What a family. Welcome to episode, 279 of the genius live.
What's going on everybody? We back, welcome to another episode of the show. I'm your host. Max Lou, Guevara filmmaker health and science journalist and New York Times bestselling author. I've dedicated my life to unraveling the science behind our choices, including what we eat and how we live affect our cognitive and physical performance, how we feel, and our health span and risk for disease. This podcast is all about how to live in that optimal state, which I call living like a genius.
- big news you guys, as you know, it's my mission to create the best health and wellness content period. So to that end, I'm excited to announce that I've created a membership program where you can now get ad free episodes of the show with Early Access to some episodes and epic bonus content, including a monthly Q&A by joining. You'll directly be helping me to expand the offerings of the show which will continue to be available at zero cost for the general population will be able to book better guests, hire new team members and
Much more. I'll explain more at the end of this episode, but if you'd like to learn more, now, you can head over to the genius life.com on today's episode of the show. I'm super excited to welcome back Dave. Asprey, Dave is considered to be the father of biohacking and he's the founder of bulletproof 360 ink. He's a New York Times bestselling author, host of the human upgrade podcast and the creator of the global phenomenon, Bulletproof Coffee and the bulletproof diet. He's got a new mineral infused.
Coffee line, called danger coffee, and his latest book is called smarter not harder the biohackers guide to getting the body and mind you want. And it is out now over the course of the next hour. And some on minutes, you are going to discover the three types of foods that Dave says everybody should be avoiding. We're gonna hear about the top factors, causing us all to be deficient in minerals. Why? Dave believes supplementation is actually a necessity in today's toxic world and the supplements he says are required to thrive today. Finally, we're going to get
Will and Dave is going to describe the three levels of spiritual growth that people experience empathy, compassion and Equanimity, and why he believes that this highest level of spirituality is only achievable to physically and mentally healthy people. I loved having this conversation with Dave, he's a friend of mine, he's in a lot of good stuff out in the world and a controversial figure, he may be, but I think he's got a lot of value to offer so I'm excited for you to listen to this episode of the show. I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think and before we dive
In. Please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with friends and loved ones that you think May benefit from it. This episode of the show is sponsored by a G1 by athletic greens. I love athletic greens ag1 because it helps you to truly film nutrient gaps in your diet, promote gut health and support whole body Vitality, one daily serving delivers a comprehensive blend of nine, count mm9 products, you get a multivitamin multi-mineral, you get a probiotic adaptogens and so
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Athletic greens.com Junius, check them out. All right guys, we're just seconds away from diving in with the one and only Dave. Asprey the father of biohacking, but before we dive in, I just want to give a shout-out to Apple podcast app user mrs. Anna Gallardo who took time out of their surely busy schedule to leave. This lovely review for the show on the app. They wrote falling in love and gave us five stars. Love the newer episodes. Since episode 260, this has been my favorite podcast before I didn't care much.
CH4 the health side aspect but just because it was not relatable to me personally, but these new series, I think she means episodes. The more internal and emotional help ones are amazing. Keep them coming. Well, Anna, thank you so much for the honesty. That really means a lot and I hope to continue to keep delivering for you. I am definitely a big health and nutrition nerd but I also am really enjoying the license that you guys are giving me to broaden out and expand and
Row with this platform. So thank you for listening, you guys, it means so much to me. And yes, if you haven't already, please don't forget to subscribe. Leave a rating and review for the show on your favorite podcast. App of choice. It helps it's free. And yeah, thank you. Now, without further Ado, here's my conversation with the one and only Dave asprey. Let's go. Alright, Dave, asprey in the house, what up
Max, it's so good to do this in person. I always see you like, around the world at the events that we go to together and then we never recorded anything. So I'm actually,
E in your studio. I get to like, pet the genius
lifesigns. Yeah, that's awesome. In the flesh. Is this painted with Organic pain? It's painted with Organic paint. Grass-fed. I knew it. It's grass-fed pain. Yeah, but this is cool because actually when we first met it was in your estate in Vancouver where you put me on your podcast for the first time and we recorded in person. I was so grateful what you working for Wired Magazine or someone back then it was vice which is actually kind of funny if Isis. Well, they were really cool back then. And then again shifted
into some weird vibe that
Understand same. Same
a little bit. Yeah, but but I was, I just remember being so grateful because you are like, you are already like a paragon in the space. And you had me on to talk about my project to my efforts and it just felt like such a great form of validation at that point. So I just wanna say thank you. You're welcome. And it's part of my
job is, I started the movement of biohacking. And I'm,
I'm looking
to be a curator of people who are doing good work, and to shine the light on people.
Well, it's not about me. It's about us. So, thank you for being an early
adopter. Yeah, of course, thank you. Well, out of the gate. I love to start high level for my peeps because I know that their time is valuable. What are the three foods that you would tell people to stop eating after watching this if they want to live longer and feel better?
Don't eat seed oils.
Don't eat
grains.
Hmm, and don't eat fake meat. If it tastes like meat in, it's not meat. It is hacking your operating system and not for your
interest. Hmm. Wow, seed oils grains. Okay, let's unpack the seed oils. A little bit. Is it all seed? Oils is like sesame seed oil or is it, are you talking more specifically about certain types? These
are General guidelines, and it's the same kind of thinking that says well, okay,
Because sarin nerve gas is a plant protein and one of the most poisonous substances on Earth therefore you shouldn't eat any plant proteins. It's actually a logical. Same reason that, you know, because spider venom is bad or some certain milk proteins, bad, you shouldn't eat any animal products. It's just bad. Science is not even thinking. So seed oils, you can use them medicinally black seed, or black. Cumin seed, oil is really useful for you. There are times when you might want to take cold,
Rest refrigerated in a dark bottle flax oil for short periods, of time to restore balance. You might want gamma linoleic acid acid from a barrage seed oils. In fact I use it one of my formulas. So even grass-fed meat is 1.6, percent omega-6 oil and you actually need a mega 60s
when I'm telling you though, is the vast
majority of seed oils on the market that you're not taking for a specific enhancement. Effect is bad for you. Hmm. So
Nola corn, soy, safflower sunflower. Not very good for you. Sesame seed, relatively high in omega-6 relatively, high and polyphenols also in the top six allergy causing Foods. So if you're not allergic to sesame seed oil and you don't overheat it and you wanted some sesame oil in your salad, go for it man.
Yeah. Also, like you make sesame seed oil by pressing sesame seeds. It's a fairly innocuous rudimentary process. Kind of like olive oil.
Yeah, we're not poor.
In hexane through there. Like, we are to make cannelloni
oil. Exactly grains. What's the story with grains?
Grains? Universally have something. I write about in my newest book smarter not harder. Although it's a small part of the book. They have phytase in addition to usually lectins and often times Omega six, and sometimes mycotoxins and other times proteins like zhan Yuan, pokes holes in your gut, and stuff like that. Phytic acid is stealing, our minerals at an unprecedented rate because we keep eating more and more grains and we don't process them the way.
Used to historically our ancestors when they started farming notice that they were getting shorter and thicker. So they would ferment their their grains, they would soak them. They would put lie on them the process them sometimes for a long period of time and they did that in order to reduce fight phytic acid. What phytic acid does is, it goes into our bodies and it rips minerals out of your bones and out of your cells and it stops you from absorbing minerals. So in people,
Who go vegan for their health away? I did many years ago and the vegan diet and even the raw vegan diet made me really sick. We say, okay, well, there's minerals in this spinach. Well, the fact that there's iron in there, maybe that's only if the spinach grune iron-rich soil and we've been depleting our soil, like no one's business. We've been binding up the minerals in the soil with glyphosate so your food doesn't have the minerals, you think it does but spinach protects its iron so you can't get the iron with other compounds. So the high iron spinach
Is 1.7% absorbable iron? Wow. The fact that there's iron in there doesn't matter if you can't use it.
