The Jordan Harbinger Show - 151: Dave Asprey | Biohacking the Way to a Bulletproof Life

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

Dave Asprey (@bulletproofexec) is a self-described biohacker, CEO and founder of Bulletproof 360, Inc., host of the Bulletproof Radio podcast, and author of Game Changers, Head Strong, and The Bulletproof Diet. What We Discuss with Dave Asprey: How Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey biohacked himself from a 300-pound heart attack waiting to happen to 9.6 percent body fat. How a prenatal condition, bullying, a thyroid condition, and toxic mold collaborated to bring Dave's health to a point so low even his doctor couldn't help him. What is your immune system's "memory" forgetting, and what role does mitochondria play in how you feel? What does Dave believe are the top two causes of autoimmunity, and what can we do to guard ourselves when our body can't even identify the enemy? Why does Dave put butter in his coffee instead of milk or cream like normal people, and what's the difference between real Bulletproof coffee and what the small-town cafe on the other side of the world is trying to peddle as "Bulletproof" coffee? And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. My friend Dave Asprey is one of the guys that essentially pioneered the biohacking industry. In fact, I don't even think we really talked much about biohacking before he came on the scene. He spent over a million dollars and 20 years, it's probably millions at this point, and 20 years biohacking. And he scaled that to a nine-figure business over the past few years, which has just been incredible to watch. Everyone's heard of Bulletproof. I've gone to a bunch of different countries. Australia, they got bulletproof coffee. It's just everywhere. And today, we're talking about brain kryptonite. This is the focus of his new book. It's called Headstrong. By Brain Cryptonite, I mean, we're talking about things like increasing energy in your

brain, why this is important, and we focus on getting rid of brain fog and being able to stay focused for a longer period of time. I found those skills particularly useful here. I don't do health-related episodes. You all know that, especially because I'm no ever. expert in this area. But I wanted to help get the word out about Dave's work because I think we can all use a bit of a boost in the brain department especially. And if you want to know how I managed to create this network for myself of incredible guests, great friends, well, I do this deliberately and I

created a course that is free for you about how to start that process. That's over at Jordanharbinger.com slash level one. All right, here's Dave Asprey. Dave, tell me your backstory because you're one of the guys that essentially pioneered the biohacking movement, unless I just don't know about everything that came beforehand, which is possible. But I know that in the beginning, the on-ramp was Bulletproof Executive. I don't even know if you still have that brand. And then a handful of other people who were doing things that I can't even remember. And then suddenly I took a nap and woke up and Bulletproof Coffee was all over the world. What happened is I spent 20 years doing research and a nonprofit for anti-aging, talking with all these functional medicine people

and other experts in nutrition. And I realized there's a whole bunch of bodybuilders over here and pro athletes over here and Navy SEALs over here and astronaut recovery people here and neurologists and none of them talk. And I wanted full control of my own biology and I said, we've got to have a name for this. So I came up with this name biohacking and I wrote it in my first blog post. I made this infographic about it. And I didn't trademark the name. And I said, you know, I want this to be a community. I trademarked bulletproof and bulletproof executives. That's my company. And it's in the biohacking field. Started the first biohacking conference six years ago. 100 people show up. And last year we had, I think about 3,000 people, maybe a little bit under

3,000, 2,800 or something. And we're having our next biohacking conference in April 5th in L.A. and what happened is this year Miriam Webster's added biohacking to the dictionary. I saw that. Yeah. And I'm in the definition too, which is crazy. Oh, really? Oh, that's pretty awesome. So they're calling me like on whatever that was, Fox News or something on a TV, like the father

of biohacking, which is really cool. I've never been in a dictionary before. Yeah. You know, you can make the Forbes list, but you really can't really, making the dictionary is even harder. I was kind of a surreal moment. Yeah. Somebody texted me.

Like, did you see this? Like, no, it's awesome. Yeah. So the idea is, is you can change the environment around you and inside of you to get control of your own biology. The first use of biohiking was in 92, but it was more about inserting jellyfish genes into your cat, so it'll glow and things like that. Also cool, though.

Pretty cool. Yeah. When are you going to try that on yourself? I was going to do that, like, to my sister when I was young, but it didn't work. It didn't work. You tried it. It didn't work? I just colored her with yellow markers, but I was poor.

Fair. Fair. But she still glowed, at least for a little while. I remember when I was taking those glow sticks as a kid that you'd get on Halloween, and I would pour them all over myself, and I'd be like, look, I'm glowing, and my mom would freak out, because who knows what's in those things, there's no way. Like, it's in a thick plastic shell because you don't want your kid to chew it open. Right. But I managed. I am determined.

I've bathed myself in that stuff more times than I should have. Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine. I don't think that counts as biohacking, but it was preliminary. No, I mean, it might be, it might be the opposite in a lot of ways. you also had to lose a bunch of weight and everything, right? I mean, how did you originally get into this? I know it was not because you're like, I'm so healthy. I would be even healthier.

It was sort of the opposite. Yeah. I had arthritis diagnosed when I was 14 in my knees. Is that genetic then? No. It's probably environmental. And no one knew what it was at the time. I was obese.

