The Ultimate Biohacking Guide for Optimal Health | Dave Asprey

[00:00:08] Dave Asprey was this fat aging tech entrepreneur who Realized he was going on a bad path. And so I forget if it was like 15 years ago something like that. He completely Changed his life around in the way he did it

[00:00:24] He didn't trust he kind of went to the scientific sources and did the research himself and practically started the field of biohacking of doing experiments on himself with his diet, with the supplements, with the devices he uses and now

[00:00:38] It's as if he's 20 years younger than he was 20 years ago He started Bulletproof Coffee, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. You've probably listened to him on this podcast and now Just wrote the book

[00:00:50] Smarter Not Harder. I'll describe that in a second and he also started a new coffee company called Danger Coffee But I want to tell a story when Dave Asprey He's been on the podcast a bunch of times when he was on in 20, I think it was 2016

[00:01:03] It happened to be coincidentally the first day I was trying Stand-up comedy. So at the end of that episode It might even been after we shut down the cameras at the end of that episode

[00:01:15] I asked him Dave, I'm doing stand-up comedy for the first time tonight, and I'm really nervous What's your advice? I just wanted to know he's a smart guy. I respect him

[00:01:25] I just wanted to put him on the spot a little bit and see what his advice would be and He thought about it for about a second. And then he said when you get up there love your audience and

[00:01:35] That is the best advice for a stand-up comedy that I have ever heard before Or since and it's really worked well for me and I would say the same holds true when I write

[00:01:45] I always love my audience and when I do public speaking or even this podcast, I always picture in my head loving the audience and What did they write about in smarter not harder well his whole very interesting evolutionary point which is that humans from an evolutionary perspective

[00:02:03] Should be somewhat lazy like we need to have a lot of energy when our fight-or-flight Reflex triggers like when you have to run from the lion that's chasing you You have to use a lot of energy very quickly and then you rest

[00:02:20] But Dave's point is that in our society just staring at screens we're getting that fight-and-flight response Sitting still and so our body and mind doesn't really know what's happening And his argument is the same for exercise like His point is and he and you know

[00:02:34] We'll see a lot of people are gonna have different opinions on this His point is you might not need to exercise for hours at a time because that's not what the human body is supposed to do It exerts itself for very short spurts of time and then rests

[00:02:46] And so his whole book is kind of his biohack experiments on exercise sleep Diet and how you can live your life to perform more optimally. It's an anti-aging book. So it's in that category We've had a lot of anti-aging

[00:03:03] Podcasts and they're always very fascinating to me and I ask him very very specific questions about food Supplements exercise because I always want to know what should I do? And we also talked about do I need testosterone or not? And the answers are always enlightening

[00:03:21] Anyway, once again, here is Dave Asprey This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the James Altucher show So first off Dave

[00:03:46] Welcome back to the show since you last were on the show. What happened to Bulletproof coffee. You just got to tell me I've about three years ago. I got removed from the board of directors and so they're doing their own thing Bulletproof's

[00:04:00] Been acquired by a small investment bank, so I don't have anything to do with Bulletproof anymore Was it okay? Like were you very upset like did it did it? It wasn't the outcome that I wanted for myself or for the investors and you know, it's a

[00:04:17] It's it's always a just a strange place to be where you build something really really big a big movement big big company and then, you know Investor preference and things like that all happen the way they happen

[00:04:30] So, you know lessons learned on raising venture capital and in ways to do that Well since you first came on the show in 2014 I've been a regular user of Bulletproof coffee But now lately I've been using I've been drinking danger coffee every morning Oh and difference, huh?

[00:04:50] You know for me it's hard to tell. Um, I'm really clueless about Like I could take vitamin C every day workout every day Whatever. I cannot tell the difference in my body with anything. And so I just

[00:05:03] Hope that the science is all correct about what each thing does for you I'm very confident that Everyone listening to this is deficient in minerals right now And there's tons of reasons for that and putting minerals back in and getting more electrolytes in your coffee

[00:05:21] It is only going to do good things. So the what we've done is We've put in danger coffee, but it's called that because who knows what you might do

[00:05:29] I guess a good kind of danger like I could do anything right I could you know win a chess tournament I could I'm gonna have to double down on my taking of a danger coffee now Yeah, and it doesn't have any mold and you know

[00:05:44] If you look at some of the brands I've worked with before that maybe once said mold on their label now They just say clean and I don't know what that is

[00:05:51] but I do know that danger coffee says mold free on the label and I know that it has a therapeutic dose of trace and ultra trace minerals and electrolytes in it and it tastes like the most amazing coffee because it is it's very high grade and

[00:06:03] Once every quarter we come out with ceremonial grade Which is some of the most flavorful highest-end coffee on the planet that's also mold free and is also

[00:06:13] Remineralized so that's a very limited amount kind of like you go to a winery and there's only so many number of bottles we'll buy up an entire lot from a micro plantation and And make that available on a first-come first-served basis

[00:06:26] So we're getting into the premium and also premium and it's it's just so fun and it tastes so good And And you since since you left Bulletproof, I guess you started danger coffee

[00:06:38] and now you have this new book smarter not harder the biohackers guide to getting the body and mind you want and I Tell you I'm sorry. I read the book and

[00:06:49] Two things two things struck out at me at first one is I really like the concept and the way you explain it This evolutionary aspect that the human body the body itself wants to be lazy

[00:07:04] It doesn't want to work out for hours in a gym. It's it's been busy hunting and gathering and whatever It doesn't want it there. Your point is basically there are other ways

[00:07:14] There are sort of quote-unquote lazier ways to get the health the maximum health you want to achieve Yeah There's that and it's also in the West we think we are our body and the reality is your body truly does not exist because as You're listening to the show

[00:07:33] Some cells in your body are falling off or getting pooped out or they're getting burned and broken down and recreated into new things So we're really more like an eddy in matter That's moving through time