Yeah, that's true. Now I definitely appreciate that. Like we know that phytic acid is so called anti-nutrient, but how big of a concern? Do you think this is in like an omnivorous diet? It's a massive concern. Even is it for somebody who's like regularly eating highly bioavailable you know, animal products that provide
absolutely take a rice cake with your steak, the steak won't work
Work.
Because there was a mistake can't get in there. Hmm. Interesting. So are you on a totally grain-free diet at this point? No, I white
rice which is exceptionally low in phytic acid and and anti-nutrients the reason white rice is prized in every country where people arises because they know that the phytic acid, the Arsenic and the gut irritants that are in the brown, rice outer layer, they do not make up for the fact that there's fiber in it. You can fiber from other places that don't have all those negative
things. Hmm.
Yeah, I love eating like sushi with white with my with you know white rice with my Sushi me too. And it's cooked and cooled
which is what you want because that makes more resistant starch and let's face it. You don't get meaningful vitamins from your brown rise. The fact that there's more of them in there, the white race doesn't matter because you have to eat six pounds of it or something to get enough vitamins to matter and then you're just going to be fat. Yeah, and the fact that brown rice and beans is somehow a complete protein, it doesn't matter because you have
Grams of carbs to get enough complete protein to make a difference and then you are actually obese. And really really full and probably farting a
lot. Like
let's just face reality. If you ignore a whole bunch of things that you just didn't want to pay attention to so you can focus on one, good thing you sound a lot like big food with the way they sell food to me.
Well, yeah, especially for people that are on like weight loss diets or Lifestyles, you know, because I mean obesity is a major problem today, right? I was 300 pounds, man.
It's your biggest focus when you're heavy.
Yeah, you do want to be cognizant of like, where your non-protein calories are coming from. And as you said with like a bowl of like rice and beans, like they it might provide protein, but it's also providing a ton of non-protein
calories and also let's face it. The protein is crap, it's not the same as eating an egg even if the amino acids were present because what helps comes with seeds and nuts and legumes aside from phytase trypsin Inhibitors, it's almost like plants, really.
I want you to steal their protein from their babies, so they inhibit protein digestion. So, in addition to the five days, you have to eat another piece of steak with an equivalent amount of protein to what you got in your stupid plant-based proteins. In order to make them available,
man, pissing off, pissing off the vegans and
think. I'm sorry, guys. I would love to just eat a bowl of gravel every day. It just doesn't work. And I was, I fell for the vegan stuff hard. I was an early adopter. I mean, everything, raw, everything vegan. And I tried vegan that wasn't raw, and I
I had my own sprouter, that would sometimes get a little bit funky in there, you know, the one with lots of trays and I had my own dehydrator and my champion juicer, and I can blend Irish CMOS better than you and your raw cacao, and cold, press coffee, even though, coffee's already been cooked, but we pretend, it's actually still raw for some reason. If it's cooked and cooled, I did, all that man. And I did it until like, shattered my teeth, because I depleted my minerals.
And I really wish I could get all that time back. It was not good for me and it took me several years to recover and the first thing they have to recover is your minerals and that's why in smarter not harder. It's not a book about nutrition. It's a book about. Here's the stuff that saves you. The most time to get to the main goals people are looking for and one of the lowest hanging fruit is not a sexy nootropic, it's actually good old-fashioned minerals and if you get your mineral levels back up, you have incredible boned.
City, which is one of the biggest and best signs of metabolic. Sufficiency that your metabolism works. It also lowers your cause of dying and being disabled. So if your food doesn't have enough minerals anymore, even if you are eating healthy foods because the soil is depleted and the foods that were being told are healthy for us are depleting her minerals. I promise you fixing. This is not sexy, it's just the thing. That provides the most leverage for all of the other bio hacks that you might be doing. So if you're working out every morning like a good human and your mineral.
Depleted, you're doing it wrong. Hmm, that's why, danger coffee my new coffee, brand is just packed with large amounts of ionic minerals that go into you when you drink the coffee, and that's there by Design, to help us restore it. And that's why when you drink it even without butter and MCT although it's good with those, what you feel is
Like, your body's like, I'd have more and it's not a caffeine thing at all. It's the body's sensors than what I call the meat operating system in the book telling you minerals. Yeah. Like I needed these, These are the raw materials for making ATP. These are the raw materials for making collagen. This is what's going to allow me to do what I'm trying to do, but I can't do because you didn't have enough chromium.
So, this is a big deal,
and it's underrated. And the reasons for it are phytic acid, oxalic acid, and
A depletion of our soil and binding of minerals in our soil because of glyphosate. And I, in the first chapter of the bulletproof diet, which started a lot of these movements. Now, as it came out in 2011, the book came out 2014 but the diet went online. In 2011, chapter 1, oxalates lectin and phytates, Omega, sixes and mycotoxins in. Histamines, are the big things that are slowing, all of us down each of them, maybe
He more or less of a problem for you, but humans don't make enough or even any for the most part phytase, which is what blocks and neutralizes phytic acid as a small farmer with a regenerative Farm. I've done a lot of research on animals as well, when they feed animals corn, and soy and grain. They actually measure the amount of phytic acid because they found it makes animals less fertile, they break their bones, their homes, start to split. So they're actually tracking how much of this they can force him to the animals.
Because the grains are not what the animals would normally eat, and then they add enzymes into the animal's food so they can upregulate that even more without harming the animals as much. And those are animals that have three stomachs that already make a lot of phytase. Wow.
And we don't make any. Nope, it actually, that's not
true. We don't make any to speak of. If you eat an enormously high phytic, acid diet for long periods of time, your body will make Trace Amounts of it.
But not enough to matter, got it. Wow, very interesting. This episode of the show is brought to you by life force. Life force is
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Say 15% off again, that is just Thrive health.com and use code genius, and you're going to get 15% off, enjoy. I've I actually tried your danger danger coffee and it's great. I've no no affiliation. I'm not kissing your ass, but I feel like after you drink danger coffee, it makes other coffees taste, like, the equivalent of distilled water compared to, like, spring water
because interesting, yeah, that feeling because it's not, it's not good.
Stronger coffee. It's super high-end coffee, but it's not stronger brood. But there's it's that feeling of like, they're both a glass of water but one feels
different. Yeah, there's something about, I mean, it's like when you drink water that has been run through a reverse osmosis purifier, it tastes like unnatural, it tastes like dead, you know. And then, when you come in comparison, when you put, trace minerals into that water. Mmm. It tastes much more like quenching.
Yeah, your body is somehow tells you, it's like a sense of taste.
It's not taste. It's a sense but it's not
taste. Mmm. So what are what are minerals and like, what are the minerals specifically that you think we ought to be concerned about and prioritizing our
diets? That is a whole chapter of smarter not harder and I'm not going to be able to go into the full detail on it just because of time. But I will tell you that because of the pandemic we all learned that zinc is good for us.
So you probably took some zinc, you probably also took five other supplement, Blends that all had the u.s. recommended daily allowance of zinc. Now I don't really put much stock in u.s. recommended daily allowance because that's supposed to be the allowance to stop you from dying of a deficiency. Not for performing well, and because they don't tell you what form to use in different forms do different things. But still you may be getting five times more zinc than you probably normally would get. And in the book, I talk about this copper bow.
Balances out Zing. So when you take too much, think you get copper deficiency from it and the copper deficiency gives you great hair. How many people went grey during the
pandemic? Hmm. A lot of
them, why did they do that? Well, because the government acted like idiots, there's that, and that creates stress, but it's more than that. You also took a lot of zinc and that also depleted your copper
interesting.
So that's an example, is the zinc and copper ratio. I also talked in the book, specifically for women that a lot of women.
Have anemia and some of them will go in and get infusions in order to stop the anemia. That gets a serious problem. So then they go out and eat a lot of iron, not knowing that copper escorts, iron into cells. If your copper deficient, you can have enough iron to give yourself iron overload and still not make use of it. So what I recommend is you take macro minerals and this is going to be about four pills a day and that includes magnesium, I don't worry about calcium.
