The School of Greatness - 464 Dave Asprey: Train Your Brain for Peak Performance

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

“If your physical health isn’t working, your brain won’t work.” - Dave Asprey If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/464

This is episode number 464 with New York Times best-selling author Dave Astley. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone to another edition of the School of Greatness podcast.

Let's go today. This is all about how to train your brain for peak performance. It starts in the mind. brain for peak performance. It starts in the mind. It starts, everything starts with our thoughts and our brain and our energy. And if we don't have the right thoughts, we don't create the right energy. If we don't have the right energy, we can't create great results in our life and everything else suffers.

So this is such a powerful episode and I hope you take notes and I hope you share this with your friends because it is powerful. Now, Dave Asprey, for those who don't know, is founder of Bulletproof and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Bulletproof Diet. He's a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent two decades and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. That's right. He's hacked his body many times. And Dave is the creator of the widely popular Bulletproof Coffee, something that I love, and also host of the health podcast, Bulletproof Radio. Now, through his work, Dave provides information, techniques, and keys to taking control of and improving your biochemistry, your body, and your mind so that they all work in unison,

helping you execute at levels far beyond what you'd expect without burning out, without getting sick or allowing stress to control your decisions. He's got a new book out called Headstrong and I think you're going to love it. Some of the main things we talk about in today's episode are how your body and brain process energy like a battery, why you should push your body to its limits once a week. Also, the new compound that makes your brain able to change itself, the worst toxins for your mitochondria and energy, and foods everyone should cut out of their diet for good brain health. We talk about that and so much more. I'm super pumped for you guys to dive in.

But before we do, I want to give a shout out to our iTunes review of the week. This is from Gaben who said, I've been listening to the School of Greatness for over a year and I still look forward to listening to who is going to be speaking every week. This podcast is worth subscribing to if you are looking to discover positivity, wisdom, practical advice, and of course, inspiration. I hope it continues to grow. So awesome. Thank you so much for that review, Gaben. We appreciate you. And if you want to be considered as a review of the week, then make sure to leave a review over at iTunes.com

slash greatness for a chance to be shouted out on the podcast. Now, without further ado, let me introduce to you the one, the only, Dave Asprey. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got a new guest on, Dave Asprey, with a book out right now. The book is called Headstrong, and he is a New York Times bestselling author and founder and creator of Bulletproof Coffee and the Bulletproof Diet. So, Dave, thank you so much for being here, man. I'm very excited about this. I'm happy to actually be in your studios. Right?

It's pretty nice. It's nice. Yeah, I love it. We just renovated it and updated it. We wanted to make it very intentional. We've got the Phoenix rising on the wall. We've got the school lockers. We've got the cool moss in the woods. So, got the school lockers. We've got the cool, you know, moss in the woods.

So it's coming together. Oh, yeah. You nailed it. It's been good. So also, Dave has got this book, The Bulletproof Diet. Make sure you guys check this one out as well. Awesome book. I did the diet before.

I drank the coffee. It's a game changer. And everyone, Wyclef was in here, and he had the coffee for the first time. He was like, what is this? This is amazing. So, you know, you've really taken the world over by storm first with kind of like the coffee stuff but then people learn about all the biohacking that you were doing for years you've been doing this not just since you had the coffee but you were doing all these tests on yourself um biomechanics on the physiology on muscles on the brain and this new

book is really about how to maximize the mind, right? How to optimize the brain so we can optimize our lives. Is that correct? That's a great way of putting it. Yes. And people have this idea that I'll start out at the very highest level. I'm going to just change my thinking and I'm going to go out. I'm going to learn to meditate or I'm going to just

start at the very most complex, most esoteric, like I'm going to go learn math. It turns out that everything you do with your brain, it comes down to how well your brain can make and use and allocate energy. So there are some things you can do that change everything in your head and oftentimes in the rest of your body as well that really don't have anything to do with memory training or with even meditation or with any skill acquisition thing it's like you turn up the volume the level of whatever you're doing goes up so if you're already great you turn with the volume you got more greatness and if you're a total jerk you turn with volume you'll be more of a total jerk but right be more effective jerk right exactly yeah so headstrong is really about about how to untap the brain energy

to work smarter and think faster in just a couple of weeks. Now, why is the brain the most important thing? Is the brain more important than your physical health and your workout habits and other habits that you have? Is the brain the thing we should be focusing on the most or is there a balance between everything else? When you dig in the research, there's actually a debate. Do the muscles exist for the brain or does the brain exist for the muscles? And probably the brain exists for the muscles, which is a surprising thing for a lot

of people. If your physical health isn't working, your brain won't work. It gets really strange though, because the fundamental unit that controls most of the health in the brain is the same as the rest of the body, but it's just a question of density. We have these things called mitochondria, and these are things that were bacteria a couple billion years ago, and we somehow incorporated them into ourselves. And there's all sorts of like tens of thousands of pages of academic debate about how this happened because this is the genesis of all life on Earth. Somehow we became able to carry batteries around with us so that we don't have to have roots in the ground like plants do. Well, those little batteries were red rod-shaped bacteria. We incorporated them into our cells or they invaded

our cells, which is probably more like what happened. They took us over. And these little bacteria, there's about 15,000 of them per cell in the brain and only 1,000 of them per cell in the rest of your body, except the heart. So the eyes, the brain and the heart have this incredible density of these little things that control everything about you. They give us energy. They give you energy, but they also decide if cells live or die. They make hormones. It's not the only part of you that makes hormones, but they're actually in control of the hormone factories.

They decide whether or not you'll get cancer. They control cellular aging. And literally, those little guys call the shots, and they don't really care much about what you want. They care about what they want. You're a walking Petri dish for them, and they're going to make sure that the Petri dish stays alive. Wow. What are these called? They're called mitochondria.

And they're in your brain. They're in your whole body. Yeah. They're cells. Well, they're inside your cells. Inside your cells. Each one of your cells has all these different components in it, kind of like a carburetor or a battery inside each cell.

So about 10% of your body weight is your battery. And these things are the battery in the body. They charge the body. They give you energy. They give you energy. Keep you awake. Yeah. They take the food, and they take the air, and they take light even, and they turn it

into electrons. The same electrons that power your iPhone power your body. Wow. And it turns out these little guys are semiconductors. We didn't know this until about five years ago. And that's why they're affected by electromagnetic fields, by light, by electricity, and by temperature, and all these other things that you can manipulate.

