In today's episode of Hell Theory with Dave asprey. We discuss how to enhance your cognition and daily performance why your ego is holding you back from the life you want how to use the bulletproof diet for longevity and how to overcome
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and be legendary
Hey everybody. Welcome to Hell
Theory. Today's guest is Dave asprey the Silicon Valley Tech entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of several books, including headstrong and most recently game changers what leaders innovators and Mavericks do to win at life. He's also one of the world's most famous biohackers the founder and CEO of Bulletproof Coffee and the host of the Webby award-winning podcast bulletproof radio now Dave the fascinating thing about you is how eclectic you are which I was really impressed by the new book is cool all over the map. But as somebody who's crazy good optimizing where I want to start is nootropics. So my personal obsession is the brain and you go into in the book nootropics you talk about going to Burning Man is one of your action items, which I thought was cool walk me through nootropics how we can use things to enhance our cognition and not just nootropics, but this sort of host of things that we can do.
One of my favorite 20-year passions starting in my mid-20s. I said my brain isn't working the way it's supposed to I started forgetting things. I was having problems. I didn't like and my career was just taking off. So I said what can I do to hack this? I ordered my first big package of smart drugs and these are mostly Pharmaceuticals they came in. I was all excited and I took the first of the bunch I was testing out on myself. It was called piracetam and I use an analog of that even today and I read about that in Game Changers, but the experience was really weird. I took it for a week and I am so so excited. So just for the sub doesn't work. So I stopped taking it and the next day I said, you know, I'm grasping for words and I realized the previous week every time I wanted to think of a word it would just come to me and then I found that I'd say it was word for that. What was I going to say? And I was I wasn't having that but
Good nootropics. Do the ones that aren't energizing which is a different effect. That's also helpful. They make you feel more like yourself. They reduce the struggle and the work it takes to do something. So it would have been within your skill set but a struggle or a stretch. I got that sort of like if you could lift a 35 pound dumbbell, but it's work and all this in you. Oh, yeah. I got that maybe I could do 45. So it's this performs the answer but it feels so natural feels like yourself that after a very short period time you get used to having that superpower in just becomes your new normal and it turns out there's a whole bunch of different racetam family drugs, perhaps times been around for almost 60 years. It's made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals a big pharmaceutical company in Europe its protective of your neurons and increases oxygen but not blood flow in the brain and we're not sure all the ways that it works but it's got a long safety history the downsides are it may use more acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter. You can eat raw egg yolks or take soy lecithin.
Or some of the supplements that I make have things that increase acetylcholine and and it's widely available at Whole Foods or anywhere you have to eat raw egg yolks to get it if they're lightly cooked. It's okay, but if you burn your egg yolks, you're not really going to get functional calling. It will be burnt. It's damaged by heat. So you you go through that. It's like that that might be one side effect the other side effect. It amplifies caffeine. So you take one of those things. Hold on your brain works better. It protects your neurons and low-oxygen environments increases oxygen in the brain and things work better. Like I think I like this and what I switch to and a game changers, I kind of give the the dosage and all this is one called aniracetam and aniracetam is lower stress. It also is the only one that increases memory I/O or input output and I'm a computer science guy. I was a computer hacker by training when I weighed 300 pounds and if you can increase the speed that you put something into a computer's memory or you get it out it radically changes the performance of the whole computer so faster memory,
Means something well as a human being if you can find a substance that increases your ability to get things in and out of your memory. When you meditate you can remember how to meditate better when you study you're going to remember what you do better when you want to recall what you did you're going to do it better. I've been on the stuff for 20 years and its really impactful. There's also these things that if you increase energy in the brain you increase performance everywhere and that's been a big big Focus. My book before game changers was called headstrong all about if you increase function of energy producing cells called mitochondria in the brain, what's it going to do and it turns out your emotions get better your bill to regulate your emotions your ability to recall things your ability to just have raw power to be you it goes up some nootropics and a lot of the ones that I focus my my formulations on our round increasing energy throughout the body, but most especially in the brain and then others
Around manipulating or modifying things another nootropic. That's really really powerful is something that comes from green coffee fruit, not the coffee beans themselves, but actually the fruit itself and we produce it's called neuro Master. There's a compound in the brain called bdnf brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And this is nootropic Factor. We're talking about nootropics. This is stuff that lets the brain be more plastic more like a young brain and it's tied to some called nerve growth factor. And if you can find a way to raise those things your brain will act like a young person's brain. It will learn faster. So the number one thing that we know that's free that raises. Both of those is exercise high intensity interval training lifting heavy things stuff that you've talked about before on the show, right but
This compound in neuro Master raises your bdnf levels four times more than exercise. So I'm like, I think I'll exercise and all that stuff. So I want that young plastic brain and after 20 years of trying pretty much every nootropic out there. I've settled in on what works for my brain but my advice for you as you go down that path and for everyone watching or listening is your brain is not the same as your spouse your friend, even your parents. Although it's more likely to be like your parents. So the stack that works for me may not be the stack for you. And this is why when you see companies have like 15 different racetam and all the stuff in there don't start there because one of those may have a negative effect on you and one may have a very positive effect. So try those individually most of the time with supplements like try all the ones that might work and see if you get the results you want then pull them out. I found that with nootropics.
