Know Thyself - E120 - Dave Asprey: BioHacking Best Kept Secrets: Sexual Energy, Emotional Triggers & Optimizing Biology

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Biohacking pioneer Dave Asprey reveals the foundations for better health and how to create harmony in your mind, body, and spirit. He shares his insights on cutting-edge biohacking techniques that not only enhance your energy and vitality but also support your spiritual journey. He discusses the integration of technology in meditation practices to maximize your mental clarity and well-being, explaining how breathwork can elevate your consciousness.We also cover essential health basics, including dietary considerations—like the viability of a vegan lifestyle—and the testing needed to find your ideal diet. Explore longevity strategies for living a longer, healthier life and the crucial vitamins and minerals your body needs.As we navigate topics like resetting your circadian rhythm for optimal sleep and the impact of household toxins, we also touch on important issues such as the low testosterone epidemic and the unique cycles women experience.Finally, we discuss the importance of community in personal development and how to remain selfless while pursuing your growth.André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro2:05 Taking Your Health Into Your Own Hands5:11 Anxiety & Biohacking Your Way Out of Triggers11:31 Getting the Benefits of Meditation with Tech 16:05 Using Breathwork to Transform Your Consciousness28:43 States vs Stages of Consciousness 34:21 We’re Wired to Be Kind: The 4 F’s That Make Up Who We Are43:28 The Basics: What You Need to Be Healthy49:03 The Viability of a Vegan Lifestyle57:29 Testing to do to Find Your Ideal Diet1:01:09 Longevity: Live Longer, Healthier1:03:44 Vitamins & Minerals You Need1:10:09 Circadian Biology & Optimizing your Sleep1:20:35 Household Toxins that are Poisoning You1:25:41 Formula for Frequency of Ejaculation for Men1:33:29 Women: Track & Understand Your Cycles1:40:09 Importance of Community for Our Health1:42:41 Staying Selfless in Self Development1:43:52 The Future of Biohacking & Upgrade Labs1:47:44 You Can Be Abundantly Happy & Healthy1:50:35 Conclusion___________Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent 15 years and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. He lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise, used techniques to upgrade his brain by more than 20 IQ points, and lowered his biological age while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time. Learning to do these seemingly impossible things transformed him into a better entrepreneur, a better husband, and a better father.Dave Asprey is the creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the radio show and #1 health podcast, Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, THE BULLETPROOF DIET.Through his work, Asprey provides information, techniques, and keys to taking control of and improving your biochemistry, your body, and your mind so they work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what you’d expect, without burning out, getting sick, or allowing stress to control your decisions.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dave.asprey/Website: https://daveasprey.com/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linktreeda&utm_campaign=more+about+dave___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgListen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927André DuqumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

There's this feeling of helplessness when you get to the point where you had the accelerator press all the way down, and you're slowing down. And I think a lot of people are there. I had 300 pounds by the time I was 23 years old. High risk of stroke and heart attack, chronic fatigue syndrome, went to the doctor. I'm like, something's wrong. And like, nothing's wrong. It's all in your head. I'm just like, I'm going to have to do this myself.

The idea behind biohacking, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control of your own biology. That means you control your state. It means that if you're feeling off, there's a technique that brings you back quickly. You can make better choices every day that don't necessarily cost more. You just need to know what to do. It's not as hard as you might think because what I've learned is that the spiritual stuff happens when the biology works better. And if you're exhausted all the time, even a small amount of spiritual progress feels like you're climbing Everest. So these are the things that affect the most systems in the body, and they're very, very affordable.

You can within one or two weeks have a profound change. Hey, everyone, welcome back to know thyself. Our guest today is a New York Times best-selling author and father of modern biohacking. He is an individual who's at the frontier of functional medicine, anti-aging, overall wellness, helping us come into wholeness, mind, body, spirit. And Dave Asprey, thanks for being here.

You're welcome. I'm excited. Yeah. Where I want to start is because wholeness, coming into wellness, Coming into wellness is the mind, body, spirit journey. And there's so many things mind and body that I'm excited to dive into, but I want to start with spirit, actually. Because for many people, their struggles with their physical health is a doorway

and what really ignites them into their spiritual journey. Because you can eat right, exercise, right, do all the sauna, biohacks, till the call has come home. And yet, if there's deeper underlying issues within our psyche that we have not dealt with, then we're going to be limited. And so how was your struggle with your personal physical health a doorway for you into your spiritual journey? Well, when I was 14, they told me I had arthritis in my knees. I thought that was for old people.

They had 300 pounds by the time I was 23 years old. I was on antibiotics for 15 years, just about every month, for chronic sinus infections. Before I'm 30, high risk of stroke and heart attack, chronic fatigue, syndrome, just crippling brain fog, and a career that's taking off, and I can't remember anything. And just this insane tiredness, it was when I went to the doctor and the doctor said, oh, vitamin C could kill you. And I'm like, something's wrong. And like, nothing's wrong.

It's all in your head. I'm just like, I'm going to have to do this myself. And what I've learned over that time is I did everything that was supposed to work. You know, I would exercise 90 minutes a day, six days a week without fail for 18 months. don't lose one pound and have the same size pants. I'm like, this is infuriating. So there's this feeling of helplessness when you get to the point where you had the accelerator press all the way down and you're slowing down.

You can push harder, but there's nowhere left to push. And I think a lot of people are there. And for me, having all the things you're supposed to get in your 70s before I'm 30 really just led me down this path of saying, all right, I'm in charge of myself. And after all the normal stuff didn't work, I did all the alternative things. I went to Peru in 1999 and tried ayahuasca. I went down there and I asked around and they said, Dave, you're white. I'm like, yeah, I noticed.

But I've done my work and introduced me to a shaman. And I actually don't recommend ayahuasca for a lot of people now. Certainly not. That's not where you should start. There are other substances or other paths that are better. And I've studied with gurus all over the world. planet. I even run a neuroscience company that does deep personal development with a computer showing you, no, don't meditate that way, do it this way, because it works better. And I wouldn't

have got there if I hadn't have been unhealthy. What I've learned is that the spiritual stuff happens when the biology works better. And you can be profoundly ill and have a spiritual practice and gratitude. If you can make your cell biology work even a little bit better, those are the antennas that reach out to the spiritual world and allow you to sense it and interact with it. So a full power body equals so much energy that you can do the spiritual deep work. And if you're exhausted all the time, even a small amount of spiritual progress feels like you're climbing Everest. So it's just harder. Yeah.

So I love that you kind of pointed at the foundations really of our biology working well, like a well-oiled machine, is the platform in which we can experience different states of consciousness and happen deeper. and one of those aspects which you mentioned, which is like something I know you do in 40 years of Zen and a lot of the trauma and emotional work is, again, there's a lot of people who keep hitting this dead end with their physical health trying to do all the things right. What have you found as to the things you really can't biohack your way out of in terms of the physical stuff? What are the primary drivers of the internal psyche stuff that we need to deal with. Most people feel anxiety over something,

or you feel triggered over something. And your body's job is to create a user interface on reality for you. So it's not like we're seeing all the quantum interactions and molecules spinning around, and we're not deciding which sphincter is to tighten and which heartbeats to do. And there's all kinds of automated stuff. So I know, and we can prove this,

that everything that I'm sensing right now when I look at you, it's not actually what's going on. It's just how my body represents it to me so that my little brain can comprehend it because the vastness of complexity of everything would be more than you can fit in your head. So if you understand that that's how things are, of course your body is going to change

how you feel about something to manipulate what you do. And this is why someone criticizes you, let's say. Now, your body is going to say, what's the first time I felt that way? And it's probably when you were three or four. There was a mean teacher or a coach or, you know, when your parents was tired. And that criticism at the time felt like a threat. So the body said, okay, in my really fast protective mechanisms, tag that one as scary. And then you're an adult.

You're sitting at work and your boss says something. And it triggers that thing. and it triggers it before your brain even gets a signal to think. So then it comes in with an emotion, right? And the emotion informs you of reality. You believe the emotion to be fact, and then you react. Now, that's the trauma-based approach. But the body, if it doesn't have enough minerals,

if you've been eating something that you think is good for you but isn't, if you've been exposed to all the environmental toxins or your diet, lagged or you're hungover, if the body feels like it can't make energy at full power, it's going to feel stressed and it's going to give you stress. So half the stuff that you think is emotional stress is actually physiological stress coming from your hardware. And your body's going, something's wrong. And then your human mind is like, well, if something's wrong, it must be my partner. But it was really just internally, something's not working. So our job is to sort out, what's a biological stressor?

How do I use healthy biological stress to improve and recovery? And then how do I sort out what is an emotion that isn't helpful? And then you can go down the Buddhist path. And I've been to Nepal and Tibet and meditated monasteries and all. And they're going to tell you, you know, sit cross-legged, do this, visualize the Buddha, and allow the sensations and the emotions to just flow through. and after many years of work I finally got to the conclusion that fuck that

I don't want to do that and the long slow middle path is that eventually they'll just calm down and they do but it takes 20, 30, 40 years of regular practice and during that time all of the biological energy that you could have put into love that you could have put into improving yourself or the world or just being happy, playing, all of it goes into useless, ancient triggers that are there to keep your meat alive.

If there's a way to go in more rapidly and to teach yourself, hey, I know body that this feels like a threat, but it's not a threat, could we turn off that pattern? It's like turning off the alerts on your phone so they don't go off anymore. So you don't have to go, oh, it's just an alert from TikTok. Let me just ignore it. So my practice, and what I do at 40 years of Zen and what I teach is, if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun, and you should probably do something about that, right? That means someone else can control you.

So it's your job to go in via any means necessary and reprogram your subconscious and even the mitochondrial networks in your body so that they are only triggered by real threats. So if it's actually a tiger, your body will protect you and you'll run away before you think about it. If you lean on a hot stove, you don't have to decide to move your hand. Your body will effortlessly move your hand before you really get burned. And you'll tell yourself, good thing I moved my hand. You didn't move your hand. Your body did it for you.

So a lot of the real work of meditation and healing and trauma resolution is, let's let the body better sense reality so that it's less reactive, which makes you less reactive, and the easiest thing you can do for that is clean up your diet, learn how to sleep, understand circadian biology. And if you do that, the body has so much energy

that it doesn't feel like you're going to be overwhelmed. And this is a through line for biohacking. The idea behind biohacking, when I created the word, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control of your own biology. And that means you can have,

have enough energy that you can handle anything. And I just fundamentally believe that you can have a kind of peace in the world where everyone is tired and run down and controlled. You're peaceful because you're too tired to do anything. Or you can have a world where everyone is just abundantly powerful and they choose to be peaceful. That also means that if you try to do something wrong, that they'll stop you. And I want that world for myself and for my kids and for all of us. it's not as hard as you might think because inside your biology, you're wired to be kind. And there's actually an operating system inside the body before you can think that informs us that that's the actual case of reality. I'm excited to dive into that a little bit more about being wired to be kind.