And since they don't listen to you very well, but they listen to the world around you, you just change the world around you, and all of a sudden your brain has more energy. And when you get these guys hacked, you feel it first in your brain, and you feel second, right in the chest, like in your emotional center, you feel it in your heart, you know, you put your heart into something. So by doing this, of course, your muscles are going to benefit because they all have battery needs. It's just,

they don't need very much to move. Thinking is actually a harder work than moving. So what if you were to give yourself a battery upgrade? You'd be a better athlete. You'd be a better lover. You'd be a better spouse and frankly, a better human being because you have more energy to say no when you have one of those urges to go out and do something you shouldn't do. Right, right, right. And so this helps you, but it all starts from the brain first. The brain muscle and mass is not optimized, and you're saying that the rest of our body will not have the energy. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Well, if your brain isn't working, the rest of your body won't be working, and vice versa. So it's a feedback loop. Yeah, you can't do that with the brain. It starts with the brain. If you have no sleep, and you're eating horrible foods, and you're not getting any sunlight, and you're stressed out all the time, but you're working really, really hard but you're working really really hard you're working out really hard and you're

trying to build your body the brain is not going to have the energy to recover or you're not going to be fully optimized or something there's going to be breakdowns what's going to be what will happen is these little bacteria throughout the body these mitochondria they're going to sense that you're stressed they're going to sense they don't have enough recovery they don't have enough energy like they're not getting enough food or enough light or enough of the other things that they rely on to be a healthy colony. When they don't get that, they're going to communicate with each other. Life sucks. Get ready for a famine. There's a threat. There's some ominous threat. They're bacteria. They're stupid. They don't know what a threat is. They're going to

change your physiology to have higher cortisol, lower testosterone, less focus, less energy. You're more optimized to fight and to run away. And you're going to be cranky. More reactive, resentful. Yeah. Your blood sugar is going to swing because like, what do I need to fight? What do I need to run? And here's the thing that comes out of this research that just fascinates me. There's only three things you need to do to stay alive. If you're a cat, if you're a bacteria, or if you're a possum or a tree, it doesn't matter. It's always only three things. Run away from or kill scary things. And plants do that by making poisons or spines and things like that. And they can't run away because they're plants. Sorry. Right. And then let's see,

you have to eat everything to make sure you don't starve to death right so I've certainly done both of those behaviors you know you eat all the donuts and oops and then the third thing is have sex with everything that's left to make sure the species doesn't die out right so reproduce yeah right so can you think of anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that didn't come from one of those three behaviors um

I mean I've been ashamed of a lot of things I've done those three behaviors was the first one again it was run away from or kill things I mean, I've been ashamed of a lot of things I've done. Those three behaviors. What was the first one again? It was run away from or kill things. Run away from or kill things. No.

I mean, I was going to say getting angry at something, but that's in that category, right? That's what that is, right. Like lashing out or being reactive or being frustrated that I didn't get what I wanted or something. The second one is eat everything. I've done that a lot. I've been ashamed of all this. I mean, I was a sugar fiend my whole life. Totally. done that a lot. I've been ashamed of all the, I mean, I was a sugar fiend my whole life. Totally.

And, uh, you know, I cut out sugar for 45 days, the last 45 days. And what a transformation in my mind and my body and my health just by not having sugar. And then wanting to reproduce. Yes. I've been there too. Yeah. Did I really go on that date? Exactly. The thing is we take responsibility for those things. And those are things we're responsible for. But they're not you. They're emergent behaviors that come from what bacteria want because the bacteria are the puppet masters in our bodies. And when you realize that, you better take care of those little bastards because they have control over you in some way. control over you in some way but when they give you enough energy in return for this symbiosis they have you can then have enough energy for the human adult parts of your brain to easily take over and easily control things that we call that willpower so so when you feel the urge to

you flip the guy off in traffic or to yell at your spouse or you know to eat all the donuts if your battery is charged all the way you're like oh i got, I got this. It's not even that big of a deal. I'm just going to say no. And it's those times when you're browning out a little bit. Like, wow, it's the end of the day. I'm a little tired. Fine, I'll just have half the donut. And you dive in.

You have no willpower. Yeah, there's frosted stuff all over your face and colored sprinkles on your shirt. Or you say the thing you wish you didn't say or whatever happens. Fascinating. So how did you, how have you applied this into your life? Uh, what are the main things that you've done on a daily basis that you've seen a transformation in your life? Cause you've done a lot of biohacking and mind hacking for years. So what is this new stuff that you've been doing? Just to be honest, I've, we've probably seen each other maybe 10 times in person. I've known you for a while, but we've probably been interacting 10 times in person. This time, you look younger than I've ever seen you. And we mentioned when you came in,

you look stronger. You look like you have more energy. You look clearer. You never looked as clear as you do now for some reason. You look very clear, high energy, and youthful. Not that you didn't before. We just look even more youthful. So what are the things that you're doing that's allowing you to have this energy of abundance that you've never had before? I'm doing a lot of stuff. And one of the things

that's a fair criticism of biohacking is, how do you know if it works? Well, like you just said, there's evidence that something is working yeah can i tell you that one of the 45 things i'm doing is the one well no because it wasn't the one there's something called synergy and and there's amplification and if you do a it doesn't work very well you do b doesn't work very well and shockingly if you do a and b it works but the

the double blind reductionist like western medicine thing i i swear's, there's like some guy in a white lab coat. He's like, there was no such thing as bread. Here's why I baked the water and nothing happened. I baked the flour, nothing happened. I baked the yeast and nothing happened. Therefore there is no bread.

And you're like, maybe if you mixed them and then bake them, there would be bread. Right. But no, that's more than one variable. I can't do it. I have to test single variables.

Our bodies are incredibly complex systems. So what I do and what this, this program and Headstrong, the two-week program is, is let's do many of the things that make your mitochondria stronger all at the same time instead of messing around with just one thing. Give me a few examples of some of the things.