I hit 300 pounds when I was about 23. 300 pounds. For people who are watching, watching us. Do you mind if I ask how much you weigh now? I weigh 203 pounds right now and I'm 9.6% body fat and I have 19.4 pounds of fat on my body. So you used to have like 119.4, give or take. It's hard to know if it was, give or take. It's hard to know how much that was inflammation versus fat. Like that's how much weight I lost. But I'm sure that a lot of those inflammation. But I also, I was a 46 inch waist. I'm a 33 inch waste now. I'm actually lower than I was as a junior in high

school. Wow. Which is phenomenal. 45, not bad. Not bad. I also, I got other, quote, diseases of aging. So I'm 26, working in Silicon Valley. I made $6 million dollars when I was 26. It was at the company that held Google's first server. I was a co-founder of a part of that company. And we ended up, you know, starting the data center in cloud computing business. And I started in brain fog to the point I bought disability insurance because I wouldn't hire myself because I couldn't remember anything. Oh, man. And you're, Were you coding? I was more of an architect.

I ended up running a program for the University of California to teach engineers how to build the internet. So it's like, how should it work? How must it works? I was a coder originally, but then I became a technology architect kind of guy. Probably helps to know how to remember things and keep things straight in your head at that point. It was terrifying, actually. And also my emotions would just get all over the place. And then I said something's wrong.

And I said, I'm going to just exercise. I'm going to lose the weight no matter what. I've had a couple knee surgeries by then. And I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week. And after a year, actually 18 months of that, I didn't lose any weight. I could max all the machines. And I realized I eat less than all my friends. And I work out more than all my friends.

And I'm fatter than all my friends. And I thought, it's a moral failing. I should eat less lettuce leaves or something. And what it was was I was eating the wrong stuff. And there were environmental factors that are involved. And I fired my doctor when he told me vitamin C would kill me and that maybe I should lose weight. when I told them what I did, he just looked me like he knew I was lying. I was clearly leaving just

stuff in Snickers bars out. And it's very common. Doctors are taught this. And I'm like, okay, no one's going to help me. I'm just going to hack this. And fortunately, I am a computer hack. So I stayed up every night and I would just read PubMed. And I would take, by the way, I lost my $6 million two years after I made it. So I haven't. Oh, classic silicon value. Yeah. It was a great couple of years, but I would just buy anything I thought would help. And I dug really deep. I learned about electrical currents on the body and the first infrared light for the brain almost 20 years ago, EEG neurofeedback. And then I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group that let me talk to to people three times in my age who were reversing the symptoms I had. I was diagnosed with

high risk of stroke and heart attack and pre-diabetes before I was 30. Wow. You were super unhealthy. I was trash. Are there people in your family that are that unhealthy or? No. I mean, my mom's side of the family isn't particularly healthy. There's a lot of autoimmunity. Because how did you get there? You know, how did you get that unhealthy stress? What else? Stress is probably a part of it, but it was a lot of environmental stress. So there's two big factors. One of them is if you're sympathetic dominant or you have a strong fight or flight response,

basically if you're anxious. Yeah. And for me, we traced that back. I know exactly where that came from. It comes from two places. It's common entrepreneurs. The most common one is if you're bullied. Yeah, okay.

So sign up any computer guy for that one. Pretty much. I mean, we go to Mastermind Talks with Jason. or any of these big entrepreneurial conferences, you ask around, everyone in the room was bullied. It's just how it works. And then you're like, I got to prove something. So I had some of that. And also, I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped on my neck.

Oh, I've heard of a lot of people. Yeah. And I actually got to work with the woman who invented for 30 years. She's run the group on this. She didn't invent it, but she documented and progressed the science on pre and perinatal trauma. So I came into the world, ready to kill, thinking he was trying to kill me, and I never stopped. Gotcha.

And it also affected my ability to make connection. with other people because you're like, I'm alone, like nothing safe. Sure. And I ditched all that in my like early 30s. I did a lot of personal development work. So that was a part of it. But the biggest part, I grew up in a basement that had had a water leak and there was toxic mold in the basement.

So in addition to all this weird stuff, autoimmunity, I would have nosebleeds every day. I had rashes and asthma and just all this weird stuff. And now that I've done a documentary on toxic mold, I've interviewed all the top experts and started a company that helps to solve that problem and even eliminated mold in the Bulletproof Coffee Beans. I understand exactly the biology of this stuff. And so what happened to me is I got Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid condition.

A lot of entrepreneurs have it. Yeah. It's so funny. I was just going to say, I know, like, this seems to be the thing that everyone is either being diagnosed with now and that it's because they didn't know how to find it before or it's more common or it's just a bias, confirmation bias on my part. I love it that you said that, though, because I interviewed a ton of people on my show and wrote a book called Game Changers that's just coming out.