I think there's a couple really important points you brought up. One, which is it can be yes and, right? It's important to focus on the biology and the health and the things that are our foundation. and then also the mental and the psyche and the traumatic things. But I did want to push back a little bit on the notion of the kind of ancient contemplative practices that take decades, 20 to 40 years, to be able to find some sense of peace or whatever. I think that if it's a proper practice with powerful teachers and you're guided rightly, it can be weeks or less than many months to arrive at a sense of interspaciousness

and kind of lessen the identification we have with their thoughts and emotions. But I also know you're just using technology also to accelerate the process. You can within one or two weeks have a profound change. And a lot of that comes from reframing your understanding of reality. And yes, you can make great progress in a short period of time. If you want to have the brainwaves of someone who's done 20 plus years of daily meditation for about an hour, that usually takes 20 years and sometimes up to 40. or you can do it in about a week with tech.

And so I will gladly say hurry, meditate faster. Because just like you could go to the gym like I did, 90 minutes a day, six days a week, for more than a year and not really get good results. But if you could do that in five minutes once a week, of course you're going to do that. So we want to choose the meditation technologies and techniques. and when I say technology, it doesn't have to be with computers. Breathwork is a technology. Yeah, we're a technology. Staring at a candle instead of just meditating in darkness,

there are different things. So we can study meditation and personal growth. And at one end is do one hour once a week of talk therapy with a therapist, which probably isn't going to get you very far. Or you might do something more radical, like breathwork, or you might do a vagal nerve stimulation. So my book that comes out in Q1 of 2025 is called Heavily Meditated. And I go through all the different things that I've done and things that are possible that just help you get the results in less time.

Because throughout most of history, we would take some percentage of people and we'd say, you go sit in the cave, you go sit in the monastery, write down everything you notice, hand it to the next generation. If we just do it for long enough, we're going to learn something. and you want to learn meditation. You go to a monastery, like I did in Copan Monastery, and you sit there and you're meditating. And if you have a new level of attainment, you hit a new state, you might notice it, but not know if it's the right state. And if you have a really good teacher who's dialed in and has learned the skill of feeling what you're feeling, okay there's 20 or 2,000 people in the room and then if you're doing it right your teacher raises an eyebrow at you and nods their head and oh i got a signal i did something right now if you don't notice the teacher or the teacher doesn't notice you it takes a long time and that's why progress can be

slow the other thing is that a really powerful teacher they're actually going to be resonating in a certain way and you're going to pick that up, right? And so just being in their presence does that for you. And if you're listening to this going, that sounds like a bunch of BS. There's hard science about heart rate variability, and even before this interview, like I did something to my energetic field,

so you're resonating with me, right? What was that? What was it? I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. It turns out there's convincing research that shows when a person walks into a stall

with a horse if the person's tweaking they can't ride the horse and the horse will tweak and if the person's calm the horse is calm so it turns out the spacing

between your heartbeats if you're calm it's not evenly spaced and if you're stressed it's perfectly evenly spaced so the horse's heartbeat spacing will change to match yours so they're almost like a mirror of you

well humans do the same thing to each other. So the person with the most powerful field in a room, whether it's calm or stressed, will shift the rest of the room. And like, what? Yeah, you can measure this. Yeah. Yeah, the more coherent person will influence the rest. I love, I feel like for so many of us, our schooling gets in the way of our education. Like, we're just not taught the human mechanism, the manual of being human, you know, and how our breath influences everything. And there's just so much I wish we were taught. One of those things is the power of our breath. And I know that in your travels and your, you know, physical and spiritual studies, you've really understood how there's so many

different ancient techniques that can be applied now in modern day living that really change our neurology and biology. And so what is the power of our breath and understanding how we can leverage breath work to change states of consciousness? this? Well, one of the earliest really powerful experiences I had was doing Stan Groff's type of breathwork. Holotropic? And this is when I was about 30. And I had no idea that breathwork did anything. I'd done a little bit of yoga and take a deep breath, you know, little pranayama, and you feel a little different. Stan Groff, and it's an honor, he invented this, and I hosted a breathwork workshop with Stan and interviewed him when he was 94 on my podcast. Stan is a

psychotherapist and licensed his entire life in Czechoslovakia and back when it was Czechoslovakia, he was using LSD with a prescription when it was legal and he's like, this works so much better than the Freudian therapy that he'd learned. So suddenly LSD was illegal and he said, I got 3,000 patients who are much better than they were. And this is not just go get high. This is with a therapist to talk through this. And you found all these patterns of human consciousness that are the foundations of transpersonal psychology today. So when LSD got illegalized, he said, well, what else can I do? So they looked at all sorts of practices. And he and his wife came up with this, really, it's an ancient yogic breath. And it's very rapid, very deep breathing. And there's lots of variation.

of that. You go to a Joe Dispenza workshop and you'll see something, it's not exactly that, but it's pretty similar. You do that kind of deep, rapid breathing, and you want to do this with the right music and the right setting. Darkness helps and having people around you helps and having people who can help you talk through it. This can be a big deal.

People see past lives. They see angels. They see all kinds of stuff, right? This is without drugs. And so one path would be, I'm going to sit in silence for 10 days and do of hypasana. There's great value to that. It takes 10 days and you're not going to get paid during that time. You're not going to see your kids during that time. So what's the ROI on that?

I'm a fan of it pasana. But if I could do 10 days worth of itpasana in 30 seconds, I would. And this is why we're always looking for things that work. And I would say breathwork paired with meditation is fundamentally more efficient. But it doesn't have to be that style. That's just a really powerful one. There's things as basic as a box breath. Many people don't know that. Special forces have been using this forever. And it's, you breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, and hold empty for four seconds. First time I tried that, I realized as soon as I sit with my lungs empty, my body sends an alert says you're going to die. I'm like, why should it be painful for me to have my lungs empty for four seconds? It's because

the body's worried you might run out of air, and it doesn't know you're in there. So a lot of the practices, whether it's fasting, and I've written major books on fasting that help to make intermittent fasting a thing, fasting is about going from the average person, 30% of your thoughts every day are about tacos. It's like, what's my next meal? What's my next meal? 30% of your mental capacity. And then you realize the reality is you won't starve for about 60 days.

and for some people much longer. So the body feels like if you don't eat lunch, you're going to die and you're going to starve. And people say, I'm starving. No, you're not. So it's about teaching the body to be at peace. So it stops sending you stress signals for things that aren't stressful.

And it turns out, breathing and holding your lungs empty for a little while, it doesn't have to cause any stress. So you're teaching the body to just calm down. And that box breath can take you out of being triggered. It can take you out of fight or flight. It can help you go to sleep at night. And I taught it to my kids when they're little kids.

And so if they can't go to sleep, they just do a box breath. And then you can go to sleep. So understanding, breath controls heart rate. Heart rate controls stress. Hmm, biohacking, change the environment outside yourself and inside yourself to control your biology. Maybe knowing the power of your breath is important. We also have Sri Sri Sri Sri Sri Ravishankar's art of living.

For about five years, every single morning, I would wake up and do his full crea, which involves weird things. You put your hands here and you go, so hum, so hum. And then you put your hands here. And what they're doing is they're moving the breath from the lower lungs to the middle diaphragm to the upper lungs when you put your arms up higher. And the reason you do this is to make sure that the lungs are fully oxygenated. And by changing the speed and area of where you're breathing,

it radically shifts your state. There's more than 50 million people who do that every single morning. And I learned this as a young entrepreneur. Every Saturday morning, I'd go to our CEO's house, BV. Jagdiche, one of the companies I worked with. And this group of powerful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would show up at 7 a.m., which is basically the middle of the night. And we would do a 45-minute breathwork thing together. And this was 20 years ago.

and one of the guys who would go, he said, you know, I can't explain why this works, but I feel like I took a mental shower every week. Like, this cleans everything up. And if you're sitting here and you're saying, I'm stressed all the time, I don't know what to do and I'm trying to calm down, maybe learning the different styles of breathwork

is going to get you there faster. Or you could say, hmm, how about I measure it? And for me, I've tried everything that's supposed to work and half of it doesn't. So I made a commitment before I even had the word biohacking worked out in my brain. I'm only going to do what works. And that means I have to measure it. And I'm going to do more of what works and I'll stop the things that I believe work that don't work.

And it's why when it comes to things like breathwork, one of the most powerful things you can do is measure the spacing between your heartbeats. So right around the time that I actually was after I learned holotropic breathwork, I found a little sensor from a company called Heart Math. Roland McCready, as an electrical engineer, has been working for 30 years in the field of measuring the electrical signals from the heart and the body and correlating them with all kinds of consciousness. And he's been on my show a couple of times about to come back on. And with this device, it's called an interbalance,

you clip a cheap little sensor to your ear and you look at your phone and you breathe in and out and make it turn green. Now, what is the word for making something turn green? There is not a word for it. And the entire history of meditation and magical training and esoteric training, if you read any 13th century cave meditation in Sanskrit thing, and yes, you can buy them on Amazon, there's these detailed recipes.

We'll try and sit with a body like this and do this and do that. we're trying to find words for a state that we don't know what it is. It'd be like if they sat you at the cockpit of a 737 and said, okay, fly it, turn on the air conditioning. I don't know, that might be the eject button. You don't know what's labeled. So with technology, you can take what might have been a multi-year journey to really feel into this subtle shift of the state

and say, when the light turns green, you've shift. And what I learned in about six weeks from doing this, it's that dozens of times a day my body was shifting into fight or flight sympathetic activation without my knowledge or permission for no good reason. And once you learn what it feels like when you shift, you also learn a skill to bring it back. So all of a sudden I'm playing whack-a-mole all day long,

even when I don't have the sensor clip to me. I'm like, look, my body did that again. But it was, it's like if you had a warning light on your dashboard, on your dashboard, but you didn't know it was a warning light. There's a bunch of lights. I don't know what that one means, but now you know what it means and what to do about it. And that means you control your state.