[00:07:45] Like if you're to watch a river at the bottom of a waterfall you can see there's a pool and it's always swirling around But it's not the same at any one second

[00:07:53] It's like it's a you're seeing a motion through water, but it's not the same water all the time Well, your body is the same way so it doesn't exist

[00:08:01] What it is is kind of a hollow tube starts with your mouth ends and your butt that's just moving through food and air And light and everything like that, which is creepy and gross except your body has its own consciousness

[00:08:12] That's not you and then you take credit for what your body does and when your body is jacked in a bad way Versus jacked, you know in a good way well, then you take credit for that too and if your body is anxious because

[00:08:26] You fed it the wrong thing or it's lacking zinc or something and you think well, I'm anxious It must be my mother-in-law or it must because I just lost it chest again It could be anything right? I have my that does make me very anxious like that

[00:08:39] It's very disturbing when I lose So the question is is it disturbing because of a mental story in your case I'm sure that's part of it or maybe the feeling of being disturbed You were easy to disturb because your hardware was not running very well

[00:08:56] And it felt disturbed and it just gave you a story about it being chess Well, I think that's true and I think and I don't know if this is a story or not But I definitely think as I age it is harder for me to have the stamina

[00:09:09] I had when I was younger and it's harder for me to focus the brain the way I was when I was younger So if like you kind of mentioned there's lots of different things people want to do with their health

[00:09:19] they either want to get stronger or they want to have more stamina or They don't want to get sick or they want their brain to improve and I'm definitely in the category of like I want more energy and I want more brain power and

[00:09:32] This brings me to the second aspect of the book though, which is I get sometimes really stressed out I read a lot of these books about nutrition and and you know I have all the latest and greatest on on the podcast

[00:09:44] many of the people you mentioned in the book have been have been on the podcast and it's it stresses me out because there's so many like minerals and vitamins and

[00:09:53] Supplements and foods to remember and one person says kale is good. The other person says kale is bad unless you do this to it I just have trouble remembering

[00:10:02] What I'm supposed to do and I feel I get I do get a little anxious feeling overwhelmed that there's like so much to do To stay just reasonably healthy let alone improve Mmm, it sounds like you've got some perfectionism going on there that could be

[00:10:17] Like like I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. Do I start like what you 150 supplements or You're not alone. And the first thing you want to do is is like this is funny

[00:10:29] It's we're smarter not harder comes from the book. It's a world different So where you are today is includes your age Your gender your hormone status your nutrient status your toxin status Genetics like all that stuff is in there. And then how tired are you?

[00:10:47] Like what's your lifestyle like how much do you drink all that stuff? It boils down to what's the state of my hardware right now How's my body? How's my mind from a cellular biological perspective and then well what matters to you?

[00:11:01] Where do you want to go? And then how much? Energy how much suffering or hard work and how much money? Oh god, every time I do that my camera zooms in because it follows my fingers. Stop it

[00:11:15] That's kind of funny though. It kind of like zooms in when you're making a point But it's a I camera. Yeah, but it like I don't know the hand signals that make it unzoom out Geez, I don't even know it drives me insane

[00:11:30] All right. Let me see if I can zoom out. Here we go Yes, I did it all by myself. How's that? It's about where I was perfect. All right, stop it camera Okay I forgot I was saying because I distracted myself with technology just it's you know

[00:11:46] We are wherever our mind is and our body is right now. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. Thank you. So What what is your current state? Where do you want to go?

[00:11:55] Right and like you said you want your energy back you want your brain to work better, right? Someone else maybe I want to be younger. I want to be stronger I want to be able to manage stress better and we all want all those things

[00:12:06] so i'm in the really late stages of Developing and launching an ai tool that'll help you zoom in on your goal And then you get to decide how much do I want to invest in time energy and hard work?

[00:12:19] In order to get there and if you're saying I have 10 minutes a week. I don't want it to hurt very much And I have you know 214 in my budget for this then this tool knows everything i've ever said everything i've written everything my research library

[00:12:32] And can make recommendations for you very specific granular ones about lifestyle and supplements And in the meantime what i've done is i've put together. What are the things everyone needs to work better? And if you go to vitamin dake.com vitamin d-a-k-e

[00:12:49] There's two supplements that just everybody has to start with I don't care what your goals are If you want your meditation to work when your brain to work you want your exercise to work you want your stress hormones to work You need vitamin dake

[00:13:02] Which is a specific combination of d-a-k and e And these do all sorts of things in the body But one thing they do is they tell minerals where to go And then minerals 101 is a supplement on the same site. This is macro minerals beyond what's in danger coffee

[00:13:16] Get your fat solubles and your minerals dialed in and then everything you do works better because now When you send a signal to your body to focus at that chest tournament or to focus when you're doing a bicep curl The body says oh, isn't that great?

[00:13:30] I have enough zinc enough copper enough magnesium that I can actually make the enzymes necessary to fold that protein or to make that Neurotransmitter or to make testosterone so now I can be responsive to signals from the environment So vitamin dake and minerals 101 is foundational for everyone

[00:13:48] And what I learned in the book too is you can't like I was taking vitamin d supplements every day but particularly during covid but You can't just in the book it says you can't just take vitamin d because there's interactions with these other ones like

[00:14:03] Oh, yeah, actually get kidney stones if you just take too much vitamin d Especially if you take vitamin d and you're eating kale and spinach and beets and almonds and even too much chocolate Right because they have additional things that cause kidney stones

[00:14:17] So vitamin d by itself is better than being deficient in vitamin d but it has risks unless you take it with vitamins K and a and unfortunately The vegan movement has convinced us that plant-based vitamin a is the same as vitamin a it's not

[00:14:36] Your body doesn't convert plant-based vitamin a into real vitamin a very well And the plant-based stuff displaces the vitamin a that you need for healthy eyes healthy vision healthy brain healthy immune function What is vitamin a? Vitamin a is a fat soluble vitamin. It's known as retinol

