's oxalates, which are a major cause of all sorts of health problems people don't know about.

1:02:54There's histamine, which a lot of people post-COVID are really dealing with, histamine in their food, they can't handle it. And then there's mold toxins that are a common problem. And omega-6 oils was in there as well, if I didn't already mention it. So like, those are the problems with plants. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat plants. I'm not against carbohydrates, even though people somehow think I only eat fat and meat and I'm Mr. Keto. No, keto is a tool for brain function and losing weight for short periods of time if you need it. But I'm not in ketosis most of the time, but I have ketones present because I do intermittent fasting.

1:03:26So I eat carbs almost every day. And I don't limit them. At this point, limiting carbs at 6 % body fat would be dumb. I don't need to do it. So what carbs do I eat? Not carbs that are full of toxins. And this is the thing. Not all plants do the same thing to you. Not all proteins do the same thing to you. and butter is different than canola oil. So we like to say, what are your macros? How much protein? Serin nerve gas is a protein. Spider venom is a protein. Gluten's a protein. Beef is a protein. Which protein were we talking about? Because they're unrelated in what they do to your body. So in terms of, okay, just like a sample diet for someone, what would you eat for breakfast, dinner?

1:04:13So I tend to eat one to one and a half meals a day. I do intermittent fasting. How much do you weigh? I weigh about 150. How much do you want to weigh? I'm pretty good with 150. I'm pretty good with my weight. So how do you put a hundred - I've like weighed the same weight since high school. Beautiful. You're lucky. How do you eat 150 grams of animal protein in a meal and a half a day? I probably don't. I'll tell you one thing I do. I mean, just for me, I eat sushi almost every night, and I don't know if that's good or bad. You're almost certainly protein deficient. And I say this, when I travel, I eat a lot of sushi because it's one of the things that's widely available.

1:04:57It has fewer man-made flavor enhancers and chemicals and colors and things like that in it. The only problem is that they don't get that much fish. I mean, you get hamachikama if you want to get some extra protein, which is one of my favorite sushi dishes. the fish collar grilled. But if you're eating sushi every night, you're getting high levels of mercury and probably some lead. That affects your brain function directly the next day. So if you're going to eat a lot of sushi, you have to take chlorella, which is a kind of algae that will stick to the mercury that's in the fish. If we did a blood test right now or a pee test, you would have probably scary high levels of mercury.

1:05:37Same thing happened to me when I was doing tons of sushi. So what you're going to have to do, and this is, it's actually really funny. I did the math about two years ago and I said, all right, I'm going to try doing a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Cause I've recommended it in my books, but I hadn't really always measured it. And sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. So I started to be religious and I realized I travel 50 % and I never getting enough protein. You want to get a pound of steak when you're traveling, you go to the average restaurant, you're going to order three main courses to get a pound of steak And$400 later or something, you finally got it, and you have to throw all these fried French fries or if it came with a steak.

1:06:14It's really hard to do that. So I also said, well, all the research that we know says you can absorb at most 50 grams of protein per pound of body weight. But I eat two meals a day. Like, how do I get 200 grams? So I said, the studies must be wrong. And I started religiously eating 100 grams of protein. That's a lot. That's a pound of steak per meal. and I take digestive enzymes. If you eat too much protein and you can't digest it, you'll get bodybuilder farts. You will clear the room and you'll know you have a problem, take your enzymes. So I take my digestive enzymes when I eat my protein. I do 100 grams of protein per meal if I eat two meals.

1:06:52I might eat a steak and take some protein powder as well. And I just don't miss it. And I travel with protein powder. And interestingly, just a month ago, a study came out that really made the rounds online in biohacking and bodybuilding circles. Some researchers figured out that there is no upper limit to how much protein your body can absorb. The 50 grams of protein was just a myth. Just like drinking eight glasses of water or walking 10 ,000 steps, there's no science behind either of those. Those are just made-up marketing numbers from someone a long time ago. So it turns out you can absorb insane amounts of protein.