It means you're much harder to trigger. It means that if you're feeling off, there's a technique that brings you back quickly. And that stuff has changed my life magically, because all of a sudden, if I'm not in the right state, why? Is it my nervous system? Is it my breath? Is it something I believe or I think? Or is it what I have?

for breakfast. You just have to know, huh, I'm not in the state I want to be. What could it be? And most people get stuck, especially when we're younger, on believing that it's you. Well, if it's the environment around you or it's your body doing something, that actually makes sense based on the environment you're in, but you think it's your fault. I went down this path where I was dealing with this just crippling brain fog. I'm going to Wharton Business School. I'm working full-time. a tech startup and we'll say it was a little bit stressful to do that and i was failing like i was going to fail out of word and i'm thinking to myself maybe i'm just not trying hard enough but i know

i'm trying it's just not working and then i thought maybe i'm just dumb i'm not particularly dumb but maybe i'm dumb compared to my classmates and one of the things that was really enlightening for me as I went and I did a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen. What I found was I had a hardware problem. So I went in in Palo Alto, meet the psychiatrist, and he looks at me and you could just kind of read it. He was like, tech bro wants Adderall. I've seen this so many times, right?

I didn't want Adderall. I hate Adderall. It does not make me feel good. You'll get focused, but then you want to punch people. It's just not a nice feeling. So when I walked in, after the brain scan, he just shook his head and he said, Dave, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen.

And I just said, finally, someone believes me. It's not that I'm just malingering or not trying. It's something's not working. And he said, look, this part of your brain just shuts down when you try to concentrate. Like, oh, that's funny. That's the rational thinking part of my brain. That's why I'm failing out. So I had a hardware problem, not a moral failing. So for everyone listening, if you're sitting there going, something's wrong with me, why do I keep doing this? Number one, you're not your body. Your body's doing that, not you. And number two, it's normal to feel frustrated over that stuff because you want to believe you're in control of your body. Your body wants to believe it's in control of you. And bad news,

your body gets to sense reality. It gets to process reality for a third of a second. and then show you only what it wants you to see. So understanding there's a different consciousness inside of you that runs your meat than runs you. It takes a lot of the judgment and shame out. So then you're saying, all right, I'm going to work on managing that intelligence because it's very fast and it's very dumb. So let's train it. And that's what meditation is.

Yeah, there's so many different contemplative practices, you know, that do different things within our awareness training, right? Like, how the tropic breathwork has a completely different effect on our stage and state of consciousness compared to a posse and meditation. And I think both are extremely valuable, and it's important just to see what is going to be serving us most in life right now. I feel having a consistent mindfulness or meditation practice for 15, 20 minutes a day is super beneficial.

And it's like getting a deep detail on your car. It can be really beneficial to you. And I'm going again in a couple of months to do something where it's like a extended period where you're really in silence because I do think there can be this conflation and especially in Western society between states and stages of consciousness meaning of course you know this but for the listeners like the various different things you can do like holotropic breathwork being one to quickly change your state of consciousness which makes you feel really good immediately and can like kind of flush your biology in so many different things and yet there's these stages

of consciousness that doing prolonged contemplative practices can help really keep you there as a baseline foundation and not something we need to continually keep grasping towards. A lot of what you're sharing is, I think, really inviting all of us to prioritize our wellness, because if we don't, then we'll be forced to prioritize taking care of our illnesses. And right now, we live in a profoundly sick society, right? Modern society is undermining us every which way we look. And big pharma profits on keeping it so, you know, and big food and so many of these industries. But I'm just curious, any thoughts you have, have on what I shared in regards to states and stages.

If you look at any of the old, whether it's TCM or Iro Veta or even some of the older Western spiritual practices, they all have sort of stages of evolution of consciousness. So you can change your state and still be at an early stage of development. And the one that works best, the one that I teach at 40 years of Zen comes, mostly out of Buddhism and there's many different branches of that and it's that when you start out most people don't even really have

a lot of empathy for others it's very much about me it's all in the ego and we can talk about where the ego comes from and why I know we're wired to be kind to each other but the first stage is you develop empathy right so now you can feel other people's emotions other people's pain sounds like a good thing right empathy is better than not having empathy but it's not a high level of development.

And for some people, that's kind of shocking. But if you have empathy, you're going to feel everyone else's shit. And it's going to take you down. But if you can feel it, you're not aware of it. So what do you develop that's beyond empathy? Well, the next step is compassion. And compassion is really different than empathy.

And what it means is that you automatically wish others well before you think or before you empathize. So someone walks in the room and they could remind you of the bully in fifth grade or they could just really have a vibe you don't like or they say something that triggers you. Before any of that, in your heart, in your emotions, not in your thoughts, you're automatically wishing them all. And compassion is a much higher, more sustainable state

that takes wayless energy than being empathetic. all the time. Right? So then, oh, I'm wishing everyone well. I'm sending them good thoughts. By the way, when you send people good thoughts, it's good for you. But you do it automatically instead of having to choose to do it. That will shift your state in such a magical way. And then the next step, the next stage of consciousness beyond that is, well, they would call it enlightenment in the East. You could call it equanimity or just resilience. And the picture for that is a monk meditated. in the middle of a storm. Nothing can take you out of your chosen state.

And that's where we want to get as we evolve our stages of consciousness to the point where you feel compassion. And it doesn't matter what's happening. You get to be exactly who and how you want to be. And when you fully attain that, it's effortless and automatic and it's just built in. And I like to say it's effortless. there's a neat story. A monk gets flown to Stanford University.

They've been doing neuroscience tests. In fact, the Dalai Lama has funded some of this to look at what are the brain states of advanced meditators? And they brought this guy in and he sits down and starts doing his thing. And the EEG electrodes start registering a signal when they're not on his body because he's casting a field. and this is real, you can measure this stuff. And all the neuroscientists are going,

oh my gosh, look at that, he's so powerful, he's so powerful. And then the signal goes away. And he goes, the monk says, I'm sorry, guys. When you said that, I started thinking, oh, look at me, I'm such a good monk, and I went into my ego, and I lost my powers. I need to go spend two hours meditating and doing breathwork to bring myself back into a state of ego control so that I can do this. Right?

Because he started thinking, look at me, I'm a big deal. So I say effortless, and he said, I haven't been in the state in 10 plus years until you guys started saying I was a big deal. So it's this idea of like, how do I just sit and be aware of these systems in the body that will take you out of your chosen state and how do you manage them? And it turns out understanding your body is responding to the environment around you and to your thoughts and your feeling simultaneously. And that all of that is within your control. It can just take less effort to set yourself up to evolve the stages more quickly. I'd love to share why we're wired to be kind to each other. And this comes out of my studies of mitochondria in the body,

what they really are, what they do. This model, I think, creates a lot of freedom for people. And it's all based on F words. And I studied when I was a computer hacker, distributed systems, and emergent behavior, and AI. So when you have small things that really, repeat a pattern over and over, you get complex things that emerge, like the reason flowers grow in a shape or the reason shells are the way they are. It looks so beautiful, but it's simple

rules repeated infinitely create complexity. So you start looking at human consciousness and you realize our bodies have to be able to stay alive like all life on Earth. So there is an operating system, a set of decisions that every living thing makes in order to survive for millions of years. And you can figure out what this is. And the first thing that all life on the planet does is fear. And that means you run away from, you kill, or you hide from anything scary. And you do it right now with all of your energy. Because from the perspective of a tiny little mitochondria sitting in your body,

which used to be in ancient bacteria, it doesn't really know if you're the last of your species on the planet because dumb little bacteria, they don't know time, they don't know context, they don't know what's in the refrigerator, they only know the present, and if there's a perceived threat, whether it's real or not, you have to react. So fear will take your energy.

And this works, if you're a slime mold, like some kind of politician, or a zebra or a tree, it doesn't matter, all life does this. And the way you run away from kill or hide can be very different. A bacteria is going to make toxins, right? A tiger is going to bite you. A human's going to make a tool and smack you on the head with it.

We all do this, right? So, fear. The next one. Food. And this is, eat everything. Because famines have taken out every species. Energy availability is precious. So this is why, until you train yourself, you think about tacos all day.

long or pizza or ice cream or candy or whatever the heck your thing is right so fear food third f word all life has to do it to stick around for multiple generations do you know that one what life has to do yeah just like all life on earth to stick around for multiple generations it's an f word so after fear after food what would come next hmm fornicate i was thinking fertility but all right you just go straight for the dirty you know whatever you're into man At least you don't drop an F-bomb. Yeah. It's fear of food, fertility, right? And probably fornication more likely for most life.

Now, everything does this that's alive automatically without any conscious brain in there. Right? Bacterio reproduce. Slime molds reproduce. Trees reproduce. And they put a lot of energy into making these little seed pods. Right. And if they were selfish and they weren't wired that way, they wouldn't put energy into that. they would just get stronger roots,

but we always put our energy into the next generation automatically because life has to do that to be alive. So fear, food, fertility. Slash fornicate? Slash fornicate. The fourth one. Oh, wait a minute. I just explained every bad decision you ever made in your life.

Your mitochondria did it. This is the operating system of your body. And that's pretty dark. Oh my God, is this really what life is about? It's not about those. because the next F word that all life on Earth does is friend. You support your species and all the world around you automatically by design. But if all of your energy goes into fear and hunger and desire,

then there's nothing left for your community. And the final F word, and the one that is the center of my work in spirituality and personal development is forgiveness. And you can say, Dave, how does a deer forgive? They don't even have a brain that really does that. Well, it's hard for humans to forgive. This is where we get stuck. For the deer, you see the National Geographic thing.