[00:14:53] And it's formed in our skin Usually and it's formed in our liver and when you have enough vitamin a your immune system works when you don't it doesn't work And it works to balance out vitamin d

[00:15:05] So vitamin a and d kind of dance with each other vitamin a actually comes out more in the evening and vitamin d more in the morning And then vitamin k which is in that vitamin dake formula vitamin k helps to keep

[00:15:17] Calcium where it belongs in your bones and inside your cells and not to allow systemic calcification Which is what vitamin d promotes without it? So it's a harmonized balance of all the fat solubles you need plus all the minerals you need and

[00:15:31] It's meant to be affordable vitamin dake. You get a 60-day supply. It works to something like 22 bucks a month so it's not a big investment, but it has

[00:15:40] Thousands of pathways in the body it affects and minerals are slightly more expensive, but not that much more expensive per month That's what we all do first When you're in the biohacking mode and then everything that you do to improve yourself

[00:15:52] It's easier because now at least you can respond to your environment instead of saying well I know you picked up heavy stuff and I know I wanted to build muscle. I didn't have the raw ingredients

[00:16:01] So how about you have some stress instead of some muscle and that's what most of us are doing in the gym today so I want to back up a second and Talk about like how did you get into all this?

[00:16:27] Like I know like when we way back 10 years ago when we first spoke, you know before you started bulletproof coffee You were overweight. You're unhappy. You were stressed. What was going on?

[00:16:37] Well by the time I turned 30 i'd weighed 300 pounds. I weigh about 198 pounds. I'm six percent body fat right now um I had high risk of stroke and heart attack chronic fatigue syndrome crippling brain fog I had three surgeries in my knees before I was 23 because of arthritis

[00:16:58] My fasting blood sugar was 117 And I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years for chronic sinus infections and strep throat. I had mold toxin induced brain damage from chemical induced brain damage

[00:17:13] Diagnosed by dr. Daniel Eamon. So my body is a complete shit show. My brain's a shit show i'm stressed all the time biologically I'm stressed all the time emotionally as well because I had trauma in there that I hadn't dealt with and

[00:17:25] I was like, I can't do this anymore. My accelerator is pressed all the way to the floor I'm slowing down. I can push harder, but it doesn't do anything And my career's taken off i'm 30. I'm going to wharton business school

[00:17:38] Right. I've already led strategic m&a and strategic strategy For a 36 billion dollar tech company and I was a co-founder part of that company Like I had a great career. I made six million bucks when I was 26

[00:17:50] I lost it when I was 28 and my brain was just cooked And it was out of desperation when doctors couldn't do anything I went to a longevity doctor

[00:18:01] There were very very few in the world back then and i'd found him because I was running an anti-aging nonprofit group in palo alto And I was learning from people three times my age how they got young Because I felt like I was old before I was 30

[00:18:13] So I'll fix my brain using what the old guys do and it worked and then I went to this doctor who I met through the group and He said dave bad news. Your testosterone is lower than your mom's

[00:18:28] Because he had done the work on my mind like it actually was Well, what was what were the actual numbers because again i'm 56 And everybody tell I haven't gotten tested for this sort of stuff. Everyone tells me

[00:18:40] Now's the time I need to get start getting tested for test I was tanked because I was 300 pounds my body converted testosterone to estrogen very quickly and I was obese which makes extra estrogen

[00:18:51] So my numbers would have been in the hundreds right now. My number is about a thousand which is where I feel best And what's normal? What's the normal range? Um, the normal range like i'm i'm lean like super lean. I feel so good um

[00:19:05] The normal range is about 700 to a thousand and what's happening right now is testosterone levels in men and women are plummeting across the developed world if you are 25 or 30 right now your normal testosterone levels are the same levels your grandfather had If you went back to the 80s

[00:19:25] So our diet all this plant-based stuff the plant-based oils all the fragrances and synthetic plastics And chemicals including atrazine which is allowed to be sprayed in the u.s. That makes frogs Uh turn hermaphroditic all that stuff is affecting your hormones

[00:19:42] That axe body spray is kind of you know, cutting off your balls chemically Anyway, you don't need to be. Um To be castrated that way by the chemicals around you so Since you're living in that world, they're going to tell you have normal testosterone

[00:19:58] I'll tell you if you're a man. I don't care if you're 80 or you're 18 If your numbers aren't around 800 or higher, you're probably not showing up in the world the way you want

[00:20:07] It's not about having muscle. It's about caring about your life and the world around you. It's a hormone of desire I didn't have that. I just had really strong willpower, but it wasn't enough

[00:20:16] I went to the gym 90 minutes a day six days a week. Like I beat myself up half weights half cardio low fat Semi-vegetarian diet all I did was stress myself out and I had a 46 inch waist When I started and after 18 months of that regimen

[00:20:31] And i'm like what I have to do eat less lettuce And so it was that backdrop. I'm like i'm gonna do something about it. I got into longevity pretty soon All these people who are teaching me so much asked me to be the president

[00:20:44] I'm like this 28 year old president of a longevity group where i'm the only guy under 60 in the room So I learned from my elders They taught me so much I interviewed The the guys that that today I would interview on my podcast like like Andrew Huberman

[00:20:58] That was maybe episode 400 before he had a show I interviewed him Well, you go back 20 years. I'd have been interviewing, you know his dad at this longevity group So I just got mentored by the best in the world and I felt called after my career in tech

[00:21:12] I just started a blog maybe I could keep someone from going through all the crap I went through And I thought five people would read it it turns out I have millions of followers and you know

[00:21:21] eight books half of them new york times bestsellers 400 million downloads on the podcast and I built bulletproof that did more than 600 million in lifetime revenue before I was removed from the company. So the whole movement of biohacking I started the biohacking movement and by the way