1:07:28So your job, get a protein powder and chug 50 grams of protein before you eat every time. And do that for one month, James, and then text me and tell me that your sleep is better, your chest is better, that you're ripped. It's not that hard. You're just not eating enough protein. What protein powder do you recommend? Anything animal-based that your body likes. The cheapest and most affordable and accessible is grass-fed whey protein concentrate. You can also get egg protein if you're not allergic to it. Some people handle eggs well. Some people don't. Sadly, I don't. I think eggs are really good for if you can handle them.

1:08:04I gave myself an egg allergy when I was coming out of that vegan period because I had such a bad leaky gut. There's also beef protein. You can buy a beef protein powder. You can use some collagen protein powder, but it shouldn't be your only protein. And some people can use other types of dairy protein depending on your allergic sensitivities. So basically, a few scoops of whey protein is what most people take away from that, but you can buy different kinds of animal protein. And you just mix it with water and drink it? Yeah. That's one way to do it. Some people will put it in a smoothie, throw in some blueberries and throw in some whatever sweetener stuff you like that's natural.

1:08:48The easiest thing to do when you're traveling is I will put it, I'll brew my danger coffee. It's a crime. I put protein powder in the coffee. It doesn't taste great. Coffee's just amazing by itself. But I put it in there because hot coffee will melt any kind of protein powder. You put it in there, you shake it up in a sealed mug, and then you drink it, and it didn't taste great. It didn't taste bad either. And then I've got my protein for the day, and then I have another cup of coffee for flavor. And that's what I do when I travel. But at home, I put it in a blender with some frozen blueberries.

1:09:18So blueberries at least are good. You didn't mention fruits that much, so I was wondering about that. Fruits kind of piss me off. So even in the kind of edges of the carnivore world, I'm not a carnivore. I tried the carnivore thing when I was writing The Bulletproof Diet, and I felt great for the first 60 days, and I destroyed my sleep architecture and got leaky gut after several months of it, which is also common. So it's great for a cleanse, but not long-term, just like keto, great for a cleanse, not long-term. So some people, including really good friends, I love Paul Saladino. It's like, well, fruit.

1:09:54Mother Nature wants you to eat fruit, so let's eat fruit. But some fruit causes gout and kidney stones. 70 % of kidney stones are caused by plants and not by eating meat. And if you're eating kiwi fruits and especially red raspberries and pineapple, these fruits are really high in oxalates. And if you wake up the next morning with a sore back and a sore joints and brain fog and crusty eyes, that was fruit that wasn't so good for you. Other kinds of fruit don't necessarily do that. The highest benefit, lowest inflammation fruit is definitely blueberries. So I eat a lot of blueberries. What about, and it's funny because I had read raspberries right before this podcast, like literally minutes before this podcast.

1:10:42But what about blackberries? I pretty much eat only raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. All right. Those are my fruits. I was like you once. On Vancouver Island, heck, we had wild blackberries everywhere. And we grew our own raspberries. I'm going to take you back to when I was a raw vegan. I used to go to the farmer's market in Mountain View, California. And I'd buy an entire flat of raspberries. And I'd spread them out on a paper towel in the fridge. And I would eat two boxes of raspberries a day. And after about six months, I noticed I have to pee like 25 times a day. And it's like really urgent pee.

1:11:19And if I don't pee, I'm going to like wet myself. Like I'm in my 30s. This is stupid. So I go to the doctor. He goes, well, it's a urologist. So I go to the top urologist in San Francisco. I go, the guy rams a camera in my pee hole. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Oh, I can't do it. It was not something I ever want to repeat. And at the end of it, he goes, I don't see anything. I'm like, you did that to see nothing? Well, I finally figured out it was the raspberries. And one of the women that I've dated, I got conscious uncoupled a few years ago. She had interstitial cystitis.

1:11:55And I looked, I'm like, stop with the raspberries and the beets. three days later, she calls and goes, it's gone. What happens is raspberries and blackberries are very high in oxalic acid and raspberries are much higher. And oxalic acid forms razor sharp microscopic calcium crystals in your kidneys and your urethra that cause chronic infections. Oh my God. So this is what stresses me out. Like what can I eat? White rice in sushi? Yeah, white rice. White rice is good. There's not much bad stuff in white rice. They've taken out the arsenic. They've taken out the lectins. It's relatively good. What do you put on the rice to flavor it, though?