There's a tiger chasing the deer. The deer gets away, and it'll shake itself. And it'll go back to eating grass. The shaking is the deer shaking off the threat being done. with it being present and going back into literally sympathetic or parasympathetic mode where you can actually digest the grass you're eating. So it's pretty easy. Either you got eaten or you didn't, but for humans, we think about it all the time and we get stuck in that. And forgiveness isn't about saying bad things that happened to you were okay. It's about turning off your

reactivity and your grudge. And a lot of the most powerful meditative practices, the fastest way to change your stages of spiritual evolution and your state is a structured process of forgiveness. And you can use psychedelics, you can use breathwork, you can use darkness, you can fast in caves, and you can use technology to do it. And in heavily meditated in my book, that's what I'm teaching people is what's the structured process for forgiveness that works? And I've had about 2,000 people come through my neuroscience program. It's a five really intense days at 40 years of Zen. These are successful people, entrepreneurs, celebrities, athletes, people like that. And what you see is when someone does an authentic forgiveness exercise, not where you think or

decide that you forgive someone, but where your biology forgives them, it's pretty trippy when you experience it. But more importantly, the brain shifts in a very predictable way. So we teach people how to structure forgiveness as a process, as a meditation, and a computer to guide you to do it more deeply, more profoundly, and to catch you when you do what most people do. And they'll say, I forgave mom. I said I forgive her, but you know they didn't really do it. Because the body believes that if you forgive a potential threat,

it still might come back. And so your hardware fights against you letting go because it wants to hold on to all of those traumas. It wants to hold on to those because they might be dangerous. And it knows it has the ability to put all your energy into fear. And it wants to keep your energy there because that's what's going to keep you from getting eaten. So if you can do the basic biohacking stuff around health, it raises the amount of energy you have available. So now even if you do keep the same amount of energy in fear, you fill up your fear bucket,

then it goes into your food bucket, learn how to eat so you're never hungry. Well, there's not much energy you need to worry about there. So then it goes into the next bucket. And when you learn how to use sacred intimacy as a form of nourishment instead of porn or empty sex, that becomes something that powers you,

that actually raises your consciousness. And then you have so much energy left that you can serve your community and you can have a tribe and doing that also nourishes you. And there's so much energy left at the end of all that that you can do the deep work of forgiveness and spiritual progression and working on yourself.

So the lowest hanging fruit, learn how to have more energy. Second one, eliminate hunger. Because that's easy. And then eliminating fear, which is hard and learning to have sacred intimacy isn't that hard. It requires vulnerability. And that's easier too if you're full of energy

and you have less beer and you're not hungry. Because it's not going to be a great night of lovemaking if you're hungry and afraid because it wouldn't be a night of lug making at all. It'd be a night of finding pizza. Yeah, there's so much value that you just shared there in terms of the framework for understanding,

even going back to like Maslow's hierarchy of like the foundational things that we can really that our biology needs that make so many of these other states or qualities or virtues that much more kind of fluid and just existing within us, like kindness, compassion, sharing within community. Like all these things become so much more effortless, like when we're actually vibrant. And so I want to focus on that now. And kind of we started a little bit higher up on the hierarchy, I guess, of development

and self-trans personal experiences. Now going back down to the foundation, you mentioned earlier. earlier as like if you had to focus on the three to five kind of lowest hanging fruit that everyone needs to focus on before you know necessarily the different biohacks or supplements or different things what would those be and we'll go from there I can give you the three to five but first we have to talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs sure you brought it up a lot of people have heard of this and Maslow's perspective is that you need to have food and shelter and safety and things like that and he's a brilliant, brilliant psychologist

who died unexpectedly before he was done with his work. And a friend, Scott Barry Kaufman... I've had him on the show. He's been on my show, too. He read all of Maslow's unpublished papers, and the final step on his hierarchy of needs was transcendence. And it's very tied to that forgiveness thing. It's that we need to be able to evolve,

and all life will evolve. And for humans, we do that through a process of letting go of old traumas, through a process of forgiveness. And when you do that, then you can see things in reality that your body wouldn't let you see before because it was afraid.

And you didn't choose that. It got programmed that way through early childhood experiences, etc. So understanding that even Maslow's hierarchy includes transcendence. We have to evolve as humans in order to be happy. And evolving consciously

and deliberately and efficiently, it just feels way better than just randomly evolving through random mutation, which probably isn't even how we evolve anyway. So three to five. Okay. If you want to have a lot more energy, one of the big tenets of biohacking is stop doing the things that make you weak. It's like if you had a car and you wanted to make it faster, so you take it into the racing mechanic. And he looks in the trunk and says, you have 500 pounds of rock in your trunk. Maybe we just take those out of the trunk and your car will be faster because it weighs

less. Oh my gosh, wouldn't that be easier than buying new tires and a new exhaust system? Yeah, it would. So what are the things that are making you weak? Probably nutrition is one of them. The vast majority of people don't get enough high-quality protein in their diets today. They also don't get enough high-quality fats. Quality food is terribly important for people. And if you're sitting there going, I'm meditating every day. Like, I was a raw vegan. And the first six weeks, like, I feel so good. That's because my body was freaking out and giving me lots of adrenal hormones and upregulating my thyroid as it was telling me, here's some energy, like, go hunt something. And after well, your energy starts to go down. You start to feel ungrounded as your minerals get depleted and things

like that. So I teach people, if you want to feel better, eat saturated fat. It can be butter or ghee, and I'm famous for putting butter in coffee, and people have lost millions of pounds on the Bulletproof Diet, and having high-quality fat, avoiding the seed oils that are common in our food supply today because they're cheap, not because they're good for you. When you do that, your cell membranes improve, but it takes two years to replace half the fat that makes up the cell membranes in your body. And this is why when I first started putting butter in my coffee, it was like I was starving. And I just couldn't get enough butter. And this always happens when people start replenishing their saturated fats. It's like, oh, I feel so much

better. And after two years, I don't need them the way I did. They're just a healthy part of my diet. And when you upregulate your protein to get one gram of animal protein, it can be Vegetarian protein. Unfortunately, plant proteins are 30% as effective as animal proteins, so you can't eat enough rice and beans. Because you're like 20 pounds of them to get enough protein from them, and you'd be a little bloated from that. You can eat rice and beans if they're compatible with you.

They just aren't a good protein source. They're a carbohydrate source. So focus on high-quality fat, focus on getting enough animal protein first, one gram per pound of body weight, or 2.2 grams per kilo. this can transform you. It raises your GLP1 levels,

like when you take Ozympic or Simoglutide. I mentioned I weighed 300 pounds. I'm 4.8% body fat right now, and I'm like stupidly ripped. I've been in magazines with my shirt off. I was the fat computer hacker from Jurassic Park 1, but not the bad guy. I was 300 pounds.

And if anyone on Earth is unlikely to look like me, it's me. My lab test think I'm 35. The calendar thinks I'm 51. And I've never had this much energy or had a healthier, leaner physique than I do now. And it's from 15 years of not eating bad oils and from getting enough animal protein and making sure that I have minerals. And the second biohack that I would offer is you are mineral deficient if you're alive. Before we go into minerals, because that's a whole other thing that I'm actually.

excited to dive into. In regards to nutrition, like there is innumerable bio-individuality between everybody and obviously what has been natural, historically evolutionary for us is not normal today in terms of the vast majority of protein that comes from animals is like 99 plus probably percent from the abomination that is animal agriculture. And, you know, so I just think it's really important to highlight as you're speaking to the things that have worked for you, the things that also we should stop doing alongside the things that will bring us more our wellness and in terms of nutrition. So, like, for example, seed oil is being one thing that is just new.

That is obviously, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And, yeah. Yeah, let me think about this for a second because what I want to say is that politicians and big food company executives, they're made out of meat and I'm not a vegan. Getting enough animal protein is fundamentally important for humans. So would you say that for everybody?

Yeah, for everybody. You can be vegetarian and be healthy. You are not going to be vegan and be healthy. Okay, so you're distincting between vegan and vegetarian. Huge difference. Sure, okay. So I have a lot of followers in India, right? Like, guys, have the Lasi, which is dairy protein and fat.

Have the ghee that your grandmother ate, which is healthy fat. India has some of the highest rates of diabetes and obesity on the planet because they switched to American seed oils because we did a really good sales. What about the innumerable examples of people who have eaten whole food, plant-based, organic food for decades and have thrived, and are athletes? Well, you mean like Usain Bolt? I don't know. I don't know what his diet is.

But I know there is plenty of amazing athletes. And I'm just saying that it's possible, right? There are very, very few who only eat plants. In fact, I gave a talk at David Avocado Wolf's Ravi. And I walked in and I said, guys, I've been a raw vegan and all in. I'm a lacto-o-bo-befo-bif-po-porko-vegetarian. I hope we can be friendly. And I gave this talk that said, look, there's three reasons we choose to be vegan.

One of them is cruelty to animals. I raise the animals that I eat. And I've done shamanic training. I've done a lot of esoteric stuff. The way the world really works is the food animals that humans have a spirit, contract with, they come here to experience gratitude. That's why they chose to reincarnate on the planet. And it's our job to treat the animals with respect.

And this is why you say grace before you eat. This is why you think the animal in every religious practice, including Christianity, including a Native American ceremony, including what you would do in the jungle in South America. You think the animal. And if you're not doing that, you're doing it wrong. and I've been one of the biggest advocates for grass-fed animals on the planet. The first all-grass-fed no-seed oil restaurant in L.A. was called the Bulletproof Cafe, and I changed it to the upgrade cafe, and during the pandemic, we ended up closing down.

But now you can get grass-fed meat at hundreds and hundreds of restaurants. You can go to Erdogan and get it. When I started, you couldn't get grass-fed meat at a restaurant. It was impossible. Most of the vegan places in L.A. are switching to regent. generative meat and vegan. The plant-based burgers are a huge issue, obviously. Yeah, they're processed food.

So if you want to have a good, healthy, sacred relationship with animals, you treat them with respect and kindness, and you thank them. And that's our agreement. We nourish them. They nourish us. And it's a sacred thing. Yes, a totally different relationship. And just an important asterisk to put on the meat consumption is where, how you engage

with it, the gratitude if you so choose to. And yeah, the quality in where it's coming from, right? Because whatever you believe in karma or whatever, like eating animal agriculture food is just, like, it's one of the worst things happening on the planet, I feel like, right now. I don't think you can say that animal agriculture is a bad thing. Without animal agriculture, there would be no animals. Factory farming in particular. You say... Factory farming is evil. A hundred percent evil. Yeah. And this is that going into compassion, and you wish, well for the animals.

Need everything you can to afford and support regenerative agriculture and you do your best. Yeah. Now, in deciding, I guess, what is going to be the nutritional makeup that's going to be best for us individually, how important is, before we go into minerals, because I'm excited to go there, the importance of testing,

doing blood tests, stool tests, to figure out actually what's going underneath the hood outside of just what my relative feeling experiences to decide, you know, what's going to be good for me? there's definitely reasons to do a poop test and look at your microbiome. You can shift your microbiome in three days by changing what you eat. When I was doing the research for superhuman, which is my big book on longevity,

how I'm planning to live to at least 180, you can tell how old someone is by looking at the diversity of bacteria and the number of bacteria in their poop. That means if you have more bacteria and more diversity, you have a young person's poop. shit together. Sorry. That was awesome. I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut in three months by increasing the amount of prebiotic fiber in my diet. It's easy to do. So you can test, you can get something like a Viome test, which they'll tell you for about $300. They'll recommend short-term changes to shift the amount of certain types of bacteria

in the gut. That can be transformative. And I'll tell you, someone who's on antibiotics for 15 years and had just a wrecked gut all the time. You could try an elimination diet that takes more than a year to do. It's almost no one can do it. Or you could spend two weeks try being a carnivore. I'm not a fan of long-term carnivore diets. I got leaky gut from excessive carnivore many years ago and I was testing out the edges of the Bulletproof Diet.