And I know you do things at every different point of the day. You do things in the morning. You do things in the afternoon and night. You're like constantly testing and tweaking. One of the things that doesn't cost anything that's really effective is changing temperature. So mitochondria, their job is to stay alive, and then their job is also to kill off the weak. So you've got to stress them enough to kill off the weak. And that process is called apoptosis.

If you don't do that, you get cancer. So you want to stress them, but not too much. So it's brief periods of stress. So there's ice. Ice is great. Ice tubs or ice showers. Yeah, just a cold shower in the morning. Not a whole cold shower, because cold showers suck.

Let's face it. Yeah, just take a hot shower at the end, turn it on cold, do it all at once once and just feel the pain for a minute. Those little guys, they're going to freak out. That makes them stronger. They get stronger and the weak ones die. And then you burn more calories throughout the day. Your brain is clearer and inflammation goes down. And here's the interesting thing. Every time you have inflammation, it's because your mitochondria aren't working very well. So if something makes you inflamed, it's because you damaged your battery system in the body when things are working well they they actually change the structure of the water in your body it's called exclusion zone

water and no one knew mitochondria could do this until a couple years ago gerald pollock figured this out and he talked about it at the bulletproof conference so all of a sudden you're just telling these little guys hey the world isn't always warm and soft and fuzzy sudden you're just telling these little guys, Hey, the world isn't always warm and soft and fuzzy. Maybe you should just toughen up a little bit. And then that toughness gets built into your system and you carry it with you for the rest of the day. And so you're a little leaner, you're a little just, just more on point and it costs you nothing. In fact, you saved a quarter cent on heating hot water for that last one minute. Like it was just a change in habit. Another thing is exercise.

So I looked at all the research on mitochondria and exercise, like what's, what's going to make them stronger. What's not going to make them stronger. There's a set of studies that show if you go for a walk for 20 minutes a day, that that increases mitochondrial function. That's it.

Now that's one set of studies you can go for longer, but if you go for too long you actually can stress them out which isn't a good thing so you know if you're gonna every day go for you know two hour run without recovery it's the lack of recovery that really messes up your energy system so you see a lot of people who are type a entrepreneurs like you or me where you know we'd like to go all night yeah and they're like and on top of that i'm gonna like run at the kona iron man and i'm gonna do it without sleep just because i could right so you push like that where we like to go all night. Yeah. And they're like, and on top of that, I'm going to run at the Kona Ironman and I'm going to do it without sleep

just because I could, right? So you push like that. And I've certainly done that in my early career in tech, the company that held Google's first servers and things like that. I'm like, why would you burn the candle at both ends

when you could also light the middle? It's so bad for you. And it's bad for you because it breaks your mitochondria. Like, they get stressed like that, and they communicate with each other. And they do that with chemicals. And we believe that they probably do it with light as well, which is really interesting. If those theories are proven, and I would bet right now that they will be,

we know that these little parts of your cells make lights the same way an LED light does. They literally make little photons and they receive photons. So a set of scientists are proposing that that's how mitochondria talk, which is why if you're beating up your muscles all the time, you're going to be tired in your head because the whole system of these bacteria that are interacting, and they're not bacteria anymore. They're part of our cells. They're called organelles, but they still have that little bit of bacterial behavior that's built in and that allows us to be who we are and what we are so it's fascinating and you yeah go ahead the other exercise just so i'd like some people listening i don't leave them going i just have to go for a walk once or maybe

twice a week but certainly once a week you need to kick your ass and there's two ways to do it and these are actually both in the bulletproof diet too because we knew they worked but we didn't understand the mitochondrial part of that back then. One is intermittent sprinting, just basically sprint for 60 seconds. And there's a neat trick in Headstrong that's not in the first book. And I got this from John Gray. The man from Mars? Yeah.

Yeah, okay. That guy, he is a crazy biohacker. You would not know this from reading his books about relationships. No, he goes deep. So we got to be friends and he's like dave after you sprint instead of walking lay on your back just lay down like the way you'll see in a crossfit gym people just kill themselves and lay down there's a reason they're doing that they're not doing it because they know the reason they're doing it because they felt the urge and that was whatever i would do crossfit to lay down it's because i could breathe and i was just like yeah Whenever I would do CrossFit or lay down, it's because I couldn't breathe and I was just like, I need a rest.

Well, that's the body's natural response. So if you want to increase the height and the trough, which is what you're doing, you're telling these guys, you better be ready to just like bring it all at once.

You're training the battery in your body to totally have a high voltage and then stop. So you should stop and go on your back. You shouldn't keep walking. Yeah, at least sit down

and better yet lay down for a minute and then get up and sprint again and then lay down. And this is what animals will do, right? That's true. And it's amazing what a difference that is. So that's one way you kick your ass. The other way is lift heavy things for 15 minutes or less and

don't stop. Keep the muscles engaged the entire time. Don't stop at the top. Don't stop at the bottom. As heavy as you can. While stretching and warming up properly. Why would you do that? Exactly. I do my warm-ups on the them as heavy as you can and you'll while stretching and warming up properly why would you do that exactly yeah i do my warm-ups on the on the bulletproof vibe you know i'm vibrating when i do that sure sure uh and i i do that vibration stuff every day or i go for a walk but quite often i'm on the phone and it's i'm in canada it's dark and raining like we're in

vancouver right yeah i think of island yeah yeah i'm on an organic farm amazing amazing yeah so i mean it's funny because I've always, in track and field, when I ran track, they would always tell you to keep walking after you're done with the sprints. So it's interesting.

And why is it, what's the science behind laying on your back or stopping and falling? It has to do with heart rate variability and cardiac recovery and getting the system

to go from sprint to calm as fast as possible. That's what you're trying to get it to do. It's just to increase the recovery after the sprint so that you can do another sprint. Another set. Yeah, and we're talking to you this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

It looks a little funny if you just collapse. People call ambulances and all of it. And you only work out once or twice a week, right? Like a heavy thing, otherwise you're walking and that's it, right? That's about it, yeah. I'll go to yoga class when I get a chance. I appreciate yoga more for the stretching and all. But I'm doing all right from a 44-year-old.

Yeah, I'm 44. You're headstrong. Yeah, I'm headstrong. There you go. I'm muscle strong. I still have stretch marks. I mean, I weigh, for people who don't know this, I used to weigh 300 pounds.