It doesn't work that way for the Pharmaceuticals with the plant based ones that usually does and I make something called Smart Mode which is a set of very well studied plant based compounds for cognitive enhancement different kind of a different Universe than the pharmaceutical side and it's funny because another nootropic that's controversial and it's in Game Changers is micro dosing of LSD. I interviewed 500 plus people Nobel Prize winners all these people and I said not what does one person do ask them all the same structure question, but what do they all have in common like what are the rules they follow to become game changers so that I could boil that down and frankly use it for myself. I like instead of doing what that one guy did I'll do it all of them agreed on and not all of them microdose LSD. In fact, very few of them do but the three big buckets that came out of all this research over several years was they do things to be smarter faster and happier.
So happiness doesn't come from wealth but wealth can come from happiness, but being angry and tired and unhappy all the time is not a good way to become successful or to change the game in your field or frankly to become wealthy or powerful or whatever else important. I also got from the data. Not one person who's been a game-changer named when I asked the three most important things in the world for people want to perform better. Not one said wealth power or fame. They're not seeking that that is not the target. It is a side effect of them doing what they had to do and I had this dinner in New York. It was profound my friend Andrew hosted this and is this long table 25 people and there's hedge fund managers like big people in New York and it was a Jeffersonian dialogue and what that means is that instead of just having a random dinner conversation one person asked the question of the table then we discuss it only one person at a time. So we're all listening and focus is really cool. Never done that before and when it got to be my turn to ask a question I said
How many people here have used hallucinogens or psychedelics for personal development? Every single hand to the table went up. Wow. I'm talking 20 year old artists to 70 year old senior executive people they'd all done it at least once right and the rule that came out of that and Game Changers was get outside your head. There's 46 laws in this book that people follow in the lines of 48 Laws of Power and Robert Greene's actually in the book the guy who wrote 48 Laws of Power and Get outside your head doesn't mean you go do drugs. In fact, if you're under 25, I would say don't go do drugs because your brains not done cooking. Don't go, you know some to some random party even Burning Man do it with a trained professional in a place where it's legal and I talked about you can actually go to a place in Costa Rica that has a medically licensed Ayahuasca setting I did Ayahuasca in Peru 20 years ago with a shaman in The Jungle which was a transformative experience for me, but just to go out there.
Yeah. Yeah, I got someone to go to Disneyland that is not good for your soul is not good for your performance. It's not kind of enhancing but having the ability to look in and see what your mistakes are. You can do this with holotropic breathing which is a type of breathing that was developed to replace LSD for Psychotherapy in the early 70s on the book go into detail about that. I love this. So Tom in addition to this losing a hundred pounds getting controlled my biology and having a successful career making my brain work better when all the stuff that was supposed to work didn't work. I said, I'm going to go outside the box. I'm an engineer. So I'm going to try meditation. It's not supposed to work in 20 years ago. No one meditated or if you did you wouldn't tell your friends because I think you're a goofy and I put on my LinkedIn profile and
I said I'm going to go do a personal development thing and I was at a point in my life. I was ending a relationship and a friend said Dave you have to go do this and I said, what is it? She said I'm not going to tell you. So what is she said? You won't do it. If I tell you to just trust me I find I didn't realize it and I was feeling kind of desperate. So I went to this personal development Retreat and a part of this was you'd lay down on a mat with a facilitator sword watching over you. There's a bunch of other people who are doing the same thing and they play like movie soundtrack music and you just really deep rapid breathing and the technical term for what you do is called tripping balls. Let's the technical to yeah, you're like what is going on here? And literally is it because you're essentially hyperventilating? Yeah, okay your hypoxic, but it has with the music and the set and setting it has really deep like really deep things that happen and I have seen more things in there that I have from ayahuasca.
