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

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

Cozy Earth: Go to https://cozyearth.com and use code ICH for 40% off the softest bedding, bath and apparel! Pipedrive: Try it free for 30 days at https://pipedrive.com/iced Range Rover Sport: Start designing your Range Rover Sport today at https://www.rangerover.com/us/sport Shopify: Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://shopify.com/ich MagicMind: Get 60% off the Magic Mind offer here: https://magicmind.com/ich #magicmind #mentalwealth #mentalperformancecoach Follow Dave Asprey: On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/daveaspreybpr On Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dave.asprey/ On X - https://x.com/bulletproofexec Website - https://daveasprey.com/ Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:30 - Departure from Bulletproof 00:04:13 - 4 types of “qualified” people 00:06:25 - Screening execs psychologically 00:12:02 - Firing People 00:14:04 - Ideal interview questions 00:16:28 - Sponsor - Cozy Earth 00:21:37 - What is “Type 1 or 2” 00:26:36 - Can mental training fix most issues? 00:32:51 - Medicine that reduce reaction time 00:35:31 - Are you happier than most people? 00:36:12 - How long can you live? 00:37:15 - Sponsor - Pipedrive 00:38:54 - Healthier at 180 than now 00:41:12 - How much have you spent on your body? 00:44:08 - Forgetfulness cured 00:50:33 - His early 20s 00:51:24 - Overcoming Asperger’s 00:53:20 - Smart kids with Asperger’s 00:54:49 - Making $6M and losing it by 26 00:57:47 - Beginning of your healing journey 01:00:26 - Limitless vs. Modafinil 01:05:19 - Craziest biohack you’ve tried 01:06:34 - Sponsor - Range Rover 01:07:32 - Sponsor - Shopify 01:09:01 - Stem cell treatments 01:12:24 - Most overprescribed medicine 01:13:17 - Rate these biohacks 01:18:47 - Practical biohack tips 01:22:00 - How to get perfect sleep 01:28:49 - Worst foods most people eat 01:29:59 - Best everyday food 01:33:30 - Dangerous biohacking experiences 01:34:18 - Anti-aging products 01:37:43 - Is tap water safe? 01:39:59 - Thoughts on Bryan Johnson 01:40:41 - Eating while traveling 01:41:28 - How bad is alcohol? 01:45:13 - Fried food and brain health 01:47:29 - Nicotine 01:51:13 - Adderall 01:59:11 - Dopamine detox 02:01:51 - Freezing yourself post mortem 02:05:37 - A question you wish people asked 02:07:11 - Why are you controversial? 02:10:43 - Best health tip to apply now *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon presents, Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe.

My next guest says he holds the secret to being smarter, faster, and happier. And spoiler alert, it's not magic. I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine. Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do.

So I started doing all the things that I didn't believe in. and shockingly, my body began to heal. The FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity.

The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life. There's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible. Dave Asprey, you've spent over $1 million on your body. You've built a multi-million dollar buttered coffee brand,

and you plan to live to over 180 years old. Thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. You're welcome, but it's a $750 million butter coffee company. So what would you call that? Multi-deca million? Why don't you round up? I feel like you just got to round up to a billion at that point. They fired me a couple years ago. That was before they fired me. I don't know. Maybe they crossed a billion now. Who knows? What happened with that? Why did you get fired? Some of that's in my new book, whatever I'm allowed to talk about. But venture capitalists, they're like, they're hitchhikers, right? So, oh, sure, we'll fill up your tank with my credit card, but as soon as you want to go somewhere they don't want to go, they stab you and kick you out of your car and take the

car. So they had the voting rights essentially, just to say, hey, we want to take it a different direction. Let's just say that it wasn't my perspective that they had the voting rights and it was their perspective that they did. So we were able to settle that legally. So their, primary concern is return on investment. Were you trying to take this company down a path that maybe was a little bit more passion-sided that they thought wouldn't yield good returns on their money? No, I was trying to exit the company and, in fact, we'd hired a banker when I was removed from the board. So a couple years later, I found out that some people wanted to buy the company for less than 10% and what it was worth when I was there. So some things I can't talk about there, but it was not a great exit for me.

And even the venture capitalists mostly got wiped out in it. So it was not a successful exit for it was a really big, meaningful, impactful company. And that's the risk of taking outside investment. And, you know, you do your best. What would you have done differently in hindsight? Understand that VCs and governments run on exactly the same algorithm. they have a potato peeler and they start peeling away your rights, right? And when you finally get a noise, hey, that's not okay.

Oh, sorry, sorry, we'll stop. They never put the potato peels back on and then they start again, right? And then they start again. So there was one decision that I made around a board seat and I made it, you know, in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff going on and that was not the right decision. And there are other times where I had an executive in place and, you know, where your gut tells you, like this person is not the right person and then you overcome it with your mind

and say, no, no, no, but there's all these reasons and that's what breaks companies. So part of heavily meditated, my new book, I talk about the four categories of people and how to spot them. And I realized that my discernment of the team was ultimately the issue. I mean, if you're the CEO, it's on you.

So there were times I could have chosen different investors. There were times I could have chosen one or two executive decisions I made. that were just not the right people. And in hindsight, it's clear at the time. There's good reasons for everything. And so I'm a much better advisor for companies,

and I have a very clean culture in my company now because we have standards for these four types of people. Do you have certain specific questions that you ask people to try to determine if they are a person that's qualified or not? And what are those four different types? This comes from Lao Zhu. You know who that is?

He's basically the Buddha of China. So there's one monastery in the mountains where the oral lineage of the people who protect the emperor has been held, and there's nine living grandmasters of this. Think Dr. Strange and stuff. One of them is Dr. Berry, who's a friend, and he taught me this. Category 1 people, they're always win-win. So you do a deal with them, you're going to make some money, they're going to make some money. They don't do deals where you lose and they win. And these are 5% of people.

They're very unusual because they're always right. Then there's category 2. They're usually win-win. they want to be win-win, but they screw up. And when they screw up and just say, hey, man, that wasn't okay. They apologize and they make it right. So you only want to hire category ones and twos. Category three people are people, they are win-lose.

For them to win, someone else has to lose, but they don't know it. They have a voice in their head. They believe their own BS. So they're saying, oh, I'm a good person or I don't fail. They cannot see themselves failing. And if they are failing, they will blame everyone else but themselves. And anyone who's been an entrepreneur, you know these kind of people. They're always deflecting.

They're always creating chaos. But they don't know it, and you will never spot them in an interview because they believe their own BS. They're not lying. They're looking straight in the eye, and they believe every single word. The only way you can find them is reference checks. And even then, are those real? Because everyone knows, if you say something bad on a reference check, you can get sued for it. So reference checks are a little bit sketchy.

And then category four people, those are a sociopaths. They're windloose and they know it. and they're experts. You're not going to spot them. So it's reference checks. And now in the nine companies in my portfolio, we have a standard. If we have a category three that we hire without knowing it,

and they make it through our hiring process, 60 days to fire them. And so far, there's been three of those. But my company culture is working well enough to say, okay, when people are not doing what they say, when they're blaming other people, they're not working as part of a team, they're out. And it's created a lot of peace in the company.

Do you screen psychologically people when you're trying to hire them for executive positions? I have looked at various frameworks like that, and I haven't found one that works yet, but I'm excited about a new one. A friend named Busy Gold has a technique. She thinks might work. I just did a podcast with her, so I'm going to try that out. And you've got to be careful there because you never want to use any information that would be protected. So if it's anything to do with age or family or any of that kind of stuff, you can't look at that. And I, of course, I wouldn't because I hire within the law. So you have to look at behaviors, right? And I have used things like the Colby test, which has been really helpful. Do you guys know that one? Colby, Dan Sullivan taught me that one. Dan Sullivan has been

teaching entrepreneurs for 40 years how to have frameworks for operating businesses and coach me. Very powerful guy. He's, I think, about 80 now and still actively going. He's on the leaderboard for longevity. He's not planning to stop anytime soon. And the Colby, score says, what are your natural instincts for how much information you need to make a decision? Right? Some people, they have to know everything or they can't decide. Some people will decide with nothing. And then how much follow-through do you have? Some people, like, you give it to them, they're going to run that project to the ground. Other people, they cannot run it to the ground. Maybe they have a framework and an operating system to do it, but it's hard for them. So if you look

at those kind of things, go, oh, if I'm hiring an operating person and they have no follow-through, that's probably not a good hire. And so there's many of these things, but a lot of them are not functional. Some of them are functional. So I'm looking for the right one. Do you guys do anything like that? We hire based on friends.

We hire based, I would say, that's really in. Yeah. Yeah. And we hire for aptitude, train for. Now, hire for attitude, train for aptitude. That works when you're small. So like when I started Bulletproof

and today, your coffee is my new coffee thing. I'm just for anyone listening to things, I'm still a bulletproof. The idea here is that I would hire young people who had evidence that they could figure stuff out, right? So it's kind of funny to say, you know, what's adulting, like going to chat cheap, and asking how to do it and then doing it, right? It used to be going to Google or YouTube, right? And it's been that way throughout all of history or you're figuring out to do stuff. But many people in their 20s, when they're affordable, don't have the ability. to do something without permission.

So if I'm hiring, when I did start Bulletproof, my first employee was under $1,000 a month and lived in his grandmother's basement. But he was willing, his very early 20s, good guy, and just willing to go out and figure stuff out. Right? I don't know how to code, so I learned. Like, that's what you want.

You find one of those. That's a great partner. And he made a ton of money when he left the company. The problem with hiring friends, you guys are going to run into this, is that hire a friend now. Three years from now, your company is three times bigger.

And that friend may not have the experience that it takes. Because if you have someone who helps you get to $5 million, not that many companies even get that big. But when you start getting to $10 or to $100 million, there's only 17,000 companies in the country doing $100 million. So if it's rarefied error, a mistake you make in a million-dollar company is not that big of a deal. You make that same mistake at a $10 or a $50 or $100 million company.

It's catastrophic. So you start hiring someone who's done it before. and that means your friends. They're like, that's not fair, man. Like, I've been growing this thing. Like, yeah, but I can't afford to pay you to make the mistakes to learn. I'm going to hire someone else with the knowledge, and they're going to have to be your boss. So what I do now is if I hire someone like that, it's like, look, if this is one of the smaller companies in the portfolio, understand,

I'm not going to make you a C-level executive because we only have two employees. We don't need C-level people. You're going to be a director, right? And understand that when we do hire someone, they will probably have 20 years of experience. and they're going to teach you everything you need to know, but you're going to get us to there, and you're going to get well paid for, you're going to have equity and all that. If you set expectations up front, good. If you don't, you end up losing friends when they quit because they're frustrated because they didn't get the promotion because they weren't qualified for it. Yeah, with our business, it tends to be so intimate that we see people all the time. That helps.

And so a lot of it is like, would I hang out with this person if we weren't working together? And if the answer is yes, and we get along and we're on the same page, that's what we love. lean towards, it seems. You want to lean towards people that you'd like to spend time with because you're working with them, right? So you want people who you want to spend time with who also know the mistakes not to make. It just depends on where you are in the scaling of the business and having built several companies. I think all my companies now are north of a million. And some are much bigger than that. I've built, the very few people have gone from zero to a hundred million plus. Every time I've had to replace almost the entire executive team at least three

times to get up to that 50 or 100 million because the people who get you up to five are probably not the ones located at 25, right? And they want to. They're good people. They're your friends. So what I do now is I'm like, okay, I have a portfolio. So if you're a specialist in this window of revenue, why don't we take over to this company where you can help it get there, but someone who's really focused on just like juggling, which is the early stage stuff, they're probably not going to have cash flow forecasting and financial discipline and rigor to work with the CFO within you know, HR constraints and all the stuff that has to happen as you get big. So it's one of the biggest challenges of hiring friends is like, how do you maintain friendships

when they can't do the job anymore, not because they're bad, but because the company changed. How do you fire people? This episode is brought to you by Tell us Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got Tellus Online Security.

It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plans start at just $12 a month. Learn more at talus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. The first time anyone fires someone, it's always scary. It feels terrible and it should feel terrible. Otherwise, you're probably a sociopath.

But there is a hack for that. And it's this. If someone needs firing, they know that they're not working out. they are stressed and unhappy in the business. And they're taking down all the people around them who are doing the work. So firing someone is actually an act of kindness because you're setting them free to go find somewhere where it's a good fit. And it's being of service to all the people on your team who are doing the work. So I do my best to be kind and to say, well, you know, we're eliminating your position. It's really nasty right now because you're not allowed to tell

someone why you fire them most of the time. Because firing for cause is, even if there is a cause, it's a thing that is fraught with legal risk. So what almost all employers do now is they say, we've eliminated the position. And then you do eliminate the position. And some employers will do that just because, like, I needed to get rid of this person because they weren't performing. But if you try to tell them they're not performing, especially if they're category three, they'll say, I was two performing. It's your fault. Right. And then it just creates a huge amount of drama. So what I like to do is have a fair package, right? And when we eliminate a position, quite often we just didn't need the position anymore.