[00:21:38] This end of may early june. So may 30 31st june 1st in dallas The 10th annual biohacking conference, it's in its 13th year, but I didn't count the the pandemic years even though we did virtual conferences

[00:21:50] So the oldest and largest biohacking conference that started the movement and i'm hosting it again biohackingconference.com Wow Plug people barely notice i'm gonna i'm gonna go. I need it. I need to hack my body james. You're welcome, man I'll i'll get you a pass so, okay, so

[00:22:08] What you know again in terms of the Lazy part like part of the implication when you when you say that in the book is that maybe you don't your workout doesn't Have to be 90 minutes for instance

[00:22:20] Like what's and you give examples and you give exercises and and in every chapter you give so much advice It's incredible And now I just want to figure out like what to focus on like what for me

[00:22:31] Starting out if I don't want to go crazy, can I focus on? You know Your goals are cognitive function And energy, right? Yeah, I I wear out by the end of the day

[00:22:45] Like I completely wear out and sometimes I need to function later in the afternoon or evening So and where are you living right now? You were itinerant when I first uh, yeah, you were homeless when I first interviewed you

[00:22:58] Yeah, i'm in atlanta georgia. I'm a southerner now. You can tell i'm a southerner Yeah, you you've totally got the vibe right? Yeah, i've got i'm racist now. It's it's really changed my life completely. Yeah, I bet so

[00:23:12] Where would you start? I was going to see if you were near I think our closest location for upgrade labs Uh would be in tennessee. We're opening one. So at upgrade labs We got 27 locations around the country in the process of opening

[00:23:25] 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

[00:23:38] 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

[00:23:50] the Uh, the idea there is so you're not going to do that. You're going to go through smarter not harder And you're going to read the two sections that are on energy and brain And you're going to pick some practices. We'll pick some some low uh cost ones

[00:24:07] Um 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. I I not always but I often take things for sleep

[00:24:22] Uh 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

[00:24:37] I don't I don't know if I want to say unfortunately, but unfortunately I got prescribed clonopin and Clonopin is extremely addictive Yeah, uh, like it's unbelievable. Like I took it for a few months. No more anxiety

[00:24:48] Like it's amazing how it works it blocks your anxiety thoughts, but then I figured okay no more anxiety i'm gonna get off of it and you just can't like it's It's really addictive. And so

[00:25:00] You know i've been on this 14 year journey of weaning off of the clonopin which I mostly have but sometimes I I have to take that to sleep And that supposedly doesn't really improve the quality of your sleep though Yeah, it it doesn't that i'm aware of

[00:25:17] Um, 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 so Let's see, so your sleep architecture is broken I would say so The short version to improve your sleep would be go to

[00:25:34] sleepwithdave.com This is totally free straightforward, it's just we haven't even had our first date but I mean it was it was the cool hair james. No It's by far the best url of my entire career because no one's going to forget that it's free

[00:25:51] 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 and six and a half hours

[00:26:06] most nights And 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

[00:26:23] When I first was introducing this idea in this global movement It's the art and science of changing the environment around you and then inside of you so they have control of your own biology Let's go back from that evolutionary perspective james two billion years ago our

[00:26:45] Insane numbers of ancestors back some cells floating around in the ocean We 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

[00:26:59] 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 two billion years ago these bacteria They were very dependent. Okay bacteria are dumb, but they do have intelligence

[00:27:14] They have to react to their environments their environmental sensors then make a decision So they look at light In the morning sunrise, it's red and it's at an angle

[00:27:26] 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

[00:27:39] 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

[00:27:48] 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 your cells it's morning The number one thing they listen to is light and within light. There's five aspects of light

[00:28:01] 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

[00:28:10] 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

[00:28:24] For you probably at noon is a good idea as well So hey, look, it's middle of the day and then in the evening seeing sunsets good after that you dim your lights And since you can't dim lights in hotel rooms and you have a life

[00:28:38] I started one of the first circadian glasses companies. It's called TruDark 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

[00:28:48] 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

[00:29:00] We have a study that's about to be published showing that those glasses the TruDark sleep glasses They cause the same Changes in your brain waves that you get from advanced meditation

[00:29:13] So in 15 minutes, they drop you into a sleep state so that you're just oh i'm ready to relax So at night you put these on at night Yeah, keep them on at night dim the lights and oh that thing about food the number two thing after light

[00:29:26] 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

[00:29:36] 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

[00:29:53] A study in japan found that the amount of light From street lights 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

[00:30:10] 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 the tools that I use

[00:30:21] But everything that you can do you can do it for free You can put aluminum foil in your windows instead of spending 40 bucks on blackout curtains on amazon Like it's up to you, right? Aluminum foil is just uglier

[00:30:32] Well, okay i'm gonna do all that I I think with with food I tend to I follow that advice I do No food three hours before i'm gonna go to sleep and I tend to go to sleep pretty early but

[00:30:46] 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

[00:30:55] 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 uh since my very first blog post in 2011 Uh, and I I love that that andrew huberman's bringing in the university aspect and he's a master teacher

[00:31:12] and structurer of knowledge um 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

[00:31:25] 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

[00:31:39] I used to wear a headband when I 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 apple Phone does now because I was so broken from a circadian perspective

[00:31:52] Um, so 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 um and just raining No offense to canadians out there

[00:32:03] 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

[00:32:21] 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. That's as good as you can get indoors

[00:32:37] All right, i'm i'm gonna do all this i'm okay and you also want red light in the morning So um red light's another really common biohack People thought I was insane when I started the biohacking movement

[00:32:48] 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 gotta I can't buy what I want

[00:33:00] Like how do I make it available so I can I can have it and others can have it that's cost effective So tell me about the tell me about the red light therapy like my wife does this she stands in front of some

[00:33:10] Like a board and it shoots red light at her It it could be even the true light board that I make there's you can buy this stuff on amazon There's stuff everywhere now. There's a lot of people just buying red leds from china

[00:33:23] 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

[00:33:35] 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 You can't go to sleep go take that same red panel

[00:33:47] Don't necessarily shine 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

[00:33:56] 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 i'm gonna do all this so that's that's

[00:34:06] Sleep and do you have a sleep tracker an apple watch an aura ring a whoop anything like that? We have the um, What is it the eight sleep mattress sleep is good. Yeah, I haven't used the tracking facility yet, but I should do it

[00:34:19] I I should do that james. I mean I I remember from our interview. You're uh, you're pretty good at Understanding the track what you hack ethos sure or not harder. So get the data Are you waking up 15 times a night? You don't know it. Do you have apnea?