From doing ceremonial use of psychedelics in an intimate setting I do like maybe once every year or two and twice I've done this with Stan grof the guy who invented it. He's the guy who created the field of transpersonal psychology in the 60s in Czechoslovakia when it was still one country.
He had from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals the same company that makes piracetam. He had a shipment of LSD when it was first invented and he is a licensed psychiatrist treated 3,000 patients with LSD and he noticed that they're all getting better and he was frustrated that the 40 and stuff wasn't working. So they all get better but there's patterns about how you come into the world as patterns where people get stuck and he could help them work through it using this and when you say patterns of how you come into the world you talking like literal birth I can about birth. Okay. Yeah, and there's according to Stan's work. There's five stages of birth and one is you floating you're happy in your mom and you know, there's plenty of space and you're like, ah, there's not enough space in here like it's getting tight. And then there's oh my God, someone's trying to smash the crap out of me. That would be the actual getting born and then there's the I just came into the world and then there's the your first breath kind of thing and then there's the is it a safe world? It was in an unsafe world and he
That repeatedly the people had this kind of problem had stuff stuck here and they would actually go back and revisit the emotional symptoms of birth and based on that a lot of the pre and perinatal psychology. That is groundbreaking work for the over the last 30 years came from stands work with his wife and when L see was made illegal. He said screw that noise and so he studied yoga and I invited to find a kind of breathing that would produce the same effects and I can tell you when you do that breathing with a license, you know practice professionals with they're doing you can do personal development that is very hard to do and it's one of the ways without drugs to get outside of yourself in my case. What I figured out was I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I didn't have oxygen cut off to my brain. So I was like, that's no big deal. But who cares right? Yeah. It was like some random thing that happened like a trivia point and when I met the woman running this Retreat where they did breathing it was called the star Foundation. I'm just still around and she had these like really vibrant.
Blue eyes and she looks at me she goes
tell me about your birth
and I was like kind of weird like I'm an engineer. So I look and I go hospitals vaginas. I've you know, and I was kind of like what's up with this and she she said it will be really really do you know anything and I said, yeah, I had the cord around that she goes I thought so and she puts up a PowerPoint slide and it's me like a SWOT analysis. They teach that in business school, like strength weakness opportunity. It was like if I was a butterfly pin down like she nailed all the things I was afraid of that. I wouldn't tell anyone and I was like, how did this how did you know that and it was like an active Wizardry and she said well it's science. We've been studying this for 30 years and we know that people who have an umbilical cord or it really traumatic coming to the world they come in and what had happened is I'd come into the world like something's trying to kill me. And so you come into the world ready to kill and you never
Up and I did that for 30 years talk about raising your IQ. Stop doing that and you'll be a lot smarter right explain that to people you talked about that quite profoundly in the book. What do you mean by if you stop coming at the world like that that you're actually smarter. Well, you your body makes electrons the primary thing that your cells do inside each other's there's hundreds to thousands or even tens of thousands of these ancient bacteria called mitochondria and they run a lot of our operating system and their jobs to take food in air and make energy and then the energy goes somewhere energy goes to breathing to walking to will power. It also goes to thinking because to anxiety it goes to stress. It goes to hate it goes to any of the bad things. Right? So if you're putting without your permission or knowledge, you're putting your energy into that, you're not putting into thinking, you know, putting to serving your community not putting into your relationships now putting into into love into kindness and to self-kindness into recuperation into recovery.
into becoming a better human being and it is you have one electron the same electron that powers your iPhone. And are you going to put it into being a better human being and you put it into being afraid of something that isn't a threat and we're wired to over respond to threats because all animals including ones without brains like ours. That's the that's the operating system for survival and it starts inside each cell literally quadrillions of times or quadrillions of locations in the body millions of times a second your body saying what's going to kill me now, it's going to come down and it's our job as we become smarter and more intelligent more effective to actually turn down that voice and some of the laws and Game Changers are about how do you become aware of that? Because awareness is hard. It's the story that you tell yourself about whether something is a threat you believe it when someone cuts you off in traffic and the story that goes ahead is that son of a bitch thinks. He's more important than me and you know, I should kill him now. I still like an overdeveloped middle finger muscle from that, but that's stories all Bs.