But if you only eat meat and salt for two weeks and watch what happens to your skin and your joints and your body and go, oh, I guess I could feel, that way, and then go have pizza, beer, Ben and juries, and all the French fries you want, and wake up the next morning and go, oh, something in the pizza beer and French fries is really trashing me because I didn't used to feel this way. And then you start this game of understanding, am I hungry or tired after a meal? I did something wrong. What was it? It's probably MSG, bad fats, or you're sensitive to a certain class of foods that may or may not be compatible

with you. I grew up in New Mexico. My favorite food on earth is New Mexico Green Chili. I have a genetic intolerance of the Nightshade family. If I eat my favorite food, I get arthritis in my knees the next day. I've had three surgeries on my knee because of arthritis because I didn't know that bell peppers and chilies and potatoes trigger that in me. And I don't have pain in my body, but if I eat them, it comes right back. So that doesn't mean they're bad for you. It means that they are on the list of suspect foods. They may be good, they may be bad. So learning which foods are compatible with you, where your skin looks good, your joints feel good, you don't wake up with a sore back, and your brain works, you don't have brain fog, you don't have cravings. So eat the foods

that are compatible. It's not the same for everyone. Testing will help a lot. And sometimes the easiest test is only eat one or two foods for a little while, see what it's like to be clean. You could also try fasting, and I've written two big books on fasting. So if you don't eat anything for three days and you feel pretty good, how do you feel after you eat again? It's just a questioning awareness without judgment, and you can learn what makes me feel good. And it's possible that your girlfriend may do really, really well on a different diet than you. And you don't eat this one food. And she eats that food and she doesn't need another food.

And this can be complex if you're a parent or something. something. But when you eat right, you're never hungry. And when you eat something that's incompatible, two hours later, you just need a snack. I feel like so many of us don't even have the reference point for how good we can feel. And in the times where we maybe experienced that state or we, for some reason, eat the right foods that match for us and we're giving their body what it needs, we feel how vibrant and alive, like how good it feels to feel really alive. And so as we dive deeper into these things, explore minerals and whatnot, would you say that the same things that will add years to your life and make you live longer are generally the same things that will add life to your years?

100%. I see like 1970s longevity doctors that are like, well, you can't extend your life, but you can extend your health span. So anything that makes you live, live longer is going to make you feel better along the way. And if you set your goal is, I just want to feel good till I die at the normal age, I think you're a punk ass. Like, you can do so much better. How about I'd like to die at a time and buy a method of my choosing and feel amazing until that point. That's where we want to be. And we already have added 6.5 years to the human lifespan. And there's a lot more coming. What is the idea of longevity escape velocity? Longivity escape velocity. is an idea that Ray Kurzweil put forward about 25 to 30 years ago.

And he said, look, the rate of innovation of longevity technologies is happening so that all you have to do is maintain your health, and the technologies are coming that will help you extend your life by more than a year for every year you live. It looks like we're probably there, and I think Ray was picking about 2030, most people are saying 2028. If you have the right resources,

I think we're there now. In the last year, I've had an injection that takes nine years off your biological age. Genetic? So gene therapy, yeah. I've also reset my central aging clock in my brain. They do that with focused ultrasound on your hypothalamus

while getting intravenous stem cells that go into the brain. and the difference in your cognition and what in the East we call your life force energy like your tea. Unbelievable. So it's possible already now. And I've been in the field of longevity for 25 years. I started running a nonprofit in the late 90s in Palo Alto. I'm working on education and research for longevity. And I've worked with most of the leaders in the field.

They've been on my show and they've wrote a New York Times book on it. So this is my thing. and when you look at what's possible and you look at what's accessible, there's a gap. And I always write my books to say, well, here's the technique and the principle and here's the free ways that you can, like fasting is free.

In fact, it's cheaper than eating. And then here's the medium cost thing that might be 25 or 100 bucks, and then here's what the crazy billionaires do. And I'll do all three. But the idea is that you can make better choices every day that don't necessarily cost more. You just need to know what to do.

And that lowers your speed of aging. Last time I measured, I was about 73% the rate of normal people, which is nice. And I live an insane life. I'm on 70% travel right now. I'll be spending three days in Scotland and coming back. And there's all kinds of stuff that I could do in my life to reduce environmental stress and toxins. I would probably give them more time. But I'm doing what I love and what I think is necessary.

Which also adds years too. Yeah, having a mission is kind of important. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So this idea that, like, for somebody who's in there, 40s right now, if they can maintain health and unlock true vibrancy, by the time they're 50, because of the exponential rate of growth with technology and AI, what's going to be available to then extend our life beyond that, you know, as we get older, is just going to be so much more

available to us. I don't think it's going to take 10 years. One of my companies is called Upgrade Labs, and we've got 32 locations, either open or in the process of opening in the U.S. and Canada. It's an AI-based longevity company. And you come in, we measure what you're doing. It doesn't even require a blood test, but you can get one. And we do this with medical grade tech. And then we set a goal because it turns out longevity is a goal, but it's usually not your first goal.

If you're tired, I want my energy back. I want to improve my cognition. I want to lose weight. I want to put on muscle. I want to extend my endurance. I want to fix my sleep. I want to fix my libido. And so we use AI and structured statistical analysis.

just to figure out what do you really want? And then what is the set of technologies available, whether it's supplements or all the equipment that we use that will give you the most benefit per minute of effort? So then, oh, look, I just checked off that box on feeling stressed all the time. I can handle stress better than ever before. Oh, next, let's lose some weight.

Oh, next, let's make my brain work better. You're always going to end up at wanting to live longer when you solve the other things. And we're doing that with AI and with amazing amounts of tech. and the transformations are incredible. So right now, I built that because I bought a million dollars worth of equipment about 11 years ago. And I said, I've built this for myself.

Why don't I put it under Arnold Schwarzener's office in Santa Monica? And that was the first upgrade lapse. And since then I've been working on how do I make this scalable and profitable? So people who open a franchise with us can make money. And it can be profitable because if you want to do something that helps the world, you still have to eat. So I look at running a business that helps people and puts food on your table as their requirements. They go together. So now it's growing and it's scaling. And that takes it from a million dollars and having a barn to put it in the way I did to having a monthly membership.

That costs a little bit more than a health club, but not much more. That gives you access to the tech that astronauts and special forces and pro athletes use so you can recover faster than you're supposed to and you can transform more quickly. And yes, it includes neurofeedback to train your brain. So important to democratize a lot of these amazing technologies. So now going into supplements and minerals, what is most often overlooked in regards to those? There's all these sexy neutropics.

I've formulated some, actually make some even now. And we're always called the latest. Here's a new longevity, a cocktail. Some of those work really, really well. But you've got to build the foundation right. The worst thing you do is have styrofoam blocks under your house instead of cement blocks, and then build a nice-looking house that falls over. So what are the foundational things that give you the most benefit per pill?

And it turns out there's just two things. The most important is called vitamin dake. And you can go to vitamin dake.com, d'a-k-e. This is a mix of the foremost important fat-soluble vitamins. those vitamins direct minerals to tell them where to go in the body. And then you take minerals 101. It's from the same side. And minerals 101 is a mix of the biggest macro minerals that you're lacking.

Because it turns out all life needs to run away from kill or hide from scary things. Plants have a hard time running away because of roots. So what they do is they put toxins into their seeds and into their leaves and stems. And the toxins are there so that if animals eat too many of them, the animals become unhealthy and can't reproduce. And the primary toxin that I'm focused on today is oxalate and also phytic acid. And both of those are plant toxins that suck minerals out of your body. So you think your spinach has iron or something and it doesn't matter if it's present in the plant. If when you eat the plant, you can't absorb it and it pulls other minerals out of your body.

right so it's kind of it's almost sad to think oh i'm taking something that i can't absorb but because it's in there i believe it's in there so i'm just going to take it anyway yeah you hate kale i do hate kale and spinach is worse than kale but kale has better marketing so kale is just not a health food it's a garnish and if you're starving you can eat some kale but there is not a case for eating kale and if you're on a budget kale is more expensive per calorie than the best quality grass-fed ribai on the planet. There's no calories in kale. So if you're hungry and you spend six bucks on a head of kale with 50 calories that just grinds up your gut, you're just not doing it right. So I always focus animal protein first, high-quality fat second, and plants third. And if you

do that, your blood sugar is stable and you feel so much better. But even then, did the animal eat grass that was full of minerals because it was on healthy soil? Probably not. So you have to supplement. So do you think mainly because the nutrient density of our soil and food, we must supplement D-A-K-E at the very least? Well, you have to take vitamin Dake and minerals 101. Those are two brands that you own, correct? There are two brands that I own. And you can go on the website and you can look at the ingredients in there,

and I designed these to be cheap. Like vitamin Dake is about $22 bucks a month. You know, one bottle is a two-month supply. It is not expensive. So why in particular all of those are the most important, the foundation and the macromed minerals as well? They're important because if you have the macromenerals in your diet and you have vitamin Dake, vitamin D drives the minerals to go into the right place.

If you have vitamin D from sunshine or vitamin D from a supplement, but you don't have vitamin K2 present, vitamin D drives calcification, which is good unless it's calcification in your brain or your joints or your kidneys. So vitamin K2 makes it go into the bones. And vitamin A controls where zinc goes in the body. So fat soluble plus minerals equals cells that have the right things in the right places. And the reason I say these are important is that if you're going to go to the gym and you're going to lift something and the body says, okay, I got some sort of threat because obviously he's picking up heavy things probably for a reason. And the reason wouldn't be because he decided to without bacteria because there must have been a stressor. So I have two choices as a body.

I can recognize there was a stress, recognize that now I'm safe, and I have the necessary ingredients to build muscle, and then I'll adapt. Or I could recognize that there was a stressor, and there was inadequate protein, and I didn't have the minerals I needed. How about just having a stress response and not growing? So in order to transform your muscles, your nervous system, or your consciousness, you need adequate stress, you need a sense. you need a safe, recovered state, and you need the raw building blocks. And if you don't have minerals, your meditation won't work as well. Your workouts won't work as well. Your sleep won't work as well.