And one of the rules, these are 46 laws based on my interview and just my love of Robert Green's work. I know you just interviewed Robert Green. Yeah. So a hero of mine. And this idea that what do all of these high performers do, who I've had on the show, and some of the mutual friends, people who have been on your show. But I asked them these questions. And one of the things that came out of it is that I'm not going to paraphrase the law exactly right for memory because of it.

because there's 46 of them. But the idea is that if you burn the candle at both ends, you don't get that back. And what happens as entrepreneurs or just high-stressed people, when you hit a certain emotional or work-stress thing and you don't sleep and you're flying all over the place and even if you're over-exercising and especially with environmental insults like that. So my entire life. Well, yeah, this is like a indemnity. Once you hit that wall and then you get a little car accident or you get a virus or, you know,

a family member dies, another stress. it pushes you over and then autoimmunity turns on. So people like you and me, we're more likely to have our immune system start attacking our body. And the first thing that gets attacked is your thyroid quite often. Why is that the case? I don't know why the thyroid is. I think we know why your immune system does that. But the deal here is really straightforward from talking to all these people and just having to force myself to the thinking, just structured in the book, is that you can push really hard and then recover. And you push hard and recover. And what I did, I'll just turn the volume all the way up and just leave it there.

Just hold the slower to the floor. I don't need to recover. I'm fine. Yeah, right? I'll just... I'm young. Yeah, I'll just push harder. It's a willpower thing.

And so what you end up doing is you permanently put the brakes on. Once you start doing that, all the energy that should go into repairing yourselves goes into attacking yourselves. And you can undo a lot of that. And I've managed to turn off my Hashimoto's antibodies. But here's the deal. Just as a thing for high performers, the best people in the world, they push really hard. And then they recover like maniacs and they push.

hard they recover. And the ones who are running from something, you know, I have to prove I'm good enough. I'm for run away from failure. The way I made my $6 million and lost my $6 million with that kind of a mindset, that's what breaks you. And that was a part of my issue. So I had a chemical assault from the toxic mold that was in my bedroom. And I had emotional stress. And then, you know, you go to work and I'm going to push really hard. And then you go through a bad breakup and things like that. And all of a sudden, your body just starts to betray you. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Dave Asprey. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you

solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Dave Asprey. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash subscribe. And now back to our show with Dave Asprey.

Why do we have AutoAMe? And I never quite understood this. It doesn't, there's nothing readily coming to me that says, so I'm really stressed out, therefore my body should attack itself. Like, what is the process that's happening here? I realize you're not a doctor, but you know all about the particular. I mean, I'm a New York Times science author at least. I have a good.

Yeah, you should have a good understanding of this. I have not written about the immune system specifically, more about mitochondria, which are the power plants in the cells. My last big book was based on. I remember that from sixth grade biology. Yeah, exactly. These guys, they're ancient bacteria that sends the environment around you. And they're trying to figure out, is this a stressful situation or is this not?

And they're doing it on a cell-by-cell basis. And that can roll up into their interpreting stress that maybe you wouldn't think of a stress, but they already got the signal before you had a chance to think about it. And that's definitely a part of it because they're the ones of the first line responders. And we also know, based on the work of a doctor named Candace Purd, she's a researcher who's passed away, who discovered the opioid receptor in our brain. So a very celebrated figure in science. and she went from this hardcore Western rationalist approach to more of a very balanced

Eastern and Western approach. And she actually showed in her work called the molecules of emotion that your immune system has a memory of its own. And what tends to happen is that in the case of, let's say, a toxic mold, it creates compounds that cause your white blood cells, your immune system, to get hyperaggressive. And it oftentimes sensitizes your white blood cells to the proteins that line. say your thyroid or very commonly your nerve sheep called a myelin binding protein. Yeah. And so because these are molecular mimics, you get that. And it's also well shown that if

you learn to meditate, if you relax, you increase your high rate variability, you learn how to not just think you're chilling, but actually chill, that it reduces inflammation in the immune system. The immune system is kind of a mimic of what's going on inside our brain, but the exact mechanisms of autoimmunity, once we crack that, it's going to change the world. In fact, last weekend, I was at the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit with Peter Diamandis, and one of the big X prizes that I think got nominated for next year was funding, you know, a 10 or a $20 million prize specifically to deal with autoimmunity. I believe the number one cause of autoimmunity is environmental toxic mold because I've seen

it over and over and it's such an endemic problem. And the number two cause is it's either hate or stress. They go together. Yeah, they do. It's a psychological emotion. spiritual thing. That's part of it. I know you've spent like a million bucks just, I was going to insert a really crude joke here, but I want messing with your own biology and biohacking yourself over the last 20 years. And I think that's pretty fascinating because a lot of people

who are in this field, they will take that sample size of one and then say, here's all this stuff we're going to do. Luckily, your sample size seems to be enormous right now because I just got back from Australia and every cafe had bulletproof coffee. Some of them are real. Yeah. I was like, is it really the same beans? And then they're just like, no, we just take, you know, whatever coffee. And then we throw some some ghee in it or some just butter. And that's it. Bulletproof is available in Australia, but not widely.

And here's the deal. I thought about this when I first started this. Anytime you put butter in your coffee instead of milk, you are getting more benefits from your coffee than milk because milk steals antioxidants from coffee. So even if everyone in the world switches to butter in moldy coffee, the world is still better off. But it's not Bulletproof. Don't call it that. It's called butter coffee.