1:12:37Because they don't do soy. Fish, beef, even a third of Japan eats their sushi with sea salt instead of soy sauce. You could do, if you tolerate it, you could do the gluten-free soy sauce. But a lot of people, a huge number of people, they eat it and they get really tired or they get hives or they get some other symptoms, it's because soy sauce, including gluten-free, is very high in histamine. If you had COVID, you probably have a histamine disorder. It causes all these long-haul COVID people, they have histamine problems from mast cells. So I just found that for me, being Mr. Sensitive with autoimmune conditions and all these health things when I was a kid, if you give me soy sauce, my face gets puffy and I get itchy and then I get tired and I want sugar and it's just not worth it.

1:13:23But if you handle soy sauce, put some soy sauce on there. You'll probably get more hypoglycemia and want dessert. So I use sea salt. And when I do rice at home, there's this cool thing called butter. And you put that on the rice. So rice, I know grass-fed beef is one of your favorites. Rice, beef, lamb, pasture pork. You can eat some pasture pork, absolutely. Pork is relatively high in histamine and toxins unless it's well-treated. So the quality of your pork matters more than the quality of your beef. Anything with hooves is good. You can eat chicken. It's not as good as beef, but it's a lot better than not eating animal protein.

1:14:02And after that, dairy. It depends what kind of dairy you handle. I love sheep's milk yogurt. Sheep's milk is the most compatible with humans, followed by goat, followed by raw or A2, grass-fed dairy. I wouldn't eat commercial dairy under most circumstances because the cows make the wrong kind of protein for humans. So that's where your protein and fat comes from, right? And then you eat some veggies and some veggies are great. Some are not so good. Those are all on the Bulletproof diet. You'll see me eating broccoli and cauliflower. You won't see me eating the nightshade family like bell peppers and things.

1:14:38Those are hard on most people. You're not going to see me eating okra because it tastes like snot and it's also a nightshade. and beets are not good for you. And you see all these poor people, they're like, oh, well, this beet makes nitric oxide. Well, maybe, sometimes it does. But if I gave you a cyanide pill that also made nitric oxide, would you take it? You would say no. So why don't we look at the negative stuff that's in the vegetable and minimize that and then get the positive stuff? And there's lots of ways to raise nitric oxide without eating something that causes kidney stones like beets do.

1:15:30Let's say you went out to breakfast with friends, and what do you order? You can't even order coffee unless you bring danger coffee with you. I mean, you can. It's just not as good. So I might order the coffee if it's good. or now I'm going to be a real douchebag. I'll order a pot of hot water and I just pour my own coffee grounds in there because I am the CEO of Danger Coffee. But you can order coffee, you can order tea. And green tea is a lot better than black tea. Black tea is also one of the causes of kidney stones. And what you're going to find is there's usually smoked salmon, which is a really good choice in any of those buffets.

1:16:09They go to a hotel, there's smoked salmon. There's some avocado. There's some fruit. You can eat some fruit. I wouldn't go heavy on the kiwis and pineapple and raspberries, but eat the blueberries and eat the melons. It's not a big deal. I don't normally want fruit in the morning other than maybe a few blueberries, but hey, going out with friends, it's okay. If you're not sensitive to eggs, hallelujah, you got the whole omelet bar there. The trick there is you tell the guys two things. Number one, make it with fresh eggs you crack. Because most of these guys are using egg substitute, not egg substitute, but egg replacement.

1:16:40They buy big jugs of pre-mixed eggs where some things are taken in and added. It doesn't taste as good and it sounds good for you. And tell them, cook it in butter. Don't cook it in that crappy salad oil stuff you're using. And most places will do it. And then now you got an omelet with lots of good saturated fat that helps you make hormones. You add a lot of protein and you're good to go. Throw in some turkey, throw in some chicken, throw in some whatever other stuff they have to put in there. It's not that hard. Just don't eat the French toast. Oh man, it's the French toast I love, but okay.

1:17:10I know, right? I'm with you there. Maybe they have gluten-free French toast. And that's something else. people get on this idea that, well, if I cheat on my diet, it's a cheat day and it's just okay, I'll just go crazy. No, you could have a day where you say, I'm not going to follow all my principles, but it doesn't mean you eat the fried Snickers bar because you're going to have cravings for a long time. So you can say, I'm going to do a really high sugar, high carb day, but make it with ice cream, which has dairy fat instead of with churros, which is like gluten and damaged omega-6 oils and sugar.