That's crazy. I was obese until, geez, my mid-30s. Wow. You could carry it okay as a 6'4 guy. Yeah. A little bit better. I couldn't quite see my feet, but I remember the first time I saw my ribs, I'm like, oh my God.

Wow. For years, walking down the hallway, I would turn sideways to make space for people because I was just used to having this bulk that I don't have anymore. How does it feel? It feels now natural, but for a while, it was pretty strange. I put on about 19 pounds in a month last month. That's crazy. I was actually doing something that's not in the book,

but if you do the orderheadstrong.com, I'll tell you how I did it. Right. But I wanted to increase my mitochondria by 50%. This is a major battery systems upgrade. Wow. And I used a research chemical called a SARM in order to do that. And I wasn't trying to put on muscles. Like I'm happy.

You're not training heavy weights all the time. No, I don't want to, I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. And I, I, I very much appreciate bodybuilders. I'm also looking to lift 180 and carrying too much muscle mass is hard.

Isn't well, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's, it's not where I want to go, but so I had to buy new, a new suit and like half my shirts don't fit. I'm like, God.

I was okay the way I was before, but it kind of feels good to have a little bit of extra muscle. You're strong, man. I'm feeling good. That's great, man. And 20% increase in strength across the board on the AirX. When I do lifting, I'm fighting a winch with a computer, so I have a strain gauge. I don't usually use heavy things that have gravity associated with them. so i'm basically pushing it to something where it's always quantified and just across the board 20 20 20 in a month with three workouts on that and one electrical stimulation

workout it's amazing man super crazy and you look younger too there's some stem cells involved but a lot of this as soon as you get the mitochondria working better they're responsible for powering recovery and and repair so what happens you do this to make your brain work better you feel in your brain first but then it goes throughout the body and like i'm you know because you've known me for a while i am getting younger you are man i'm not i'm not it's crazy you almost looked like a little weathered at times like the first few times i met you maybe it was because you were like launching a business you're like everything was involved in the stress when you first met me, I was a VP at a publicly traded company, head of

global evangelism and starting a blog. And doing this on the side. Yeah. And in three years, I was one of the top 20 most influential voices in health on the internet. I was a new dad or a second new dad. It was a lot. You had a lot going on. Yeah. You still do, but you seemed like more, you just seemed like

overwhelmed when I first met you a few times because you had a lot going on. I can only imagine. And now you just seem like this lightness about you. There's something else I've done too. Freedness, you know. And this is something I write about in here. I've talked about neurofeedback as like a general term,

but I opened 40 Years of Zen, which is now something that I'm running as a, I'm not operationally running it, but it's something that I created that has been like my baby. I wanted the world's best brain mechanic in order to do performance tuning for my brain. I've had my own EEG machines at home for 20 years. What's that? EEG is the idea you can measure electricity coming out of the brain.

Guess where that electricity comes from? It's all about mitochondria, right? Wow. So you can measure it and then you can teach the brain, means teaching the mitochondria how to work better wow so i've been doing this but i kind of tapped out on all the things out there so we created new hardware and software and in order to teach you to be in this zen state like 20 to 40 years of daily zen practice you can achieve that in five days wow and that sounds like a big claim. It's just, it's quantitative analysis of your brain. I can show you your brain before and after. And like,

there you go. You just, you made these, these shifts happen. So I've been doing that. It's a facility in Seattle. It's a five day executive thing. Very few people can go through. And like, we vet out some people or just where like, this isn't the right training for you. But I did that because I really wanted this for myself. So I've been able to go and do that. And here's what's interesting. You get a new battery upgrade. You do this headstrong stuff.

What do you spend most of your energy on? You spend it controlling your desire to kill people, your desire to eat everything. You can turn off everything. That's the bulletproof diet. How do you lose the cravings? That's what the whole diet thing was about. That's one of the three things.

I still haven't hacked that. How do you not want to have sex? Because actually, it's good to want to have sex. If you don't have sex, your mitochondria won't be happy either because that's one of the reasons they exist is to reproduce, right? There you go. So sex is good for you and all that. But the thing is, how do you control that overwhelming anxiety, the fear, the sense of overwhelm? The stress.

Yeah, yeah. the the sense of overwhelm stress yeah i i sit in these big pods that we've made that that literally have 24 electrodes glued to my head with a computer showing me how to be chill so literally on the way over here i was negotiating a hundred million dollar deal no joke right and it's a very substantial thing i'm looking at venture capital dollars and all these things and right before that i was on stage with Jim Quick at Quick Learning. But I'm not stressed. Like you can see me. Like I'm happy and I'm full of this.

Before, even five years ago, without this level of training, I think it would have been harder for me to task switch and just to be grounded and present. So some of this is just deep internal awareness. And because I don't have the food craving thing, the one third of my cognitive burden that would have gone towards saying no to food or thinking about food, that's gone.

You're just like, give it to me. I need something. Yeah, I need some energy, right? Yeah. And the part of me that's like, I have to run away from or kill things, that's turned off. I mean, if you were to attack me right now, I would respond appropriately and with my instincts, but I'm not like oversensitive to those things.

So I'm in that sense of groundedness and awareness, but not in a state of fear. And that also frees up a huge amount of energy that was subconscious, but it was like constant worry in the background. What if, what if, like, what if there's not enough, what am I going to say next?

All those voices, those are just gone. The voice in my head is just blissfully silent now. And then, you know, there's, there's that third behavior there like that. I'm married.

So like, you know, I get something. It's great, man. Amazing. What is this process called? That's called five day process called 40 years of zen you created it or is it part of a program that i created it yeah it's it's it's my baby i've been like i gotta tell you the story check it out man it's cool yeah you should come up and do it i would love to jim did it jim quick did um when you uh let's see envision like

honey did as well i don't know if you know vision yeah of course if you own jj she was on your show yeah jj's video yeah in fact it's in her book yeah nice so when you uh when i started doing this in 1996 this is like going back geez i'm like 20 years ago i decided my brain was i was really struggling and i didn't understand mitochondria i didn't understand like how to turn energy on i was really successful in my career but i was i was like i wouldn't hire myself i don't remember what's going on half the time. Like I'm all over the place. So I started doing neurofeedback in Silicon Valley and this, this, I walk into the office for the first time and this like 10 year old kid comes up and he looks, he looks at me and goes, and just starts running in a circle around me. And it doesn't

stop yelling or running. It just runs like 20 or 30 times. Like, this is weird. And I realized, okay, the kid's probably autistic or something, but it was kind of jarring. So I did my training for 10 sessions, got some nominal benefits. This is very primitive tech. And then I come back six weeks later and the same kid's in the waiting room. I'm like, oh God. And he walks up to me, he goes, hi, my name's Bobby. And like makes eye contact. And I was so blown away. It was like a miracle had happened. And I realized this is where neuroplasticity comes from. Like this is why a kid could change so much. And I had some change from that.