Well, you should get enough of that, except for maybe some like, raw vegans or something. In which case, you might need a calcium supplement, if you eat a lot of oxalates. Like, if you have,
like, if you have some sort of bizarre, kale fetish,
here we go.
And, you know, you just eat kale every day, which you don't. I just eat you about it. But you know if you're eating a lot of especially raw spinach and raw, kale and beets beets are also a very high source of oxalic acid. You might actually need to take calcium specifically with that food, ideally even when you're cooking it so that you can precipitate the crystals of oxalic acid out in your stomach and just do some damage to your gut lining instead of precipitating.
Out in your blood. And then having little razor sharp crystals going around and giving you goud's or vulvodynia or kidney stones. Hmm. Interesting. So, kale taste so good. I reckon
no, look, people disagree with me on this and whenever I post about Kel on social media, there's always well, now, it used to be there. I was going to say, there was always, at least, like one person in the comments. But now, there's always at least a dozen people in the comments tagging. You it's so funny I eat and I've said this
It's not that, I don't regularly by Kale for my house. But I shop at a place in l.a. that makes a kale salad that I really enjoy. And so I will routinely eat that but it's not every day and when I do it's not like I'm eating a whole bowl of it. You
know. I really like that that line of thinking, it's like, I have this one drug dealer, and they just gave me heroin. And I just, I don't do it every day. I just feel like once a week and so, it's just, yeah, I'm seriously. Just teasing you. So here's the reality though, if you kill once a week, it probably doesn't matter. Unless you have kidney stone.
Got it. Probably won't matter. Some people have oxalobacter in their guts and they handle that family. With all the oxalates, much more than other people. I don't have very good bacteria, they're all of my other bacterial stuff. I've been able to modulate and manipulate and get my levels up. That one doesn't matter. I can eat, you know, a piece of kale every day and it just kind of gives me tartar on my teeth, which is a sign that you're getting oxalic acid overload, the very back of your bottom teeth. You ever eat like a raw spinach salad or spinach smoothie, and it's kind of like tannic and
Pretty. Yeah, that's oxalic
acid. Well, that chalky a sensation that sucks, out gasps. It interesting. So wait, you were saying, you can take calcium
with calcium carbonate. Not all calcium will do it and probably baking soda calcium carbonate, works better what you would do. In fact, I taught Joe Rogan this on his show, seven years before he actually gave up Kayla because of oxalic acid, it took him a while to get it, but what you do is you when you're cooking, you don't saute it or bake it, you boil it. And
You put the calcium carbonate in the water and that'll cause the majority of the oxalic acid to crystallize in. You want to see it in the bottom of the pan. Whoa. And then you dump the water and then you eat the slimy. Kale stuff that's left over. And then you congratulate yourself on having spent more than the cost of grass fed beef to buy the cow because a bunch of kale has like 30 calories in it, and it cost for bucks.
There. Any calories? Have grass-fed. Wagyu rib
eye is less than four bucks. Yeah you're right and it's like 30 calories of like yeah. I mean yeah the dollar per Callie Cal ratio is astronomical. Yes, of organic killed people should be eating. If it should be organic, if you're going to get held regularly, it
should not just be organic. It should be organic Dino kale because Dino kale has about thirty percent loss, or less oxalic acid than Lacey, kale or Lacey out. Okay. Liz
They call it. Wow. So the stuff that you would put like at Pizza Hut around the salad bar. That was the largest purchaser of kale in the country was as garnish that people wouldn't eat at Pizza. Hut salad bar until 2004 the kill marketing Association, spent six million dollars to convince us that Kayla's food instead of Garner
fascinating. So wait, Dino Kells is a type of Kelly you can find it somewhere
guilty. Yeah. It looks more like dinosaur skin, not that we really know what that looks like, but it's darker and it has less of the wavy edges and it has more of it looks kind of
With more cabbagey.
I think I know what you're talking about. It's also like
darker Hue. It's got more polyphenols as well. Wow, so if you're a kale fetishist, it's like you know some people might like patent leather and said it was like any other. If you want to be like one of those
I'ma kill fetishist apparently, okay. So you were talking about copper what are some of your favorite sources of copper? The very best
source of copper on the planet is dark chocolate by Flavor
my flavor. So, if you're eating, like, 100 grams, like,
a
Goods, a good quality, dark chocolate. You're going to get a good dose of copper. And if you don't do that regularly, then you can get copper from shellfish. But surprisingly oysters are not a great source of copper because they have so much zinc. They stop you from getting copper. So other shellfish can work really really well.
Interesting, wow, okay, good to know and we talked about zinc. What about magnesium? Magnesium is one of my sort of favorite go to go to minerals.
It turns out, if you eat kale,
Doesn't work,
does not true. Just direct magnesium is one of the
macro minerals and it's the one that's most important. You need more calcium than magnesium and I actually became aware of this. When I was maybe 19, I bought this iguana, his name was Skippy and he was like 8 inches long when I bought him and he kept growing and he grew to be about four and a half feet long and he'd write on my shoulder like like a parrot. I was I felt I was like a lizard pirate.
It and in order to raise iguanas, you have to learn some things. And these are fundamental biohacking, things, number one, if you don't have a reptile light with ultraviolet in it, they die. And I remember thinking, I wonder why I don't need a reptile light, and then it was like ten years later, I'm like, oh my God. I do need a vitamin D light, who would have thought. And then, I also knew that, if I didn't supplement, his mostly plant-based diet because that's what iguanas, eat with a two-to-one calcium, magnesium ratio that he would also die. The thing for us is we usually
We have a lot of calcium just around in our in our diet especially if we're eating dairy and we're usually so deficient in magnesium, that what you want to do is get, your magnesium levels up. So you have the right ratios in the body and that's most important. Something similar happens with sodium and potassium where people say you have too much sodium. But wait, you need sodium to manage stress and we're all more stress than we ever have been. So to cut sodium to the levels that are recommended by the government right now is so low that it
Increases something called renin in your blood which increases your cardiac risk. So, low sodium increases heart attacks usually goes too low. So, when you're stressed, you naturally want more sodium in. That's just fine, but it's not just fine in a world where you have almost no potassium. So, your job is to get your potassium levels up and eat as much salt as you want. As long as it's sea salt, because sea salt contains trace minerals. So, I go through this in one of the chapters in the book that says, look take your macro mineral supplement, take your Trace.
Also get in your danger coffee or not. And when you do that every other thing you do, even if you don't do the other by a hawk. So you just go to the gym the way we used to, that's okay, you're still going to get more results and when you try to think about something hard, it'll just work better because you got these in, but there's one other supplement. That is, as important as minerals, that's intimately tied with minerals in a way that people don't understand. And that is vitamin D. Take your heard of that. No, Max
You have D AK e. This is all the fat soluble vitamins all together. So we all know about vitamin D, I've been hitting that one just since I started my first blog post vitamin D3 is so important, but if you're not taking vitamin K2 with it, you can actually have vitamin D drive, calcium into scar tissue into your arteries. So it's critically important to get vitamin K2 and a little bit of K1, probably with your vitamin D3. But if you do that, and you don't have a
Vitamin A vitamin. A is part of what drives minerals into your cells, including iodine and plant-based vitamin A it doesn't work. Beta carotene is not vitamin A, no matter how many times you call a plant-based vitamin. A it doesn't magically transformed into retinol which is the substance you need. So when you take vitamin Dake, which is something I'm making for upgrade Labs, but you don't have to take, you can buy a vitamin E here and vitamin K2 it. You can do all these things and when you do that, magically the minerals, you take will go.
Into your cells and stay there where they belong. But if you take minerals and you don't have your fat solubles, the minerals don't work. And if you just did these two things, then your expensive nootropics and your expensive sexual energizer's and all the other stuff and you know you and I both take more than a small amount of supplements, they all work better because you have the ability to just get minerals into a mitochondria. So so look there's my minerals. I guess. I can catalyze that reaction with an enzyme that I made that required Boron. So I'll do it. And as a proof point for this, I follow my practice is here.