Right, the probably came from being bullied in first grade. Who knows but the real story is someone coming from you and they could be on the way to the hospital to go see their dying wife or they could just be an asshole but you don't know so I stopped the stress that that would thing for that like I want to choose the story but we're doing this thousands or even tens of thousands of times a day. And if you just shift the needle a little bit by gaining awareness, the end result is not only do you have more time and more electrons to think more effectively, but we're wired to be nice to each other when I say wired I mentioned overreacting to fear Tom if you are a single-celled organism, there's a very specific set of rules that everything has to follow and the first rule is if something if you think something's about to kill you.
It's a threat immediately. You have to run you have to kill or you have to hide and that's the first effort. It's fear because it's game over like if you're a bacteria something eats you up. That was okay lost. So life won't go on without that. The second thing you do is eat everything because you don't know there's gonna be a famine if you starve. It's game over and the third thing so that was feeds we have fear feed. The third one is also an f word and it's reproduce the species and that explains like why you date all the people you shouldn't date right? Because if you don't reproduce the species, it's game over. So our wiring is all about game over and you can say well that sucks because that's the Human Condition. It's actually the condition of life. And without it. None of us would be here because we would do things that would self-destruct or it's a we do the more often a lot of us self-destruct anyway, but there's another f word that comes at the end of that and it's friend even single-celled organisms will work together, they'll cooperate and they'll form a community.
It provides greater benefits than being the Lone Wolf kind of thing and humans are the same way. So this is our order of operations. So our job is as human beings your job with the work you're doing on spreading information like this. It's like look, maybe we can have less fear. We have less hunger we can have better sex and may be more beneficial Soulful, you know healthy sex, by the way, there's four laws in Game Changers about sex including orgasm hangovers and what those do to men and when you you get past that we're actually supposed to be nice to each other. It actually feels good to be supportive and to be nice and this is built into our built into every cell in our body and that's why this getting outside your head is so important and whether you choose to go down that psychedelic group whether you want to do a shamanic drumming ceremony, you want to fast in a cave you want to go to Tibet and you got to go to mount kailash and do meditation for 10 days. These are all paths that lead to more.
Earnest and along the way would it be nice if you weren't hungry the whole time so maybe you could eat properly right? And if you just do some of these right don't do all right, there's huge amounts of untapped energy inside the human body inside us energetically biochemically emotionally, spiritually. It's all it's all in there. And I was only tapping. I know what percent 5 percent 10 percent when I was in my 20s and I'm 46 and I have more energy now than I did when I was 25 and I'm going to show you that a lot of people work for me 20 years younger than me, and it's all there because I just stopped doing the stuff. That wasn't serving me. What is up activist? Hope you guys are enjoying this episode. Wanted to give a quick shout out to our sponsors and then we'll get right back to it. Remember our sponsors are all hand chosen. We love these guys and think that they have something incredibly valuable to offer. So be sure to give a listen a lot of these guys are doing special offers just for you.
What is up impact of this. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode.
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legendary
so going back to the 3000 people treated with LSD the fact that everyone around the table at experiment with hallucinogens. Is it the dissolution of the ego? Is it like what is it about it that's going to allow you to redistribute that energy to stop wasting it on stupid shit. Like what what happens actually? Oh that is a profound question. So part of my path has been doing neurofeedback and I've spent four months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing intense meditation looking at brain waves and I do this with clients and you can learn some things about the ego. I mentioned that operating system in the body. There are studies. This is creepy but it is these are real studies that are validated and reproducible where they'll take a computer screen.
And the of a random number generator inside the computer. So no one knows what's going to come out and if it's an even number, they show a picture of flowers and puppies. And if it's an odd number, they show a picture of grisly violence. Okay, they're hooking the subject of the study up to monitors that look at their it's called galvanic stress response or skin response. It's a measure of stress in the body. And the weird thing is before the image comes up before any human being knows what the image is going to be if it's the grisly image the body responds before the image. It's creepy if that is real and it is then there are some things that we don't understand there's all sorts of theories and some of them are being born out and it probably has something to do with Quantum which is the most misused new-age buzzword of all hell but it's also quantum physics Quantum biology. These are real scientific things studied at University. So we essentially there's something going on here.