And that actually encouraged me to start not just doing neurofeedback, but I bought the gear. And I've been doing it myself for 20 years. And I've been working with neuroscientists and like leaders in the field. Because there's a certain point where you could harm your brain with neurofeedback. Because it's like doing surgery on yourself. You should be careful about that. And what came out about that is actually part of what's in the book. And it's something called brain-derived nootropic factor, BDNF. This is a compound that makes your brain able to change itself better. And many of the practices in the two-week program are designed to increase levels of this that makes your brain more plastic more

useful the cold shower thing we talked about exercise higher quality sleep not necessarily more sleep just better sleep yeah and it drives me knows people say you need more sleep like no you need right sleep good sleep yeah right it's just such a different animal when you're like i slept with no wasted time i woke up in six hours and i felt amazing by the way the last 1438 nights six hours and five minutes of sleep like i track it every night i have for more than three years that's how many five hours six hours and five minutes that's my average some nights it's a night before last with three and a half hours because i was flying i had to get up early but like you can bring it all day it doesn't

matter amazing right and if you do that night, you're not going to like your life. But it's entirely flexible. Yeah. Wow. So the whole BDNF conversation is how do you make your brain younger so you can learn better? And one of the things that happens as we age, and how old are you now? 33. 33. So you're already on this- 34 in a month. Yeah. And you're already on this path. How do I stay younger? All right. 48% of people under 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction.

That means they're not making enough energy and also their neuroplasticity will go down because they don't have enough energy to make new neurons. And so that's half of us under 40. Over 40, everyone has mitochondrial insufficiency, and that's called aging. So our goal is, no matter what age you are, to give you maximum performance in this battery so you can turn the battery on, you can pull a charge out of it at very high voltage if necessary, and this would be the ability to sprint, the ability to lift something heavy. Or during 40 years of Zen, we actually train you to increase voltage that your brain can make.

It's a trainable thing. So literally the speed of neuron firing and the height of the voltage curve you make in your brain is hackable in five days. It's completely ridiculous. Just no one ever thought to train that. This is not the stuff you do for a sick brain. This is stuff you do for a super brain. And some of that's what you're seeing in me. Like I've hacked the crap out of my brain amazing bdnf though those cold showers exercise

sleep eating more fat and one of the other big things is avoiding toxins that lower mitochondrial function which what are mercury vegetable no you can eat you can eat fish. Not a lot of it. Yeah, you don't want super high tuna and sharks and things like that. But one of the biggest ones out there is environmental mold toxins. And I did a documentary. It's called moldymovie.com about this. I interviewed Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman and some of the luminaries in the field about what's going on with these. And it turns out a lot of people get sick when there's a water leak in their building. And they don't know why they're sick.

Suddenly, everything sucks in their life. They gain some weight. They get emotionally unstable. They start forgetting things. It's because they're poisoning their mitochondria. The battery that used to make electrons well doesn't make electrons well. So there's things you can do about that. But one of the things you do is you eat less of those.

One of the reasons paleo works that a lot of paleo people don't know about is that paleo naturally eliminates a lot of the mold that we eat because it's in grain for the most part and when you cut out the grain you cut out these things that slow down your energy systems you don't do any grain i don't do anything great i'll do white rice it's part of the bulletproof diet got it and the rest of the grains you just don't do it or quinoa out of the other grains quinoa is technically a seed not a grain and i it's for quinoa works for most people but there are some people where it's just not right yeah it's on the suspect foods we're like it might be guilty might be fine you just gotta you gotta know so i would be uncomfortable saying quinoa is good for you yeah i'd be uncomfortable saying it's bad for you it's a testable one versus some kryptonite foods like MSG, corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil.

Those things are always bad for your brain. In fact, this is going to shock people, but nicotine is a mitochondrial stimulant in low doses. I've never smoked. Smoking is bad for you. But if someone came to me and said, Dave, here's a plate of deep fried food and here's a cigarette, I would rather smoke the cigarette. Wow. Because at least I'll get the nicotine performance boost and the damage from the free radicals from the smoke

and all the other crap in the cigarette, they're only going to really hit me for four hours. The fried food is at least 24 hours of damage to the brain, to the membranes in the mitochondria and in your cells that make all this energy. Bad fat is really bad for you. And one of the reasons that I look the way I look is I don't eat bad fat. It's not, oh, I'll just have a little bit. I just had to have the deep fried Brussels sprouts. I'm like, what do you fry those in? I don't eat that crap. It's not food. And when you get that freedom from

cravings that comes from eating a higher fat diet, from using brain octane and bulletproof coffee and all that stuff, you suddenly have that ability to be like, I'll just pass on the fries because I know the steak is coming. And when you do that sort of thing okay you look better you feel better but your brain stays sharper and like i'm i'm amazed at the changes i've been able to experience from just that one decision wow not that i've ever smoked instead of right exactly so what are the things you like are non-negotiables that you cut out maybe like five or seven things you think everyone should cut out of their things that that contain MSG have to go. And there's still a group of science trolls who say, there's no evidence that MSG is bad

for you. I'm like, except for like a gazillion pieces of evidence that you chose to ignore. So MSG causes hypoglycemia. Restaurants buy spices that are 74% MSG by volume, and they are not required to be labeled as MSG. Spice extractives, paprika extract, garlic extract, a lot of the extracts and flavorings, natural flavorings sometimes. The food companies sell these in magazines and catalogs saying it does not have to be labeled as MSG. They know it's MSG, but according to FDA law, actually it's probably USDA law, but 75% or above is MSG.