And if someone is being eliminated for cause, then we tell them ahead of time. And it usually takes about six months of documenting and telling them and putting them on a plan and all that. So I have right now for my portfolio, my head of HR used to run a 10,000 person HR or 10,000 employee HR group because you have to be compliant with all the laws. It's really hard. And many small companies get taken out because they hire a category three, a narcissist or maybe a category four, a sociopath. And then the person's creating drama and chaos. And then you fire them. But it couldn't be their fault.

It's going to be your fault. And then they come after you. And there's specific tactics for that. If the law wasn't the legal barrier for you asking certain questions, what would you look for? Hypothetically. You know, what I would love to do with people is say, let's be. be honest, maybe even with a lie detector, that'd be fun. I would love that.

Let's talk about your childhood, right? Like, let's talk about bullies. Let's talk about mean teachers and mean coaches. Let's talk about parenting, right? Because all of the emotional crap we deal with as adults is just echoes of the way our operating system got set up when we were little. So it's amazing what all of my senior leaders do, their first week on the job, they go do 40 years of Zen, which is my $20,000 a week.

brain upgrade for executives and entrepreneurs. It's up in Seattle. They come and they spend five days, and this is an investment I make in my team, and they go through and they turn off all of their triggers. Because let's face it, if someone's emotionally regulated and they've done their personal development work,

you can sit down and say, hey man, you're failing on this, right? And you can say, I don't know if it's because you don't have the right resources. I don't know if you don't understand what it is. Maybe something's wrong, but can we talk about the fact that this isn't succeeding and that it's important? Now, that's a great conversation to have, but most people will respond emotionally.

They'll feel criticized. They'll judge. They'll drop into first grade or second grade or fifth grade or whatever. And then they yell like, no, it's not. It's not. And then you can't have a constructive discussion about it. So in some cultures, like the old Microsoft one or Ray Dalio kind of Bridgewater things, they're like, you know, we're going to have these kind of hard debates.

And it feels like crap. I don't have that kind of culture. We have a culture of kindness, which means, have to be truthful. We're not nice, but we're kind. We're going to talk about the problem. And if someone has an emotional reaction, it's like, do you need to hook some electrodes up to your head and get some regulation of your nervous system here because we don't actually treat each other this way? So we're going to talk about the problem, right? And we're going to have constructive solutions. And if you're going to do the blame game and, you know, throw your emotions around, everyone has outburst.

That's fine. Are you a category two who says, I'm sorry? Let's make it right. Or are you a category three who blame someone else? If you're category three, you got 60 days. And that's how it is. And I just don't want to work in an environment like that. And you can't ask someone about their childhood when you're trying to hire them. Nope. And I don't. Right. What's the reasoning behind that? It seems like that would just be like a general conversation.

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and now let's get back to the episode. You know, people file lawsuits for all sorts of things, right? And it's gotten to be, you guys have probably been sued by a former employee. No. How many employees do you have? No one. It's really just all independent contractors and bodies.

Independent contractors reduce the risk a lot. Yeah. If you were to build a team of, I've hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, and there's always people who are like, I could never have failed at this job, therefore, and they make up a long list of crap. So this is why it's so expensive to hire people. It's a lot of it just goes into nonsense. Yeah, our team's like maybe like five people, max.

And most of them live with Jack. So he sees him daily. So, yeah, if that doesn't work out, it might be an awkward. situation for Jack. It would be weird. Like, what if one of your, your team starts sleeping with another one? They're all guys. Yeah, but it's, that's not technically off the team. I guess not. Okay. I have some questions about, but no, they're going to see that. Which one? Okay. I'm only joking. But yes, I don't know. I don't think that there could necessarily be drama because I think that our friendships, this could be very naive of me to say, kind of supersede the, uh,

the work. And this is just based off of like a long time of knowing them. Like these aren't superficial friendships. It's, it's so, it's so helpful to have that background to my employees have me for 12 years. Like, we're friends. And remember this. They're friends, but you can take away their money. So hiring a friend changes the nature of the friendship, especially if, you know, they have a family and you're, you're responsible for their, you're responsible for their, financial well-being, right? So it makes just a subtle shift in the power dynamic. Because with a true friendship that doesn't have money flowing, then it's like, you know, you can just be truthful. And it creates, and I have hired friends, and it creates, I've also taken money from friends.

And there's something like calling up a friend who trusts you and saying, hey, man, it looked like you were going to get at least a 20x on that. And I was too. And we both just got wiped out, right? So I've lost friendships because people gave me money. And then I got to. wiped out too. Like I did my best. It was pretty traumatic for me. It was traumatic for my investors too. So understand as you scale and grow, some of those friends, it's like, well, I don't want to tell him this because I guess my job, but he's my friend. And it just creates those little things. So I would be like super blunt and just. Yeah, that's, I mean, communication was an issue in the beginning, but over, you know, some trials and tribulations, we've since learned that open communication

and bluntness is the best way of doing things. And plus, I categorize them as the, one and two. Like, I wouldn't say that they're three and four people. So that's why it's a hedge against that potential risk. And as you build your culture, too, it means that your whole team knows, oh, that's a three, this behavior pattern. We know it. And a working culture, whether someone comes in as a contractor, we all do it this way. And if it's, I think of it like a school of fish and they're all swimming, right? And if one of the fish kind of goes sideways, the other fish kind of bring it back in, right? And if it doesn't work, the whole thing can follow that fish. That's why a narcissist can destroy a company culture relatively quickly, because it makes

everyone think they're crazy and it kind of scatters the cohesion. But if you're aware of that and your team's aware of it, then you're like, okay, that one's a category three, right? And we'll have those conversations on my executive team. Like, oh, oh, looks like we didn't hire the right person. That's a three. They're out. So you're saying that it's your experience as a young person, a child when you're growing up through your teens, that basically determines your engine, that you process information, that you act by when you're older. And if you're, if you're determined as a category one or two by the time you're 25, that's probably where you're going to be for the rest of your life? No, it's entirely editable. That's why I wrote heavily meditated.

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

when someone yells at you in a meeting, you're going to get a fear response and you're going to act emotionally instead of like an adult, right? So if fear is first, second is food. Eat everything because there's been famines everywhere. A third of the average person's thoughts are about tacos every day. Literally, a third of our thoughts, what's for lunch? It's crazy, but that's there. And then the third F word, all life has to do it to stay around forever.

Can you guess that one? All life has to do is stay around forever? To stay around for multiple generations. Oh, I would just say habits, like their main thing is to... It's an F word. Fear of food, four letters. Fornicating. Yeah, fertility, I was going to be.

Fear is pretty much the other F word, but it's fear of food and fertility. So every single thing in reality all of the time, your body is filtering. Is it scary? Do I need to kill it? Can I eat it? and can I hump it before your brain knows what's happening. Now, is there anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that isn't one of those three things? I have to think of that.

I mean, yeah, that would take a long time to. There isn't. It always comes down to one of those three every single time. It's not you. It's an automated protection system to keep your meat alive as if your brain wasn't in there. And that is why all the childhood experiences, the bullies, the teachers, all the stuff that happens to us, you know, falling off a bike. It doesn't have to be a big thing. That sets up reactivity, and it's just your body trying to present reality in a way that will make your brain do what it wants you to do.

So I developed something called the reset process. After 10 years of working with more than 1,000 entrepreneurs at my neuroscience company, sitting down for five days and teaching them how to reprogram the operating system to not be triggered by things that are stupid, it creates incredible freedom. And I've had billionaires go through there. I've had all kinds of people, spiritual gurus, and it always works. And that's why I wrote the book,

because it costs 20 grand to come and glue electrodes to your head and have the whole team work with you, or you can do the process that I'm giving away in the book at home. And what you do for that is saying, you know what, every time someone criticizes me, I stay up at night, you know, it really gets in there and I just ruminate on it.

Great, you have a trigger, right? So someone criticized you, and they're in charge. Because if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun. It means you're not in charge of yourself. right so if i can make fun of something about you and it and it bothers you at all you're just not in charge of yourself you could think of your nervous system and the mitochondrial networks in your body they're like a labrador okay this big floppy dog comes in eats your couch peas on the rug choose up your shoes

barks and slobbers right and eats all the food on the table or that same dog you put him through service dog school comes in and sits there you put a piece of popcorn on his nose and you just sits there and waste of you tell. Your nervous system is one of those two things or somewhere in the middle, and the people who are most successful in life don't waste energy on flopping around and peeing on the couch and all that other stuff because they train their nervous system. And that is so much more elegant and efficient than what most of us are doing, which is you're sitting in the meeting and someone criticizes you or does something that pisses you off. But instead of reacting and swearing at them or punching them, which is what sometimes we might want to do,

You smile. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's okay. But it's like the fake smile, right? And everyone knows that you don't have congruance. Your inner state doesn't match your outer state, but at least you behaved yourself, which allows society to happen. And that works. It just takes a ton of energy.

And your life sucks. And you're like totally thinking about all these things that you don't want to think about because things didn't go the way you want it. If you go through and instead of learning to manage emotions, learning how to turn off the alerts in the first place, you have a ton of energy, and then someone during an interview can't manipulate you. You can't be programmed. What percentage of problems with your mind can be solved with training the way that you respond to things, your motivation,

stuff that directly relates to your brain versus fixing things with your body? Wow. That's a really hard question, and here's why. You have a certain amount of energy, and you pour it into the fear bucket, and then it goes from there into the fear bucket, and then it goes from there into the food bucket, into the fertility bucket, and then the other two words are friend to supporting your community, and then into forgiveness, which is evolution and retraining yourself. So if you don't have enough energy because your body and mind are broken the way mine was in the 20s

when I was 300 pounds and just had all these chronic fatigue problems and a lot of sickness, fixing the hard was most important. But once you have enough energy, then the answer shifts and all of the problems. can be solved by changing the way your threat detection networks work. It's just reprogramming things. And this explains like the Buddhist stuff. It explains like the Christian forgiveness stuff. All of the things that all the different spiritual lineages that I've said it are trying to teach you. It's that. And the important trick is there's now a technique that lets you show the body, this feeling is not the right feeling. So you re-engage the feeling. You flip a switch.

by finding something good that happened, even if you hated it, and then you go into another state, and the body goes, oh, this negative feeling can't exist with this other feeling, so they cancel out, and they remain canceled out permanently. It's like a real common thing. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Almost everyone gets pissed off at that, right?

So if you went and you ran the reset process on that, the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, you just don't care. You don't feel good or bad, but you don't feel good or bad. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital, maybe they're not. It just doesn't matter. So there was a time in my life where the most exercise biggest muscle in my body was the one on this finger. Like I might have been a hostile driver. I just don't care if someone cuts me off anymore.

It doesn't matter. But it's not that I thought that it didn't matter. It's that I changed my programming in my body. So I don't get the tightness in the gut. But that would be like a mental struggle, a flaw with your brain. It's not in the brain. No, that would just be reframing your beliefs about being cut off, right? That's all...

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's all cognitive. So what the emotion happens before the thought. And I can prove this. There's one third of a second where the body picks the emotion you're going to feel. And the brain doesn't get the signal of what happened until after that censorship window. So your body is interpreting reality, putting emotion on it, right?

So you could say, well, I got this negative emotion. And then you catch it with your mind. You go, oh, I'm going to reframe it. Dude, feeling a negative feeling about something that wasn't a threat and then catching it and then reframing it, it takes energy. I want to take that energy and use it for folding proteins or something. But it's not reality itself. It's the perception, right? And the perception is created by the mind.

No, it's not. So what is the perception created? It's created by a network of trillions of environmental sensors studied throughout all the cells in your body, except for your red blood cells, that are actively monitoring reality. And your mind has a one-third of a second delay on reality all the time. It's not your mind.

Your mind is only getting what your body gets. gives it. One third of a second seems like a long time, though. It's called P300D. And it's really funny. If I do this, cloud my hands. Now, you know it took some amount of time for the sound to get there and then you heard it. Right.

That's a lie from your body. If we had electrodes glued to your brain, your auditory cortex doesn't get any signal at all for one third of a second. And it takes another 700 milliseconds before your prefrontal cortex can figure out what it was. So you have about a one second delay on reality that your body and mind erase from your consciousness. because it's not useful to watch it. And you know how cats move? They only have 30 milliseconds. They're 10 times faster than us.

That's why they can do all that crazy stuff because their lag time on reality is much faster than ours. So you have a sensor in there. It's called your ego, but the ego is part of the operating system that keeps your body alive. Here's another example.

You ever lean on a hot stove and then go, you know, this stove is pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand. No, we do. Your hand pulls itself away and you take credit for what you. your hand did, but you did not decide to move your hand. Right? Your body automatically did it. That system is the same one that's making you feel all that

negative stuff about the guy who cuts you off in traffic. Yeah, but I feel like that touching a hot stove is way faster than one third of a second. It is because it's not your brain doing it. It's your body doing it and then your brain taking credit for what the body did. Right? So what really happens to go, ah, right? It's way less than the third of a second. So what's going on there? It has to be the body making the decision and you think you did it. It's just the body tricking you into believing that what it's doing is what you're doing. It has an entirely different consciousness based on fear, food, friend, and forgiveness in order all the time. And it does that constantly before you ever get a picture of reality. So the one third of a second is only your conscious

thinking, like interpreting the data? Think of it like your body catching the signal and holding on to the signal, right? And then one third of a second later, the auditory cortex in the brain, it gets the first electrical signal that says the sound happened. And the sound has already been in your body for a third of a second. And then after that happens to figure out what it is, it gets routed to the prefrontal cortex, and that takes around 700 milliseconds. Is there a way to speed that up somehow? There is. When you're young, under, let's say under 18, it's a quarter second instead of a third of a second. You still have the same process, fear, food, all that stuff, but it's, you're faster. This is why you have a faster reaction time when you're very young. And if you're, say, a Formula One driver or very highly trained,

you can train that. So my reaction time is 240 milliseconds, like it would be when you're 18, because I'm a brain hacker. But having a faster reaction time doesn't mean anything. What's important is if you're to pick up your phone and turn on the alerts from every app, it's like, boing, boing, but you can't use your phone. So you go and you turn off the alerts. You've got to turn off the alerts from your nervous system so that they don't get in the way. That's the trick. This might sound stupid. Are there drugs that you could take that would shut down that reaction time?