1:17:44Like there's a big difference in your outcome. So literally cheat with cheesecake instead of cheating with junk food. And you totally change how I feel. I will on weekends with my kids. I'll make pancakes. I'm going to make them out of rice flour. I'll put maple syrup on them. I'll make them with butter, right? No, it's not perfect by a long shot. It's just, okay, now my blood sugar went up. But I didn't have to deal with food colorings, food agents, 48 hours of inflammation from the seed oils that's more inflammation than smoking a cigarette. I had a great breakfast. It was fun. Everyone's fine.

1:18:18We drank extra coffee and we went out and we went for a walk to keep our blood sugar stable. It's not that crazy. It's like high quality food. Okay. So we talked about the exercise, the food, talked about vitamin Dake, which I'm going to order from, I got that website that you mentioned up on the screen right now. and but now supplements so there's all these i can't even i can't even deal with the whole supplement industry there's like and because i feel when i start reading about it i feel like i want to have everything and you you talk about so many supplements in the book but i'll tell you what i do i do uh the nad plus stuff and from from qualia yep uh no i do it from thorn okay Okay.

1:19:07And that's basically it. Then I do quercetin to absorb, I don't know, it interacts with the NAD plus to, I don't know how. And I'll do zinc and magnesium. Cool. So I like that you're doing zinc and magnesium. I really want you to take Minerals 101 from the vitamindake.com website because the opposite of zinc is copper. You're probably copper deficient. Most people are. You're also not getting molybdenum. That is, by the way, a metal that I will never know how to pronounce, molybdenum. And I know this because when I read the audio book for Smarter, Not Harder, I had to go back and re-say that word like 5 ,000 times, and I still don't remember the correct spelling.

1:19:51So anyway, it's a really important mineral for recycling glutathione and for being able to digest enough protein. So you're deficient in those minerals almost certainly. So that's why I made a broad spectrum mineral supplement. So you just have all the minerals your body needs, not just zinc and magnesium, although those are two of the most important ones. That's going to help you a lot. And then what you're going to do, because you don't want to become an expert on all this stuff. I'm about two months out from launching the AI tool that will guide you on what to do. Till then, and that'll be on daveasprey.com, and it'll be with Upgrade Labs.

1:20:29Some members will get access to it. But what you're going to do is you're going to say, what do I want? And you're going to get a cognitive enhancement formula that you really like. And you're going to use that every day. And there's a variety of them out there. I've worked with NeuroHacker on even formulating theirs. I like their formula a lot. It's called Qualia Mind. There's probably code Dave or something. I have no idea if that's the code. You know, I have Qualia Mind. Do you take it? You know, you got to take six a day. And so sometimes I just don't want to take six a day. So here's the thing.

1:21:02How many pills can you swallow at one time? Two. Have you ever shotgunned a beer? No, I get like a, I get a gag reflux pretty easily. All right. So what you want to do is get like a banana and just like ram it down. Okay. Don't do that. You can learn. And I've taught so many people how to take five or six pills at a time. and you won't have a gag reflex when you do it. The trick is take two pills and put them in your mouth and then fill your mouth as full of water as you can and toss your head back and gulp the water. Like open up your throat like you would just take a big swig of something. And then the next day do three.

1:21:42And the next day do four. And pretty soon, you can do five or six. I can swallow as many pills as will fit in my hand. It's probably like 40. And a while back, Liver King, who's got hilarious social media, he swallows 20 liver pills. He's like, you know, anyone who can, you can have more pills than me in one swallow is more of a man or something. And so I'm like, I'm not the Liver King vibe, you know, full respect. I actually like it that he's a biohacker. I don't have a problem that he uses a lot of performance enhancers. I just like it when you disclose all that stuff. So I ripped my shirt off and I took 40 pills.