I had foot surgery and they cut into the bone with a bone saw and I was awake the whole time. It was actually really cool
because said nobody ever know it was it was
amazing. Yeah, I feel anything. I was numb, what was cool about it? Well, I got to talk to the surgeon. He was doing it, and I mean, you can't feel anything. So I'm just laying back and they've drained all the blood from the legs. So there's like blood squirting everywhere. It's just like this kind of amazing thing. You can just like go in there. It's called a blood. Blood filled or bloodless surgery. Wow.
So he's doing this and you don't watch it for some reason that that bothers people, so I didn't he just said that he gets worse results from it. And then he, he goes in with his bone saw and it's like sounds like a dentist's drill is goes
and he tells us,
what is this game? Even human? Like I'm having a hard time getting through his bone and after the surgery is like Dave, I had someone in here who was half your age before you and I could get through their bones like butter. Like what do you
Doing are you even human because bone density like that doesn't happen unless you take your vitamin take and your macro minerals and your trace minerals and then magically you have bones that have a little bit of unobtainium in them, or adamantium depending on which Universe of comics, you
like, Marvel re Marvel Universe Wolverine. Yeah. Hey guys, quick pause this episode of the show is sponsored by H, VM n. If you followed my work, for any significant amount of time, you know, that I am super bullish on the research surrounding
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Did you know that you swallow five to seven percent of your toothpaste? Every single time you brush your teeth. I mean, statistically that's what I read and if you think about it doesn't entire blob of toothpaste, every 7 days and that kind of sucks because most toothpastes are made with ingredients that you generally don't want to eat. That's why there's a warning on the back of most toothpaste tubes. That's why I love bite for all of my Oral Care. Needs, they make dried toothpaste tablets using clean ingredients? No artificial sweeteners.
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or you can use code genius at checkout, I love the stuff, they make a bunch of clean flavors. They also have other Oral Care related accessories, really, a ton of great products that are super effective and conscientious. Check them out again, try by.com slash genius or use code genius at checkout to claim this deal. I use this stuff every night. It's great. Wow, that's crazy. So vitamin Dake Dae and K. Yep. Obviously people can take these from supplements but if there's
Important. I think it's worth touching on where we can find these in food. Why? Because so that people can go and you know, optimized for nutrient density which we know is so important to help them. Work smarter not harder.
Why is nutrient density and food important
because well we have to eat and we don't want to eat nutrient depleted
food but you are eating nutrient depleted food because it's grown on nutrient depleted soil. Are we going to pretend food is high nutrient even though it's not.
So what do you eat them? Like, what's your what's your diet,
08?
Grass-fed grass-finished steak, I do a variety of powdered organs and I have four since I started by talking my pregnancy book, I tell people to do,
those are all loaded with with fat soluble vitamins.
Yeah. It's Foods. Yeah, they absolutely are right. And then I eat, you know, organic vegetables, and ate some white rice. But I have I am under no misconception that those will deliver enough nutrients to me to allow my body to thrive in the world that
We have created that has way more toxins than Mother Nature. Hmm. So it is a Fool's errand to pretend that you're serving of pinto beans or liver has x amount of minerals in it, because it probably doesn't the chart. You're looking at was based on an animal, that ate something or another a while ago. And if you look at the ranges, they're incredibly huge. So you can go to a calorie in a food Tracker app that tells us that is all masturbation. It feels good, but nothing productive happens at the end.
You simply don't know what's in your food and that's okay. You can still be safe and not know what's in your food. I know it's in my food because the highest nutrient density food on the planet is my vitamin D A ke because it's 100% nutrients, except for the gelatin in the capsule and that's also good for
you. So you're so you're saying that you think today. It really is necessary to supplement.
The only person who should not supplement is the person who lives in nature, in a wild area with no artificial lighting. No non-natural EMF.
Which means you have to blow up starlink and only eats wild-caught food in that case, your life
expectancy 45. Hmm, hmm.
Just because what we have a world that is soaking and toxins we made, and you don't have to be afraid of it. I would like to and I'm working very, very ardently on fixing that, but right now, you are getting a ton of endocrine disrupting. Chemicals, in smarter not harder. I talk about like removing obstacles.
Smarter not harder reducing friction. So you can say, oh it's hard to drive. So let me make a more powerful engine. You could also say what if we just like, put some put some grease on the bearing. So the wheels would turn, maybe we could take some weight out of the trunk magically you can drive now. So we have major issues with toxins so, calcium, d-glucose rate is another one of the unusual supplements I talked about here. If you take nutrients that allow your body to have a superpower detox system,
You can thrive in a world that has more toxins than normal. If you have more minerals than you would have gotten from food. If the food had minerals, you can thrive in a world that maybe isn't the perfect world, but still has amazing opportunities. I'm like, you can pick up your phone which contains blue light and contains non natural imf's and probably endocrine disruptors in your case and you can access more information than a king from 50 years ago the most powerful people on Earth and it's free. Okay, that is a benefit but
Since you're going to do those other things, you might as well just make your body really resilient because resilience is one of the big five things that people are asking for what I did to write smarter not harder. So, I opened upgrade Labs about eight years ago, underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in Santa Monica, and it's still open today. And in fact, it's franchising across the country, we're opening dozens of locations, and you can go to own and upgrade labs.com. You can open up biohacking facility in your neighborhood.
The the thing that it taught me though is if someone walks in the door they don't know what to do. And say I want to be healthy. Like I was that mean
And I don't me ask you that what does help was healthy mean to you? Oh man.
Well to me I guess it means feeling really good in my body and feeling resilient and feeling at peace feeling strong. Okay? Feeling whole obviously the absence of disease, feeling energized.
You hit some major points
there.
The ability to manage stress for the first time ever. Last year people asked for that.
More than weight loss because we're so stressed. Right? And that's because of isolation and because of people illegally taking control of our fundamental human freedoms and that makes people stress just not being able to see. Smiling faces, not be able to see your friends and having economic distress. Now those things happen, right? So Stress Management, you talked about, so ability to handle stress better. You talk about energy, which is another one fact. Those are two of the five categories in the book, where I teach a, here's the ways to do it.
Turns out energy is intimately tied to metabolism which is tied to weight loss. So actually but having more energy and losing weight actually the same thing to make you lose weight, gain more energy. So some people ask for that, some people ask first to energy stress, some people ask for more muscle and you mentioned being strong, it's another one other people say, I want more cardiovascular endurance, I get tired playing with my kids, I get tired, walking up the stairs, so cardiovascular different than strength and they want that.
And then let's see which is the fifth one that I'm missing. Oh, cognitive function! That's a massive ask. You don't go to the gym for that but people are now asking for that. So when they come in to upgrade Labs, I actually give people a quiz and the same type of quiz information is in the book and the quiz itself is on Dave asprey.com and you can go there and I hope you identify what is your top goal for biohacking and you're unlikely to be a say over those five. This is most important because there's always a little trade-offs you make so I used to
Go analysis and all of that. And upgrade Labs, we use an AI back to system, that helps to figure out, which interventions, which bio hacks are going to work most quickly for you and we measure you with thousands of variables. Then we what's your goal. Oh what's the fastest path to get you there in the least amount of time and the reason I call it smarter not harder Max is that we have fetishize I don't like you talking about that but I'm normally it's about kail.
I'll with you online, but we have fetishized as a species grit. Hmm. And, and working really hard and struggling and suffering and sweating.
I don't want to do that. Is that okay, right? I feel like like I just don't I'm willing to and okay, I think I know how to apply grit and willpower like I have built a ginormous companies. I've done a lot of things in the world, right? And I've overcome the weight loss, I didn't want to do all the work I had to do for that. In fact, the reason I can build big companies just because I do less work than other people because I learned how to be good at that. So on one hand, our meat operating system, the part of our body that runs
We're not looking it wants you to lay on the couch because if you lay on the couch you won't burn any calories. And then you won't starve to death in case there's not enough calories. So this is an inborn mechanism that drives all of human progress. Oh, I was, I was really tired of shoveling horse manure. So I built a car, right? I was tired of waking up at four in the morning to let my bread rise. So I made baking powder. Like these are massive labor, saving things. We are driven in our bones to save time and energy by our laziness laziness is a sacred
Good virtue. And here's how sacred it is. Have you ever dated someone who came home and said max? I saved $500 on his hand back.