So it's like immediate? Well, even if you shut it down to five milliseconds, understand your body's job is to create a user interface on reality that's useful for you, right? And this is why we hallucinate time into existence. We can go to quantum physics and we can prove mathematically time is a hallucination that we create. It's just a very useful one that lets us live, right? Even space is a hallucination. And we can prove that too.

inside this microphone, it's mostly empty space. We just all see it and perceive it because it's useful for our meat bodies to do stuff. So you could narrow the window, and there are drugs that make you faster like that. Like modafinil would probably do that. I've been on that stuff for 20 plus years. But you're still going to have the pre-processing of reality

because here's the thing. Your brain cannot handle reality. Right now, if you had to pay attention to every little valve opening and closing inside your body, making sure you breathe, you blink, and being aware of all the micro stuff happening in the environment, little air currents and how it feels and the hairs on your arm and all that, you couldn't do anything.

So we have a beautiful distributed processing system that keeps the body alive as if we're not in there. It's the same thing that runs a bear or a skunk or a blade of grass. Fear, food. Always, always. That's what keeps life alive, right? So you just have to program it so that it doesn't feel fear except when it's real.

and if you just do that, it frees up so much energy that when people do this process, 91.7% report massive improvements in their relationships. Because now your girlfriend doesn't trigger you anymore. Like, oh, she's having some emotions. Okay, that's cool. It's not that you don't care. It's that it doesn't cause you pain, right? And then food, you learn how to do some intermittent fasting.

And your body believes right now that if you don't eat every four hours, you're going to die. And it feels like that. And you say, I'm starving. Well, you just teach the body, you're not going to starve. learn how to fast, and the amount of stress in the nervous system goes way down from the stomach's empty. Now you have more energy. So stop wasting energy on alerts that are going off all the time over scary things or over hunger. And then there's another whole set of practices in heavily meditated around turning what I'll call lust or only fans or whatever into a source of transformative

altered states work. And the way we go in and we fix all these things is altered states. And you can alter your state with meditation, with technology, with neurofeedback, with. And you can alter your state with breathwork, with psychedelics, with tantric sex. Like, just all these different ways. And all of these ultimately are, how do I change my state? So I can get into my control panel settings, and I can change the settings on my nervous system so it behaves itself. So would you say you are happier than the average person and by how much?

You know, I don't compare myself to other people very much. I'd have to think about that. Local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us.

Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. I would say that I am reasonably happy. And one of the things that makes for the best entrepreneurs in the world is capacity to handle suffering without breaking. And if you read heavily meditated, I've gone through a lot. I mean, losing a company you built that's, you know, doing hundreds of millions kind of your life's work, that was a lot. So I am more resilient than almost anyone I know.

And I have periods where I'm happy and I have periods where I'm less happy, but I'm not worried about either one of them. And how much longer do you think you could live based on reframing a lot of? of these beliefs and going into that control panel. My book on longevity, I spent about $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years, and I just publicly said I'm going to live to at least 180. And I pick that number because our current best is 120. I want to do 50% better. I have 100 years to do it.

And I have AI. And I have PubMed, which is all of the research we've ever done on medical stuff. And we have all these tools available, all this knowledge, that the person who made it to 120 didn't have. So I don't think 50% better in the next 100 years is particularly aggressive. In fact, we've already extended life

by six and a half years. Do you think your life, though, would be... You would be able to do things at that point, or do you think you'd be hooked up to a computer and, like, some beeping sound would be constant? And your mind would be, like, uploaded to a computer. I'm talking... Feeling better than I do now.

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And now let's get back to the podcast. Feeling better than I do now. At 180. Yeah. Okay. So I, like, I am highly, highly, highly skeptical when I hear. And I'm sure a lot of viewers are saying the same thing. I would love to be proven wrong because that sounds awesome to feel better than I feel right now at 180.

But it just doesn't seem intuitive. And usually my intuition on something like this, I feel like could be, like, give me like your best sales pitch on how you think you can live to 180 and feel better than you do right now. Well, most agent comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction. We didn't know much about mitochondria until the 90s, and even now we're learning more about them. And we have top doctors at Harvard, like David Sinclair, who's a friend who's been on my show a couple times. It's like, we can reverse aging in cells. I went down to Costa Rica, and I did a stem cell procedure with focused ultrasound on my brain that reverses aging in the central aging clock in the hippocampus. So I opened up my blood brain barrier, put stem cells in there, and it totally works.

I've had gene therapy that takes nine years off of the average person's measured age in a single injection. And we're just getting going on all this. Will you look younger too? Because all of these like scientific like biomarkers and lab results, lab tests and stuff like that, for most people that aren't like super in the weeds, they won't be able to actually have something to meter if someone's getting older or younger. Like biologically speaking. Here's what matters more. do you wake up and your brain works and you have a ton of energy and your body doesn't hurt? Like if people have that, they're generally willing to have some wrinkles, right?

And right now, as you age, you cut your fingernails, right? Because they keep growing and that's considered normal. Well, your skin grows as you age. And that's something that we haven't yet, but probably will in the next five years, resolve. So we need a way to get a signal into the body that says, tighten up the skin. and a way that isn't, say, you know, creating scarring or something, which is what we do today.

So this is about communication with the cells themselves, telling them what to do. And I've worked with a couple of companies that are actually figuring out how to program a single photon to do that. So bottom line, between peptides, between signaling compounds, between the magnetic stuff, the lasers and things like that, we'll probably solve your tissues over time grow

just like your hair grows and your fingernails grow. The skin growing thing that grows over the course of decades, that's annoying. But if I feel great and my body doesn't hurt and my brain is on fire and I have some extra skin, I don't care. How much have you spent on your body? About two and a half million bucks. What would you say has the best ROI on everything you've spent money on? Neurofeedback.

What real results have you achieved from neurofeedback? I tripled the amount of electrical power that my brain can make. So what does that mean? Well, when your brain is making a brain wave, there's two things that we look at. One is how orderly are the brain waves? Like, can my brain, can all of it decide to do the same thing at the same time? It's like having an orchestra that plays the same stuff in the right order versus just all over the place. And then the second one is how loud can it play?

Or think of it like a wave. Do you want to be surfing the 100-foot wave or surfing the 10-foot wave? right you want your brain to be able to on demand make 100 foot waves which is a marker of youthfulness and a marker of power so you can train your brain to do that and i have trained my brain to do that so is that just like cognitive ability because i also read that you had claimed you'd increased your IQ by like 20 yeah that's really simple okay if you want to increase your IQ by an average of a dozen points you can do it in a month that's a horrible kind of training called dual in back training and you're is the most frustrating thing I think I've ever done. You play this impossible video game that just frustrates you constantly, and you do it for 20 minutes a day. And if you can make yourself do it for 20 days, which almost no one does, at some time around there, all of a sudden you can do it,

and it doubles working memory in your brain. So most people can remember seven numbers, maybe eight. You can remember 16 after you finish that, and that'll increase your IQ. What's the game? Like, why is it so frustrating? Because it's a grid, and you have to remember which squares lay. it up in order and what letter or number was inside it.

And then four moves ago, on the top left quadrant, where was the color four moves ago? What was the number? And it sounds impossible because what our brains are wired to do is to remember either the order of things lighting up or the order of numbers. But when you just kind of torture the brain with failure, eventually the brain says, oh, I can remember both. and it's like turning on a new skill, a light switch. When I first did this years ago,

I remember I had just finished it, and I was sitting with 16 people, and we were taking sushi orders to go, and I remembered everyone's order for 16 people. I'm not a waiter, and this was outside of my abilities, period. And it was after list, it was just there. But does that translate to different results on like a real IQ test?

Because isn't IQ, like, technically just different, than working memory, like it would be, you know, problem solving and you're, yeah, how increasing working memory will reliably increase IQ. That's why I claim about a dozen points from that. So I'm curious, what does it mean when my memory seems to be sometimes so bad that I can't remember what I did last night or the night before? It means that you're clinically, uh, dumb. Seriously, there, I started doing this journal that like every day you're supposed to fill. it out and it's like things you're grateful for in the morning, what would make today great, highlights of the day. Sometimes I'll go by mistake, two days of that filling this thing out.

And then I look back and I think I have no recollection of the day before or the day before that. And I have to think to myself. What did I do? And I have to go through text messages. And we have a camera outside and I look through the camera to see, oh, I left it this time. Oh, yeah, I went there. What does that mean? Well, there's two kinds of memory. There's episodic memory, which is what you're talking about. Do you remember specific episodes? And then there's a kind of memory that's how things work and for facts, right?

And different people have a different mix of episodic versus factual memory. So for me, I don't care what I did yesterday. I have no idea. It's not relevant. I have systems for that. And people I know, like, oh, yeah, last year on July 2nd, I was doing this. I'm like, why do you know and why do you care? But that person can't remember mitochondrial function in which supplements it do.

So I have this rich internal universe of biohacking and neuroscience and longevity and esoteric spiritual stuff because that's what I care about. So for you, if you're a typical entrepreneur, you have ADHD anyway. And ADHD is the gift that you only pay attention to things you care about. And I would argue you probably don't really care about what you did yesterday. You'd remember it. And there's nothing wrong with that. That makes more sense.

So some people organize their mental. hierarchy by time, others by function, others by human network. And this is foundational. It's like the systems architecture of your processing network inside your body. See, I went down the rabbit hole of WebMD and convinced myself I might have early onset dementia. No, you do not have that. How old are you? 35. It's not impossible. I would really worry about that. Actually? No, I'm just trying to see if I would have that. I think that you bring your brain to a different playing field whenever you're working. And like it kind of just, like exercising that muscle for as long as you have just makes you completely oblivious to other things that like might some other people

might be more in tune with such as social dynamics, such as, you know, maybe episodic memory. But that's similar to kind of what you said. It's just Graham really. cares about the things he cares about. Yeah. And by virtue of that, it means he could care less about the things that you don't care. If it's anything the Chinese embassy said, Jerome Powell said, any market fluctuations and know it, it's just, like, if you're talking to him about something that he doesn't have interest in, his eyes immediately gloss over.

And he's just not listening whatsoever. So it's, so you probably have ADHD. I don't think I have ADHD. You don't? He has incredible focus when. Hyper focus is part of it. It's also, it's weird because it's in such a way of like, like you said, it's easy to focus when you want to be focusing. But there are lots of times where he grinds on something that he may not be particularly passionate about, but he does like the grind.

So I don't know what that necessarily means. Deep focus. Deep focus is a passion of mine. Okay. So deep focus is an altered state. Correct. So what if there were technologies to help you get into deeper focus more quickly? Love that. One of those is called meditation.

But meditation takes too much time. time. The other thing is around 35, your testosterone is low. It's high. It's high. It might be lowering now. Your free tea, have you measured it? Free tea is in the 800s. That's total tea. Your free tea is probably not above 20. I could, oh, you know what? I could find it. Yeah, check it out. I have it online. So there's two things that happen. One is testosterone drops. And for all of us, testosterone is low right now because of plastics and lighting and fragrances and circadian disruption, all kinds of stuff. So just our species is in trouble from a testosterone perspective.

Testosterone drives dopamine. Dopamine drives desire to focus and get stuff done. So you get rewarded for pursuing a goal. But if your testosterone is a lot, you don't care. And this is true in men and women, because women have four times more testosterone than estrogen. They just have a lot less testosterone than guys do. So looking at that affects brain function in a meaningful way.

The other thing that happens is your body makes cortisol and adrenaline, which are stress hormones that all entrepreneurs have, and all people have, but it also makes counter-stress hormones called DHEA and pregnant alone, and to a certain extent, progesterone. And starting around 35, those go down, but the stress hormones don't, and it's worse in women than men. So in either case, if your DHA is low, which happens as you age, well, welcome to aging. And 35 is about, we're like, oh, shit, like it's not happening. So if you do the anti-aging stuff at 35, you don't have to dig yourself out of a hole by waiting until you're 40 or 45 or 50. So a major reason I started the biohacking movement is because the things that make old people

young make young people powerful. And so the goal is to say, if I would have known about this when I was 20, I wouldn't have weighed 300 pounds because I would have known what to do. And I would have done all these things that are cheap and easy. And I probably would have not had all the dumb decisions I made, too, if I'd have learned all the meditation stuff. So if you take a few steps now to keep your stress hormone and anti-stress hormone levels at the levels of a young person, you're going to like your life 10 years from now. And if you don't, you're like, God, I have a dad bot.