We have a the ability to detect the environment around us before we have conscious awareness of this so the body responds and then we think about it and then we tell ourselves a story about why we did it but the order of operations is different and if that sounds weird, here's something that happens to most of us at some time in our life. You lean on a hot stove and you pull your hand away before you get burned you say thank goodness. I pulled my hand away but that is not true statement because you did not decide to pull your hand away something pulled your hand away without your knowledge or permission and you're glad it happened. So you decided that it was you did it right? Well, what is that? That's the ego the ego is the operating system that keeps you alive if there's no human in there. So it has its own goals. It has its own agenda and it is there to keep you alive. Unfortunately, it thinks many things will kill you that won't kill you and most of its programming happens in ages zero through seven. So if you were bullied and even if you had great parents, I
Must you that there was one time when your mom stopped nursing you and you got really pissed off and whatever was happening in situation. It leaves a pattern and your body is just a pattern matching system and the egos. They're like, I'm just trying to live and your egos also just it's absolutely convinced that if you're in charge instead of it you'll die because it's job is to keep you alive and if it's not doing its job you'll die. Right and because it's an emergent system inside the body what's happening when you take any of these Solutions when you do any of these practices that get you so outside yourself you gain better self awareness because you start looking yourself as this system and you start seeing what your egos doing. You see how absurd that story is about the guy cutting you off in traffic or what are some patterns and routines that people can do on a daily basis. You've talked about how only miracles happen in the morning talking about the power belief. What can anybody watching right now take away and do on a daily basis to make sure that they're optimized for this. Okay?
The single biggest way to turn off the ego the ego is about want it's about emptiness. It's about what the defense called Hungry ghosts. So hungry goes hungry ghosts. It's one of the Seven Realms of Hell in Tibetan Buddhism and it's one where everyone walks around these distended bellies and they're always hungry no matter what they eat. They can never be satisfied no matter what they have and this happens with a lot of people entrepreneurs this happened when I was 26 Tom. I mean six million dollars. I was 26 years old at the company that held Google's first servers. I lost it when I was 28 when I when I had that money, I looked at a friend at the same company where we all made more money than we should have and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10 million. Yeah, I freaking said that. Okay, what kind of a jerk move was that but that was my story right? That's that hungry ghosts and row.
Right. And so what you can do that's the antidote for that. That's the antidote for all the stress anxiety. Anger fear is something I do with my kids every night and you don't have kids to do it, but I sit down and I say tell me three things were grateful for today and gratitude is the final law in Game Changers and what we see in in 40 Years of Zen in the Neuroscience facility when people are grateful even for just the shittiest day ever.
They're grateful for one little thing that transforms the biological response in the body from wants from the hungry ghosts from I'm never going to have never going to be happy it transforms it into. Whoa. There's something good here. There's some abundance and what happens right after gratitude and with in the Neuroscience stuff we dig deep with. Okay. That was the Gateway. Now, you've got to actually do something called forgiveness, which is when you permanently change your pattern or instead of holding that Grudge whether it's a grudge you chose consciously because something happened to you when you were 20 or something you chose unconsciously because happen to you when you were to it doesn't really matter you forgive that all the way and what's left is compassion. So now you can walk into a situation that would have just absolutely just you know, tighten your jaw. Like, you know what I'm grateful for this and you're unflappable the amount of energy waste the amount of struggle you have it all goes down and it's simple write down three things you're grateful for and I asked my kids do this every single night. That's right down. They just tell me
And sometimes it's like I'm grateful we had steak. You know, I'm grateful I played with Johnny whatever but my son was five. He goes. I'm grateful for the Big Bang because without it there wouldn't be anything any like whoa, like I never would have thought of that one. But these little things it's free. You just have to find a way to consciously intentionally be grateful instead of be hungry empty pissed off angry stressed feeling not good enough and all the other stuff. This is what the people who are game changers of people who've done really big things including you like you figured out a lot of the stuff in this book when people get to a certain level they by definition had to figure out some of these laws because you cannot get there if you're running just the normal Mogul programming that we all come into the world with its going to say you put in the book that God normal is your Nemesis. Yeah. I normalize the enemy one of the two average is the enemy. There you go. Nice. Yeah. Yeah like that. So speaking of average being the enemy and things that we can do one of the concepts that I found really interesting in the book is rewilding and