Yeah. Okay. Have you ever dated? Someone said
max, I spent five hundred dollars on the sandbag. Yeah, really. Okay, well,
I've spent it but not talk about it but not, I've deliberately
overpaid. There you go. What, what you'll find is that companies have figured out this hack for the meat operating system. They will tell you how much money you save and big letters and your operating systems like, yeah, yeah, savings savings. That's like, laying on the couch. I got you it like, but man, you gave me a 200 dollar discount on the handbag or the shoes.
Are the Watcher, whatever it was, but you still spend 500 bucks. But we ignore the effort. We don't want to pay attention to effort, so you can do the same thing. When you learn the bio hacks that are in smarter not harder and the motivational Factor there, is you just acknowledge that your body doesn't want to do this even if you know as a good person you're capable of doing it. So when you do something that takes five minutes but gave you the benefit of an hour you don't go man. I had to do five minutes of whatever you go. I just saved 50 minutes just like the person comes home because I save so much.
Money. It was your half off at the store.
It wasn't half Han at this. Don't write, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. No, you
celebrate. Yeah, and that actually makes the resistance that we all feel to go into the gym, it evaporates. It's a very powerful mental hack and from, there was all right. What are the things that are actually going to get you there? The fastest and what I find in those five, big domains by there's two sub domains that are side effects of this. I just want to mention them because they're in the book, They're not the main focus, but there are things you get one of them is improving sleep.
The other one is improving sacks, so those are things that often times our goals but they're never the primary goal unless they become a really serious problem for someone. And at that point, still, we fix their energy, we fix their metabolism, or we fix some other thing in their Stress Management. Usually in those come back in line. So what I'm looking to do in the book and what people get when they read it is okay. Now I know where to focus first, which removes a lot of uncertainty and it just makes us safer more.
Accessible space And Then There are the free hacks based on a new principle of biohacking, a new principal biology. That's in the book. Here's the free ones, here's the cheap ones, and here's what the crazy billionaires do and I do the stuff that's worth it, that the crazy billionaires do and I'd put that in upgrade Labs. So that becomes accessible because it's a membership, you just come in and you do it. You don't have to buy a million-dollar lab the way I did it. My house in order to figure how to do all this. So every biohacking facility in lab out, there is basically the seed for those was
Apps in Santa Monica and if people have come in II, could try and copy that, what they don't have is the data and the path through the system. And in the book I'm teaching you, okay. If this is your goal, here's what to do like an example. You and I both do ice bath, right? Yeah. Okay. When I started doing ice baths before they were cool, 200 there.
No pun intended but also pun intended
to. I just saw I said that that was not intended but it was funny. Anyway, so
Before it was in Vogue. I said, all right, I bought an agricultural tank in my farm little plastic $79 thing actually wasn't that it was big, then I go to the convenience store and it's been 40 bucks on bags of ice and I drive to my house and I'd put him in the water and then I leave my trunk open so it could dry out from all the water so it doesn't get all funky in there and then I would throw away the plastic bags and then I would do my ice bath
that sucked. It was a lot of money as a lot of time and I wouldn't do it every day because I just frankly, don't have a half hour to go do it. And if I was rich at the time, when I was starting this, I was absolutely not. I maybe could have hired someone to go buy ice and then like, this
is ridiculous. So what we've
done since then is we've said, oh well, I'll just buy a really nice, cold plunge and I have won. A lot of people have those now or in my house. I have liquid nitrogen cryotherapy because that's what I use. It upgrade Labs actually have an electric one too but
The idea there is is there's various levels of accessibility for this, but the ones that we think are cheap and easy aren't because it's actually 30 bucks to get enough ice. So how do I teach people who are reading the book to do the free version of cold therapy because cold therapy takes advantage of this new principle that? I'll show you in a minute. The easiest way to do real ice therapy isn't actually a cold shower other that that helps and we've probably both talked about cold showers here face your chest for a minute.
Studies show that if you expose yourself for three days to cold temperatures, that that is the amount of time, it takes to change the amount of compounds in cardiolipin, which is a critical part of your mitochondrial membrane. That's why after 3 days suddenly, it doesn't suck to be in cold but the first three days are miserable? Well, because your cells your meat operating system tells you it's cold. You're going to die, get out, get out, get out and eventually listen to it and you know you're not going to die in one minute or cold shower but it sure feels like it. But the body goes.
Wait, I guess I'm enough to deal with us and it just edits itself and puts more cardiolipin in there. And then, you know, God, I actually feel really good after this. Well, the cheapest and easiest way to get that at least you get many of the benefits is a salad bowl and you take a salad bowl as big as your face. You put some water in it and freeze it overnight. The next day, when you want to ice therapy, pour some cold water in there. Let the ice chill it. Take a deep breath and been for to stick your face in the water for as long as you can, which is probably going to be about 8 to 10 seconds before you get a cold headache. Hmm. And then you got some
Sucked. And you do it a couple more times and then the next day you do it again. And now you didn't spend any money on ice, but since most of your temperature receptors, at least the densest ones are on your face and you get your vagus nerve that way. You actually get really strong biological benefits and it didn't cost you anything. And you do this every night and magically your sleep. Improves your nervous system gets stronger and maybe then a cold shower doesn't matter. Maybe then you go to and facility like an upgrade Labs with
You know, whole body therapy and all that kind of stuff. But it's not necessary to get some of those benefits.
Wow. So you can you can actually like acclimate to colder temperatures by putting only your face into cold water. Yeah,
I got to the point. I just bought a snorkel. Lastly, my face in there for five
minutes. What your skin is looking good. These days is probably really really good for your skin as well. It is really good for your skin yet. Tightens up your
collagen. Mmm.
So there's there's a principle that has never never really been talked about that. I could find in any papers. My can find signs of it everywhere, but the picture wasn't put together and it's part of the reason I wrote the book, it's a new principal and biohacking, and it's called slope of the curve biology, I mentioned earlier. Our bodies are strategically lazy, and so, any time they can get you to save energy, they will
They're particularly lazy around thinking because your brain uses about 15 percent of your calories, is a small amount of space, so it's an energy hog. It takes a lot of energy to think hard. So if you can make an intellectual shortcut, that saved a lot of thinking, you'll just do it and it'll feel so natural and be absolutely convinced what you believe. Hmm. The intellectual shortcut. That's easiest the lowest hanging fruit is
If something is good, do more. If something is bad, don't do any. Now this is a problem because that's not how biology or the world actually works. So Z cortisol, it's a bad stress hormone, right? If you have low cortisol, you will get sick and you will die like low. Cortisol is worse than high cortisol, but of cortisol, bad low cortisol, good. All right. Same thing, intermittent fasting. Good starvation, not so good.
Exercise good. I will do it every day and I did this one when I was young and I was 300 pounds, I exercise for 702 hours, yikes, 18 months. This was 90 minutes a day, six days a week and I would did halfway tough cardia. Got to where I can max out all but two machines at the gym and my treadmill was 15 degree incline, wearing a braided backpack, couldn't run because of knee surgeries. But after all that low fat low calorie diet calories in, calories out.
Yeah, I heard it from a bully on the internet. Well, I still had a 46 inch waist and I still weigh 300 pounds. Yeah, I had some muscle and now the calorie bullies will tell you. You were eating Snickers bars. You're lying because what happened couldn't have happened and the response to that as well guys. There is a drug. You can give cattle called zero and all and it makes the cow's fat on 30% less
calories. Hmm.