When you eat this, or let's say you're running a restaurant, you want to make more money, put something into the food that has MSG in it that isn't labeled. Your chef can, without even knowing it's in there, will be, oh no, there's no MSG, I checked the label. When people eat this, they're going to like the food because it tastes good. But they're also going to increase their order by about 30% because they're going to order more drinks because they get thirsty. And they're going to order dessert because they got hypoglycemia. Guess what hypoglycemia is?

It's a lack of energy going into the inputs in the batteries in your cells. So you feel like you need more. Well, they start creating a panic response. It's like, give me sugar, baby. And that's where sugar cravings are coming from. So yeah, you got to not eat MSG. It's just not there. Healthier fats because you have less cravings when you have more fat.

And it's not just healthier fats. It's undamaged fats. You can take like this grass-fed steak and like, oh, it's so amazing. It's got that nice ribbon, like a ribeye, nice yellow fat. It's like juicy and good. Well, throw it under a broiler at 450 you don't want to eat it because when you damage fat it makes really toxic free radicals that directly lower your energy production so you want gently cooked meat like a lightly caramelized

steak is fine a blackened steak you got to cut off the black part or just don't eat it and i'm i i'm sad to say this but if you're cooking on a grill versus baking broiling or cooking in water or even like a stir fry the grill makes a lot of things that we've known for years contribute to cancer really yeah and unfortunately before they contribute to cancer i love grill you can add smoked salt though if you get like the real smoked salt not the msg salt like lowry's and all but the stuff where they like alder smokes i know it is oh it's so good it's it's amazing because it's bad for you probably right it's the msg though of course good so i i'm like use the stuff where it's just the pure smoke yeah that isn't going to cause damaging mitochondria and people like dave you're so you're

such a picky bastard right like seriously yeah like. Yeah. Like look, try it. Try this for two weeks. And just the times when I would have had like a food coma, food comas are not normal. Shouldn't have them. Yeah, the coma comes because the energy in your brain where you should have been on turned off because the energy was going to pumping crap out that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

People probably didn't have food comas 100 years ago. Yeah, if they did, it was like vodka and juice. Yeah, right. But it wasn't like putting all these toxins in our body this inflammation constantly right yeah uh and talking about inflammation i think you say inflammation is the muffin top of the brain is that right yes and what does that mean what is that well anyone who's ever had muffin top maybe notices that some days it's there and some days it's not right muffin top is not fat muffin top is inflammation if it's always there you have a little bit of flab but for most of us like you know i went out

drinking last night i stayed up late or i flew somewhere and then the next morning i had muffin top you don't put on fat like that it's just the fact that your mitochondria became less efficient at managing water and you ended up getting some bloating you can also get bloating feed a bunch of carbs because you store water weight when you eat carbs and things like that. But when you get that muffin top, it's highly variable. So when you see the muffin top here that wasn't there yesterday, your brain has the same kind of inflammation. Really? Yeah. So if you see it on the body, it's in the brain. And here's the weird thing about inflammation. Inside each cell in the brain, there's this 15,000 mitochondria, and they have something called the electron transport chain.

So they make electrons from food, and then they have to move them. So if a cell is, let's just kind of blow it up, like the size of my hand, and the electron has to go from here to here, well, make inflammation happen. Now the electron has to go twice as far. So a small increase in inflammation really changes the efficiency of the

system and that's why inflamed neurons and brain inflammation is terrible for cognitive performance and if you're seeing inflammation in the body you'll see it in the brain drops the mic no i'm kidding what are what else is inflammation foods that we shouldn't have gluten yeah and look there are people who will argue, oh, I like gluten. Okay, that's great. I like heroin too, right? Okay, I don't actually like heroin.

Or alcohol or whatever. I've never tried heroin, to be honest. So, but that whole thing, like, it doesn't matter. I like sugar too, but that's not good for you. Yeah, right? And so, that's not a valid argument. And then there's a bunch of people who say, oh, there's a bunch of studies that show

that only celiacs, no. There's study after study after study that show that gluten causes problems more for some than for others but it's never a food that makes you it's not an enhancer no it at best at best it's neutral and it's probably bad yeah and it it's not going to make you superhuman it's not going to make you everything it's not gonna make you great right i mean like you're the school of greatness, right? If you really want to be great, gluten just shouldn't be on your diet. And if you're like, oh, I just have it twice a week. No, it causes continuous changes in your immune system,

depending on what genetics you have and all those things. So just because you're like, well, I can eat it and I feel okay. Doesn't mean it's not damaging something in your body or your mind. You can also start smoking and feel okay. It doesn't mean it was a good choice right exactly so i i know that that's a controversial thing but we should take gluten out of the human diet unless unless in times of famine it would be better for our soil better for agriculture better for animals better for us better for everyone it it's we know better now we just do it because that's what we've done for the last few thousand years because we had to feed a lot of people when we didn't have good technology yeah or we didn't have the money or

whatever yeah yeah exactly all right so we talked about bad fats we talked about burned fats we talked about burned meat we talked about gluten all right here's the other thing sugar probably right well sugar absolutely except mitochondria love sugar so yes what types of sugar well they love straight up glucose so fructose is bad you, like high fructose corn syrup especially. And by the way, anything that's not organic and is made out of corn is full of glyphosate, which is essentially Roundup. That stuff is a mitochondrial inhibitor. Guess what?

These bastards who make glyphosate, who literally we should stop them tomorrow because it's destroying our soil. They say, oh, it doesn't affect humans because it only affects bacteria. There's a quadrillion ancient bacteria in your body that are in there, and they are affected by glyphosate. It's just a fact. Not to mention your gut bacteria, which talk to your mitochondria via these light pathways. They're also affected by glyphosate.

So you need to eat more organic, and you shouldn't eat concentrated corn products anyway. But there are times, especially if you're like, wow, I'm getting a really strong sugar craving. Guess what? You might want to give into it. But what should you do? Have a banana or an apple or something? A banana or an apple, mostly fructose.