Sure, sure. Yeah, you can try that. But I think the problem, the best thing is, look, if you invented tissue paper and you called it Kleenex and then I grabbed a Costco brand and I say it's a Kleenex, it's not the official thing. But like when your brand has made it that far into, what do you call it, the public conscience, it's pretty cool. Yeah. But we send a lot of letters to make sure the trademark is well protected. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that chip has probably sailed in some countries, though, especially.

We have global trademarks, but it's just enforcement in different countries. You could go broke trying to enforce it. Yeah. I think it's probably, it's better for your brand to be recognizable than to go after the food cart at the mall in Australia. I got the best photo from a remote town in India. And there's a little handmade sign bulletproof coffee. It was probably just a ski and whatever coffee. It was not bulletproof coffee.

And I don't think we could find that guy to send him a warning letter and we wouldn't. But I would say, if you're thinking about putting coffee in your cafe, We'll happily sell you the beans that are lab tested for mold toxins, brain octane, which is required. It's not MCT oil. It's different and better. And we'll get to some grass-fed butter. That's easy.

Nice. Well, okay, look, Silicon Valley is inhaling bulletproof coffee, branded or not. David Beckham had it or something. I think I saw that somewhere online. I think there was something on social about that. And Hollywood loves it. And it sort of spans the gamut of people that it went beyond the laughter curtain of why the hell are you putting butter in your coffee.

It went pretty fast, actually. And this is a lesson for entrepreneurs listening, and it's the opposite of what they taught me at business school. I went to Wharton. Same school as Trump. And Adam Grant. Yeah. In your defense, Adam Grant went there, too. A lot of good people went there.

A lot of great people on both sides. I think it's a fantastic school. The only issue is they didn't have a built-in ethics program. And I went there was the only school they didn't. So we were given a hard time about it. I think they've sensed remedied that. But they taught us in one class. It's cheaper.

to spend a dollar telling people your product is good than it is making the product good. Oh, that's depressing. It's a common business school teaching. Let's highlight that, though, one more time. It's cheaper to spend a dollar telling people your product is good than to spend that dollar actually making the product good. And I fundamentally believe that's unethical. And I also believe people are smart enough to buy what works and having an efficacious product.

A product that actually does what you say, I can do that you can feel and see a difference, So the reason Bulletproof took off wasn't the brand, although I think it's a pretty awesome name. It is a great name. I thought about stealing it many times, but I like you too much to do that. Thank you. And I don't want to get sued. Nice. But the honest truth is that people try it and they go, I thought it was BS, but I actually

noticed a difference in how I felt, I think I want to feel this way more. And then they tell their friends because they want to share something that matters. And that's what made it spread. Yeah. It was, you know, I probably could have called it, you know, Buttercup or something. Oh, yeah. Maybe it wouldn't have been as cool to refer, though, to it wouldn't have done as well in the bro culture with the name Butter Cup. I know, I remember, I remember, there was this, you might remember this.

It was like an Arctic expedition. The guys were walking to the North Pole or something like that. And I remember there was this 900 number. Remember those? Oh, yeah. I remember 900 numbers. So my friend was at, we were all at some kids' house and we're like, let's call this 900 number because it was a bad thing to do. And we'll get updates on the Arctic expedition.

So we called, and they were like, these guys are hiking, and here's where they are. They're 100 miles north of this. And every day they put butter in their coffee, and we were like, that's so disgusting. Yeah. But I think they just needed the calories. Yeah. It wasn't like, this helps us absorb. I think they were just starving.

Yeah. And they needed the densest thing they could carry, which is pure fat. Yeah. So they just put that in their coffee. It's true. Settlers would carry butter and bacon fat or talism. hollow and like some sort of carbs and that was about it. Yeah, it was because these guys are on foot. I mean, there's not a whole lot they could do. And so then when I heard about Bulletproof,

I was like, they kind of had this, but it was a little different. And you only needed it when you were shivering so bad that you needed 5,000 calories, 7,000 calories a day. It's kind of funny. The idea for Bulletproof coffee came to me because I had exhausted the Western medicine stuff. And I knew I still wasn't happy. And I believe that everybody fundamentally wants to be happy. I was just willing to literally go to the end of the earth for this. So when I tried all the stuff that was supposed to work and didn't, I said, I'm going to go to learn meditation from the Masters. So I took off for Tibet. And I spent about three months in Nepal and Tibet, went to monasteries, meditated, things like that. And I went to Mount

Kailash, which is remote western Tibet, middle of nowhere, five days in a four-wheel drive to get there. Five days in a four-wheel drive to get there? 10 hours a day, yeah. Oh, my gosh. That does not, there's no way to get there on a plane or anything? No, this is one of the most remote parts of the world. Wow. And it's where, basically the Mount Olympus of Buddhism and Hinduism. So this is where the gods live on this mountain.

No one's ever climbed the mountain. And you go and you walk a 26-mile circuit at 18,000 feet elevation around it, sort of like to honor the mountain. So I'm going to go do this. Just because it's one of the things that no one's ever done. Bucket list. Well, no one from the west. It turns out a lot of people go there in the middle of summer from India and Tibet.