If the drug can exist, which it does because harm
Buying it because it seems to work and it's cheaper to give him the drug. Then it is to buy a lot more food, right? If that door can exist the calories in, calories out people who keep telling you to drink diet coke and canceled out with a Snickers bar, all that nonsense. They're just people who were bullied and they're very angry. And they're going to tell you about their story and they're not interested in learning and they're just not our people. And so it's like if you're one of those people, like get help like your mother actually loved you. I'm sorry, she was mean to you that one time you
Are
enough. Okay. There's so many people like that on the internet in general but they cut these seem to concentrate in the nutrition space.
They do and it really makes me laugh too because there's so many absurd examples of for instance a gram of uranium has a million calories. Actually more than that I did the math.
That's interesting. Well, I mean you should be able to eat some uranium and they got
this that doesn't count. You can't absorb it. And oh, so you mean the amount of calories I absorb is part of the equation. Why didn't you say so? Because you told me about how many I ate and then they start backpedaling and then they said, well you're not taking it seriously. Give me references when someone says give me references and I say, well, have wrote a book with 1400 references. Oh, I don't read that kind of book. I believe in calories and I'm like, you keep believing in calories, man. The reason you're acting this way is that you're malnourished and you're hungry all the time and that makes you angry.
When you're angry all the time, what will happen is you don't have enough electricity to turn on the prefrontal cortex in order to catch your emotions so that you can act in a way that is worthy of respect people who were at full power, are kind to each other and always nice. Because sometimes just the kind of thing you do is say, dude, get out of my space but we are. We are able to choose our state and maintain it even when a troll comes after us. And this is why I actually why danger copies called danger coffee
And it's why I wrote smarter not harder. Is that when I exercise that much, I was actually depleted. I, I was empty and I was a jerk right? When I was a raw vegan. By the time I was done, I was incredibly emotional and very hard time to hang on to my emotions. When I did the full-on carnivore die, as I was testing the edges of the bulletproof diet. Back in 2010, I did three months of straight carnivore and my sleep went to where I was waking up a dozen times a night without knowing it on my
We Monitor and I just felt like a zombie all the time and I was irritable and cranky so you can get to these states and those are not states of high performance or strength. You can overdo these things and being malnourished will make you be unkind to other people. And it makes you volatile and reactive and one way of creating peace on Earth is to make sure that everyone is so weak and tired and downtrodden that they cannot do anything. But be peaceful because they can barely get through the day. Hello.
It was me with chronic fatigue syndrome. Like I was angry but I can't do much about access to you tired. And the other way is to make a world where everyone is dangerous, because they're so full of energy, who knows what they might do? I know of people doing their full of energy. They improve themselves, and they improve the world around them because we are wired to do that as a species inside our cells, in our bones, but we will not do that. If we don't have our minerals, we don't have a signal from our environment to improve and the definition of biohacking. The
In science of changing the environment around us and inside of us. So, we have full control of our biology that includes. Control of your thoughts control, your emotions control of how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, how you treat animals, how you treat the soil. But if you are easy to program because you are beaten down and malnourished by a food pyramid. You will not be dangerous. You're not dangerous because you're trained as a ninja. If you're a malnourished ninja, you're really, really dangerous. But you're out of control if you're trained as a ninja or not, but you're in full control of your faculties.
Lt's and you are shining at your full power. That's the kind of dangerous person that I want to fill the world with. I want to hang out with those people. I want my kids to grow up with those people. That's why I put minerals in the coffee even though it's expensive. That's why I eat the way I eat and that's why I teach what I teach because we must upgrade our species this way. So that all of us walk around as individual nodes in the great human Network acting with integrity and with in to act with Integrity, you got have
power. Hmm. Your it reminds me so much of that. Jordan Pederson quote
If you think that a strong man is dangerous, wait until you see what? A weak man can do
and this is why we should ban so lame.
Yeah, I mean, I it's I try to stay on affected by the amount of vegan trolls, that come across. My, my timeline on social media and to always remind myself that this is not the whole, you know, that there are a lot of empathetic wonderful people within that community.
Petit. But it seems to be the case that the most vitriolic and hateful and agitated of the trolls that I encounter on social media are of that sort of plant-based alignment, you know, it and I can't help but I can't help. But wonder if it's due to Chronic
malnourishment it is but there's an equal event but there's an equivalent group. The
the low carb
Community has, some people have been so low carb for so long that they acted very similar.
And the worst of all is the calories in calories out Community because they're always hungry and they eat junk food that has low
calories. So right mother's. So they're eating like calorie-dense minimally. Satiating junk Foods trying to squeeze them within the parameters of their, of their macronutrient
Californians, who cares about MSG and NutraSweet artificial colors and flavorings because don't have calories, they're okay. And they did get just as shrill as the vegans but there's something really important Max. When you start to just feel like
Videos are representative of society in Germany. In 1945, nine percent of the population was a member of the Nazi party only 9% and look at the damage that they did. Hmm and when you you study history and you study the percentage of sociopaths in the world, it's around five percent and narcissists. Unfortunately, it's larger than it's ever been because probably of social media and maybe because of malnourishment, who the heck knows?
But those are the people who, who do that behavior online? I do think they're over-represented in the vegan Community, but like I said, I was a vegan, I have tons of vegan friends and we actually share goals you and I and the begins way more and I presented it David Wolfe. He's like a raw vegan. Our presenters conference and I walked him a guys.
I've been around vegan and today I'm a lacto-ovo b fo Porco vegetarian and I hope we can be friends because I care about soil and I care about animal cruelty. And here's the case for eating GE along with your vegetables because you'll make better use your vegetables and create better soil and the Animals won't suffer. And I came back the next year and two thirds of the Audience by by a poll of hands, had started eating GE because of that David cells gay today. Wow. And I am so grateful
faithful that they did me. The honor of being willing to consider my words and I care about deaths per calorie. I learned about that from a Tibetan Lama outside of Lhasa Tibet, and he blew my mind, I was trying to tease him for having a yak skin on his prayer Paul and like you say, no killing you kill the yak one death feed everyone, hmm complete, peace about it, and as a farmer out, if there's a sacred thing, we nourish our animals and we care for animals and we wake up in the middle of the night. And
Take care of them. We stop Predators, we nourish them, and they nourish us, and it's a secret cycle and is not evil. What is evil is torturing an animal and then killing it in distress. You don't do that. And the big companies that are doing that need to stop, but the solution to that is not to eliminate animals from the world. And if we go all plant-based everywhere, that's what'll happen. They'll be like six cows left on the planet and someone protesting that they might fart. Even though vegans fart seven times more than non vegans and we haven't measured their exhaust. Gases are probably responsible.
For global warming right there.
Yeah, definitely contributing to
it, by the way, that's an actual study the seven
times when I saw the headline and did not read the study but I'll take your word for it. Yeah, I mean I think I think people would people don't when they look at you like I think oftentimes, they don't understand the man behind the brand and the fact that you have achieved a lot of credibility in multiple areas of your life, but in two ways that I think are most relevant to this conversation, one, you are a farmer. I've been to your farm.
That's real. Yeah, that's real. And to, I've eaten meat that you've that you've raised. Did it taste different. It was great. Yeah. It was like pastured pork or something here. Yeah. But then also that you did something that's incredibly difficult to do and that is that you've lost over 100 pounds. And you've kept that off just honored I ever lost over 100 unless you count, you know, losing 20, gaining 30 losing third, again point, I did that. So maybe it was over 100 but I mean that's yeah. Both of those things. I think like you know, a lot of people there's a lot of
Armchair experts on the internet today and you're somebody who's like, been in the trenches and you lost the weight and you've raised animals and you know what? It's like, Thanks Max. Yeah. So so yeah. You know, I mean, I just think people need to people need to better understand where you're coming
from. I started what became bulletproof, as a Blog. I ran a non-profit anti-aging group and I was going to start it as a non-profit. I just wanted to share information that was that would have prevented
Me from going through all this, in my early 20s, my late teens, just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting well and then hundreds of thousands of dollars getting way more than well. And man, if I just had good advice, if I'd have just known how it worked, it would have been like a 10,000 dollar problem and I would have never been hungry. Never been a jerk the way I was and I would have had pants that fit like it would have been so nice and I suffered greatly and it just it was unnecessary. So I went to my board of directors of the know
Prophet said we need to start writing this. Like I want to do this in the board started arguing with me about URLs and I can't do this. So I started my own blog and I had a job Max. I made a quarter million dollars a year in and stock options at a publicly traded company. I was VP of cloud security at Trend Micro. I'm a computer hacker. I'm Silicon Valley, dude. Like, I already have a career and having a baby of two babies. Like worst thing I could ever do is start a company, but eventually I was just called to it. Like it people kept getting more interested. I say, does he?