[00:34:34] There's so many things you can do and chilling your mattress, which is what eight sleep does it's a pretty good idea But chilling your mattress in a room that has you know, blinky lights from your phone charger

[00:34:45] It's not going to work the same. So you want to line up your your sleep environment so that you really Get a signal to your body that says it's it's time and then you're not going to want the content Yeah, that's the goal. Okay

[00:35:02] 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's called 40 years of zen

[00:35:20] And we're expanding that right now so about 1500 people have had these transformative experiences that are on par with a psychedelic journey just from looking at their own brain waves and Ordering it At home, you can do something called heart rate variability training

[00:35:37] And in fact, I used to advise this company back in 2008. It's called heart math And this is different than what you get from your eight sleep or from one of your your tracking devices

[00:35:48] 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

[00:35:58] 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

[00:36:11] And you exhale that changes the spacing of your heartbeat that causes your body to want to go to sleep It's been really transformative for me So now I have I've learned the signal of my body kicking into anxiety the second it happens

[00:36:26] 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

[00:36:36] You know, okay. No, no, don't you're not allowed to come back start over come back and eventually your nervous system It is trainable. It has its own consciousness. It is not you

[00:36:46] You're riding 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

[00:36:54] Well, maybe just chilling out your nervous system consciously is what you want to do or 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

[00:37:13] You you there's a device to monitor your heart. So, you know, like what were you describing about the device? It's called the heart math device and it's a little I don't have it on my desk right now

[00:37:24] 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, you know

[00:37:34] 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

[00:37:50] 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

[00:38:03] You can if you just tune in. Oh, yeah, I remember that and the hairs on the back of your neck will will stand up So you have replay abilities you learn how to replay the sense of peace that i'm talking about

[00:38:13] 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

[00:38:30] I have a sixteen thousand dollar 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 in your brain how to do it

[00:38:42] But what i'm talking about is a couple hundred bucks That you could do you 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

[00:38:56] Who was on on my show? This is a practice i've written about for many years and it's a basic breathwork practice and Uh, andrew huberman calls it the physiological sigh

[00:39:08] 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

[00:39:25] Are you having a hard time going to sleep or staying asleep? Staying asleep. So if I wake up i'll go to sleep right away But if I wake up at 2 a.m, I have a hard time getting back Got it racing thoughts

[00:39:39] I don't know not really. Okay. I mean, I think I feel like I that I had and I don't have any more for whatever reason most people who wake up between It's usually 3 to 5 a.m. And just can't go back to sleep that is

[00:39:56] Um, 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

[00:40:09] You stick it on the back of your arm I've worn one for almost two years and it tells you in the middle of the night did your blood sugar crash? Most people who wake up feeling that way

[00:40:20] 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. Here's an answer

[00:40:32] How about cortisol and adrenaline because those release sugar real quickly problem is cortisol 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

[00:40:43] 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

[00:40:52] Wow, I totally did not know that that's very it's a really big thing and a lot of people run into that problem I mean you should do you have a version of your coffee that is not caffeine that has all the mct oil and all that

[00:41:04] stuff in it If you 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

[00:41:13] 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

[00:41:24] So, what do you do decaf danger but you still have to put your own stuff in there so you 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

[00:41:40] Through my work at bulletproof. So a lot of people are making that stuff now And you can buy it at you know, whole foods or on amazon. It's all over the place um

[00:41:48] 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

[00:42:15] So 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

[00:42:29] 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

[00:42:40] 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 was smarter not harder was using the laziness principles

[00:42:58] 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

[00:43:15] 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

[00:43:24] 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

[00:43:40] The 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

[00:43:53] 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 two billion years And there's nothing wrong with you

[00:44:06] If you don't want to go to the gym and you want to eat everything, that's your hardware doing its job to survive now there is something wrong with you if you Think that that is you doing that and then you feel guilty

[00:44:19] 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

[00:44:29] 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

[00:44:45] And it's one of the big nuggets from smarter not harder And 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

[00:45:02] 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

[00:45:17] 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 And then it doesn't feel like work

[00:45:31] But if instead you say well i'm going to go do five minutes of working out the body's gonna say no That sounds like a lot of crap. Have you seen potato chips? right, so The companies who understand this are the ones who give you a coupon

[00:45:42] How many times have you gone to the trouble you go to a website you in your email and they send you A coupon code you open it and and they spam you for a while and you get you save four bucks on something

[00:45:55] It wasn't worth your time to save four bucks, but your body was like no this i'm saving money man This four dollars means a lot to me Well, this is why we're willing to to it feels like you're saving a lot more than four dollars

[00:46:08] 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 here's my my entire weekly workout 20 minutes

[00:46:25] For the entire week not per day 20 minutes the entire week and I am ripped and i'm you are I could see Six in fact people are saying dave you look old. I'm like dude. I used to have 300 pounds of fat

[00:46:35] I have extra skin because I don't have any fat in my face, but like the veins are everywhere like it's it's insane and as a 300 pound computer hacker, this is Unprecedented, but I don't work at this

[00:46:46] 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

[00:46:59] Called rehab 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

[00:47:17] 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 You can instead say i'm gonna do an hour a day five days a week