I said I wouldn't do that. I look, you know, I'm losing some hair and all that kind of stuff. So prevention is much easier. And it turns out that is exactly the same stuff that makes your brain work better and gives you more energy and more power. So it's like you have nothing to lose from doing it. For those that want just a very, very quick kind of up-to-date background, you were very, very early on into tech. And you made, what was it, like $6 million by 26 and then lost it all by 28?

You were also 100 pounds overweight at that time. What was like going on? What was your kind of life like? I used to have Asperger syndrome. So it's on the autism spectrum. And I had ADHD and something called ODD. You ever heard of that one? oppositional defiant disorder.

It means that when someone tells you to do something, you automatically and reflexively tell them no. You can imagine by the time I graduated from high school how popular I was with the teachers and whatnot. And all of this comes down to hardware in the brain and threat networks and we'll call it the emotion and spiritual side of what's going on. So I reversed that.

And it took me years and a lot of money to reprogram my brain, reprogram my eyes, my ears, the way my tongue moves, the way my body moves. I had to redo all that. And then I had to learn all the emotional stuff that I never picked up as a kid, all the social interactions.

Those are learned. Okay, so how did you lose Asperger's? Because isn't that kind of like a, like, you know, it's permanent, right? People believe all sorts of weird stuff. Did you know that until Eric Kendall won a Nobel Prize in 1994? Scientists believe that you were born

with the number of brain cells you're going to die with and that you could never change your brain or grow it. It was funny. I still believe that. Like, you lose your brain cells and they'll never come back. I interviewed Eric Kendall when he was 84 on my show. And he's incredibly high performance brain, happy, engaged.

And yeah, he proved that neuroplasticity is real. And my cognitive enhancement book is based on that. So we believe all sorts of nonsense. Here's what's happening with autism and Asperger's, especially the higher functioning stuff. something happens environmentally that lowers mitochondrial output dramatically, and you can measure that, and we find this to autistic kids. So now you have a low power brain.

It just can't make enough electricity to do what a normal brain should do. And then because of autoimmune inflammatory stuff, which can be caused by many different things, the signals that come into the brain are staticky. So eyes don't work right, ears don't work right, touch doesn't work right. So now you have a low power brain trying to make sense of the same. signals in the world around you. But the signals are dirty and it's low power. It's to become really good at low power pattern matching. So what did I do? I fix my mitochondrial networks. And that gave me a huge amount of energy. And then I went through and I fixed my nervous system.

So now I have a clean signal coming in. And then the hardest part was teaching my brain how to process the clean signal. And that took several years. And I wouldn't be able to do without neurofeedback. I'm reprogramming my hearing and my eyes was so hard. to do. But it is possible. It's just hard. And I know dozens of parents who've fully healed their kids from autism. It just takes a lot of work. What about for the autistic or kids with Asperger's who are just really smart, though? Like those days excel, like maybe Elon Musk who said that he's had Asperger's or has Asperger's. Well, you don't lose the pattern matching. See, that's the gift. So my brain evolved in a low power environment. It learned how to process that. And even studies of

Einstein's brain. It's not that it was bigger. It said it was more efficient. So my brain, through suffering, learned to be hyper-efficient at recognizing patterns, which is why I was able to create biohacking, why I can, I'm a futurist. Like, that thing I did in my 20s, I'm the first guy to sell anything over the internet. Like, my, Dave, you weren't fat. I'm like, well, here's my picture from entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23 in that article about, hey, guys, this kid's selling T-shirts over, they enter something or another. Have you heard of it? Like, the words e-commerce had me. I knew that was happening because my brain does that. I still have that. But now I can make eye contact. I have social networks. I've got all my emotional stuff that works. And I generally move pretty well,

although there's a couple little movement patterns I haven't quite hacked yet. You were one of the first people to sell something on the internet. No, I was the first person. The second one was the guys who ran virtual vineyards. And the internet at the time was used net. We hadn't invented the browser yet. And you were selling the coffee t-shirt? Said caffeine, my drug of choice. had this molecule on it. Caffeine is my drug of choice. Mine too. Exactly.

I'm at least consistent on that. How did you make $6 million by 26 and lose it by 28, though? Well, I knew that the internet was going to be a thing because I had been on it since I was studying computer science and all that first move for advantage kind of thing. So I went to Silicon Valley and I made a resume that said internet on everything. and I got two job offers. One was for the company that made the first internet data center.

Google was two guys and two computers. Hotmail started there. The Facebook was eight servers, started there. I helped Salesforce when they were eight people. So we built 42 data centers and grew to, let's see, to 5,000 employees in three years. And the part of the business I started

did 100 million a quarter in revenue. So my stock options were worth $6 million. And that was awesome. Then there was a crash in the market. because WorldCom lied about internet traffic and a bunch of financial nonsense. But the company went bankrupt because I attended board meetings and I was high enough up. I was blocked out. It was illegal for me to trade my shares.

So I watched my wealth evaporate from $80 a share to $5 a share in less. So that was, it was horrible. But here's the thing. I was miserable and anxious all the time and had terrible brain fog. I had arthritis since I was 14. And I'm like, I just, I want to be happy. I want to do the things I'm supposed to do. So I tried being famous.

I was an entrepreneur magazine and all these other things about early business on the internet. And then I tried getting married in my 20s. That didn't last very long. That was not a good thing for happiness. And then I tried being rich. And I completed all of those before I was 28. And when I had $6 million, I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And I didn't understand dopamine.

I don't understand brains because pursuing things makes you happy. Getting them never makes you happy. It's provable. So happiness is an internally generated state that's irrespective of what's happening in the world around you. So the real game that we're all playing is how do we change our state at will? Because you want to be the person who can meditate in the middle of a storm. You want to be able to say, you know what?

The economy's doing this. Social media is doing that. The government's doing this. and it didn't affect my internal state at all, so I'm going to do what I'm going to do. And you say, I like what happened, I didn't like what happened, didn't affect my internal state.

Because that's how you have the most power to change the world. That lets you show up for your friends and your family and your community, not being programmed, not being triggered, just being present and being thoughtful and being in charge of yourself.

So why was I working in 90-hour weeks back then? Because I was convinced it would make me free and happy, and it doesn't do that. And I also was convinced that it would finally show the bullies from seventh grade that I'm better than you. That's not my motivation anymore. So what were the next steps that actually started this healing journey of like where your body was in a rough shape, your brain was in a rough shape,

what were the first things that you actually started to see made an improvement? The first thing was I was desperate. I bought disability insurance when I was 25. I'm like, I wouldn't hire myself. My brain is failing. My doctor says everything is fine. Everything is not fine. I don't know what to do.

So I started doing all the things that I didn't believe in because I already tried antibiotics every month for 15 years for the stuff going on. I'd always get strep throat and sinus infections. I had toxic mold. I didn't know it. I decided I was going to spend 20% of my earnings, which were pretty sizable during some of that time, on fixing my biology. And one of the things that happened, I was going to Warden Business School,

I was failing out of my classes. So I went to a psychiatrist, and I'd read Dr. Daniel Aiman's first book about brain scans. And this is not the kind that I do at 40 years of then. This is called a spec scan to figure out where is metabolic activity happening. And I went into one of his doctors and said, I want a scan. And he said, oh, TechBrow wants Adderall. I know this game. And he said, fine, we'll get you a scan.

And I come back in a week later after they've injected me with radioactive of sugar and you looked at my brain. And he just kind of, his face is white. And he says, Dave, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me right now. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. By camouflage, what he meant was, humans, when we are sick or weak or struggling, we're wired to not show it to others because we might get kicked out of the tribe.

Some other animals like cats, like if they're sick, they'll run away and go die in a tree so they'll get the other cats sick. Humans aren't like that. So there's people you know right now that are absolutely tapped out. They have an accelerator pinned to the floor all the time and they're slowing down and they feel helpless and there's nothing they can do. That was me. So that was the thing. And when he when he said that, I was like, finally someone believes me.

And I started taking smart drugs actually before that that were helping. And he got me the drug that I actually come to him for, which is called modafinil, which is an off-label treatment for ADHD. But I was dealing with chronic fatigue, not ADHD. And I learned what causes chronic fatigue, and I learned how to reverse it. And so I don't have it anymore. And I have an incredibly powerful and fast brain that I never had in my 20s or 30s. And it's doable for anyone. It just requires curiosity, and it requires data, and it requires systems thinking, which is my gift.

Was that the drug that Limitless was based off of? How close is medaphanal to Limitless? When you take it, if you're paying attention, attention, modafinil will slightly change the saturation of color. So if you watch Limitless, every time he's on the drug, everything turns kind of green, there is a shift in color perception from it. And I warn people, if you're a dick, modafinil will make you a faster dick, right? So it makes you more, and it makes it easy to focus and to get things done. But it's not a stimulant, even like coffee or like Adderall or something. It's a different feeling. And it is one of the most studied drugs.

it actually does raise IQ. It increases reaction time, or so it decreases reaction time, makes you faster. And it has very few side effects. So if it works for you, 20% people don't really feel it, but if it works for you,

it's kind of magic. And I've been on a low dose of that stuff pretty much every day for 20-something years now. And it's totally worth it. How do you, is it safe? Well, we've known about it since the mid-90s.

It's been very well studied. It has very few side effects. It's much safer than statins. It's safer than antidepressants. So why isn't everyone doing it? Well, there are a lot of people doing it. How many entrepreneurs do you think are not on it? I don't know a single person. I mean, maybe just they do and they just don't tell us. So I was concerned about that. So at Wharton, I'm like, guys, I don't want to be accused of doping. So I would actually put my modafinil and my prows to have my other smart drugs because cognitive enhancing drugs really do work. And so do the supplements. I make them today. But I'd put him on the desk in front of him. I'm like, guys, I'm not breaking rules, but I'm on these substances.

And I don't think I would have graduated from business school without neutropics. It really made a different. What do you think of magic mind? Boost, energy, and focus, crush procrastination. See what's in here. Neutropics, macha, adaptogens. I love adaptogens. This is really small.

Let's see, some olive oil, cool. Ashvaganda, I like that. That's good stuff. But Copa, really good for dopamine. Rodeola, one of my top all-time adaptogen favorite things. Got some turmeric, Lionsmane, Fossil-Syrene. I like this ingredient list. I just don't know how much of it's in there.

Like, how much rodeoal are you really getting? I do a couple of capsules of it. And Lions' Main can be really powerful. L-thian, natural caffeine, vitamin C. So it looks like a great list saffron. I just want to see the amounts of each one. Like, saffron is better than antidepressants. So I've heard the same thing as you.

It really comes down to the amounts. And I've heard maybe something like they don't share the amounts because they don't want other people to copy their exact recipe of how they do it. I've been drinking these usually before the podcast. It's like an energy shot, and they sponsored us. And I've just been curious about it. It's got natural caffeine in it. It's going to make you feel good, unquestionably. And since you don't know how much caffeine, it could be 200 milligrams.

This is 60. 60. Okay, cool. So it's about a shot of espresso worth. Yes. So that's going to help you on a podcast. I understand the desire to have proprietary blends, and I've done it myself, because you're so tired of these knockoff clowns doing it, at the same time, a serious biohacker, like, I know how much rodeo I take every day. And given the volume of that thing, unless it tastes really bad.

Some people don't like it. I like it. But I like bitter things. Okay. So I would say it's kind of like a mixed of bittersweet. I like it. It tastes very, like, kind of a little sour, like very probiotic, it's pungent. Okay, I would like that kind of a taste.

And so it's a great ingredient list. I would just want to know, am I taking too much of one of those with all the other stuff I take, or is it the right amount? So what I would like to see them do is if someone reached out to customer support or something. Most companies will say, all right, here's what's in there. And guys, if the people are making magic minds, see this, anyone who wants to copy it can take it to a lab and break it down easy enough. So, like, it's a pro and con thing, but for people who are going to be taking things, I worry, like, people throw vitamin B6 and everything. I didn't see B6 on that, which is good. The form of B6 that we use is not even good for you.

It creates problems for people because it's in a natural form. But if it's in every supplement and every energy drink, you're going to get, like, numb feet and hands from that because you don't know how much you're getting. So I like to know what I'm taking, but I really like their ingredient list. Cool. Yeah, we've been taking this. I usually take it with us when we travel. It's a good. It's on to the podcast.

So if you guys are interested, we do have a link in the description, and I'll reach out to them. I'll see if we can find out the doses. It's a good idea. I like it. And I understand not putting it on the bottle. Just if someone asks their customer support,

I would hope that they would say what it was. And just third time I'm saying it is, I didn't see anything on there. I don't approve of on the ingredients list. So it looks like it's a good combination. What's the craziest biohack that you tried? I've had my bone marrow taken out while I'm awake. to get my stem cells.

How painful is that? It's not very painful. I've heard that's like the most painful thing. They put lidocaine on it. The reason people say it's painful is it's scary, but it's not really painful. So like being burned is painful. This isn't like that. The weird thing is, you know, that fingernails on a blackboard sound?

Yeah. Imagine that coming from your skeleton, all of your skeleton. It's so creepy, but it's not pain. It's just the weirdest sensation you've ever felt. and you could easily freak out about a weird sensation. But it's, it wasn't that, there was that. I also, what did you do with the marrow? Blended into my coffee, obviously.