Want to try some of this coffee. I'm tired of passing out when I drink bad, moldy coffee. I thought the market size was 0 and maybe 20 people in the market size was more than that and it just happened and I'm eternally grateful for that, but it happened out of a desire to make sure that that that guy who's 22 years old. Like I was maybe 23, I'm an entrepreneur magazine and we're gonna double extra-large t-shirt. My face is all bloated and, and I look kind of like a lesbian, I'm androgynous because my testosterones at
Hundred to him, I'll show you the picture after this and I like math, my life was not good then and there was no reason for that. It was because of just like deception and unevenly distributed knowledge, and the knowledge, it was out there, wasn't packaged in a way that I could have absorbed it. That's all that drives me on this stuff. I don't have to do in this stuff that I do. I want to do the stuff that I do and it's because I've seen the just the the sole pain that happens when you're obese and you've starved yourself.
Off like a hundreds of times and you've just burned your willpower out and it and it doesn't matter, you stay fat and you feel like you're a failure and like, know you've got this whole operating system that's running and different things, you don't understand. And the things you feel guilty about actually aren't a problem and you're just doing it wrong. And that's all that's ever motivated. Me and it's, I'm just honored the people listen to what I say.
Yeah, yeah. Well a lot do. Are you still drinking Bulletproof Coffee every day?
I drink danger coffee these days.
Because I'm really focused on minerals
Yang's.
I do sometimes put MCT oil, I usually use the brain octane from bulletproof and I sometimes put collagen I use a bulletproof collagen and sometimes I put butter in it, sometimes I don't. It depends on my day. This is what I've always taught. A lot of the Cal trolls. Like, Bulletproof Coffee has 400 calories, you have to get fat and I'm like, whoa, okay, we can talk about, you know, where the fat goes in the body and all kinds of things about by all and whatever, or
They could read what it says in the book, which is depending on your body weight, and your energy consumption, and your hunger levels, put the right amount of butter and MCT oil for your day. And I promise you that, if you were a vegan for the first two years of drinking Bulletproof Coffee or any coffee with butter in it butter will be like your best friend. And every time you put butter in something, you'll get this. Like, glowy feeling about this, like, like, if I could only absorb it through my skin, I would rub it in and you just, you need it. And after
Almost exactly two years suddenly, it becomes nice but not like the most pleasurable thing on earth. That's because the half-life of fat in your body is two years. Hmm. After two years of eating butter are or other Tallow and other natural plant or other natural non plant-based fats once that are compatible here, biology your body is like okay I replaced half of your cell membranes now with good fats and then you like I'm at a new level and after that another two years later, you'll replace 75% and then two years after
It's 80 something percent and then you know, you could probably eat some french fries cooked in canola oil, it's bad for you but it's not going to break you the way it would have a few years ago. So it takes time to restore minerals. It takes time to restore fat. It takes time to restore fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamin Dake, but these are that's two chapters of smarter not harder. The rest of it is. How do we get your meditation? Like the whole back? Third of the book is like, spiritual stuff. Like hurry, meditate faster is a thing because I believe as
you mentioned earlier, you know, your audience is time is valuable, it's exceptionally valuable and they choose to invest it in listening to your show because they think they're going to get more back than they put into it and you deliver on that. Well what if the time in the gym wasn't delivering as much as it could. That's a big reason that people don't like to go. Most people don't go to the gym. They say they do they own memberships but there's four hundred million dollars a year of zombie memberships that people just never go but they have it because it
They feel good about themselves and that happens because the ROI and going to. The gym is not very high. Hmm. But if I can use this slope of the curve biology hack, which is behind. Almost everything in the book turns out, your body, doesn't respond to how much work you do and be like more better struggle suffer that stuff. No. And what will typically do is if you want to get faster say to do some cardio.
What you do is you run, maybe warm up a little bit, run full out and then slow down to maybe 70 80 percent of what you can do, and just grind it out, right? Maybe like do some ups and downs, like, you're running and Hills or something, because, obviously, more is better. I'm just going to push myself and it makes sense. This is probably how you get stronger because then you could do it more and actually works. You do get stronger, there's a study that shows. If you were to do five days a week, 45 minutes, a day of spend class after six or eight weeks, you'll improve your VO2.
To Max, which is the gold standard for cardiovascular stuff by 2%.
If you apply slope of the curve biology, which is behind the hacks at upgrade labs.
You could do five minutes three times a week and get a 12 percent
Improvement. Mmm, so you have 6
times better results in. Let's see instead of 45 minutes times 5 hours, whatever that is you're doing 15 minutes a week when you didn't have to change clothes and sweat and no instructor in spandex sweated and told you boo. We can do it. You just don't have to do that. If you love it, go do it. And go do it. But understand.
It didn't work very well, right? And so I just believe that that your doubt your audience is time my readers time. It's incredibly precious and so is their energy. So that means that we owe it to them. To say this works better, you will get it better and slope of the curve. Biology means that it's how quickly you can turn on a stressor, whether its heat or cold weather. It's cardio or muscle and how quickly you can turn it off. That's what drives
As your body to change quickly. It's not how much you can do and then keep doing that actually tires. The body and the body is like what? Yeah, I'll get around to getting more resilient but man that almost killed me. Hmm. So wow, you could get a signal in as long as you can chill as soon as you get the signal in and we just don't naturally do that because we think that we have to do more but what AI systems machine learning and newer science is showing is that whether it's from neurofeedback work, I'm doing it, 40 Years, of Zen or that I'm doing now.
At upgrade Labs, or whether it's even something, like, cold therapy, or fasting, or any of the other hacks out there, how fast can you make yourself change? Hmm, another example and all these, there's free versions of it. You could say I'm going to meditate because I want to be more resilient or smarter, so I can close your eyes, or you could do some breathing and the studies show that breath. Work with meditation puts your brain in the state's. You are looking for more quickly. So,
So hurry meditate faster is a thing and if you do that, it works and we are learning over time, all of the techniques and Technologies so that you can have control of your state. And this is a big focus at at 40 years, of Zen, which is my Neuroscience facility in Seattle. It's a five-day brain, upgrade thing. And what what's happening there is we have the largest database on Earth of high resolution scans of high-performance brains and that's according to my neuroscientist team at the University of Victoria.
so,
That means I can compare your brain to a set of people who are doing big things versus a set of random people who probably eat, you know, Taco Bell every day and their brains don't work as well. If you say junk food every day and they're drinking alcohol, just a beer or two a day, whatever those harm your brain. So I don't know what do the like most interesting brains in the world look like. How do you rank compared to that? How do we train you to do that? Hmm and the old way, well clearly sit in a cave it's 20 years later.
You'll be fine, right? And we'll bring you soup once a week, and this is what we used to do. But I just, I know that with all of the tech all the ability to measure of the ability to compare all the ability to show your meat operating system, what to do, automatically it wants to improve and it wants to not waste any energy doing it. That's why I smarter not harder is worth it because even a spiritual path, can be accelerated in a safe manner, so that we can show up for the world. The way the world needs us to
show up. Hmm, this is music to my ears because I am pretty
Well, versed in the benefits of meditation, but I just don't have the discipline to do the /. The often prescribed 20-minute dose of meditation twice a day I just don't,
I mean, let's face it. You should go to the gym every day for 45 minutes of something or another and you should meditate for another hour a day, probably do cold therapy. You need to go to bed by 7:00. You could spend your entire life, biohacking and never do anything useful right in order to be optimal. I don't want
Ogle. And I've dedicated my career to this, like, what's your average person to do? You know,
it's and it's a hopeless task. Actually optimal is not even going to happen for most of us. It's kind of a dirty word in my vocabulary because it means making these trade-offs. I want better, I don't want to know if there's an optimal day because I did an inefficient meditation for just enough and an inefficient workout for just enough. Like how about I did a workout that got me. Everything I wanted in five minutes. I got my meditation done in 12 minutes with neurofeedback other really it's 20 right now.