Your sex hormones won't work as well. So these are the things that affect the most systems in the body, and they're very, very affordable, which is why do those first before you buy the fancy neutropics, before you take the testosterone enhancing things, before you take even creatine, which is also great. And from the macro minerals, which are the ones you measure in hundreds of milligrams or milligrams, we also have... Which, what are a few of those? Like, what are... Magnesium, zinc, calcium, copper, polybdumum, which I never can say right.

And even vanadium is one, which really helps to control blood sugar. When you get those, there's also trace and ultra-trace minerals. And those are lacking very much so in soil. Get a source of trace and ultra-trace minerals and get them into your body every single day. And when you do this, you can measure changes in the amount of electricity your cells can manufacture and handle. And we use gear that does that at Upgrade Labs. You come in, we do a cell health analysis, and you can see how good is this person's system at making electricity. It's measurable.

So you don't have to just imagine something works. You can do it one day with and one day without and see that there's a change. So you kind of laid out, as we're laying out the foundation more from nutrition the things we shouldn't be doing, the vitamins and minerals that are essential for the foundation of our building our physical vitality. Not many people think of light as information and as like a part of our diet as well. How is blue light specifically detrimental to us? And how should we be thinking about circadian rhythm and biology to be able to leverage it effectively for health? circadian biology is it's at the core of biohacking and the idea of circadian biology is that your body detects what time of day it is and it changes your system and what it's going to do based on the signals it gets

so light is a nutrient you have people say well i need some carbohydrates i'll just have corn syrup it's a carbohydrate but it's junk food it's not a big stretch to say we can have junk light and your body looks at the color of light, the intensity of light, and the angle of light. And 5% of cells inside your eyes, pick up that light, but it doesn't show it to your visual cortex. It goes into the timing system in the brain called the SCN. And the body says, huh, it's my job to figure out what time of day it is. And this goes back to mitochondria two billion years ago.

They're in the ocean. It's cold and dark at night. And that's when they recover. And then the sun comes up and it's red. So you're getting sunrise. And then as the day goes on and the sun's right above you, you get bright blue and all the colors of light. It's directly overhead. And that's when there's the most food available because the algae's been growing all day.

Right. And then the sun starts to go down and it gets redder again and then it's dark. Well, the entire system in your body is trying to figure out what time of day it is to tell you what to do. And if you have dinner after the sun goes down, down, goes, oh, there's a lot of food. It must not be nighttime. And if you have dinner underneath those stupid spotlights they have at restaurants now that are just like making you cringe like you're in some sort of East German interrogation thing, you've now told your body with the environment around you that it's not time to get ready to sleep. And if you have that

dinner late at night, you have bright lights at night, your ability to regulate your blood sugar goes down. When your melatonin levels rise, which is supposed to happen in darkness, it makes you insulin resistant. So midnight snacks, late dinners, they will make you old. And earlier dinners can have a profound effect on your metabolism. And controlling the light at night, especially, if you were to visit my farm in Canada, all of the lighting outdoors is red. It doesn't disrupt insects or birds. There's owls that live very close to the house because there aren't bright lights. It doesn't attract bugs. And I go outside and I can see the Milky Way because the red lights don't affect us either, unless they're very, very bright. Go to my house in Austin. It's all red lights

at night. Same. This place is like my neighbor sometimes walked by my house. You're like, why is your house always red at night? They're like, vampire, maybe it's a house of ill repute or a submarine. Just trying to keep my circadian biology in check. It has changed my life. I was the guy who would go to sleep. I've tracked my sleep now for 17 years because I was so bad at it. my bedtime was 2.02 a.m. since I was 10 years old. I was saved late at night with a flashlight reading. I just wanted to read. And I've never been able to go to sleep before that. And about seven, eight years ago, because of biohacking, I finally figured this out. And I started one of the first modern circadian glasses companies called True Dark. I have some of you guys light bulbs. Oh, sweet. You got the light bulbs? I love those. And the glasses, I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. Because even what I'm wearing right now, these are only black. toxic blue light because you need blue light during the day. You just need some of it.

And blue light below, it's called 490 nanometers, but it's the lower spectrum of blue light. That stresses your eyes and your brain, and it sends you a very strong signal that it must be the middle of the day. So when you cut that out and you allow the healthy blue in, which is what these are, these aren't blue blockers. They're true dark glasses. They're different.

And in the evening, you'll see me wearing ones that are carefully designed layer of optical filters that control the angle intensity and the four colors of light that ruin your sleep. When you see me sleeping in a hotel, I'm the guy who puts black electrical tape over the stupid blinking green light because green light disrupts your sleep. And yes, you'll go to sleep. You just don't get good sleep. And I get an average of 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM sleep in six and a half hours and I go to bed at 1030 or 11 easily. My entire life, I could not do that, no matter how much I tried until I learned about lighting. You want to live a long time.

You want to have a better spiritual life. Experience darkness. We were wired to have darkness, only starlight, or to sleep in caves. So have a sleep cave. How expensive is it to have blackout curtains and to put tape over any LED in your bedroom? It's not that expensive. And if you're saying this sounds crazy, there's a study from Japan. They look at the amount of light that leaks around curtains,

in the average city and found a 69% increase in depression in people who slept with that amount of light. Or you could just get better curtains and get a dimmer switch. You can do this. Yeah. Yeah, amazing. Are you, you're obviously a big advocate for red light as well. And so what's the efficacy of red light therapy? You're leveraging that as well in the morning or nighttime, whether it's through a panel or you have light bulbs and different things in your house in terms of what it does for mitochondrial function and just overall health. having red light therapy is different than red light for circadian time yeah so for red light therapy it turns out cells in your body have something called chromophores and these are light sensitive proteins on cells and there's two spectrums within red that are particularly effective so there's narrow little windows of

light that light up the cells they can actually add electrons to your cells your mitochondria make electrons or you could have a red light on you that adds electrons red light speeds healing of wounds, speeds healing of your skin, and it can help to reset your circadian biology. But you can use red light any time you want. If it's really bright and you shine in your eyes at night, that's not a good idea because it's too bright. But you put it over your gut because you're vagus nerve

and there's so much activity there and you just feel your whole body calm down. Anywhere that's feeling injured or tense or muscle knots, you put it there, it just calms down. Even my kids and then get a stomach ache, which isn't that common in kids. if you know how to feed them. But if they would go in, you put the red light over their stomach, and the nausea goes away. So it's pretty profound what you can do, and red light therapy today is very affordable.

So should you get 10 minutes of it in the morning while you're brushing your teeth? Yes. And that's a great idea. Should you do it at night? Yes. And I do do that sometimes, but you can also just go outside if you want to save money, as long as you have sunshine. If you live in Canada, you're screwed because it's dark all the time. So then you should probably have a red light panel.

Yeah. So in terms of optimizing sleep, which I think is, you know, at least for me, is like the number one thing that affects my state of consciousness during the day is like how well I'm rested. So good. And so we touched on light, which is obviously one of the most important. You also mentioned time of last meal. I've always found like my last meal. It's like around 3 p.m. And I feel so much better in the deep sleep I get.

And so what are the other things that can really help optimize sleep? eat earlier and experience darkness at night or wear the true dark glasses that basically make your eyes think it's dark even though you can still see. That's just the first thing you do. Blacked-out bedroom. You want to cool your thermostat to 68 Fahrenheit

or you can do what I do and have a system that cools your mattress. Is it like Sleep Me or Eight Sleep? There's Eight Sleep, there's Sleep Me, which was formerly chilly sleep. Yeah, I have a... I was an investor in Chili. It was like the first podcast they were on.

And those really make a difference. There's also various things that matter you wouldn't expect. It's what you do when you first wake up that affects your sleep that night. So when you first wake up, go outside if you can and get just a few minutes of bright sunlight. Sunglasses, regular glasses, or contacts stop it from working. And there's a few newer biohackers. Like even Andrew Huberman is saying, well, it doesn't matter if you have, no, it does. matter because ultraviolet light is a signal for your eyes. People who get some ultraviolet light,

you don't want to cook your eyes in the sun all day long, but some ultraviolet light is associated with having less nearsightedness so you don't need glasses. And ultraviolet's just a very important signal to tell your body to make something called melanin. And you have a healthy glow of having a tan, well, melanin has a very important function electrically to help convert light into electricity. in the body. I wrote about the research in that in Headstrong, my book on cognitive enhancement. So morning sunlight equals better sleep at night. If you don't have morning

sunlight, bright red panel, really good idea. It also supports melatonin release, right? With the circadian rhythm, if you get the light early in the morning, it kind of sets your clock up, right? Yeah. And if you want to be real fancy about it, go out at lunch and spend five minutes again, you know,

and you can be in shade, but you just need the sun above you. And then that timing system goes, oh, wow, I got a morning signal, I got a midday signal, and then you stop eating. If you can stop eating at three, that's great. The reason that I taught people to skip breakfast for intermittent fasting is that the way society is set up, dinner is a social meal. And being able to socialize is really important for us. So if you're a hardcore biohacker and you don't have business meals and you don't have to have your kids home from school and have dinner at five or six, which works for most people, If you can set it up so that you work out at 2 p.m., which is the best time to work out, and you have your final meal at 3 p.m., you'll get the most results.

It's just you have to live like a hermit to do that. Yeah. Another thing that's a really important low-hanging fruit that I'd love to get your perspective on, because so much of our life is now indoors, and there are all these environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors, I just found it so important to, like, there's like the subtle shifts with our bed sheets and the things that are, you know, volatile organic compounds in our life that we just switch and then we're not breathing that stuff in

anymore, you know? And so when you think about those environmental toxins and the endocrine disruptors, what are the most important things to know to switch in our life? If you have anything with fragrance in your house, you're doing it wrong. And there are two hormones that drive your spiritual progress that we don't talk about enough. One of them is testosterone. Women have four times more testosterone than estrogen, and men need a lot more testosterone than women do. But testosterone drives dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gives you a reward for pursuing a goal. It doesn't give you a reward for getting the goal.

It's the pursuit of the goal. So if you experience motivation when you're pursuing a goal of personal development, like, wow, this is great. I'm doing something that matters. If you use fragrances in your house, all these plasticizers, you drink plastic water all the time, and you're exposed to all the things that are in our food and you eat extra soy and chia and all the other high estrogen foods that people think are superfoods that aren't, you end up with low testosterone, which means you have low motivation.