And your choice to move to an island in Vancouver on an organic farm because you said the greatest gift you could give your kids was growing up in nature talk about that. Why is it important? What does it do for us? What's Forest bathing? Like all that stuff? Oh, this is so cool. I'm so happy that you went there. The idea of rewilding is that we've been kind of domesticated when animals are in a zoo the old zeros were, you know, a bar like bars in the cement cage and animals would die all the time. So they finally realize maybe we could make an environment. That's at least mostly like nature. So you go to the San Diego Zoo and there's trees all around and there's a little miniature Savannah and all that. Well, we're the same way so have plants in your house do some sometimes your cold. Sometimes your warm. Sometimes you you're hungry things that would have happened to us as human beings. It's really transformative to have some of that when you combine that with access to Nature you get this idea of forest bathing which came from
Hand and just walking around in a forest exposing yourself to trees and clean air does a couple things one is its shown to reduce anxiety levels just seeing plants does that but the other thing it does is it changes the microbiome in your gut and your lungs and your nose because you're walking through Forest bacteria and our bodies collect these bacteria from the environment around us and B. They become a part of us and the idea that we're not bacteria is completely false. There's bacteria inside every cell in your body that power who you are. There's they become a part of us. We like to think they're different than those other bacteria, but they're not so this Forest bathing you get the cognitive effects of seeing the green a lot of people don't know this but we can see more shades of green than any other color because we evolved in the forest. And the reason you need that fine ability to see the shades of green is because that's where the leopards hide predators are there, but we're wired in that environment when you do
Your body relaxes and so just introducing plants walks in nature sunshine and occasional biological stresses, it's cold. It's hot. I'm hungry. I worked really hard. The way animals would have transforms your biology D. Take cold showers. I do in fact, if you take a cold shower for three days in a row, you only need about 30 seconds, maybe a minute at the end of your shower. So if you do this, you have to hit you on the forehead and the chest and it's important because the most cold receptors are there and you're going to last 10 seconds the first time you do it and you it's really unpleasant and you'll be like shivering second day 20 seconds third day, like, you know, I felt a little actually felt kind of good today and the fourth day like yes, and there's something in your mitochondrial membrane membranes are a little layers of fat than surround every cell and it's called cardiolipin and a new study just came out that shows three days of cold exposure even for a few minutes raises cardiolipin levels, which makes
Cells make energy more effectively all day long the side benefit of a cold shower is that these ancient bacteria? Some of them are in good shape and some of them are not in good shape when they can't turn on heat quickly. It means they're weak if you show the body you will be an environment where sometimes you need to make it heat quickly. The weak ones will die and they'll be replaced by young ones. So you want to stay young you take a cold shower. You don't do it every day, but do it every couple days after you used to it. All right. So let's talk about staying young as talk about so my personal fantasy is actually to live forever. What are things that people can do on a daily basis to Prime themselves to live as long as humanly possible. I love it this month Men's Health ran an article about Ivan really public. I'm going to live to least a hundred eighty and at least as an important word there because like I said, I'm happy with forever. And what you want to do is look at at aging as Death By A Thousand Cuts it there's no one cause of Aging
We think that there's basically seven different things that happen inside your cells and outside yourselves that evolve over time. And here's the deal if it's Death By A Thousand Cuts. Maybe you could have only 500 cuts and make them less deep. So when it is not expensive it's not inconvenient or painful take the path of less Cuts don't eat fried food. Don't eat charred food. Like these are very basic things. But the science is pretty solid on that don't eat seed oils things like canola oil corn oil soybean oil vegetable oil cottonseed oil that stuff will make you age and we understand that it is abundantly clear. Don't eat too much animal protein and don't eat no animal proteins. Like these are things eat a lot of vegetables. Don't eat stuff that's been sprayed with glyphosate because it messes with the way your body makes collagen protein and it messes with your gut bacteria and things things like that. Those are going to go huge way sleep adequately.
Right, I sleep about six hours and five minutes a night. You set an alarm. I do if I if I have a busy day, which I quite often do however, I often wake up before the alarm and the alarm is set to wake me up at the top of a sleep cycle. So I never wake up when I'm groggy. So you can do that or you can just make sure you get enough sleep. We have enough deep sleep which is anti-aging and enough REM sleep which consolidate your memories. And if you do that, you're going to live a lot longer. Oh and don't eat too much. If you eat a lot of calories more than your body needs that's aging intermittent fasting which I helped to popularize in 2014 with bulletproof diet. That is a big thing. It works occasional longer fasting. None of these is expensive and I take a hundred fifty supplements a day Whoa. We Can't list a hundred fifty. We give me some of the All-Stars so I focus on mitochondrial enhancement. So I take a kind of fish oil that comes from not just Krill, but it comes from fish eggs.