It's one of those like going to Mecca sort of things. So I said, I'm going to try this. But I got there two months late. and it was 10 degrees below zero. There's 30 million hour winds, and there's only eight people in these little guest house. You can call it the mud huts on the fire. And I'm feeling wrecked because of the elevation and it's cold. I'm not all the way recovered the way I am now.

And this little Tibetan woman, I saw have a picture of her. She gives me a yak butter tea and I drank it and was like, game on. Yeah. I feel so much better. And it just stuck in my head. I made a habit of noting when I felt amazing or when I felt crappy so I could just find the variables that caused it. And I drink a lot more of that. And when I came home, I decided, all right, I'm going to start experimenting.

I ended up doing the mold-free coffee, grass-fed butter, because I tested regular butter. It doesn't work. And I added the brain octane from the knowledge I had from the anti-agion group. But something else happened into bed that I haven't talked about very much. I descended 7,500 vertical feet in one day, and I completely jacked up my knees. So I already had arthritis. So you're a little like walking down. Walking downstairs for, you know, a mile and a half vertical or something.

Oh, man. It was, so I, for five days, could not walk even with two poles. I could barely cross the street. Massive swelling and information. Harsh pain. So we're driving to Tibet and I really wanted to go on this walk, but I wasn't going to be able to do it. So we stopped with this little mud building on the side of the road. And I asked a Chinese guy in the bus and you could read the menu, hey, what does it say?

And he read everything. I'm looking for collagen. I know I need collagen in my joints. That's what they're made out of just to repair them. There's only one menu item that will fit the bill. It was pig's ears. Oh, delicious, by the way. I got a bowl of cold, boiled pig's ears.

It was horrible. Really? They're kind of good if they're done right. I know you're talking to like the one guy who's had bowls of pigs' ears, and I'm like, you just haven't had pigs' ears, buddy. You know, I imagine they could be good. This was a roadside without refrigeration in the middle of nowhere. It was brutal.

Maybe I skipped them in hot soups and they're really chewy. But the next day, my knees were 50% better. I just needed the materials. And like, I'm not putting pig. I'm not my coffee. So the reason you see collagen... That's my new business idea. Pig Zier's coffee, you're all over it.

I've got, it's like, yeah, there's a, there's a brand here. Bacon proof coffee. Bacon-proof coffee? Yeah, yeah, except it's not quite bacon. It's, yeah, I'll make it Latin, so it sounds fancy. Baconoid. Yeah, baconoid. So what I ended up doing when I came back is said, all right, I know from the anti-aging stuff

what collagen does biochemically, I'm going to start using it as a performance supplement. the reason you see collagen everywhere right now, it's all because Bulletproof put collagen on the map. So the original posts about biohacking were, hey, the type of fat, this weird brain octane stuff, this butter in coffee, the purity of the coffee, a collagen protein. And those things help me to resculpt my body. Like, these are fundamental technologies that were missing from the story. And it's that sort of stuff where you just notice one thing in the environment. And then you say, wait, why? And then you dig in, you understand the science, and then you build a product out of it. 48 million cups, and I hate to harp on the coffee, but it's really, this is kind of like the flagship product.

I know you have a million other things, but I am curious because 48 million cups of bulletproof coffee. That was a long time ago. Oh, really? That was a long time ago. So it was probably like 150 million now. You know that. Yeah, because I saw that in The Guardian. And it was like last year, but the articles.

It was like 2014. Yeah, I think it was 2016. Yeah. But I was just thinking those poor yaks, right? They're getting milked raw. All six of them. Yeah. Right. Why does it matter where the butter comes from? Because I think, and I don't want to get too into the weeds on this, but I found that interesting because then it's not just the fat, right? Because you can get fat anywhere.

Yeah, it turns out there's super toxic fats. There's fats that do all sorts of different things. So you can't say fat's good or bad for you. It depends exactly which fat. And when I came back, I just bought some butter. And I was organic butter. It wasn't grass fed and some tea. And I blended it. It just tasted bad and didn't make me feel good. And what the heck? So I ended up trying all these different teas. $100 an ounce tea kind of things, all these different, no difference. So then I went to the gourmet store. I had 24 different kinds of butter. And I just tested them all. And I said, wait, these two work, and those are the grassfoot butter. And I said, okay, it feels different if you use grass-fed butter. So I standardized on that.

And this was just a process of experimentation and elimination. And then I tried coconut oil and coconut milk. And then I tried MCT oil, which is four different kinds of fat all mixed together, one of which doesn't do anything biologically compared to the others. And I ended up after trial and error, came up with the one of the four kinds of MCT that's brain octane oil. That was the one that you could feel the kick. It had the most effect. Three years after I launched that, UC San Diego came out of the study that shows it's four times more ketogenic.