And when there's low motivation, you have less motivation to evolve yourself. Understanding that perfume you're spraying on, the personal care products with paraben, these are affecting you. Even sunscreen that most people use now goes right into your blood and raises cancer risk for cancers that are very dangerous. And putting sunscreen on

has a very small reduction in skin cancer risk for cancers that are very, very curable. So I'll use a mineral sunscreen on my face, but I would never touch one of the chemical sunscreens because it's an endocrine disruptor. Use like zinc oxide or something instead. There's zinc and titanium, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that was obviously super, super important. What else in terms of environmental toxins? Obviously, fragrance is a huge one, and honestly,

it feels so abusive when somebody's got strong perfume or cologne on. It's like, especially when you like detox yourself of that stuff and then you experience it again and you become very sensitive to it. And it's everywhere. It's in like every laundry detergent for the most part and all the stuff. One of the easiest things you can do is just throw away your fabric softener. You don't need that, and it makes your clothes and your betting toxic. And especially if you have kids, there's this new trend amongst like ninth graders called scent maxing. Have you heard of this? They're going out and reading all these articles about perfume or cologne and then buying a hundred dollar bottles of perfume with their allowance and just dousing themselves at it. And you do not have a right to cover

yourself and endocrine disrupting chemicals that affect people around you without their consent. It's rude. So if you think, oh, this is my scent, it better be a natural essential oil or don't do it. If you want to make your house smell like a chemical factory, okay, but to do that in an elevator, to do that around other people, we need to shift society that way because we have an epidemic of low testosterone in all humans, especially our young people, men and women. They have no testosterone. and they have no drive, but it's not just young people, it's all people. This is why I've been a huge advocate for testosterone replacement therapy. When I was 26, I had lower testosterone levels than my mom.

Because when you're obese, well, your white fat cells make more estrogen. And because I've been exposed to toxic mold, which is another source of environmental estrogen, I had very low production. So under a doctor's care, I went on bioidentical physiological replacement. and I've been on it most of the time since then. And the difference in your quality of life, quality of consciousness, from having the kind of testosterone we're supposed to have, but we don't because of chemicals,

that's probably worth paying attention to. At what level would you say somebody's T's would have to drop down before you'd explore TRT? Like if somebody's got 900 plus, 1,000 plus testosterone without that, at what point would you, is it at a certain level you would start recommending that? Or age? It's very, by the, biologically unique. Some guys will feel great at 900. Some people need 1,300. And unless you were

healthy as a young man and you measured your levels, you don't know what the right level for you is. So you do it to make yourself feel good. The total testosterone's relevant, but free testosterone above 20 is what you're aiming for. It's very hard to get there unless you're sleeping well, eating enough animal protein, and eating enough saturated fat. If you do those things and you're young and you feel good and your levels are high enough, that's, you're probably going to get there. but so many people can't get there. So there's nothing wrong with taking minerals like zinc that can boost your testosterone

that's part of minerals 101. And there's nothing wrong with using herbs that might help. And there's nothing wrong with boosting testosterone using technology that includes red light on your balls, which can boost testosterone, or just using testosterone cream or injections. Another really important thing is the precipitous drop in testosterone after ejaculation for men.

And so what, You really want to go there. I do. I think it's important, man. It's often not talked about enough in terms of sexual energy. And I've heard you talk about the formula of how frequency of ejaculation for men. So talk to me about all that. All right.

I want to be really clear. I'm going to talk about frequency of ejaculation, not frequency of sex. Most people, when they hear this conversation, are going to hear me say not to have sex. I'm telling you have more sex and hears how to do it. In Taoism, There's an equation. It's your age in years, minus seven, and then you divide by four. It's going to give you a number.

And they'll tell you, to maintain your health, that's the number of days between ejaculations. The minimum number of days. So if you got the number of seven when you run the equation, that means you ejaculate once every seven days. Like, what? But I might die. Now, that's the same voice in your head that says, if I don't have tacos, I might die. It's BS. If you never ejaculated again, you would.

wouldn't die, but it probably wouldn't be very fun. That's really the game we're playing. So, when a man ejaculates, for 24 to 48 hours, there's a precipitous drop in testosterone, and they don't talk about this as much, but it's maybe more important. It's a rise in prolactin. And prolectin's another hormone, it's actually associated with turning on breast milk. So that combination is why you hear the old, well, you respect me in the morning. Well, there's an ejaculation hangover in men.

And yes, it feels good to ejaculate. And there's a spiritual practice that says, what if you have sex and you don't ejaculate? What happens? Well, what happens is you have a lot more sex and your oxytocin levels go up and your testosterone levels are high and your motivation is high

and your focus is high and you get a raise, you get a promotion, you start a company, you build a family, you build a life. And you realize that ejaculation is optional. and it shifts your whole perspective on things. Now, I didn't believe this. I thought it was BS.

I thought, well, I'm a biohacker. I'm just going to get the data and I'll disprove it. And I published the data in my book, Game Changers. It's my personal development book. And I tracked my daily happiness for a year. And I tracked my frequency of sex and my frequency of ejaculation. And I tried the advanced technique, which is if you want to live forever, ejaculate once every 30 days,

but keep your orgasm to under an hour. And I read that, I'm like, this is such BS. Like, I love proving ancestral practices as being real and science-based, and a lot of my work is around that. But this is one that couldn't be true. Orgasms for an hour. Yeah. I see why the warning is,

because in the course of this year of practicing this with my partner, I did do 30 days. And there's a few times you're publishing your data. Like, well, I only made 23 days. Oops. It's kind of hard to go 30 days. Right. And you learn that you're just not going to die, whether you do or don't ejaculate.

It becomes an act that it's totally fine to do, but you do it when you decide to do it instead of reflexively. And it doesn't become the goal of sex. Like, sex is more playful. It's more intimate, it's more sacred. And then you can go as long as you want because ejaculation isn't the goal. So an hour or two later, okay?

Like, we're both really happy now. And what you'll find is it makes you a much more conscious lover. But most importantly, you maintain your testosterone, your prolactin doesn't rise, and you feel really good. And doing this when you're 20, like if you run age in, years minus 7 divided by 4, so that's 13 divided by 4, Basically, you can ejaculate every three days when you're 20, right?

But if you were to just do it once every seven days, the amount of chi that you will have from that is crazy. And you'll probably be having sex every single day because you're always ready to go. And what's that going to do for your lover? It's going to rock their entire world, right? The Taoists, though, they have a huge number of pieces of advice for men and for women, and they're very different when it comes to this. And in the writings, they'll say, women walk away undiminished.

And that means that for women, having an orgasm, or even ejaculating, women can ejaculate they do. And doing that is good for them. And in more recent studies, EQ goes up, oxytocin goes up, happiness goes up. But the Taoist never wrote an equation for women. And so I did a lot of research, and I finally figured out the equation.

and it's until you feel like you're going to die plus two. Must be nice. If the guy knows how to ejaculate at will or to not ejaculate at will, you can go to these profound states. And what you don't hear, but there's studies about this. 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm. So your partner's laying there flopping around, making noises and doing whatever they do,

they're having a profound healing spiritual experience. So one of the pathways to increasing, your consciousness is through sacred intimacy. And if you're going to ejaculate every single time, it's going to be really hard to get there. So learning to be peaceful if you skip lunch, to be peaceful if you don't have food for three days, and learning to be peaceful whether or not you ejaculate, it's an advanced spiritual skill. And it radically improves your energy and improves your relationships in ways you would never imagine. And it takes the focus from how do I get there to, I'm not going to get there today. What else can I do that's

fun. And it just, it changes your whole vibe. Yeah, it's just coming back into right relation with a lot of these aspects of human biology. I feel like there's this limb of yoga called Pratihara, which is withdrawal of the senses and the abstinence of like forefasting and food or sex or ejaculating or even in modern day times, you know, phone technology, all these things, bring us back into right relationship with it. And it just makes you such a more powerful human being. In regards to sexual energy, I feel like it really helps if you have clarified your why in a mission in life to, like, channel that creative energy into something else in the world because it is literally the potential to create more life. Like actually, literally, right? It's called life force energy.

That's what she is, right? Yeah. It's, this is really controversial. And still, most people who heard this are going to go, Dave said I shouldn't have sex. I just told you to have more sex and how to have more sex and how to have it way more pleasurable for you and your partner. That's what I'm actually talking about. But to get past our internal firewalls, your body's like, I will die if I don't do that. It's because your body's worried that the species won't survive unless you ejaculate all the time.

And you just want to get past that. And there is something called dopamine fasting. I've written about it. And the guy who runs Maximus Tribe, one of the testosterone enhancement companies out there. I'm an advisor to them. He talks about like a modern interpretation of that path of yoga. Dopamine fasting means you go for a weekend or a week. no social media, no TV, no strong flavors, no sex, and just allow the senses to calm down,

which makes them feel better later. It really raises your baseline for just pleasantness and experience, right? Specifically for women, what's like a biohack or something in particular that is really important for them to focus on maybe more so than men? If you're a woman who's menstruating, understanding your cycle, you can only get pregnant for a five-day window in your cycle. Understanding the change in your biological state is really, really important. And there's times when you want to push hard, and there's times when you want to focus on recovery. And a lot of women have sort of stepped into this masculine,

push, push, push. I have to do the same thing every day. That's not how it works. And this is why, since the very start of the biohacking movement, about 55% to 60% of followers are women. Women are better biohackers than men naturally, because for a lot of guys, especially me when I was younger, if there's not a bone sticking out and I can still walk, it's probably okay. So our bodily awareness, unless we cultivate it, is not that strong. Women usually have more bodily awareness because they're used to cyclical changes that guys don't notice. So just stepping into the sacredness of your cycle is really important. And another controversial thing, birth control is very, very important as a human right. Hormonal, chemical, industrial birth control is a crime against women because it raises your risk of depression and cancer and many cardiovascular diseases.

So they're selling you, oh, take this and you don't have to worry about your cycle. You know, take this and, you know, you don't have to worry about getting pregnant. You can only get pregnant for five days. We have other forms of safe and effective birth control, and this comes at a huge spiritual and biological cost for women. And my very first book was on fertility, because the mother of my children was infertile when I met her. We restored her fertility with biohacking and had one kid at 39, one at 42, with no IVF and

no medical prescriptions just from food and environment biohacking. That book was called The Better Baby Book. So I spent five years studying hormones in women and men and preconception and fertility so I could have my two amazing kids. And I'll just say as a woman, understanding that hormonal birth control is tricking your body's basic networks in a way that takes away some of your ability to perceive the world. And a prime example here, when two people are histo-compatible, which means that your biology is compatible with each other, you'll smell good to each other. And birth control pills break that. So you cannot smell whether your mate is an appropriate mate.