1:22:21And I'm like, I see you and I raise you 20, liver king. And it was kind of funny because people called them liver queen for all of 30 seconds afterwards. But yeah, you can swallow 40 pills. It's the same that most people did in college with beer. It's just the same skill. So you can get over that. I mean, good God, James, you've done so many amazing things to like press the edges of what humans can do. I know you can swallow six pills in one swallow and then the problem is solved. All right. So I'm going to do this. But then it's like, where do you stop? So there's zinc, there's molybdenum. When you get the minerals 101 formula, it's three pills that have all of the minerals you need in them.

1:22:59Okay. So vitamin D is one pill and it's tiny. You won't even notice it. And you take three mineral pills and you don't have to take your zinc separately. You probably still want to take magnesium because you need a lot of that. That takes about three pills for most people to get their magnesium. What do you think of the NAD plus stuff, the anti-aging stuff? I think there's a good argument for it. You can take niacinamide for people listening who want to save money. Niacinamide has been on our diet for thousands of years, but in the longevity world, we've used it for the last 30 years to raise NAD levels.

1:23:31It's very affordable, but take your NAD stuff from Thorne. It sounds like good stuff to me. Okay, so two more questions. You mentioned creatine in the book for cognitive enhancement. I never thought of it. So I have Jocko Willings creatine powder that he sells. I don't know if it's good or bad or what. Jocko's great. I remember interviewing him live during one of my book launches. And he comes in, like this guy could kill everyone in the room, but he's actually a really calm and peaceful presence. Like he's got the strength, but also the peacefulness of a warrior. And yes, his creatine is great because all creatine works.

1:24:08It doesn't have to be fancy. There's some evidence for something called creatine GG, but it's probably not that big of a difference. So I would say any kind of creatine. But it does help. It does work. It works really well. And it works via mitochondrial enhancement. Just one morning, a small number of men lose hair from creatine. So if you start taking creatine and you're shedding your hair, you're probably one of those, but most people don't have that. And then creatine makes your brain work better. It also makes your muscles work better. It's just a good thing to do. Okay, so that's creatine.

1:24:45The last question I have is testosterone. I forget if we were talking before the podcast or on the podcast. I haven't had this tested, but I'm 56 years old. I was talking at the, I was giving a talk in the metal group, which you obviously know about. And in the middle of my talk, everyone started like texting, this guy needs to test his testosterone. You're 56 and you've never tested your testosterone? No, I've never tested anything. Are you trying to enhance your feminine presence or something? No, but I just never really thought about it. I never really thought it would be an issue. Right now, testosterone is an emergency issue for humanity.

1:25:30People in their 20s have half the testosterone that they did 30 years ago. So if you're 20 and you have normal testosterone, you have the same levels your grandfather had 30 years ago. This is environmental pollution. It's plastics. It's fragrances. Axe body spray. those little pint and trees in the Uber you ride in, probably half the stuff you smear on your body. It's a big deal. So when I had lower testosterone than my mom in my 20s, I got it tested. I've been on testosterone since I was 26. I took three years off when I was developing the Bulletproof Diet to see if I could get my levels up naturally.

1:26:07You can. It's an enormous amount of work. You have to do everything perfect, including get your sleep every night. And if you travel 50 % like I do, you're not going to do it. Anyone over age 40, you're probably low on testosterone for men and women. And testosterone matters, James, not because it's going to give you, you know, morning wood or make you all ripped. It might do both of those. It's a dopamine and testosterone ride together. So when your testosterone is low, your dopamine is low. When your dopamine is low, you don't care about making a difference in the world as much. And when your testosterone is high, your dopamine is higher, and then you're motivated to be a good father, a good provider, to be a good person, to do stuff that makes a difference.

1:26:53So if you want a programmable bunch of tired, overwhelmed people, you lower their testosterone with environmental chemicals, and that's what's happening to us. The solution is really straightforward. You can inject testosterone. You can put testosterone cream on your balls or armpits. You put testosterone gel in the same places. And they just came out with an oral form of testosterone. Some people use Enclomiphene. There's a company called Maximus that pioneered doing that. It's a small microdose of a pharmaceutical that naturally raises your testosterone. Or you can take oral testosterone pills now.