It causes ketones to rise in the body, even if you had carbs, four times more than coconut oil and twice as much as the MCT oils that even work and probably three times more than plain old MCT, including all the junk stuff that you can buy that doesn't raise ketones at all. I want to switch gears a little to the brain stuff because I actually got a little sidetracked on the coffee because I'm interested in it. But the brain kryptonite and some of the things from some of the ideas from Headstrong are really interesting because there's a lot of people that think they're eating right, myself included. I mean, I'll be honest. I think I'm eating right sometimes. But a lot of entrepreneurs, they complain, oh, I slow down a lot or I have brain fog or maybe I'm burning out. And it seems like that's probably true. a lot of us are overworked, but I think a lot of us are getting the wrong kind of fuel or

we're in environments where things aren't so good. And I know for me, one weird observation that I have is, let's say you're wearing way too much cheap cologne and we're on a airplane. I, not only am I cranky, you can ask anyone who's been close to me for any amount of years, but I can't do, I either get ravenously hungry, but I'm craving junk food and or I can't sit down and do a task. And I thought I was just getting distracted by the smell, but there's something else going on. It's biochemical. Yeah, I have gone through phases of my life where I had the same problem, and it comes and goes. And that is a toxin effect. And the reason you're getting the sugar craving like that is your cells are freaking out. They're interpreting that as a toxic assault,

which frankly it is. That stuff is endocrine disrupting is bad for you. But when that response happens, they're sending out an emergency signal and they're saying make a lot of energy, like fight or flight gets triggered. You don't have the energy. there, eat sugar. You got out sugar. Yeah. And it turns out if you want to nail that when it first happens, what you can do is you can actually have two packets of sugar, just a couple bites of something with sugar.

Coffee helps a lot. And there's two different, three different things that I'll take if that happens. One of them is called keto prime. And yes, these are supplements I make. I'm not trying to sell them. I'm just, like, I make them for a reason as long I'm saying. Keto Prime makes it so your cells can make energy more easily. I make another supplement called Unfair Advantage, a little ampil you squeeze.

Oh, I've had that before. Yeah, that stuff in that situation, the cells like, oh, I needed that. These are building blocks for energy. And so the energy demand on your brain just went way through the roof. So you're like, okay, here's a little bit of sugar, you can burn it. And here's some stuff that's going to make it so that it burns more smoothly. And then, of course, brain octane works. And there's a supplement I also make called Glutifion, which is the primary detoxing

antioxidant. So you can stack all those up. And then what would have been a, you know, I'm zomified my eyes around, back in head and I'm cranky and it turns into okay I'm back and I went from times my life where that would happen and I'd just be down for the count for like the whole day yeah right and now I generally recover within a few minutes if I just hit it with the right stack and it is an energetic thing in the cells and that's now hackable well I like the idea that coffee helps as well although usually I just want to pour it on the person that's wearing all the cologne it's sometimes really helpful because it washes

the cologne right off it's scalding hot temperatures I was in an uber car this morning and And oh, the air fresheners. I always get it. I got to get out. I just ask him. I'd say, could you, could you toss those in the glove box and then that quiet? Like, seriously, but this was a guy wearing so much clon. I'd go for the whatever the select ones are because they usually don't have all the crap in the car. The guy was wearing so much clon, I just rolled the windows down and kind of hang out the window. It's the worst. Yeah, it's gross. It's the worst. Yeah, that's how I knew that something is wrong because I got in an Uber once and I was fine. I was really happy. I was talking to my wife on the phone. And I got in the Uber and I immediately got ravenously and kind of. of, like, danger zone level of hunger and crime. Angry. Angry is the right word. Yeah, I got hangary, but it was immediate. And I said, hey, man, can you take out the air fresheners? And he goes, sure.

And he pulled over to the side of the highway, which is not what I intended for him to do. And he reached in, you know, those drink holders on the side of the car? Yeah. He reached in on one side with his hand and pulled out seven cube air fresheners, and then reached in the other side and pulled out seven more in each door. And then he threw them in the glove box and slammed the glove box shut. I was like, you have like 30 air fresheners in this car. And you know what that does for the driver?

That stuff mimics estrogen in the body. It disrupts all kinds of things, including your thyroid. You want to talk about Hashimoto's and thyroid dysfunction? Synthetic pregnancies do that. Those things should be banned. Why does that, what's going on there? I didn't know that you could inhale something and it would trigger that much. Like smoke?

I mean, smoke for sure. Yeah, okay. Now that you put it that way, it all makes sense. Inhalation is a very powerful. Inhalation, yeah, I believe. In college, I experimented with the inhalation administering certain things. But if you eat it, it doesn't hit us hard. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. It just takes longer. So I've heard. That's right. That's right. So I've heard. Good point.

Well, I'm going to recover from that somehow. But let's go back to being an entrepreneur on that. Sure. So you're cruising along. You're trying to get stuff done. Something that you didn't choose like that wax you over the head. And now you're still because you're a good person. You're going to succeed.

You're going to grit your teeth. You're going to apply willpower. Willpower still use the electricity like everything else. But your electric. just got stolen. Right. Right. So now you're pushing, but the accelerators all the way to the floor. You're not going faster. You're slowing down. And what are you going to do? You're going to get angry. It's natural. So it's our responsibility, especially as entrepreneurs, especially if you have a team working for you, your energy state is reflected in your company. That's something that I've

learned. I spent a huge amount of time meditating with electrodes on my head and stuff like that, because if I wanted to be able to grow a bulletproof that I wanted to, I have to have my shit together. Yeah. Right. And that means that if something happens in the world around me that makes me weak, I've got to have a countermeasure or I've got to be able to just remain calm. And it's a lot easier to remain calm when you have enough energy.