No. We got the stem cells. Put on top of the steak. Yeah, I got the stem cells out and injected them into old injuries for longevity. And did it work? It helped. However, there's much more powerful stem cell stuff. I go down to a place in Costa Rica called RMI now,

and they're the ones who reset my central aging clock, and I've had every joint in my body injected with stem cells twice. because I would like to have those same joints when I'm 180. So preventative maintenance. When is the right time to start injecting stem cells? What makes a leader stand out? It's not just about taking charge, but about setting new standards and embracing bold moves.

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com slash US slash sport with the link down below in the description. Thank you, Rangerover, for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. A fun little story here, but when Jack and I started the Ice Coffee Hour, we had to figure out everything ourselves, from the best audio equipment to use, the best cameras, had a book guest. It was a challenge. Every day was a unique experience that we had to figure out ourselves.

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they can grow new stem cells from your 35-year-old stem cells, and then when you're 135, you still have young stem cells. That is a gift if you do that. And do you need to do it? If you have an injury, you should use, the stem cells to heal the injury. So most of the time you're 35, there's a time you're playing soccer or biking and your shoulder got injured your knee or something. Those things that are just like annoying now, if you don't do something about them, if you wait 15 years, those are the things

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

And that sounds expensive. It's going to, if you wanted to inject every. every injury you had and do your brain and do your face and while you're at it, it might as well do your dick, it's going to run about 50 grand. For everything. Yep. And you said they can take it from blood? They can now, yeah.

So they don't need to drill in a bone. They could just drop blood. No, the drilling in the bone was definitely an experience. Is one more or less effective than the other, like marrow versus bone or versus blood? Those actually are marrow cells in the blood. You can also get stem cells from your fat. it's just a different kind of stem cell. So if you go down there in one week, it's extra five days, they do all of that stuff.

They'll get your fat cells, they'll get your marrow cells without going into your marrow. So you take a drug, makes your bone marrow spit the stem cells out into your blood, then they just harvest them from your blood, which is easy. They filter it out. Not safe? It seems like that's not safe. It seems like that's not safe to have your bone marrow excreting stem cells into your blood will they extract that.

Oh, it's totally safe. So your bone marrow is supposed to be making stem cells. all the time. That's its job. So they just have a pharmaceutical protocol with a well-known drug that does that. Can you use someone else's bone marrow? Not bone marrow, but stem cells? It's really sketchy to do stem cells in the U.S. because they usually take umbilical cells from like eight random women, and they say, oh, we tested them. And I know someone who's active in that industry who used his own product and almost died, couldn't walk for six months. So I'm concerned about viral stuff. So I don't use other people's stem cells unless it's from a single person and its culture expanded. And that's illegal in the U.S.

The FDA won't like to do it. So I go to Costa Rica and I get it done. Why is it illegal in the United States? Because the FDA hates you and wants you to die. At least they did before our FK came in. Why? What's the benefit for the FDA, not to allow or as a wholly owned subsidiary of big pharma. The FDA does not want things that work. They want things that drive you to buy new drugs instead of old drugs or natural cures. And it's been that way for a very long time. So what do you think are the most over-prescribed drugs right now? Statins and antidepressants.

How could you cure depression? Well, one of the easiest ways to cure many types of depression would be darkness. Get rid of bright lights at night and get some sunshine in the morning in your eyes. Circadian disruption is behind a huge amount of depression. And the second thing would be ketamine, which is one of the chapters in heavily meditated. Even a single dose of ketamine under medical circumstances with integration, it works on treatment-resistant depression. That's why about almost a year ago,

we added ketamine to 40 years as then. It's the world's first psychedelic-assisted neurofeedback program, where optionally you can come up to spend five days. We use a little bit of ketamine to create neuroplasticity in the brain, so your brain can form new connections more quickly while you're doing this training to reset your operating system. So I want to give you some biohacks. and I want you to tell us how effective they are from one to ten. Ten being very effective.

One being not at all. It's not even worth it. Infrared light therapy. Ten. Keto diet. Six. Sleep tracking. Just tracking it?

Four, but hacking it's a good thing. Grounding. That's surprisingly a seven. Stem cells. Those are a ten if they're done right. Cryotherapy. That's about a seven. Electrodes and neuterone.

your head for neurofeedback. In your head or on your head? On your head. Okay, yeah. So not Neurrelink. So neurofeedback, if it's the right protocols, like those stuff that we've been doing, that's 10 out of 10. That's most effective thing I've ever done.

But there are some types of neurofeedback that don't do anything. Meditation. Four and a half. IV drips. Depends what's in it, but they can be 10 or they can be one. Cold plunges. Seven. Intermittent fasting.

That's probably an eight. If someone wants the 80-20, and just get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort, what would your recommendation be in terms of biohacking? All right, a little bit of self-serving here. You should come in to upgrade labs.

This is my company that does that. We've got 30 locations opening, nine already open across the U.S. and Canada, and we have someone come to your house and draw blood and get your labs, and you come in and we get 187 million data points over the course of the year. And based on what your goals are,

which are different for different people, and based on the state of your biology, we recommend a bunch of different biohacks in the right order to get you the results, a combination of supplements and red and infrared light therapy with specific frequencies or cryo or a bunch of things people haven't even heard of.

And the results we're saying are profound. It's just, it's not the same for everyone. Here's an example. If I would ask you, what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to you? I would say waking up energized, feeling happy and energetic throughout the day, and then falling asleep quickly at night. So for you, it's energy and sleep?

Really? Yeah. Okay. What does it's healthy mean to you? I would say motivation and energy levels. Motivation and energy. Got it. So if I would ask another person, they'd say, I just want my knees to stop hurting, right?

And for someone else, it could be, I want my libido back. and someone else I need to manage stress better or I want to lose the weight or I want to put on muscle or I want cardiovascular endurance I don't have that anymore and it turns out that after starting

the first biohacking center under Arnold Schwarzenegger's office about 11 years ago now which is now upgrade labs there's buckets and we use a survey because the problem is if you wanted to buy a laptop right now

you want a laptop with a 500-inch screen that weighs one ounce and has a two-week battery life and infinite memory. But it's not possible, right? So we all want all of those goals, but you want some of them more than others, and you don't know which ones you want more than others. So we use statistical analysis and AI to figure out your actual stack of prioritization. And we use that as the inputs to say, okay, if your true goals are these, what are we going to do to personalize it? And since you're both different biologically, right, your starting points are different. And it's the personalization that makes it happen.

So it could be that for your energy, we're like, oh, you've got some nutritional stuff that was easy to pick up. So let's get you on some vitamin dake and some minerals and all of that. And then we're going to affect your energy with one set of technologies. And for you, we might say, you know, you actually have pretty good mineral levels right now. We don't need to worry about that for you. So we're going to do this tech and then this tech. And you're both going to get your goals, right?

but if yours is more motivation, we're going to recommend something like I have a dopamine supplement called Motivation 101. I'd be like, that should be the one for you. For you? I'm not going to do it. Because what we talked about earlier, I'm going to put you on brain 101

because you're working more on your memory. So different goals, different starting points, and this rich set of technologies. So for people listening, you'll never do all of the biohacks. I have done almost all of them because it's my job

and because I'm willing to spend unlimited amounts of money on this. and what I want people to understand, you read any of my books, especially heavily meditated, you're going to go through it and go, there's like 75 different things here, but that one stood out.

That's what intuition is about. You can say, oh, that makes sense. I want to do that, right? So for you guys, I'd be like, you better get your testosterone and your thyroid levels. Everybody needs those just as a starting point. That's probably the easiest thing to do

for most people. The amount of people with subclinical hypothyroidism right now is insane. And that means your body won't enough energy. No wonder you're stressed and tired and anxious and you can't sleep. Your thermostat has turned too low and you try to push the accelerator and there's nothing in there because you're limited. So you fix that. And then we look at your testosterone. Oh, that's low because you're alive for almost all of us. It's low. So then we fix that with lifestyle or with medications or with

nutritional supplements, whatever it takes to get your levels where they should be for a healthy 25 year old and we pin them there. So when you're 125, you still have a 25 year old's level of energy and motivation. And from there... Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids,

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Let's just say, though, that you're a viewer with maybe like 200 bucks, and you're like, you know what? I really just want to spend some money to get the right supplements, to get, you know, a red light or maybe a sleep mask, you know. Gotcha. Okay, $200 budget. First thing you do is you go to Amazon and you buy some cheap red LED light bulbs. And then at night, as soon as the sun goes down, the lights in your house are red.

And you take another 20 bucks and you buy blackout curtains. And in your bedroom, it needs to be pitch black, no light leaking around the curtains. And no LED lights. Tape them over inside your bedroom. There's a study out of Japan that shows that the amount of street light that leaks around curtains in the average city increases depression by 69%. So we have a circadian problem. these are one-time changes you make. Okay, I have dimmer switches and or red lights in the evening,

and I have a blacked-out bedroom, and you will find your entire life changes because now when you sleep, your body actually does what it's supposed to do. And right now, if you look at a bright screen, you have the bathroom lights on for five seconds, it doesn't matter. The timing system in your brain, in all of history, there's never been bright white lights in the middle of the night.

We had a full moon, and we had fire. And it. And so when you turn on those bright kitchen or bathroom lights or whatever, the timing system goes, it must be daytime. And then it starts turning things on that are supposed to be turned off. And it's driving depression and anxiety and drops and hormones and all kinds of weird stuff. It's easy to fix. And it's way less than $200. So you're saying optimizing sleep, basically. Optimizing light is more important than sleep. And don't wear sunglasses during the day outdoors. They're bad for you. And that's just because you don't want to trick your brain into when you should be on or off or alert or. or not. Light is a nutrient that's as important as food. And it's like we just put junk lighting everywhere. It's like we replaced all of your food with Twinkies and that's what LED lights are. Why did you say that people that sleep for six and a half hours live the longest? Because that's what the data shows in three large studies of more than a million people over multiple years. How would the data show that? A lot of like I feel the best when I get like eight and a half hours of sleep, maybe nine hours sleep like the next day my mental acuity my my CPU is is functioning at a quicker pace and i just feel

better i can hit the gym harder that makes absolute sense i am not recommending that you cut your sleep to six and five hours that's terrible what the data really shows is that healthy people need less sleep to recover so if you wake up fully recovered in six and a half hours great if you need eight and a half hours to fully recover, either you're working out really hard or some systems aren't optimized. So if you just wake up fully refreshed, feeling like your CPU got the upgrade and you did it in six and a half hours, that would be better than eight and a half, right? That would be the goal. But do not cut your sleep back to try and live longer. That's a terrible strategy. The data is very clear, though. It's more causation then. It's like if you are healthy, then you just need less sleep.

So the sleep is kind of the metric that they use to reverse engineer. Exactly. Okay. Right. The data is very clear, though. People who sleep eight hours or eight and a half hours, they die more from all-cause mortality, meaningfully more than people who sleep seven hours. So how do you get the perfect night of sleep? This is awesome. The short answer to that is free. It's just go to sleep with Dave.com. And everything I know about sleep is there. I just needed a URL for all that. What sort of website is this? It's my only offense. No, it's just the most memorable marketing URL of my entire life. And it makes me laugh every time I say it. But yeah, Sleep With Dave has all this stuff on it. And again, I'm not selling anything.

Jackusleep at Jack.com. Nice. It's just a form you to go out. 10 bucks, guys. Nice. The short version to get good night's sleep, have dinner before the sun goes down. That's critical. Don't have any calories after that.

And then have darkness after the sun goes down. And I'm staying in a hotel here in Vegas. So I have glasses that we created for sleep that tell the brain it's night time, even though we can see. So I was at a, out of a concede. you know, last night I'm wearing glasses. They look like they're red, but there's multiple layered optical filters. It's called True Dark.

And those things we published in a medical journal that 15 minutes of wearing those shifts the brain into the same state as advanced meditation. So if you want to get a good night's sleep, you need darkness or red light before bed. You need a lack of food before bed. And when you lay down for sleep, you want to set your thermostat to 68 or less

because cold is a signal to tell your body that is time for sleep. And then you want to take a few deep breaths before you go to sleep. And your out breath needs to be twice as long as the in-breath. So you fill the lungs completely like, and then another one.

So it's really full. And then you breathe out through the nose really slowly and do that three or four times. And that will cause your heart rate variability to be higher at nine. If you do those things, you're probably going to get a good night's sleep. And there's a handful of sleep supplements

that I talk about on that site that work for some people more than others. If you wake up at three or four in the morning routinely and you can't go back to sleep, you have a blood sugar issue, a little bit of raw honey and or MCT and or collagen before bed, we'll fix that. So I was about to ask,

I get up, it seems like almost every single night at like 2 to 2.30 in the morning, and it's usually, I got to go pee. Yep. And or I'll wake up briefly and I'm thinking to myself, I would feel better if I just went to the bathroom, so I don't have to think about having to go to the bathroom.

And then I do when I go back to bed. But it's such a recurring thing. Why is that? When you go back to bed, do you have racing thoughts or you just go back to sleep? Usually go right back to sleep. Okay, good. So you just have a pee problem, and you may have a little bit of prostate inflammation. So one thing is, don't drink so much before bed.