[00:47:32] So that five hours a week versus 15 minutes a week And that's going to get you two percent improvement so what so like what happens in the rehit that that Makes up for all the time in the gym. Well, it turns out

[00:47:47] And you would know this because you've studied the way your brain works and in 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

[00:48:02] So you could look at something and go well If I know water is good more water is better Right, and then you're going to be fully confident or pretty confident in that you're going to go ahead It's going to feel like you're right

[00:48:13] 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 over hydrating without electrolytes

[00:48:24] 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

[00:48:42] 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

[00:48:52] How quickly did you return back to baseline and did you have adequate nutrients like minerals and things like that And protein from animals. So if you go, oh look I was moving real slowly. Look there's a tiger

[00:49:06] You run away for 20 or 40 seconds from the tiger like you're gonna 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

[00:49:19] 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

[00:49:33] 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 and they put on some more taylor swift and then

[00:49:42] The person at the front of the things just stand up and you look around and 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

[00:49:53] You're sweaty you have endorphins, but your body's like I just got hunted for an hour I'm, not gonna lower my heart rate for another hour and I don't have enough energy right now because I almost died

[00:50:03] I'm not going to improve and this is why you get two percent better in five hours or do it my way Get 12 better in 15 minutes. Like it's just easier so this is really interesting because it probably is related to the

[00:50:14] 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

[00:50:26] 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

[00:50:41] 100 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

[00:50:54] Making hormones running repair processes and 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

[00:51:12] 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

[00:51:24] I'm going to get ready for more stress This is why a meditation practice or a breath work practice a neurofeedback practice. It's so important You will get more

[00:51:35] 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

[00:51:51] Studied physiques and storied physiques in the bodybuilding world and when I interviewed him Look, there's a stereotype for for bodybuilders that a lot of people have 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

[00:52:07] What I do now he's in the 70s and still ripped He's like, you know what? I do. I play the flute for an hour a day and I write poetry and He said the reason he was so successful

[00:52:16] 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

[00:52:30] It's not how hard you can whip yourself. It's how hard you can hug yourself But but how did he 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

[00:52:46] Stamina is a kind of a different metric. So 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

[00:53:01] That's a lot of protein and when you do it your body will put on muscle much more quickly So you're you're you said you're 198 pounds. How do you eat? 198 grams of protein steak I I it's still a couple pounds of steak

[00:53:14] 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 if I wanted to do this as a vegan

[00:53:25] 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

[00:53:41] The big companies know that so so so you do that and then It's the same rules. You need to stress the muscles more than they want in a small period of time and With the part of smarter not harder or when you come into upgrade labs

[00:53:58] In order to do this we add stress to the body For the muscles that it's not used to getting so what your body really knows how to do is handle gravity You take a dumbbell you flop it up

[00:54:10] Right, 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 weigh more so it holds back a lot of capacity

[00:54:22] 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

[00:54:37] 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 And then I talk about other hacks in the book

[00:54:53] 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

[00:55:05] 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

[00:55:20] 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 so your body says

[00:55:30] 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

[00:55:44] 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 phytic acid that I had never heard about and that it

[00:56:00] It basically does a lot of harm to your system and it's Kind of hidden inside all these foods that are that people commonly eat That I would never think were bad well

[00:56:13] 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

[00:56:29] Ranchers all know this When you feed chickens or 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

[00:56:46] And they start getting sick and their hooves fall off And they get mange or they die And 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

[00:56:59] 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 the animals I just mentioned they have on board enzyme manufacturing

[00:57:14] 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 raise my hand guys. I was a devout raw vegan

[00:57:28] 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

[00:57:43] 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 it's one of those things where I lived it and the reason I shattered teeth even though I was a very well-trained

[00:57:58] 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 well, I did myself great harm and the reason you see me online railing against kale

[00:58:09] I've been doing that forever. Is it 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

[00:58:22] 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

[00:58:32] So if you eat very many of their babies, you can't have babies which means over time there will be balance And and this is this is fascinating because this is where you overlap with so i've had on a couple times

[00:58:42] Uh, dr. Stephen gundry. He talks all about the lectins you mentioned in the in the book you mentioned gundry in the book and Basically his point is the same as yours, which is that

[00:58:53] Seeds like you say are 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

[00:59:05] On the diet and chapter one 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

[00:59:17] Um, there'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

[00:59:29] 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 only eat Fat and meat and i'm mr

[00:59:39] 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

[00:59:49] So I eat carbs almost every day and I don't limit them at this point limiting carbs at six percent 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

[01:00:04] 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?

[01:00:15] Serin nerve gas is a protein spider venom is a protein gluten is 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 it, okay Just like a sample diet for someone

[01:00:34] What would you eat for breakfast dinner? So 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?

[01:00:46] Uh, i'm pretty good with 150. I'm pretty good with my weight. So How do you put I've like weighed the same way since high school beautiful. You're lucky um How do you eat 150 grams? of animal protein in a meal and a half a day

[01:01:02] I I probably don't i'll tell you what one thing I do. I mean just for me I put I eat sushi almost every night and I don't know if that's good or bad You're almost certainly protein deficient

[01:01:14] And I say this when I travel I eat a lot of sushi because it's one of the things That's widely available. It 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

[01:01:30] I mean you get hamachikama if you want to get some extra protein, which is one of my favorite sushi dishes You know the the fish collar grilled but

[01:01:38] 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 gonna eat a lot of sushi you have to take chlorella

[01:01:49] 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 p test You would have probably scary high levels of mercury. Same thing happened to me when I was doing tons of sushi so

[01:02:04] What you're gonna 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 because i've recommended it in my books

[01:02:17] 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'm never getting enough protein you want to get a pound of steak when you're traveling you go to the average restaurant