And there are lots of cases of women who go off birth control when they decide to have kids, and they're no longer attracted to their husband because the birth control pill breaks their reality. They cannot sense the way the body is meant to sense. People talk about female intuition. And some people say, well, men and women are exactly the same. that doesn't match my experience biologically. So women, on average, have more intuition and a different kind of intuition than men do. And this is getting into esoteric and spiritual stuff, but intuition is real and it's measurable.

So if the birth control pill is making you less intuitive and less connected with all of your cycles and systems that are a part of being able to sense your reality, that's a very big price to pay. and I just don't think it's worth it. So if I was to offer one thing, you probably need more sleep than men. You probably need less fasting and less heavy exercise than men in order to be able to push your biology to transform. And so many women can't lose weight

because they don't eat enough and they're filling up on kale and these high oxalate plant foods and then they get interstitial cystitis which is caused by oxalate in a lot of these things. So understand, it's okay to be kind to your body. for men and women, recovery is more important than stress in order to improve. But women usually need more recovery, more sleep, less exercise, but still exercise.

You just don't have to go as hard as a guy does to push your system to improve. So understanding that about yourself and understanding that you can push harder at one time of the month and you want to sleep more the other kind and that that's okay, this is the one thing I would just wish that all women knew. Is there a specific resource in terms of the different phases of a woman's cycle where they can go check this out more? Because it's so important to understand. There are three or four apps out there that help you track your cycle and tell you when you want to do more stressful or less stressful things. And if you're listening to this and you're a guy, if you ask your partner to send you an invite to their app if they're using a cycle tracking app, knowing where your partner is in their cycle is really, really useful biohacking information to have. have a healthy relationship.

I am dating someone who runs the We Deep and Love Club, who's studied relationships for more than a decade. And she sends me her cycle tracking because it's helpful to know. This is the time of the month where more playful, more aroused, and this is the time where more rest. And just knowing that is really helpful. And it also allows me to be more patient because, I'm like, oh, this is that day 22, 23 time where, like, anything that comes at me that's out of character,

it just doesn't matter. Like, okay, it's all good. We'll talk about it in a couple days. Otherwise, it just feels like if you don't have that awareness of where your partner is in their cycle, it makes it harder to forgive and just let things go. And, you know, we have a fantastic relationship. And part of it's because she shares the data with me and it will just, oh, yeah, what's coming up here? right and the few times that we've had even small amounts of friction it's usually related to that

and just being able to have patience is is incredible because every time you know day or two later it's like oh yeah i was pretty sensitive wasn't i'm yeah it's all good but as a guy if all this is invisible to you yeah it just feels like maybe women are crazy they're not right and also for guys we also have our shitty days we just don't have a clock that tells us when they're going to happen Yeah, not more subtle perhaps. But yeah, that context is super helpful as being in relationship dynamics. Dave, this whole conversation has been super fruitful. And there's just like one or two other things before we wrap up on.

There's many things we can do for our health. And I think oftentimes the overlooked ones include having a vision of a future that excites us, the important of community and relationships. So in specific to that, how is community immunity in a way? And like the importance of relationships to become happy health. and find well-being. I interviewed our Surgeon General on my podcast, and the only book has ever written is about the epidemic of disconnection.

People belong to fewer clubs or communities than ever before in history. No one goes to their bowling league anymore. And so the number of people who have no close friends or only one or two has skyrocketed. So loneliness, it affects your stress levels because fear of food, fertility, friend, these are all sources of nourishment.

Well, I guess fear isn't, but the positive side of fear is stressed. So anyway, all those are there to serve you. But if you don't have community and you're lonely, your biology is stressed. So building a community of people who you want to be like is just critically important. It's why when I started the biohacking conference,

I'm like, I got to build a community for people who care about, transforming themselves and want to use the right tools for this which to let bodybuilders and neuroscientists and longevity guys all come together and nerd out and throw in some shaman's as well like let's let's go and the biohacking conference in austin may 28th it's biohackingconference.com 4 000 people are there with more than 100 people who make the supplements and make the technologies for biohacking but the reason people go is community we've we've invited steve aoki to come in play. So we're going to have, you know, a full-on party as part of this. Because play reduces

stress and play with friends and community and people like you. It's an experience that we need and that we don't get. So you take steps to consciously build this. And it's fine if it's at the dog park, if it's at the yoga class. But you go over and over and you get to know the people. And that nourishes you as much as eating a piece of grass-fed ribeye. Yeah. Amazing. It is susten. needed. There's so many things I could continue to dive into. One thing, at least in the biohacking space, is that what do you think about the individuals that overdo it and kind of the solipsistic notion of so overly focused on self? Service is such an important thing to

develop a healthy psyche and to be in right relation with the world. And so what do you think about like overdoing the self, the focus on self? It's possible to have orthorexia. which is a fear of not doing everything perfectly. There are people who are terribly stressed if there's sleep score isn't high enough. Oh, God, I'm going to have a bad day. All of those are just fear, right? And if someone just overly focused on themselves,

look, there are narcissists in the world. I actually write about that and heavily meditated that's coming up my next book. And there are actually sociopaths out there. And if you put your oxygen mask on first, You always take care of your energy first, and you do that, it's not a selfish act at all. As long as because you do that, you can take care of your family, you take care of your friends, you take care of the world around you and your community.

And it's actually a trauma response to not take care of yourself first. But if you only take care of yourself and you ignore everyone else around you, you probably have some work to do. Yeah, yeah, amazing. Important reminder there. because you're somebody that has access to the information of like the cutting edge technologies that are coming out that are already here what do you see is to come and maybe what's already here in the next three to five years in terms of the most promising technologies well two that i'm working on one of them is 40 years of zen we mentioned earlier spending five days with electrodes glued your head with facilitators and neuroscientists really does do the same mental and brain state change and that you would have to spend a much, much greater amount of time on. And I'm working really hard on making that program more effective.

We now have the world's first psychedelic-assisted neurofeedback program where optionally you can have ketamine under a doctor's care. And that's been transformative because ketamine causes neuroplasticity changes. It's not about the journey of ketamine. It's about the ability to choose how you want your brain to be. Well, it's extra neuroplastic. So the ability to radically reset yourself in a small amount of time is one thing. The other one is at Upgrade Labs.

I've been working on bringing the million dollars worth of biohacking tools so that everyone can use them. And we're at dozens of locations. They're opening all over North America. And the reason that matters, if you go to a spin class five days a week for an hour a day, and you do this religiously for two months, you'll improve by 2% your VO2 max, which is your cardiovascular endurance. If you come to upgrade labs and you do five minutes three times a week, you'll improve by 12%. So you spend 94% less time on cardio and you get six times better results. Now, if you do that, I'm pretty sure that in that extra time,

you can do something that matters. So the transformation is we're using data and AI to tell you what's going to work best for your goals. So it's personalized advice. And what's also really exciting for me, if you go to the Upgrade Labs website or you look at AXOhealth.com, which is our app for that, you can order a blood test at your house. Cutting out the need to have a doctor tell you you can't get your lab tests and all that. So it's low-cost lab tests, all the stuff you need. So you can look at that at home whether or not you're near an upgrade labs. And if you're near one, you go in and you do it. The idea here is in the past in biohacking, we're talking about red light, we're talking about cold exposure, we're talking about all these things,

but no one knows what to do for me today to get results. Well, we know what upgrade labs. So the idea of using data and AI to guide you on the best path to get results with the least wasted effort, where does the extra effort go to community, to relationship, to evolution. And I just want to free us from going to the gym and not getting results the way I did. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, I'm just so stoked to see what continues to come out. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing in regards to spreading and democratizing so much of this information, which is so vital in a time right now where, again, loneliness is a real epidemic.

people are feeling so disconnected. They don't have the right understanding for the proper mechanisms of like baseline fundamental health. And so I guess in closing thoughts, when you look and you zoom out a little bit and see kind of the state of the world in terms of our health and our connectivity with each other, what, yeah, what do you feel like is the importance and urgency of like sharing these insights and what you see to come as we're clearly at a very pivotal point in the evolution of humanity right now.

If you look throughout history, civilizations come and civilizations go. And we're reaching a tipping point where the big pharma industry, big food, they've done enough damage, they can't hide it anymore. So what's going to happen? It's time for them to fall. And just by doing a practice of being healthy, it's an act of revolution. And earlier I talked about Danger Coffee and why it's called Danger. because who knows what you might do, be abundantly healthy.

And when some government person or some regulator tells you some nonsense that a politician who doesn't follow his own advice did, you're like Neo in the Matrix and you just say no and the bullets fall out of the sky. That's the world we're building. These guys cannot get away with telling you that they get to tell you what you put in your body. You have biological autonomy. And because of that, you have spiritual autonomy. And when you are the person who is the most powerful spiritually in the room,

because you took care of your hardware, because you took care of your inner environment, well, you want to be that guy who has resilience, the monk meditating in the storm, and all the things that feel like they're big in the world where things are not as good as they could be, well, you have access to more information than the president of the United States did in 1950 for free. you can look at a sum of a lot of our knowledge and ask it a question via AI. Like there's so much abundance in the world around you. You just have to see it.

And when some low vibration bureaucrat tries to mess with you, you don't even have to get mad. You just say no. And that's where I think we are. Yeah, like the old saying, it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.

and it's time to collectively reclaim our sovereignty because we're the most powerful and we do so. And then we could just stand for things that are genuine, authentic support and guidance for people to follow in terms of health and well-being and all of these things. So thank you so much for living in your purpose and sharing this information, Matt. Is there any other last words you have before we wrap up? A lot of what keeps you back is shame and guilt. and it can be shame or guilt over I'm not biohacking enough or I'm not meditating enough or I'm not good enough and all those sort of angry voices in your head

understand that every negative voice in your head is just your hardware trying to keep you alive. It is not you. Those are not your voices and you don't have to believe them. And if you understand that, it just drops so much with the shame and guilt that I walked with in my 20s and 30s just thinking, what is going on in there?

It's not you. It's just ancient systems that are working. read and that perspective has brought me a lot of peace and I hope it works for you too yeah thank you so much an important reflection as like all of these things in releasing the shame guilt finding true vitality they're freeing us up to do what we're here to do exactly yeah so thank you so much and everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the know they'll myself podcast let us know in what ways this resonates for your own personal mental physical spiritual journey so curious to see as this community continues to build Dave thank you so much until next time

be well.