That would be a good thing. Right, that could solve the problem. Right. And in order to do that, having electrolytes in your water, having more salt. Yeah, so I do LMNT in my water, and I do one of those hydrogen tablets It's mixed with creatine. Great. And then I...

That might be the issue. Creatine before bed is a big problem for some people. That's usually when I do it. It's too stimulating. So I do creatine in the morning, and there's great evidence for creatine. Cretein does wake me up a little bit. Really? Yeah.

Usually like forget. If I take it before the gym, it can actually hype me up a little bit for the gym. So I was looking online and said, that is not really any correlation between when you take. As long as you take it. I think it depends on the person. It's funny when they do correlation studies versus mechanistic studies, I tend to like to know how things work. So because you have more ATP What happens with creatine in many people, but not all is it reduces sleep drive

So if I take creatine, I'm going to wake up at 4 a.m. And I don't want to go back to sleep and I get up Now, that's not a good thing unless I got enough sleep But if I don't take creatine that night, I won't do it And there's ways to overcome that with supplements and things like that But just shift your creatine timing drink less water before we go to bed Usually what it is, not all the time, but usually between 8 to 10 p.m., I'll realize I didn't drink any water throughout the day. And so then I have a big glass. But it's not all the time. And so even when I don't do that, I'm still waking up at two something.

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

That was your body getting rid of toxins. If you wake up and your bladder is full, then that was really having to pee. So toxins are what makes you have to pee before you really have a full bladder. I always experience, like, I feel like I have to be so bad. And then I go and I like hardly pee. I'm like, okay, this is weird because, That happens all the time.

Every road trip we take is he's got to pee like white. True. On the road trips, it's because I just, I'm always drinking something. So you're like the woman on the road trip. That's not true at all. He's worse because he doesn't drink anything. Like he's like a camel. It's actually the amount of things this guy needs to survive is incredible.

Very little. Yeah. He could survive probably on like 700 calories and like half a pint of water a day. Wow. It's probably true. Yeah. That's hilarious. But for me, like, so you're saying,

It's releasing toxins? Well, if you were to drink moldy coffee, let's just say. So I'm kind of famous for making coffee without mold in it. The mold that's found almost universally in American coffee is called OTA. It's the toxin. It survives roasting and brewing. I got 36 studies I didn't pay for that support what I'm saying. So that makes some coffee people mad.

Sorry, guys. So if you drink coffee and then you have to pee an hour later and your bladder's empty, it's because OTA is a specific toxin for the kidneys and bladder. and the body is pulling water out of your blood, and it's diluting the toxin, and it's giving you a signal to pee, and then you pee, and there's nothing in there. If you drink coffee that doesn't have mold in it,

you don't have to pee afterwards. That's your signal. So one of them is mold. The other one is this oxalate thing. If you were to eat two big bowls of raspberries, some almonds, some spinach and kale, you're going to have to pee really urgently because you just sliced up your urethra.

And I've worked with so many people who have this problem. And it happened to me, too. Back when I was a raw vegan, I was eating one or two baskets of raspberries every day. I had to pee 20 times a day urgently, and it drove me crazy. I went to a bunch of doctors. Finally, one stuck a camera in a place where cameras should not go on men. And they were like, we don't know. And I tracked it down after a year.

It's oxalated in raspberries. So this is a common plant toxin. And all these superfoods that people are eating, they're not superfoods. I'm very suspicious of plants. I do eat some plants. I just know which ones don't have the ability to make razor-sharp crystals inside my urethra, because that sucks. So what are the worst foods that people could eat or that do eat? Aside from ultra-processed nonsense and omega-6 oils and all that, beets, spinach, most nuts, kale, raspberries, and this pains me because I love them sweet potatoes and white potatoes.

Why sweet potatoes and white potatoes? They're high in oxalate, and white potatoes are high in lectins. And unfortunately, sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes, but they're both very high in oxalate. So if you're going to eat a little bit of those on occasion, fine. But most people get such a large burden. Oh, and green tea and dark chocolate are also very high in oxalate. So most people are taking in so much that it's building up crystals throughout their body. It's like, oh, my body hurts all the time, my muscles hurt.

80% of people at autopsy today have calcium oxymoclite crystals in their thyroid. So this is something I wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet in the first chapter. I underindex how important this is for aging and for function, for cognitive function, for having joints that work. So calcification of your tissues over time is something that's crappy as you age. This is a major driver of that, and it's easy to fix. Don't eat so many stupid plants. So what's the best food for someone to eat? If they're going to have a diet seven days a week, what would you?

So I'm not a kind of a supporter in that I don't. think most people should eat only meat for long periods of time, but I would say for someone listening, if you were to go carnivore for two to four weeks and watch all the things that improve in your life, that's a pretty clear signal that some of those plants are not good for you. So what do you do? Then you ask your favorite AI tool, which of the plants are lower in oxalate or other plant toxins? And I'll tell you. So I'll eat arugula. I'll eat lettuce. I'll eat some celery, but not too. much, right? And I'll eat white rice, which has very low toxins

in it. What about broccoli? Broccoli is okay. I wouldn't eat massive tons of it, unless you have a problem with sulfur metabolism, which a lot of people do. So if you eat broccoli and it doesn't make you fart, you're probably fine. What about things like peppers, mushrooms, turkey, chicken? Peppers, I wouldn't eat them.

They're delicious, but they're a night-shade vegetable. They have oxalates, and they have very high levels of lectins. Some, people tolerate them better than others, but they're not an ideal food. In fact, for most of recorded history, we believe that peppers and even tomatoes were deadly to even touch. So they were ornamental plants. Oh, we can eat those. So the cool thing about being human, you can eat all sorts of crap and survive, which is great during a famine. But if you regularly eat famine foods,

toxins build up in your body, and it takes a toll over time. I prefer to have animals, detoxify the plants for me, and then I eat the animals. So grass-fed, meat should be number one. Dairy protein, if you tolerate it. I do sheep because I don't tolerate cow very well. Dairy fat, olive oil, and some plants. I just listed some of the common ones. And some carbs, eat some fruit, but not all fruits great. Raspberries are not good. Blueberries are very good. Pineapples are not a great choice because of oxalate. Kiwi's not a great choice. If you eat one of them, it's probably not a problem. But a lot of people are eating huge amounts of fruit that never existed in all human history.

They're moderate and oxalate relatively high in starch. They're not great. So it sounds like the ideal diet is really just grass-fed beef with rice, blueberries, lettuce, add a bunch of oregano and rosemary and herbs that are really good for you. If you ate that, you would live a very long time and be very happy. What about, I would say, 75% of my days, I eat, I go to Chipotle, I get a bowl with white rice, black beans, double chicken, pico, cheese, and lettuce. That's it.

Ditch the black beans. They're full of omega-6 fats. What about pinto? Could I get the refried or the pinto ones? Pinto are better than black. Black beans are one of the highest plant toxin forms of beans. I would say away from those, but I wouldn't want to eat very many beans either. I don't think they're pressure cooking them, are they?

If you're going to eat beans, they need to be pressure cooked. otherwise they just shred your biology. Most restaurants do not know how to cook that stuff. And beans are poverty food. They're great to survive on, but look at where beans were invented. Go down to Peru. I've been down there.

The average height is like five feet because you can survive on it, but it's not enough protein. It's not a complete protein. I like your double chicken, but I'd rather do double steak. Have you ever done anything that was dangerous in terms of biohacking that you later found out

or maybe wanted to push the limits a bit? Oh, yeah. I've almost died a couple times. How? Well, one time I did something called a hydro dissection on my vagus nerve. It's when they inject lytocane around the vagal nerve on your neck, and it floats it so it's not stuck to your tissues, and this is good for your sympathetic nervous system.

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

enormous numbers of products that work for some people, but maybe not for you because of the personalization. And there are a bunch of scammers out there making stuff. So you really can't say anti-aging products is like saying, does breathing work? Well, are you breathing exhaust or are you breathing clean air. There are different things, right? So I would say that there are profoundly effective longevity products with clinical studies that back them. One of my favorite companies there is called Qualia. Kauly has way more researchers and scientists than most supplement companies, and I've held on some of their formulations. And their stuff works. I mean, take it, you measure it. And they only launch a product after they have clinicals that show it works. So I'd say there are legitimate products that truly work.

And there are some people who are saying, well, I threw this crap together and I have a third-party white label manufacturer and I'm going to pretend like it's a good product. And this is a problem in every industry. Somebody makes something good and then somebody makes a crappy disposable version of it that looks about the same and sells a knockoff. So what's worth it for people to buy then? Like what specific things if they want to either stay or reverse aging? What age are you? Me? Well, I mean, the first of my first.

asking for because someone who's 65 and someone who's 25 should allocate their resources very differently, right? So the lowest return or the lowest cost, highest return on investment would be put some sea salt or some electrolyte in your water and have some creatine. Because those are so cheap. Take vitamin dake. And that's vitamin dake.com dakee. And that's a specific mix of fat soluble vitamins that direct minerals into yourselves. And on that same site, take minerals 101. Because if you're deficient and minerals and fat soluble vitamins, nothing else works. You go to the gym, you can't make muscle because you don't have zinc. So you just need to get these as foundational, and everyone is deficient in minerals today because our soil is deficient and because superfoods suck minerals out of your bones, and it's dumb. So those are foundational for everyone, and those are cheap, right? And you're saying, okay, what am I going to work on next? So you might want to look at a cognitive enhancing supplement, like the Brain 101 or like the Qualia product called Qualia Mind. Right. And then you might want to look at a sleep product, right? Because what is it you're trying to optimize? And the mistake people make is

they just say, oh, I'm getting overwhelmed. There's just too many things to do. Pick a goal and work on that, right? And take some supplements that do that. If you want foundational longevity stuff, my book, Superhuman, goes through the seven different systems in the body that need maintenance, if you want to live a long time, and which supplements or practices to use for each one. But some of them are very cheap, like intermittent fasting. It's cheaper than you. It's cheaper than you. You know, eating breakfast, so not eat breakfast. There you go. That's going to create autophagy in yourselves. So I'm very respectful of the amount of energy, the amount of suffering, the amount of time, and the amount of money that people are willing to do in order to get a benefit.

And what about when it comes to something like tap water? When you're at a restaurant and they say, do you want tap or, you know, bottled? I just say I want the glass bottle bottled water because that has no microplastic in it to speak of. How bad is tap water for me? It's really bad. I've always been told it's good for you because it has like all the minerals in it. It's not like totally filtered. It has things in it that would be beneficial for you.

I've always just drank tap water. So if we were to measure the tap water you're drinking, it does have dissolved minerals from 100-year-old plumbing with lead in it, with all the stuff from the PBC. There's abundant levels of atrazine, which basically makes froggyl. into hermaphrodites, and it messes with your testosterone in a major way. It has birth control pill residues left in it. It has antibiotics left in it. But are those in any amounts that will actually

make a difference to you? Unfortunately, they are. So why can't that just be taken out by these tap water companies? And they just like run through the filter. Well, if they take it out at the central plant, it'd be very expensive. And then the pipes are not at all clean. So the best thing is get a reverse osmosis unit and take it out before you drink it. And if you're going to a restaurant, that's one of the many reasons not to go to restaurants. But if you're going to go to a restaurant, don't drink the tap water. Either don't drink any water, which seems to be your thing, or drink bottle water. I drink very little water, but then the water I do drink is tap water.

So is that worse? It's not a good call to do it that way. Drinking water is good, but most people, like, eat glasses a day. Did anyone ever tell you how big glasses are? I was assuming it would just be like a cup. They never tell you. It's complete made-up bullshit. And many people, they drink water because they think they're supposed to, and they're actually harming their performance.

I don't drink water without salt or minerals in it ever. And it means I need less water, and it means my brain works all the time. But if I drink two big glasses of water with no electrolyte in it, I can feel a difference in my performance. My body's like, you bastard, you just diluted all the salt in my cells and were essentially salt batteries. So salt is profoundly good for you. And if you're going to drink tap water, you should filter it, man. Like, why take the toxic hit? What do you think of Brian Johnson?

You know, I knew Brian before he got into longevity because of his work with kernel in neuroscience. And it's funny, my big campaign for my longevity book was I spent $2 million to reverse my age by 20 years. I'm going to live to 180. And he's come out, and I'm very happy that he's spent, reports say, $25 million on marketing the longevity movement. We need lots of voices in longevity. So generally I like Brian. I don't do all the things he does. And I don't know that I like all the metrics he uses,

that I have some different ones. But generally, inspiring people to do things that make them live longer is a really good thing. How do you eat when you're traveling? I bring 100 grams of animal protein powder with me when I travel because it's hard to get enough protein on the road. And then I usually intermittent fast in the morning. I make danger coffee in my own hotel room, and I have that for breakfast. Sometimes I'll put protein in it, which doesn't taste great, but I don't care.

And then I'll eat one or two meals a day. Like today, I've had nothing but coffee. And it's what is it, like, 2.30? So. I've had nothing but a new tonic today. Before I get on... I've had nothing but a new tonic today. There you go.