And fish eggs aren't even richer source of phospholipids. And so that's something that bulletproof manufactures its are a mega three Krill and I think that's really important because getting Omega-3s into the brain is the most important thing you can do I take supplements that control inflammation because my body's still tends to because I had autoimmunity for a long time. It tends to have more tools more inflammation. So we make a turmeric that has some Chinese herbs in it that really work for the kind of information that I have and I go I feel much better. I take a bunch of other unusual mitochondrial enhancers that we make what's called unfair Advantage another one's called Quito Prime and then actually Prime's the mitochondria pump to be able to use sugar or fat to make more energy. So I used to open ten bottles take ten pills. Now, I open one bottle and it's just less work. So a lot of us have been consolidation over time in order to do it. So when I travel I have three bags like little crack bags full of pills and I take one when I wake up I take
With food or coffee in the morning one at lunch in one before I go to bed. And you know what? My life is way better when I do it. It's annoying and it's not cheap, but I'm going to extend my life and even if I completely die trying I've extended the quality of my Life Energy along the way you cannot lose with that strategy talk to me about vitamin D. You've said that sun exposure is not optional and I'm trying to imagine you in Vancouver in say February getting Sun every day. Do you really go outside in the sun it everyday in Vancouver? It sucked to move up to the Pacific Northwest. I've been up there for eight years. I grew up in a desert in New Mexico. So I'm a desert person what I do in the winter and it took me about three Winters to figure this out is I take vitamin D and taking vitamin D is importance as a supplement as a supplement and we make one the check. This is important. This is the one I take it's got a DK because you need Vitamin A and vitamin D together and if you take vitamin D without vitamin K
I mean K2, not K1 when you take those together vitamin K basically keeps the calcium in the cells and vitamin D encourages calcium to go into the cells. If you take the vitamin D without vitamin K. It can encourage calcification throughout the body, which is not what you want. That's a bad thing. So that that works really well, but for vitamin D to work, it has to be activated through a process called sulfation and that's what happens with ultraviolet light exposure. So in Vancouver what I do in the morning, I stand on my vibrating platform. Yes bulletproof thinks that it's called the bulletproof Vibe. I stand on that and I have some tanning lamp that's optimized for high UVB. It helps vitamin D and it even helps with collagen formation. Where do you get the machines? I know Mercola was making one for a while. That was UVB optimize. Yes. I have more cones all machine. Okay. And what happened? There is it was very unpopular to say that that UVB light had any health impacts.
And it's bad for you. And I doses let's be really clear like you can get cancer for two months UVB. But if you do a search for a high UV be tanning lamps, they sell them on Amazon. They have little boxes that do it and just don't overuse it. This is not about getting dark. This is about getting an effective dose of something that's going to bio transform the vitamin D hormone. It's a hormone that really vitamin A in the body so that becomes active and that can reduce the risk just having active vitamin D of all sorts of things. So I that's what I do, right and I feel good about that and I think the science is solid on that what are a few key things that people can do for their diet if they want to live forever.
All right, I wrote two books that are sort of diet focused. One of them is headstrong but the big diet book is the bulletproof diet. And here's the gist of it. It is cyclical ketosis. If you do the the key no bro diet as I'm going to call it right which is you never eat a carb again. I don't think that's going to work for you. If you eat lots of carbs, that's not going to work for you. So you should absolutely do Quito and then you should stop then you should do Quito and then you should stop and this is for your gut bacteria and this is for the glial cells in your brain that prefer glucose to ketones. And so I feel like like if you go to the I'm going to be like I used to be a raw vegan, you know, that's not going to end well for you, it's a little just tell you really you didn't enjoy the experience. Well, I mean, I feel great for the first two or three months like most people do because using a lot less of the other crap, but it's what happens over time. Even if you're pretty knowledgeable very few people. I think none of the anti-aging people I know support that kind of thing because they see it in
Patience the CrossFit coaches the guy can spot a vegan or raw vegan. I asked them to hold on to a bar and they drop off after five seconds and people eat french fries can hold on for 15 seconds, if people eat grass fed steak and you've do Quito and you are doing things right they hold on for 30 seconds. Like it's quantifiable. Right? So this isn't the ribbon vegans. I was a vegan for a long time. I would eat gravel if it's what was best for me or best for the planet. That's a eating grass fed meat that restores soils is best for you invest for the planet, but not too much and that poses a huge plate of vegetables with lots of undamaged quality fats following the ratio in your cells. Your cells are 45 percent saturated fat your cell membranes, especially in the brains little bit higher there in the brand about 3035 percent monounsaturated fat. And then the rest of it is all about the ratio of Omega-3 to omega-6 and there you want more omega-3 and less omega-6. So tons of veggies moderate amount of high quality grass fed protein tons of fat from protein perspective.