You're not going to get it. You might want to have a small amount of real sugar. Really? Or honey or something? Yeah, honey could work. And you'd want to do that just because you're having an energy crash. And it's better to train your body. You've burn some fat use some brain octane which will go straight to ketones right but you can do that and a little bit of sugar so if someone's if you're

listening to this like wow i can feel like i'm crashing like i i had lunch at this restaurant it tasted too good to be true maybe i'm getting a sugar crash if you prop up your glucose without having a huge wave of sugar you know i'm gonna eat five scoops of Ben and Jerry's. A tiny bit along with some fat and protein, it might turn off a migraine. Like it might affect you in a big way. So if you're crashing, there's nothing wrong with saying, all right, I need a little bit of sugar right now.

Like some honey and some pistachios or some cashews or something. Some halva, right? That'd be fine, right? Yeah. And so people are really surprised. I was like, Dave, I thought you were like a zero carb. No, Bulletproof Diet has always been a cyclical ketosis diet that uses external ketones in the form of brain octane to make sure you always have some ketones. Ketones are these fat burning molecules that give you more energy

than sugar. We're wired to only have ketones or only have sugar. And here's the cool thing about your brain. Your neurons, they prefer fat as fuel. They'll burn ketones over glucose, even if they're both in your brain at the same time. But the way we evolve, we're not supposed to have fat and sugar. If you want fat, it's easy. Fast for four days or go on like the Atkins diet,

like a ketogenic diet. And then you have no glucose and only fat. Or eat some carbs and some protein, and then you're back in glucose mode, which is our default energy production mode. Well, you can cheat, and that's part of Ed Strong. What if you had enough protein and a few carbs, but not too many, so you actually had glucose in the system and you had ketones? You're not supposed to be able to do that. You're supposed to be in one or the other, but because brain octane converts to ketones, even if you're eating carbs, there you go. Now you get the benefits of ketones, which is more energy than mitochondria. The neurons in the

brain, they get to get their optimal fuel, but the nerve, the immune cells in the brain called glial cells, they want sugar. So they get a little bit of blood sugar that comes from eating even vegetables and from eating steak and things like that. So all of a sudden now, both types of cells in your brain got the kind of fuel that was best for them. So all of a sudden now, both types of cells in your brain got the kind of fuel that was best for them. So now you have the energy to grow new neurons, to do neurogenesis, things like that, which is cool. Oh, and we haven't talked about neurogenesis very much.

We talked about BDNF before. There's a new supplement that I write about in the book. The studies just came out. The one you gave me? Yeah, it's called Neuromaster. That's the way I put it. And there it is. Yes.

So this comes from coffee fruit. This is not coffee beans. It's not green coffee extract. And in two different studies, it raises that BDNF, that factor that gives you a more youthful brain. So when I'm doing all this crazy brain training at 40 Years Zen, when I'm meditating, when I'm doing anything that is a skill acquisition thing, including reading, I take one of those in the morning. So it keeps my brain at higher BDNF levels. And I do all the other practices in here.

Most of the things that make your mitochondria strong also increase BDNF. So even intermittent fasting, the bulletproof intermittent fasting, all those things do it. So it doesn't matter what you're studying, what you're working to be better at. Having more neuroplasticity can only benefit you. And that's why we came out with that stuff. I'm pretty excited about it. It's one of my important new supplements. Yeah. And you got so much at bulletproof.com. You got tons of great products and foods. You've got the bars that I love that we're talking about. The lemon bars are amazing. What's it happening again? The ingredients? It's brain octane oil and collagen protein instead of like, there's a lot of bars. Like bad yeah whey is is not that good but a lot of the the very common like ketogenic bars have milk

protein isolate from non-organic milk it's like it's one step above soy protein it's toxic right it's got some inflammation it is very likely to increase inflammation and certainly it's it's not pure and collagen you can't get in most food you have to boil bones to get bone broth or gelatin or something so i'd have a bar where all the protein in it comes from collagen with cashew as a binder and then to get the brain octane to suppress hunger and turn on ketones that's what i eat when i travel i give these things to my kids and i just made those bars because i didn't want to eat the ingredients like artificial sweeteners are universally train racks for your mitochondria.

Things like sucralose, aspartame, acyl sulfate, potassium, those belong on this kryptonite foods list. And a lot of people who are into keto, and by the way, I lost 50 pounds in the late 90s on the Atkins diet going into ketosis, and I ate artificial sweeteners the whole time. And you can't lose the other 50 pounds because artificial sweeteners cause inflammation, and half your weight gain is inflammation anyway. It doesn't matter how hard you work out yeah right didn't for me doing the food yeah an hour and a half a day six days a week and to not lose weight after a year and a half or 20 yeah i was only like 24 when i did that wow and i it i was so

i felt like such a failure i'd had three knees or two knee surgeries oh man and i was like all right i'm never going back like i'm done with the. I'm going to be in the best shape of my life. I can max out every machine at my gym. And I would do 45 minutes of cardio at an incline. Wow. But you were still eating the wrong things. Yeah. I was actually eating less calories, about 1800 calories a day. And I was eating a low-fat diet and I could not lose the weight. I was like, I could bench press my thin friends while they eat French fries. And it was one day I looked at them like, wait a minute. I actually do eat less than any of my friends.

And like, it's not me. It's not that I didn't try hard enough. It's not that a moral failing. It's what I'm doing just doesn't work. And what happened, I was overtraining and I was fat deficient and protein deficient, eating inflammation and all that kind of crap. Yeah, man.

And if you guys haven't checked out bulletproof.com, make sure you check it out. You got a lot of great resources, the books, the diet stuff, but you have tons of supplements, products, foods. The Bulletproof Coffee, obviously, has changed thousands of people's lives, hundreds of thousands.

I took this out, 48 million cups of Bulletproof Coffee. No way. Served in what way? How are you quantifying that? Like at home or at a store? Wow. Bulletproof coffee is the mold-free lab-tested beans with brain octane oil and grass-fed butter.

Putting butter in coffee is better than putting milk in coffee because milk steals the polyphenols from your coffee. It sticks to them, and polyphenols are required for mitochondria to function. In fact, check this out. Throughout all of history, the first trade routes established were for salt because salt is required for adrenal function. It's fundamental being a human. And if you have salt cravings, there's an easy thing to do. Give in to them.

Just use salt. You need that. That's your adrenal system crying for salt. That was like cash back in the day, right? Yeah. Yeah. You paid your Roman soldiers in salt. Is a man worth his salt?