Before I get on the airplane, I'm going to find somewhere that has steak, and I'm going to go eat probably a pout of steak. I'll get on the airplane and fly home. So that's my most important food is protein and fat and everything else is optional. How bad is alcohol for you? Alcohol is really bad for you. It is so pro-cancer, pro-aging. It's just not a good choice. So I have a rule for alcohol.

I only drink alcohol that's older than I am. That means it gets progressively more expensive and harder to find as I get older. So it's rate limiting. The reality, though, like if I'm going to have sushi and, I have a couple shots of high-end sake with it. Who cares? But if you're having it once a week, it's actually affecting your performance for multiple days.

And everyone I know is like, you know, I'm going to go a month without it. Like, wow, my life really did get better. But if you're going to drink, there's a bunch of stuff I've put out there over the years. I put out a big infographic on alcohol. Distilled spirits are much less toxic than wine and beer. Because you're relying on technology to get out the impurity. but wine and beer, you're relying on your liver and kidneys to do it. And if you're going to do it, you want to take glutathione, which is a supplement that protects the liver from alcohol-induced toxicity.

20% of the toxic byproduct of alcohol comes from liver metabolism. The other 80% comes from your gut bacteria. To fix that, there's a genetically engineered probiotic called Z biotic, and you take a little shot of that. And for 24 hours, after you take that, your gut bacteria won't make those toxins from alcohol. So if you're going to drink, number one, it's not a great idea, but drink the hard stuff, take zbiotic, take glutathione, and take some extra electrolytes, and you'll be fine. You do that after you drink. You do the zbiotics ahead of time. You do the glutathion before, during, and or after, and the electrolytes should be before during and after.

And how much of this is in your control versus genetics? Because some people just seem to have zero effect on alcohol. They could just drink whatever they want to, and they are fine the next day. Yeah, they call them alcoholics. So with those people, I mean, there are people like that, like they can't function without, you know. Or no, I'm not saying you can't function without. But like, if I have more than two drinks, I feel it the next day, I am tired, I'm lethargic, I lose my motivation. It's not worth it, but other people could have 10 drinks.

When you were 26, could you do that? Not really. It really started affecting me early, like way earlier than any. I still feel fine. Like I maybe get hung over one out of every 10 times I drink. Most people until their mid-20s handle alcohol really well, it's still ruining your brain, and there's plenty of studies about that. But you don't feel it yet because you have just a lot of resilience. So there is a genetic difference, and there's also just how good is your body at clearing toxins, and some of that's genetic, some of that is what else is in there. So let's say you

stops drinking tap water and you rehydrated your body so that your cells are better. Like if you came to upgrade labs, we'd look at your cell hydration and be like, ugh, and we'd show you what's going on and make it a performance enhancement goal for you. So let's say you start doing your electrolytes in water three times a day.

You might be much more resilient to alcohol. So there's a lot of environmental variables, but you might be Asian. You're not going to tolerate it because there's an Asian gene that makes you not do it. You might have MTHFR, which I do, or some other things that make it harder to process toxins. You could have a leaky gut.

So the more problems you have, the worse alcohol is for you. But you have no problems to drink alcohol, it's still causing damage that we can prove and increasing your risk of cancer. So I would say instead of alcohol, you should do what we do in Austin. Like, eat half a gram of mushrooms at a party. It's probably good for your brain.

It's certainly better than alcohol for your brain and has much less of a downside. How bad are fried foods for your brain? Depends what you fry them in. If they're fried in canola, soybean, and corn, and vegetable oils, they are so bad for your brain, I would actually smoke a cigarette

before I'd eat a plate of french fries because the cigarette, even though it's burning stuff and is bad for your lungs, that only creates about eight hours of inflammation and you're going to get two days of inflammation from the French fries. I just don't eat fried stuff unless I fry it in my own oils.

But why are so many people using this sort of oils then? Because they're cheap, right? Back in about, was it the early 90s? There's a big campaign from the canola oil and soybean oil companies like Crisco. And they're like, let's compete with tropical hard fats. Everyone used tallow because it was a very stable oil.

And tallow is really good for you. It gets rid of fatty liver. So all the french fries were made with that and people were fine. And they switched to these crappy oils and the obesity rates. It's been going up ever since. So they do it because it's cheap. I invested in a company called Zero Acre Farms about five years ago that's doing a fermentation-based oil that's entirely heat,

that costs less than soybean and canola oil. And assuming that their plan works, we should be able to free up millions of acres of prairie land in the U.S. and return it back into just being nature instead of being row after row of corn with dead soil. So we have a big challenge ahead of us to fix our food supply. And one of them is we need a source of oil that doesn't go rancid when you cook it. And that means it needs to be saturated or at least mono-unsaturated.

And we can do it with tech. we just have to have the motivation, which means we talk about the problem. What the big food industry does is they just try to say there's no problem, despite all the evidence. And thank God there's enough other people sharing this. Vonnihari, Food Babes, a good friend, RFK is out there doing this. Callie Means, Jason Carp, these are all friends. And we're out there changing the food supply right now. They just pulled all these petroleum dyes that had no business in food.

They just announced they're going to fix that. So I'm a part of that small group of people who's just put. pushing and pushing and pushing on how do we fix this. And that oil has to change. Yeah, I saw that bill that they're trying to ban food dyes. No, just petroleum-based food dies and some other toxic ones. What is that? Nicotine.

So what is the, you know, it's so funny. I see a lot of people, like Alex Hormosey. Yeah. He likes chewing nicotine gum because he says it helps him. Focus. It's so funny because growing up, everybody learns that nicotine is like, well, maybe not nicotine in a vacuum. But like, you know, the way by which, yeah, we all assume that nicotine is just really, really bad. So what do you have to say to, like, that?

10 years ago, I found a guy named Dr. Nicotine, at least that's what I call him. His name's Andrew. He's from Vanderbilt University. He published the first study in 1986 showing that pharmaceutical nicotine but not smoking reverses Alzheimer's disease. And he's come out with like a dozen papers since then. and I've been sharing on the podcast. It's in my brain book. It's in my longevity book.

Nicotine is neuroprotective. Nicotine mimics exercise in the body by enhancing PGC1 alpha. Nicotine was protective against COVID for a very specific reason. Nicotine helps with paracarditis. Nicotine reduces your risk or treats Parkinson's and MS in addition to Alzheimer's. It's a mitochondrial stimulant. And if I was going to get another tattoo, if this one's caffeine, this one would be nicotine. I don't smoke. Tobacco's not good for you.

Low-dose pharmaceutical nicotine is an amazingly effective longevity molecule, and it's a major new tropic. Are there any downsides? Yeah, and do you feel, like, addicted to it? Like, if you don't chew nicotine gum for, like, six hours, you're like, ah, you know, I kind of need to get my nicotine gum out. Like the scratch. Yeah, you guys get a lot.

I usually sit a little bit. Yeah, like deep neck scratch. So cigarettes are terribly addictive. and that's because they add a bunch of different compounds that increase addiction dramatically. Nicotine itself in multiple studies has a three-day physiological washout period, same as caffeine. So you will feel physiological brain fog and nastiness if you're used to taking nicotine and you just stop cold turkey. If you want to stop, you just taper down. And I've done this, I don't know, five or six times.

I go off it for a couple months. My brain works so much better with nicotine. I love the stuff. And I consider it just part of my performance enhancement stack. So I don't do nicotine. I've never really tried nicotine. Do you want to try some now? No. There was one time where I was like, I was at a party and someone had this thing called snus.

Oh, yeah. And they offered me some of that. And I tried it. And it was just way, like, like, it, I took it out after 45 seconds because it felt like it was burning a hole in my lip. And then I felt nauseous. Like, I felt like I was going to get sick. And then I kind of started getting nervous.

And it was just a horrible, horrible experience. That's hilarious. And so, like, that's coming from someone. I've never tried a zin, never had a cigarette. Like, I've tried a couple cigars and stuff. But it was way too much in every experience that I've had, really, with nicotine. Like, it's not been a pleasant one. You may be someone who just doesn't benefit from it.

There are a few people like that. It's also dose dependent. And snooose is, that's just a pouch. It's just the Swedish or Norwegian word for it. And I got it from a Swedish person. There you go. I was married to a, weed for a long time. So what's going on with that stuff is you were probably getting six or

eight milligrams, which is a big dose for a first timer. And what I'm using right now is a three milligram and I take half of it. So I'm getting one and a half milligrams from nicotine. A cigarette has up to 20 milligrams in it. So this is a low dose. And if I quit taking it, I would feel tired for a few days. And my brain likes it. It literally protects your neurons. What do you think about taking small doses of Adderall? That's really not good for you. Why? Ducing Adderall is just going to mess with a neurotransmitters. It's just not a good beneficial drug. You're much better off to use modafinil. Where do you buy it? Madoffin? Yeah. It's a prescription drug. So you go to the doctor and say, I have shift worker's sleep disorder because I have to stay up all night for my podcast and can you please write it and a good doctor will do it. If not, you just buy it from India, like everything. That's safe? We buy it from India. Like go to, like, how do you? No, you can buy any pharmacy.

What's just like you want online? From India. Well, India or Canada or somewhere. There's multiple sites. How do you, like, doesn't it get, you know, don't they stop it at the border? And the law in the U.S. says really clearly, you can import a 90-day supply of any medication that's not illegal for personal use from anywhere on the planet. So it's not illegal for.

It's, I think it's more of a quality issue. I looked at this when I was getting finasteride and I looked at how much it cost from India. It was like a fraction of what they're selling it for here. And I never wanted to do that just because I'm like, well, I'd rather pay more. At least know I'm getting the actual thing and not like, because I'd have no idea. You could have got some like thick Indian hair. That would have been nice, right? That would have been a good thing, man.

I got to warn you about fanasteride. Do you know about the side effects there? I've seen some of the side effects, but I'd not experience a single thing. So I'm glad you're not experiencing a meaningful percentage, maybe as high as 5% of people who go on that stuff, get chemically castrated. Like, their sex hormones just go away. And it doesn't come back when you quit taking it. So. Yeah, see, I went down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. I tried it. And you're fine. Zero difference. So I would just say topical monoxide and caffeine is probably a better choice. And there's a new thing called one skin that has a new peptide. They just launched it. Like, I interviewed them about it two weeks ago.

40% more hair and 40% thick. hair in six months from their peptide that you just put on topically. So I would just be careful. When I, years ago, I tried a Phanastoride derivative and I used it just topically on my hair for two weeks. Total edy after two weeks. I was like, what? I didn't know what it was.

I'm like, what is it going on here? And so I stopped it and it took about six months to come back. It was scary. I was like, is this ever going to come back? So just for anyone listening, if you try Finasteride and you have any changes in your actions, you should stop that right away because you just don't want to be one of those 5%. There's whole Reddit forums full of people who are damaged by that. So it's risky. Yeah.

You're okay. I went through the same thing, the same Reddit stuff. And then I talked to so many people who said they're on it. And not a single person knew anyone that had a side effect. And it's just these online stories. Oh, it does happen. It's actually documenting clinical studies. He's like, I know doctors have treated people like that, and I had that effect happen.

It's real. And the actual incidence, it's hard to know the reporting. So up to 5% seems real. So if you know 100 people on it, do you think you even know that many people on it? I know probably 20. Right. So maybe one person, right? Maybe that's me, right?

Could be that one. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, that's a hellish side effect. So for anyone who's listening, you should probably start up the docs with an oxidil and caffeine in adenosate. There's a bunch of stuff or one skin you put on your head. And then if it's still not working, add that new finesteroid and then see if you have any changes. It's called one skin? Yeah.

And do you just buy that over the counter? Is it like an India sort of? No, they mail it to you. It's not even prescription. But the research is incredible. And that's safe? Oh, it's totally safe. It's a peptide.

Like, it's a signaling molecule. Very safe. So why aren't more people using it? because it just got launched two weeks ago. Then I feel like I'm being a guinea pig for this thing that just got launched. No, it's been in testing for two years. And the peptide they're using has been used topically for about five years now. And I've interviewed their PhD biochemists a couple times on my show over the years.

And what was happening is there's all these breakthrough innovations in longevity. And you just don't hear about it, but they're happening. It's all happening at the same time. So for that peptide to be discovered, they used AI. and they used just their background in biochemistry, they came out with 600 candidate molecules for stimulating collagen synthesis. They tested them on gene cell chips,

like where they have actually skin cells growing on chips to see what happens when you do this, and they found this one peptide that they predicted what work was the top performer of 600. Then they ran clinical trials for a couple of years, then they launched facial stuff in body lotion, and then they ran clinical trials for two years on hair. So the best,

longevity companies are treating this almost like a pharmaceutical dev process, but they're not the only one. There's like dozens of companies looking at doing this internally, doing this all over. This way, this is the renaissance for longevity, for cognitive enhancement, for biohacking. Right. And that's just one little example. And if I can get a peptide with 40% more hair and 40% more thickness or a drug that might chemically castrate me, well, the drug industry is going to be pissed. I don't want their drug, right? But I'd rather do a peptide. And so this innovation is just being unlocked. And then when it comes to the drugs, why do you have to go to a doctor to get a permission slip for something that you already want or that you already take and you pay the doctor and you're inconvenienced and the doctor's

inconvenienced because it's a waste of their time too, but at least they get paid by the insurance company, then you go to the pharmacist and beg for permission for the pharmacist to agree with whatever the doctor said to give you a little bottle of shit that you could have just had sent to your house. So right now we're just breaking the chains of medical mafia behavior. because you have a right to buy any drug you want because your biology is yours, and you don't need your daddy or your mommy to tell you where you're allowed to take. Like, that's absurd. How important is strength training or cardio for longevity?