You want to get high quality protein and plant compounds polyphenols terribly important. You're not going to get them from colored fruits and vegetables. They're just not rich enough herbs and spices are how you get it and number one source of polyphenols in the world. You probably know what it is. Mmm good coffee coffee. I do know that because you talked about it in the book. It was all right, so copy tea chocolate and I'm sad to say this even though we all like red wine. It doesn't have very many polyphenols and you got to detox the alcohol in the aldehyde so you can have some wine but make sure it's good quality wine. I would say wine and and grass-fed meat. It's like spend money on quality and consume less. You don't have to consume that and and that algorithm. It's like it's quality over quantity. When you do that. It sends a signal to the whole food production system about what's acceptable and you know this because you've run a very impactful sizable company, right if the customers are saying they want something and they won't buy the
I'm stuff. Well, then the company is making the garbage food. They lose sales in the company's making the really good things, right? They gain sales. So all of us when we say I want the animal that was fed grass instead of fed corn and soy and antibiotics. I'm willing to pay a little bit more even if I buy a little bit less. So it's the same dollars out of my pocket. You'll change our soil. You'll change our agricultural systems. I think I firmly believe that both for my own biology and for the world that we're going to live forever in I don't want to mess it up, right? I don't know what you know a lot about the stuffed I want. What do you think about nutrition dude? We will bring you back for part two because I haven't even gotten to a like one-fifth of the things that I wanted to talk to you about it too much. No, this is an amazing see exactly what I wanted before. I ask my last question. Tell these guys where they can find you online go to bulletproof.com and check out bulletproof radio and iTunes wherever podcaster distributed and Game Changers is in stores. Now if you read it and you like it leave
View, I actually see those reviews you do to when people tell you any of your work matters week are like the reviews you get on the show. They matter you can thank both of us and there you got your gratitude checkbox for the day. Nice. I like that my final question. What's one change that people could make that would have the biggest impact on their health.
Wow, just one change with the single biggest impact. All right, can I answer with two things sir? All right. Number one. Learn how to sleep like a boss. Okay. There's a bunch of new sleep acts in Game Changers do whatever it takes to sleep really well and you're gonna have to block out your room. You can have to like just learn how to do it. No one teaches how to sleep. Okay, and most of that stuff is free or very inexpensive or one-time cost. The second thing is
You got to stop eating the things that make you weak and you know those are and there's one category of foods that are pretty much bad for one seed oils deep fried stuff charged things and whole grains. Those are just not good for anyone. Right and you might tolerate whole grains better than your friend. They're still not good for you. Sorry. Okay, so get those out and in the bulletproof diet, there's a layer of suspect Foods. They're bad for some people and good for some people and you need to know which of the suspect foods are guilty for you and there's an infographic just Google bulletproof roadmap and you can download it for free think it's basically the entire bulletproof diet book without all the explanations. Just here's what to do. Now. Here's what foods are really good the bull of your Foods. These are suspect and these are Kryptonite Foods just so you can write if I'm going to do a protein or whatever that totally works. I love it guys man. When I say that we didn't even begin to get into some of the stuff that this guy can go wax eloquently about you're going to want to dive into this world and check it out. He is one of the most
Recognizable names in the world of longevity hacking biohacking in general mitochondria, like all kinds of stuff that are going to help you live your best life. He's that guy for a reason. So he has just a breadth of knowledge on a whole bunch of subjects his new book game changers. I found really interesting. We didn't even get to go into sex. He mentioned the orgasm hangovers, which is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. He actually graphed out his own orgasm to life satisfaction. It was amazing. It is one of a hundred reasons. You're gonna want to check out that book. All right, if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary. Take care.
Everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes go to Stitcher rate and review us that helps us build this community and that is what we are all about right now building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible and you guys reading and reviewing really helps with that. Alright guys. Thank you again so much and until next time my friends you legendary. Take care.