Maybe a woman, but back then, I don't think they paid for women in salt. Paying for women is bad, by the way. That's what they did back then, because they were bad Romans. Anyway, you know what I'm saying? Literally, soldiers paid in salt. And from there, the next evolution of those roots was spice. What are the highest polyphenol foods on earth? They're spices. Oregano, thyme, vanilla, all of these things. And after that was tea. Tea is also a high polyphenol food. It turns out these little mitochondria that run things, they are desperate to get these compounds that function as antioxidants, but also are signaling molecules to the body. So we set up global commerce. We've had wars over access to polyphenols, and we've had wars over coffee.

And it turns out coffee is the highest polyphenol food in the American diet, just because we get most of our polyphenols from that. So part of the Headstrong program is you need to add more high-quality spices and herbs to your food, more turmeric. And coffee is good. Tea is good.

Dark chocolate is good. Unfortunately, alcohol is bad for mitochondria, but wine has some polyphenols in it. So if you're going to have some, at least drink wine with less anti-nutrients that harm mitochondrial function in it. So there's cool stuff you can do in all these different things. But who would have thought that polyphenols were so important to the evolution of our society?

Well, it turns out Bulletproof Coffee is the culmination of that where we don't use milk in it. We use butter because butter allows you to absorb the polyphenols. And we use brain octane in it, which also allows you to make more energy from it.

So all of a sudden, the mitochondria are like, you gave me energy. You gave me polyphenols at the same time. I'm ready to party. And that's why you feel so different when you drink it.

Oh, I love it. And there's no crash and it tastes smooth. I don't drink coffee, but I like Bulletproof. So we drink it all the time here. Cool. Yeah, yeah. But I never drank coffee before.

Isn't it like being a vegetarian that eats fish? Exactly, yeah. But I never had coffee before. I mean, I'd have it every now and then or a cappuccino or something just for a taste or whatever. But now, yeah, I do it almost every day. It's a performance-enhancing substance. And you drink less of it.

Like a cup of Bulletproof is a good amount. Goes a long way. Yeah, it goes a long way. So awesome, man. I want to make sure everyone check out bulletproof.com. Make sure you check out orderheadstrong.com. You can get some free videos, a lot of other good stuff here.

It's the Bulletproof plan to activate untapped brain energy to work smarter and think faster in just two weeks. So it's really a two-week program to get you up to speed on everything you need, test it all, put it all together, and then see how you feel after two weeks. There you go. And they can connect with you on social media where? What's the best place? Let's see. I'm Dave Asprey on Instagram. On Facebook, I've got 300 and something thousand followers. So pretty much Facebook and Instagram. At Dave Asprey everywhere?

Yeah. It's all Dave. I think on Instagram, it might be Dave.Asprey. Okay, cool, yeah. I think on Instagram, I'm Dave.Asprey and I'm Dave Asprey on Facebook. Awesome, awesome. A couple of final questions for you. This one's called The Three Truths. I don't think I asked this the last time you were on,

which was a few years ago. Yeah, it's been a while. So this is called The Three Truths. I ask everyone at the end. And the question is, when you're 180 and it's your last day and you've written everything you want to write, you've put out videos, you've put out all this content, but for whatever reason, it's erased. It's gone.

No one has any of your information anymore. All the stuff you've taught, they don't have access to it. You have a piece of paper and a pen. You get to write down three truths, the three things you know to be true about everything you've learned, everything you've experienced, all the biohacking, the mind hacking, all of it. If it came down to the three things that you would pass on to the world, these lessons or truths, what would be your three truths? It's an interesting question. I haven't heard you ask it before, so I'm coming into it blind. See, this is what professional interviewers do.

We're actually taught to not say that's an interesting question, but I did it anyway just to throw you sure i'll think about that for a second yeah three truths uh the first one would would be that the world is way more complex than you than you perceive it to be like there are things you just don't notice that are really important the uh the second one would be that you have way more control than you ever thought you did. And the third one would be that it costs you more and causes more harm than you think when you hold hate and anger in your heart. than you think when you hold hate and anger in your heart. And that the antidote for that is gratitude and forgiveness.

And that if you can just do that, that when you set that stuff down, you stop carrying other people's baggage for them that costs you, that you don't know how much freedom that'll give you, but you're also probably entirely unaware of the harm you're causing other people by sending them those bad vibes. Yeah. Well, those are great, man. Those are great. I want to acknowledge you

for a moment, Dave, for being intelligently useful in all of your ways of being a resource for the world. I mean, you've tested so many things on yourself. You've researched more than probably anyone I know to see how you can improve your life and impact the lives of millions of people around the world. And you've put yourself through who knows what type of harm or all these different tests. And you continue to push the boundaries to be in service to yourself and to other people

with this mind hacking and everything that you do. So I acknowledge all the work that you do to constantly step up for yourself, risk yourself, to learn how we can improve our lives. And it's really making a big impact. So I would acknowledge you for that. I appreciate that, Lewis. That feels good. Thank you. Yeah, of course, man. Final question is, what's your definition of greatness? That feels good. Thank you. Of course, man.

Final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Definition of greatness. You know, the very greatest people in history, in my view of looking at this, are the people who've reached full enlightenment. And my definition of enlightenment is based on, I've studied in Nepal and Tibet and all this stuff, but I don't follow any one spiritual school or anything like that. I believe that when you have full awareness of what's going on inside your body, that that leads to full awareness of what's going on outside your body. So a sense of inner awareness tied with a sense of outer awareness, when you know everything that's going on, you will be great

because your ability to interact with the world without telling yourself a story that's not true, you basically erase the story. So you're like, oh, this is what's actually happening instead of what I told myself about what's actually happening. So it's about removing self-deception. And that's what makes it great. Dave Aspin.

Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, Lewis. Boom shakalaka. There you guys go. I hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure to subscribe. If this is your first time here,

just click on the podcast app and click on subscribe over on your iPhone podcast app, over on Stitcher or on SoundCloud. And if you haven't left a review yet make sure to leave a review for your chance to be a reviewer of the week go to itunes.com slash greatness and let us know what you think about these episodes make sure to share this one with your friends if you thought it had any value if you know someone who could benefit from this then share

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Get ready. Make sure to subscribe because this one is going to be hot, and you'll want to be notified when it comes out live. I love you guys very much, and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. you