[01:02:28] You're gonna order three main courses to get a pound of steak And you know four hundred dollars later or something You finally got it and you have to throw all these fried french fries or whatever came with the steak Like it's really hard to do that so

[01:02:41] 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

[01:02:56] 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, 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

[01:03:09] So I take my digestive enzymes when I eat my protein I do 100 grams of protein per meal if I eat two meals I 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

[01:03:24] 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

[01:03:35] 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 but just made up marketing numbers from someone a long time ago so Turns out you can absorb

[01:03:50] insane amounts of protein so 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

[01:04:05] 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

[01:04:23] Well, some people don't sadly I don't I think eggs are really good for if you can handle them I gave myself an egg allergy when I was coming out of that vegan period Because I had such bad leaky gut There's a

[01:04:37] 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

[01:04:51] So basically a few scoops away 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

[01:05:00] Yeah, that's one way to do it. Some people will put it in a smoothie throw in some blueberries and you know throw in some You know, whatever sweetener stuff you like that's natural

[01:05:11] The easiest thing to do when you're traveling is I will put it i'll brew my danger coffee It's it's a crime. I put protein powder in the coffee. It doesn't taste great Coffee is just amazing by itself

[01:05:22] But I put it in there because hot coffee will melt any kind of protein powder you put in there You shake it up in a sealed mug and then you drink it and it didn't taste great Didn't taste bad either

[01:05:32] And then i've got my protein for the day and then have another cup of coffee for flavor And that's what I do when I travel but at home I put in a blender with some frozen blueberries

[01:05:41] So blueberries at least are good. You didn't mention fruits that much. Uh, so I was wondering about that fruits kind of pissed me off so even in the The kind of edges of the carnivore world. I'm not a carnivore

[01:05:54] 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 a great for a cleanse, but not long-term

[01:06:08] Just like keto great for a cleanse not long-term so Some people including like really good friends. I love paul's aladino It's like well, you know fruit mother nature wants you to eat fruit

[01:06:19] 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

[01:06:38] 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

[01:06:55] Is definitely blueberries, so I eat a lot of blueberries What about and it's funny because I had red raspberries right before this podcast like literally minutes before this podcast But uh, what about blackberries? I pretty much eat only raspberries blackberries and blueberries. All right. Those are my fruits

[01:07:12] I was like you once uh 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 Let's go to the farmer's market in mountain view, california

[01:07:26] 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

[01:07:38] I noticed I have to pee like 25 times a day and it's like really urgent pee And if I don't pee i'm gonna like wet myself like i'm like i'm in my 30s. This is stupid So I go to the doctor he goes we'll see a urologist

[01:07:51] So I go to the top urologist in san francisco 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

[01:08:00] It was 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 that to see nothing like well, I finally figured out it was raspberries and

[01:08:11] One of the women that i've dated I got consciously uncoupled a few years ago She had interstitial cystitis and I looked I'm like stop with the raspberries and the beets Three days later she calls and goes it's gone

[01:08:27] 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

[01:08:45] 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

[01:08:57] Um, it's it's relatively put on the rice to flavor it though Um, because 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

[01:09:12] Um 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

[01:09:25] 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

[01:09:39] 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

[01:09:46] But 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 write at home, there's this cool thing called butter And you put that on the rice. So so rice

[01:10:01] I know grass-fed beef is 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

[01:10:19] 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 and after that dairy It depends what kind of dairy you handle. I love sheep's milk yogurt

[01:10:31] Sheep's milk is the most compatible with humans followed by goat followed by 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

[01:10:49] Right, and then you eat some veggies and some veggies are great. Some are not so good Those are all in 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. Those are hard on most people

[01:11:04] 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

[01:11:14] They're like, oh, well, you know this beet includes it 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

[01:11:27] 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

[01:11:54] Let's say you went to out to breakfast with friends and What do you order other than you know, you can't even order coffee unless you bring danger coffee with you

[01:12:03] I mean you 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

[01:12:13] I am the ceo of danger coffee. Geez, but You can order 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

[01:12:26] What you're going to find is there's usually smoked salmon Which is a really good choice in any of those buffets that go to hotel. There's smoked salmon. There's some avocado There's some fruit you can eat some fruit

[01:12:38] 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

[01:12:50] 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

[01:13:03] They 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

[01:13:17] And then now you got a omelet with lots of good saturated fat that helps you make hormones You got a lot of protein And you're good to go throw in some turkey throw in some chicken throw in some whatever other stuff

[01:13:27] 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, I know right i'm with you there Maybe they have gluten-free french toast and that's something else

[01:13:37] People get on this idea that well if I 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

[01:13:48] But it doesn't mean eat the fried snickers bar because you have cravings for a long time So you can say i'm gonna 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

[01:14:03] Churros like gluten and damaged omega-6 oils and sugar like 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 I will on weekends with my kids

[01:14:19] I'll make pancakes. I'm gonna 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

[01:14:30] Food colorings food agents 48 hours of inflammation from the seed oils. That's more inflammation than smoking a cigarette Like I I had a great breakfast. It was fun Everyone's fine. We drink extra coffee and we went out and we went for a walk to keep our blood sugar stable

[01:14:45] It's not this it's not that crazy It's like high quality food so, 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

[01:15:05] There's all these I can't even I can't even deal with the whole supplement industry there's like 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

[01:15:17] But i'll tell you what I do. I do uh the nad plus stuff And from from qualia, yeah, uh, no I do it from thorn. Okay uh and And that's basically then I do I I do

[01:15:35] quercetin to absorb. I don't know it interacts with the nad plus to 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 one-on-one from the vitamin dake.com website because

[01:15:54] 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 audiobook for smarter not harder

[01:16:10] I had to go back and re-say that word like 5,000 times and I still don't remember the correct spelling So anyway, it's a really important mineral for recycling uh glutathione and for Being able to digest enough protein so you're deficient in those minerals almost certainly

[01:16:25] 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 Um, that's going to help you a lot