It's hard to remain calm when you're crashing. So I avoid the crashes and you eliminate toxins or just remove some of them from your environment. You eat so your blood sugar doesn't crash. You get background ketones by putting brain octane and stuff in your food or in your coffee, whatever. And all of a sudden you have stable energy. And that means when you need to make a decision to apply willpower, you have more

resilience. And resilience is what makes an entrepreneur able to succeed at the end of the day and stops you from yelling at your assistant or your spouse or all that. It's all about the brain. That's why my first book was, you know, what do you eat to feel good and look good and not spend a lot of time worrying about it. The second book was, what do you do to make your brain work way way more often and longer and better than it normally does? Because that's why I need. These are like my own precious things. Your own issues as well. And I think one of the chief problems that I had with all this stuff initially was, look, caveman or whatever, or even 100 years ago, 50 years ago, we didn't have all these different oils and all those different things we were putting in.

But upon further reflection, we also weren't working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and sitting in front of computer screens and talking on phones and bathing in blue light, which we'll get into in a second. And a lot of things were different back then that we still suffered consequences, didn't know what they were, why they were happening. but now it's much more intense. The basic rule is this. If you want to get all of your nutrients from your food,

make sure you get all of your toxins from Mother Nature. Like, try to do that while living on the planet. You cannot do it no matter where you are. Like there's glyphosate in the North Pole at this point. So we are now under a higher load biologically on a sub-cellular level than we ever have, and not to mention all the social media and stuff like that. So of course, if you're going to be able to outperform in a harder to perform an environment,

you might want to modify your fuel source. Sure. It just makes sense. Let's talk about blue light, because this is something that actually changed my life quite a bit recently, both using it appropriately and getting rid of it. Oh, wow. A friend of mine, I can't remember why we went to, I think we went to China, my wife and I, and a friend said, hey, you know, how's your jet lag?

And I said, it's miserable. They said, order this light off Amazon. So we did, and we turned it on in the morning, and it was really, really effective. Like a blue green light? It was some sort of blue disc. Yeah. Phillips makes one, and there's some glasses. called Recharger that do that? It really worked well, and I thought this is really cool.

And then I heard something from guys like you and other friends where at night I was like, wow, I'm having trouble falling asleep. I'll just look at my phone for three hours. And I just felt like I could not go to sleep. And I'm pretty good at falling asleep. So I was wondering what was going on. It's just some sort of lifestyle change, some sort of trigger. And then I want to say you or someone else had given me a pair of blue blockers.

Was it the true dark one? The dark one? This is a long time. So like 15 years ago I started doing blue blockers, but it's progressants. They actually looked kind of like what an old lady. Where's after eye surgery? By the way, people, these are eight bucks online. You can get blue blockers, but if you block all the blue, you're not going to like what happens during the day.

And if you block all the blue, it doesn't work all the way at night either. That's the problem. I was overdoing it during the day and underdoing it at night. Yeah, there was some issues with what I was doing, definitely. But I'll tell you, once I started wearing these things, even just in the hour and a half, two hours of watching TV, which I don't really do anymore. which is I didn't realize a massive source of unhealthy blue light, I would lay down, I would actually either fall asleep while we were watching TV or I would lay down and immediately conk out.

And Jen's like, wow, you must be so tired now. I'm like, I've always been as tired. I just don't want to keep watching TV for four hours when I watch for 30 minutes and I'm starting to not off. And the goggle, the blue light glasses or goggles or whatever, depending on my day, makes all the difference. And I've noticed even little things like I have an air purifier in our room and there's a blue light on it. You have to tape it over.

It's literally an LED. I have to tell you. This thing keeps me awake all freaking night until I taped it over. So I got so tired of this. One of the companies I started is called True Dark. And I'm wearing a pair of them right now. I have a case of those in my house right now. Do you have the sleep ones?

I have, are those the red ones that are like goggly red? Yeah, those are patented spectral filters. There's four of those. four different spectrums inside there. Those are the ones that for me have eliminated jet lag. Tomorrow I'm flying to New York, getting there late sometime. I use those there. I'm going to be on Dr. Rawls.

There's why I'm going there. You don't want to have jet lag when you're going to be on TV because you want to do yourself. You can also look really jet lag on TV. It's not a good look. No. So you could fly the three days early just to make sure look at it. I don't have three days. I don't play with my kids, right?

So I wear these glasses religiously when I'm flying from west to east. And truly, I don't get jet lag anymore. but the blue blockers didn't cut it. So I had to go one. And if you don't have those ones. I do. They're the ones that when you wear them, you look like a supervillain, right?

Yeah, or like a Cyclops kind of. Yeah. But, I mean, you see people wearing them on airplanes now because they're, in fact, we've measured within 15 minutes shifts and brain waves in people wearing that they're as junk light is like corn syrup. Yeah. And so that's important. And for those little, the flashy light things, I got so tired of this.