1:27:27Yeah, there's two oral forms. I see because Maximus sends me email ads. So what do they do? So what they use is a pharmaceutical that I started taking along with testosterone when I was 26 that my doctor recommended. And it's a small dose of a drug that causes your body to secrete more testosterone naturally. People get about a 50 % testosterone boost from that. Full disclosure, I'm friends with the owner. I'm a small investor and advisor to Maximus. So I just, I'm not going to make any financial changes in my life if you or anyone listening does it, but I don't want anything undisclosed there.

1:28:06I just backed it because I'm like, this is a cool way to raise testosterone that doesn't require you to smear it on or inject it or get a pellet. The final thing, though, is a new form of testosterone that just got approved. It's an oral form. And you just take a pill. It's called testosterone undecanoate. And like you go to any doctor and you get tested and then they - I don't know about that last one. I would go to Maximus first and see if that works. They'll test you as well. You got to run the test. And then after you do the test, you figure out the form you want to try. Maximus is probably the lowest hanging fruit, easiest to do.

1:28:43And then if you don't get the results you want, I would go for probably an injection if you have younger kids around, or I would go for the cream if you don't have younger kids around. Why injection if you have younger kids around? If you're using the cream and you have some left on your arm or your hand or your sheets and you get a little testosterone cream on a two-year-old, it's going to have a meaningful effect because two-year-olds aren't supposed to have endocrine disruptors. They're also not supposed to have sex hormones until later in life. There is a reason that girls are entering puberty at six years old now.

1:29:13It's environmental chemicals. So you don't need to add to that burden by throwing a little testosterone into the mix. I see. All right. I'm going to do all of this, Dave. James, do me a favor. You have my mobile number. Just text me if you need advice on any of this. You're 56. There is no way that our government should allow anyone over 50 to not have a testosterone test to know where they are. You want to lower your all-cause mortality. You want to lower your Alzheimer's cardiovascular cancer risk. Have the testosterone levels of a 30-year-old. And if we can send like hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine and we can't provide testosterone for our men and our women when they need it, and most of them do, and we can't buy good school lunches for our kids, then someone doesn't care about you.

1:29:59Why do you need to have a prescription for testosterone? Why can't I just go to the store and buy it? Like they may get very complicated. It's called a trade union, the American Medical Association. They're the same ones that make you have a prescription to get glasses. And the rest of the world just go into the glasses store and say, I need ones this strong, and they just give them to you. So the US has set up very carefully so that we spend 20 % of our national income on our healthcare more than on national defense. It's insane. And no, you shouldn't need this. You should need a lab test so you know what you need, and then you should get your testosterone.

1:30:351970s Puritans, roid rage from synthetic testosterone that's not even the same thing, and just a lot of fear. Bottom line, though, is testosterone and thyroid are the two hormones that matter most for humans to have energy and motivation. And this goes back to, surprisingly, to danger coffee and not minerals or whatever. It's called danger coffee because who knows what you might do. And you need testosterone to do anything that matters. Otherwise, it just feels like too much work. And you need thyroid to have the electricity and the heat in your body to do it. I want people at full power with motivation to do great things because then you're going to say no to stupidity.

1:31:13You're going to help the little lady across the street and you're not going to lose your mind when someone yells at you in traffic. That's the world we want to live in. strong, powerful people with testosterone, with thyroid, with minerals, with a good night's sleep, because you can't be programmed that way. You're going to turn off the news because it's stupid and you're going to be hard to trick. And I want people like that in the world around me. Well, Dave, so do I. And we didn't even really touch the surface of what you're talking about in Smarter, Not Harder, The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body of Mind You Want by Dave Asprey.

1:31:45I mean, we did touch upon the surface, but there's so much depth to the book. Thank you. Again, that's why I was feeling a little almost overwhelmed, but I'm glad we had a chance to talk because it cleared up so many issues and highly recommend the book. I've read, in the course of doing this podcast, I've read, you know, hundreds of these sort of books. And I always keep coming back to you, Dave, because it's always great advice, great guidance. And I was a fan of the Bulletproof Diet. I'm a fan of this. so thanks once again for coming on the show. James, you're one of the more interesting guys I've ever interviewed.

1:32:21You just see the world through different eyes. I love it that you're competing in chess and making your brain young again. You're one of the more curious people out there so it's always a pleasure to see you, my friend. Thanks, Dave. Talk to you soon.

1:32:44Passion Freddy