[01:16:35] 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 daveaspire.com

[01:16:50] And it'll be with upgrade labs. Some members will get access to it, but What you're going to do is you're gonna say what I want and you're going to get a cognitive enhancement

[01:17:00] Formula that you really like and you're going to use that every day and there's a variety of them out there Um, i've worked with neurohacker on even formulating theirs. I like their formula a lot. It's called qualia mind

[01:17:12] 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? Uh, you know, you got to take six a day and so sometimes I just don't want to okay six a day So here's the thing

[01:17:25] How 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

[01:17:35] All right. So what you want to do is get like a banana and just like ram it down. Okay, don't do that um You you can learn and i've taught so many people how to take five or six pills at a time

[01:17:47] 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

[01:17:57] And toss it 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 And the next day do four and pretty soon you can do five or six

[01:18:10] 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

[01:18:22] Anyone who can you can have more pills than me in one swallow is is more of a man or something And so i'm like i'm not the liver king vibe, you know full respect. I I actually like it that he's a biohacker

[01:18:34] 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 and I like I see you and I raise you 20 liver king

[01:18:47] 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

[01:19:00] You 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

[01:19:09] All right, so i'm gonna do this but then but then it's like where do you stop? So there's zinc there's molybdenum well, these are all when when you get the

[01:19:17] Um, when you get the minerals one-on-one formula, it's three pills that have all of the minerals you need in them Okay Right. So vitamin daca is one pill and it's tiny you won't even notice it and you take three mineral pills

[01:19:29] 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 the anti-aging stuff?

[01:19:40] I think there's a good argument for it Um, you can take niacinamide for people listening who want to save money Niacinamide has been in our diet for thousands of years But in the longevity world we've used it for the last 30 years to raise nad levels

[01:19:54] It's very affordable but take your nad stuff from thor and 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 for I so I have jaco willings, uh creatine powder that he sells

[01:20:08] I don't know if it's good or bad or what? Jaco is great um, I remember interviewing him live during one of my book launches and You know comes in like this guy could like kill everyone in the room

[01:20:19] 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. It doesn't have to be fancy There's some evidence for something called creatine gg um

[01:20:40] But it's probably not that big of a difference. So I would say but it does 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 creating

[01:20:55] 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

[01:21:07] Okay, so that's creatine. The last question I have is testosterone Oh, I 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

[01:21:20] I was giving a talk at the 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

[01:21:34] No, i've never tested anything. Are you trying to enhance your feminine presence or something? No, but I just never I never really thought about it I never really thought it would be an issue right now Testosterone is an emergency issue for humanity

[01:21:53] People 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

[01:22:07] Axe body spray those little pine trees in the uber you ride in I'm 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 uh in my 20s

[01:22:22] 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 you can It's an enormous amount of work. You have to do everything perfect

[01:22:34] 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

[01:22:49] Or make you all ripped it might do both of those it's It's a dopamine and testosterone ride together So when your testosterone is low your dopamine is low when your dopamine is low

[01:23:02] 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

[01:23:15] So 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 a testosterone cream on your balls or armpits

[01:23:29] You put testosterone gel in the same places and they just came out with an oral form of testosterone Some people use inclomiphene there's a company called Maximus That pioneered doing that it's it's a small amount of testosterone

[01:23:43] It's a small microdose of a pharmaceutical that naturally raises your testosterone or you can take oral testosterone pills now Yeah, there's two I see because Maximus like sends me email ads. So like what do they do? so what they use is a

[01:23:58] 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

[01:24:14] I'm full disclosure. I'm friends with the owner. I'm a small investor and advisor to Maximus So I just I'm you know, I'm not gonna make any any financial changes in my life If you or anyone listening does it but I don't like I don't want anything undisclosed there

[01:24:27] I just backdick so 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

[01:24:40] And just take a pill. It's called testosterone on decanoate And like you go to any doctor and you get tested and then they prescribe it know about that last one I would go to Maximus first and see if that works. They'll test you as well

[01:24:56] 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 the lowest hanging fruit easiest to do And then if you don't get the results you want I would go for

[01:25:07] 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 why injection if you have younger kids around?

[01:25:17] 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

[01:25:28] They're also not supposed to have sex hormones until later in life 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

[01:25:36] It'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 gonna do all of this Dave. So James, I'm gonna change my mind

[01:25:48] 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?

[01:26:03] 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

[01:26:14] 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. Why do you need to have a prescription for testosterone?

[01:26:25] Why can't I just go to the store and buy it like they make it very complicated Um, it's called a trade union the american medical association They're the same ones that make you have a prescription to get glasses

[01:26:37] 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 u.s is set up very carefully so that we spend 20 percent of our national income on our

[01:26:48] On our health care 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

[01:26:58] 1970s 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

[01:27:12] And this goes back to surprisingly to danger coffee and not minerals or whatever It's it's called danger coffee because who knows what you might do and you need testosterone to do anything that matters

[01:27:23] 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

[01:27:36] You're going to help the little old lady across the street and you're not going to lose your mind when someone yells at you In traffic like that's the world we want to live in strong powerful people with testosterone with thyroid with minerals

[01:27:47] 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

[01:28:00] We didn't even really touch the surface of what you're talking about in in smarter not harder The biohackers guide to getting the body and mind you want by dave asprey I mean we did touch upon the surface, but there's so much depth to the book. Thank you again

[01:28:14] That's why I was feeling a little almost overwhelmed But i'm glad we had a chance to 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

[01:28:26] You know hundreds of these sort of books and I always keep coming back to you dave because it's 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 for coming on the show

[01:28:41] James you're one of the more interesting guys i've ever interviewed. You just see the world through different eyes I love it that you're competing In chess and and making your brain young again. You're one of the more curious people out there

[01:28:53] So it's always a pleasure to see you my friend Thanks, dave. Talk to you soon