My house had like electrical tape on everything. So that same company. makes these little dots that are, that are die cut. They either block it entirely, but sometimes you need to see it, they just filter out all the blue. Yeah, they filter out the blue, so it's just a dim red light. And everything in my house has that. And in my hotel room, those stupid blinking green lights right above your bed, I always get up there and stick one on there, because how can you sleep with every five seconds? There's a bright green flash. Those things drive me nuts. And I thought I was just being high maintenance. Green is a spectrum that disrupts

mitochondrial function. It talks to something called melanopsin sensors in your eyes, which are driven by mitochondria, then that talks to a part of your brain that isn't even where vision is processed. It goes straight to your timing system. So your brain is getting a little signal every five seconds. Hey, daytime. Daytime. And you wake up feeling like a zombie. It's just science.

And the Nobel Prize was awarded for circadian biology. So I wanted to do these actually in Bulletproof. And then I talk with my team and they're like, Dave, this is a very big difference from the supplements, the neutropics and the coffee and the protein bars and all that. let's not. So I actually started a separate company. I don't operate this. I funded it and got the IP organized.

But the company is called True Dark. And I always wear these glasses when I'm indoors because I have my brain on at the end of the day. And I just, I would say for everyone who stares at a phone, there's something that you can do with free. I'm going to show you right now. It'll take like half a second. So watch this. This is a normal iPhone. I want to show you my calendar because you'll just, you'll cry if you see it.

Yeah, no, no worries. All right, so what you normally do is your phone looks like this. It's just a normal, like I saw you win. Yeah, yeah. It's really harsh. So night shift is not on, yeah. First thing I do, night shift is always on, no matter what. But here's what you can do with the disability settings that are on here.

So I have this set up. I can triple click and I can reduce the white point and all of a sudden it's not as bright. Oh, yeah. Interesting. And you triple click again, I turn on the red filter. Now it's like I'm wearing the red glasses, but I'm not. You can stare at that phone in a dark room, and you're not going, it's not as good as wearing the glasses, but it cuts out probably 85% of the bad light. The settings are there, but they're not designed into the settings.

You have to go in and basically do the visual accessibility settings. We can link to, do you have a video of you doing this online? Yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes because otherwise it's impossible to show people what we're doing. But I also have the accessibility shortcut set to do that dimming thing. You know how to do that. Okay. Yeah, but I've never seen the red filter. for you. Yeah. But what, what ends up happening? Like, okay, either we're crazy or we kick ass, right? It's one of

those things. If I can get 5% more energy by doing this or my sleep quality, by the way, the true dark the red glasses, I double my number of hours of deep sleep when I wear it when I measure it. If I do that, it works. So yes, I will get, I'll squeeze every drop out of every day. And if I have to wear glasses or, you know, not eat the deep fried cheesecake or whatever, it's a trade that I'm happy to make because I love what I do. And if I hated Maybe I have to see the cheesecake and stare at the screen. I don't know, but I don't like how I feel that way. These little tweaks have made a lot of changes. Now, I'm not familiar, and I definitely haven't delved into the science of everything.

You don't need to. Bulletproof otherwise. But I will say things like the blue blockers, my wife can attest that when I put those things on, it's lights out. I mean, she can be reading with a light on. And if I've got the right, the Cyclops goggles on, it's over. And these little lights in your room that you think aren't making a big deal out of it, They are absolutely ruining sleep. Check this out.

A study came out in Japan. They looked at 800 people. The amount of light that comes in around your curtains in a normal city, not like with a bright light around. Just normal light leakage causes a 63% increase in depression compared to sleeping in a dark room. It's crazy. It's that big of a deal.

It messes with your body's sense of when and where you are. So the timing systems, so I'm a computer science guy. every computer has a clock in it. And if the computer doesn't have a clock, no circuit knows what other circuits are doing and it doesn't work. So your body has quadrillions of these little things all trying to figure out what time it is

and they rely on a central clock. And if that doesn't match, it's no wonder that you don't run as well. Sure. Yeah, it's like having the audio not sync to a video properly. Well said, yeah. Dave, thank you very much, man.

Really appreciate your knowledge and the coffee. Thanks, my friend. Great big thank you to Dave Asprey. The book title is Headstrong. And if you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests, manage my relationships, using systems and tiny habits to create friends like Dave who can help me hack my brain and body. Well, check out our level one course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one. Don't kick the can down the road.

Don't say you're going to do it later. Don't put it on your plan for next month. I get that all the time. It's ridiculous. You're not doing it. You're just lying to yourself. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this kind of thing and not dig in the well before they get thirsty. seeing the value in creating and maintaining relationships. Once you need these relationships,

you are too late. These drills are designed to take a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew 15 years ago. It is not fluff. It is crucial. And you can find that at Jordan Harbinger.com slash level one. And speaking of relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Dave Asprey. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason the Butterman to Philippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes by Robert Fogarty, worksheets by Caleb Bacon, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which is hopefully in every single episode. So please share the show with those you love, and even those

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