Strength training is really important for longevity. VO2 max is important for longevity, but VO2 max doesn't mean you need to do cardio. And that sounds a little bit weird. What I do for cardio is based on AI. it takes 15 minutes a week, and that's three, five-minute sessions, and in them you never sweat, it's not hard. That gives you six times better results than an hour a day of cardio. So cardio-resportatory fitness is important, but not as important as muscle strength and then muscle mass,

right? And there are some people out there saying, oh, V-O-2 max, you have to do Zone 2 training for six hours a week. Those are actually the same people who take statins still for longevity, which is nuts. So what you'll find is that raising VO2 Max is simple if you know the algorithms, and we use AI for that. And strength training once or twice a week, put on some muscle mass be strong. And those are really important. But going to the gym for an hour, day, every day is probably not even good for you. Most people over-train and go to the gym every day.

I see it over and over. This guy's like, I've been going for 20 years and I've had both shoulders replaced and have a big pot belly. I'm like, yeah, that's a cortisol over-training. small percentage of people that go to the gym that often, that, like, that actually, you know, break down their muscles. Oh, it's not because very few people go to the gym that often. The ones who do, that's what happens, right? That happened to me, too. I went 18 months, six days a week. At the end of it, I'm still fat, right? And so overtraining is a major thing.

So people either under-train or they over-train. And one of my goals here is to tell people, here's the minimum effective training that you can do in an hour or two a week that hits all of the things for longevity, including training your brain, training your strength, training your cardio in very small amounts of time. And it's all powered by AI. That's what Upgrade Labs does. Because I don't want to spend my time in the gym. I got shit to do, but I will, if necessary. What about doing a dopamine detox? Oh, those are fun. Is there actually a benefit to doing this? Yeah, the guy who invented that is a friend, Cam, who runs Maximus, one of the testosterone enhancement companies. And manipulating dopamine is one of the things in heavily meditated that's particularly important.

You could do no caffeine, no nicotine, no spicy or delicious foods, and no stimulation for a week. You might as well go fast in a cave if you're going to do that. And there's benefits to it. But there's another hack that's new to the world of biohacking that I'm introducing in heavily meditated. And it's called bicep. And it's not like this kind of bicep on your arm, brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And this might be a lot. might be better than a dopamine fast. Monks used to whip themselves. Self-flagellation, have you heard of this?

Yogis lay on beds of nails. And I used to think, well, the monks think they're sinners, they're punishing themselves, the yogis are laying on beds of nails to prove their good yogis. That's not why they do this at all. It's because brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain for one to three minutes,

if you do that, without harming your body, it resets your dopamine sensitivity by about 250%. It means it takes less dopamine to make. motivate you for the rest of the day. So the monk was self-flagellating because it made it easier to stay in monk mode. And the yogi did it because he was a better yogi because it took less dopamine to motivate him. And biohackers, we take a cold shower, get in ice water, or Texans, which I also am, you eat some spicy peppers. Humans have been doing this forever. And there's a rich history in all the different lineage I've studied. So doing something that's painful for two or three minutes, it works.

So is your recommendation the cold plunge of like something painful or should you like actually just be like to whipping yourself? I like to hire people to whip me because it really just is more fun that way. You've ever tried that? Do you, are they a type 1 or 2 person? You definitely want a win-win scenario there. So you type 1. I just ask my girlfriends. Yeah, if you have a friend who can help, no.

There's other benefits from cold plunges. there's metabolic benefits, and there's a separate dopamine benefit that no one's talked about in cold plunges. So if you're like, I'm not motivated a day, do something that hurts, right? Intentionally hurts. And it's funny, cold plunge is a great way to do it. One tribe even uses eye drops that are super painful. And you put it in a mean like, ah, really hurts. And then you get really clear vision from it. But the exposure to pain is what caused the neurochemistry to change. So eat a hop a neuro, like do whatever's going to work for you. Would you ever want to freeze yourself if they had the ability and then come back 500 years from now?

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

choosing to believe in reincarnation is the only rational thing to do. All right. So what happens when you die? Well, let me finish the point about why you should choose it. I'll tell you what. The reason you want to choose it,

if you're right, you're going to live a good life, but you'll be less afraid of dying. If you're wrong, you'll be less afraid of dying, and you'll live a better life with less fear. So it doesn't matter whether reincarnations will not just choose to believe it

because it turns down the amount of energy body puts into fear of stupid shit. You're going to die because you're alive. Like being born is a life-threatening condition, period. The planet will come to an end, the universe will come to an end, we will all die, and losing your shit about that is dumb.

So let's just tell ourselves a story that reincarnation is real. But is it real? I think so. I've had plenty of esoteric mystical experiences, and I've worked with hundreds of people who have them when they just turn off fear. Like, oh, my God, look, what's going on?

So what happens when you die? Your energy continues. And if you want a really good scientific-based perspective on that, read a book on biocentrism. Have you heard of this? Biosynchristrism is something that comes out of the field of quantum physics. Mark Gober writes some really good books about it.

Robert Lanzah does. But you can look at quantum physics and prove that time is a fantasy that we make up in our meat bodies. And the implications of this, which is provable with hard science, is that death is also just a change of state, but it isn't the end.

So your energy has to go somewhere. And the perspective that we have is you go to what in Buddhism we call Bardot, called the afterlife, and you kind of review what you did, and then you come back, if you're dumb enough to come back.

And that's my perspective. Now, I've trained in shamanism, I've studied with gurus from many different lineages and all that sort of stuff. There's some disagreement about small details there, but that's what most of it is, and the Christians will say, you know, you go to heaven or hell or things like that.

Those are reflections of a similar system, I'll put it that way. you know, in the in the Buddhist teachings, they say, oh, yeah, there's 74 kinds of hell. Actually, I think it's 72. But they're different hells, right? So you can get stuck when you die. But when things work, you don't get stuck. When you get stuck, you get stuck. So there's all kinds of stuff that isn't readily apparent to most people. But there are some percentage of people who regularly see things like that. And they agree. So I don't believe any one person. but when you have someone who says, you know, let's take 100 people,

let's teach them how to leave their body at will, let's not have them talk to each other, let's have them all go out and explore the world they see in these altered states and come back and compare notes. If they all see the same thing, I think the word for that is science. And there's multiple people

who've done that kind of experiment all over the world, and they come up with the same results. So I'm just going to go with what the data shows. What's a question that you wished more people would ask you? Not a lot of people ask about, like why I do what I do.

I think they think that it's because of money or because of some kind of like an ego thing. And I'm not motivated by like I want to feed a billion people or whatever. I started my blog and started sharing all this information. I just wanted five people not to go through all the suffering I went through. And that's been my motivation. I didn't make a list. I didn't do any of the stuff you're supposed.

to do. I'm like, I'm just going to share the stuff because people need to know. And it was like two decades of accumulating all this knowledge, both the spiritual stuff and heavily meditated, as well as all the physiological longevity stuff. And that's still what motivates me today. I mean, I can probably stop it. And like, so many people are just walking around feeling like shit and treating each other like shit because they don't know how good they could feel. Right. And sometimes it's a harder problem. Sometimes it's a software problem. It's just not that hard anymore. So I'm motivated because I think we need an upgrade as a species and that it's not that hard to do it. So I just keep doing it because I think it matters.

But it isn't because I'm seeking recognition. Like I tried the fame thing in my early 20s and it doesn't do anything. It's actually inconvenient. So, yeah, the motivation thing is really interesting. It's just I have suffered greatly and I would prefer other people not go through all the crap I went through because it's not fun. And it's totally avoidable. So that's why I do what I do. Why do you think a lot of the claims that you make are so controversial?

Everyone has a lens on reality that is functional for them. And we do that to make ourselves feel safe. So anytime someone penetrates your lens on reality, it creates cognitive dissonance, which makes you feel unsafe. And it doesn't make you think you're unsafe. It makes your body feel unsafe. Like, oh, that shift in my worldview. The number of people who got outraged when I told them to put butter in coffee is,

is insane. Okay, butter is a safe food, but people literally thought they were like putting it in the blender like, oh my God, can I really do that the first time? Like I'm walking on, like what? We've been programmed. So the other thing is people get really mad when I say, I'm going to do something has been done before. You know who else? Really piss people off? The right brothers. We're going to fly. And then, in fact, I have a video I made where you have all these people saying, it's never going to happen, then they do it. In fact, every great leap in in human capability starts with the people who are from the old generation saying it can't be done. I have the audio of the chairman of the FCC saying that satellites will never be used for communication.

We have Einstein saying that the power of the atom will never be harnessed to make electricity. Right. So what happens is humans are usually backwards looking, and it's always been that way. but we are entering a world where it's not just exponential, it's double exponential. So the future looks very different than the past. And people get mad because there are rules that they've been following their whole life.

And some of those people, their whole career is based on enforcing rules that are bad for humanity. And how dare this computer hacker come in and say something different? And I'm like, how dare you not be curious? Because the way science works is if you have one data point that disproves your theory, the theory is still useful. It's just not accurate. But what's happening in the world now is you have this belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's anti-science. Science says a claim requires the same amount

of evidence no matter if it's extraordinary or not. If you think it's extraordinary, maybe it's because you're an idiot, right? No claim is extraordinary. The data is the data. So when I come up there and I say, I have data. If you blend butter in your coffee, it really does something for you. I was right, it works. About seven years later, I funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollock for 50 grand. And he's been studying basic water chemistry inside cells. And he said, huh, we just determined that butter oil and MCT oil create the largest amount of structured water called Exclusion Zone Water in cells. Now, there's a whole bunch of nonsense, structured water stuff that's out there. This is stuff you're you can see on a microscope. For your cells to function to make ATP, they need to change the viscosity of water a little bit. It turns out the Tibetans, who came up with this idea,

they would churn butter, and tea in a butter churn for a while before they would drink it. And I'm like, why would they do that? Well, it doesn't work if you don't blend it. So could I make the claim based on an observation and a testable observation without knowing why it works? Yes, I could. Why did it make people mad? I don't know. But I think it's because they felt unsafe because the world might have been different than the safe little story. they had. The reality is our bodies cannot sense 99.999% of the actual reality happening out there. You got to be comfortable with that. So if you're to explain in 30 seconds, someone with an unlimited budget that feels fine, that wants to just go out and get every single piece of data that they can

possibly want to improve their health, what would, what should they do? Well, you're going to spend about 10,000, maybe even $50,000 on lab tests just to get all the data, right? You'd want to do a whole body MRI for sure. You want to do a full genetic, a full human genome, not just the 23 and me stuff. And then you want to get your cardio-respatory fitness and things like that done. And once you have that stuff, you want to get a QEEG, which is part of what we do at 40 years of end, to what's going outside your brain. And the combination of those things are going to give us a really, really, good picture. You have your toxin load, your mitochondrial function, your hormone levels, your inflammatory molecule levels, whether you have an aneurysm or any other thing going on in

your body that you don't know about early stage cancer. And based on that, what are your goals? And once we have the data, we're going to sit down and say, okay, is your goal, you want a brain that's way better, right? Do you want more stress management, more capacity, more resilience? Do you want to live longer? Do you want to increase your bone density? Whatever it is, There's a path to doing that that we understand now that we didn't understand 10 years ago. And it's ridiculous what's possible. I had surgery on my foot for an old yoga injury, and they had to cut through the bone on the foot all the way through it. And so I was awake for it because it was interesting and it was numb anyway.

And you hear the bone saw, it's like, booz. And the doctor looks and he goes, I'm having a hard time cutting through his bone. Like, is this guy even human? And I did a podcast with him about it. And afterwards, he's like, Dave, what is up with your bone density? I've never seen this. He said, I operate on someone half your age and their bones cut like butter and I can't even get through your bones with my saw.

Well, that's biohacking. Bone density is one of the biggest indicators of a healthy metabolism and they're going to live a long time. And it comes from the right nutrient intake, avoiding toxins, and then exposing the body to things that make it harder and stronger. So if you have a big budget, you can totally add 20, 30 years to your lifespan and they'll be really good years. And you see these cowardly people in the field of longevity saying, oh, it's not about extending human life. It's just about health span. You're going to die at 86 the same way you wear,

but at least you'll be healthy until you die. And I'm like, why? Like, how dare you call yourself a longevity doctor and say you can't extend human life? The goal is to extend our life and to extend our quality of life, both. And people say you can only extend the quality of your life and you're going to die at the same age as everyone else. Why? They never have an answer. So let's set the goals right. Double lifespan and feel

way better when you're 150 than you do when you're 50. Why not? We have the technology. We have the tools. It's possible. And there are people doing it, including me. I love it.

Cool, Dave. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for a long interview. That was fun. Yeah, absolutely. We'll link to your information down below in the description. And check out heavily meditated. This is my most important book

of all the ones I've written. It is just coming out now. People spend $20,000 to spend five days of me to learn this stuff, and I put it in the book. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you to everyone for watching this show. It means so, so much. Until next time.