And then I had so much time left over. Yeah, I did some cold therapy and I needed a little bit more restoration so I did some stuff to show myself out with pulsed electromagnetic frequencies or whatever that get was. And then I went out and I totally Slade my day and then I came home and I had really good sex after item steak
sounds like a perfect day, doesn't it?
That's not optimal. That's just improved that, that's what we're building and you have to be able to do the things that get the signal in your body and a small amount of
time. Otherwise there are people who are making money off telling you to do it slowly. These are not bad people, they're not deceiving you, but systems evolved that way. I mean there's a reason diet sodas exist. You make a ton of money selling people a product that doesn't work very well so they'll keep
doing it.
Yeah, it's crazy. Sex is one of those. It isn't sex. The pretty good. I mean, you brought we brought up. You brought up sex twice already. It's one of the, it's one of the things that I think is a pretty good litmus test for health. You know, we're talking about like defining Health earlier. Yeah, it's like if you're horny, if you're horny hungry and happy, there you go.
You're probably, you're probably doing pretty well.
You're absolutely right. And it's funny if you're hungry for too long, you won't be horny. So you got to be hungry enough, right? And if you're afraid, you won't be very hungry and you won't be very horny. And so our job is to shift our species out of fear.
Out of hunger and into love and include sex. And then in in my work, the the fourth thing that comes after it is into Community because every organism on the planet, whether it's a single-celled, you know, yogurt culture or a slime mold or an elephant or a forest of trees, they support each other. We're wired all life, does that? But we won't if we're malnourished and we won't if we do not love
in our life and you can't have love in your life, very effectively, if you're malnourished, it's really hard and people do and they do their best having had chronic fatigue syndrome. Having had those severe brain fog, having had the Obesity in arthritis before I was 30. I just lived all that stuff that's supposed to happen when you're 70 before. I was 30. And I'm not going back, right? And I don't want anyone to ever experience that and I don't think we have to as we age either. So to do it though, to lead a life that you want that. That's
Earthy. You've got to have some time to do the things that are worthy and that means you cannot spend all your time doing less effective things like picking up, rocks and running away from Tigers. All exercise. We're going to concentrate the Rocks into steel. That's that's the biggest innovation in exercised in a long time, or maybe you're going to run away more or less fast. So, I just go through for each of these domains. They look, here's how we've always done it. Here's step one, better step to better step 3 better, and you can pick the one. That's the right cost.
Stand the right effort in the one you like and most importantly you're not going to focus on all five of these at the same time, unless you do it, by taking your minerals and your vitamin take because that does affect all five. Everything else you're going to say, you're going to focus on your brain. You go through that actually tell you if you focus on your brain as your top, your top goal, here's the benefits. You're going to get for all the other domains that come for free, but if you focus on your brain, is probably not going to do that much for your muscle gain, but it will do a decent amount to help you.
Stress Management and you're resilient the end of the day, we're working to build these three levels of spiritual growth that people experience and this comes out of Buddhism and I'll use the the western words because they're just easier to comprehend. And frankly I don't remember the words in Tibetan or Sanskrit or whatever.
So
The first level of personal growth when you have the energetics to do this, just like that your Meats working, well enough is empathy, you feel empathy for another person, that means you can you can feel their emotions. So if someone is suffering, okay? You feel that if someone's happy feel that, this is a level of spiritual growth, great. A lot of people don't have that, you have to completely lack empathy to follow an order to lock someone in the house when they want to leave like you don't have anybody left in you. It's been beaten out of you programmed out of you or
Starved out of you. And the next level above that is compassion and it's a higher spiritual State and compassion comes from. Well, yes, I don't have to feel your pain but I wish you well and I wish you know suffering and you do it automatically and it's not conditional. So you walk in the room, you wish everybody. Well, you have compassion for them even if they're doing your arm and that's hard to do their requires.
Giving us a lot of the 40 years and Technologies actually around making sure that you forgive a harm. So compassion is very high, spiritual state that Buddhist loving, kindness and all that. But the highest state that they teach you about above compassion is the one that actually drove me to name. Bulletproof, what I named it and it's called Equanimity and it's called Equanimity. And Equanimity, in other words, that is resilience, but it's deeper than that.
Because Equanimity is the monk who can meditate in the middle of a storm. Nothing can pull that monk out of his State, his chosen State and I want you Max, I want everyone who reads the book and everyone everyone who doesn't read the book, I just want the world to have that sense of equanimity where you get to choose your state and you get to hold it. And if someone comes on Instagram and trolls you it's so
Funny. It doesn't hurt and that if someone comes on the news and it says something, that's so ridiculous that you laugh instead of reacting and even when the government tells you to something that's ridiculous and stupid that you laugh and he refused and you don't lose your state. You don't fall into fear, you don't fall into denial, you don't become programmable. You don't act like a lemming.
On the other direction of anything, you hold the middle, you hold your ground and you remain kind to yourself to your family to other people. That is a big ask, it is hard work, and I do not succeed in that all the time. I'm just way better at it than I used to be. That is what humans do as we evolve. And I think, especially this year, this is the year that we all step up and we decide that's what we are going to do. And when we do it for ourselves, we do it for everyone around us because they see us
With Equanimity, they see us holding the line and maybe they're starting to sway and fall to one side or the other, and they all wait. There's a third way. That's why biohacking matters. Mmm, that's why it's called danger coffee. That's the kind of danger that I am as a kind of danger. I want to be. And it's it's not the kind of danger that comes from carrying a pocket knife, the way that I do. That's so I can cut my steak at restaurants that don't have good
knife.
I love that. No. But you're so right that that is the that is the rebellious act right in a world that wants you. That try so hard to trigger you and divide you from your neighbor to practice, non
reactivity, to practice, non reactivity into practice, humor. One of the best movies for the times we live in is V for Vendetta. One of my favorite movies. Absolutely right. Oh my God. But the lesson in V for Vendetta isn't
Go ahead and blow something up and all that kind of stuff. It was the way humor, dismantled The Tyranny. It was the comedian. Hmm, and they came actually kill the comedian but nonetheless it was the comedian making fun of the power structures that caused them to fall. Hmm it wasn't the
rebellious hmm. It was
remaining humorous and light and being on reactive. Hmm. And this is what the best boot. Is that the monks that I've met the llama,
Has they can be happy no matter what the the biggest lesson I got in this was on that same trip to Tibet where I first had Yak butter tea. That was my inspiration for starting bulletproof. I also went to Cambodia. It was 20 years ago. 20. Yeah, 20 years ago. They this was when the country had recently been ravaged by just terrible inner turmoil. Young people had seen their parents murdered incredible poverty a dollar a day as a really good income back then.
And I looked around and I saw people smiling and singing and holding hands, not just a few just, it was just how they lived. And I thought about, man, in Silicon Valley, I don't see any of this crap, like, people are miserable. And I just remember thinking, how is it? How is that possible? How can you do that? Whatever it was that they had despite just unimaginable trauma, how do we build that into the whole world and that's important. But that's Equanimity and I can't tell you why. Now,
They did it but I can tell you what it looks like and what it feels like. And I'm moving in that direction. And if we all just move a little bit, it doesn't take everyone and it we don't have to do it perfectly. We just have to take a few steps. The next time someone cuts you off in traffic, put your brakes on and we'll just wait a minute. Watch what happens in the world around you, that's Equanimity, but you will not do that. If you just drank like six monster energies and had six Twinkies, you'll be to tweaked to do it and you'll probably do what I did. You'll do like interval training for me.
Your finger
yeah you're right. Wow. So good. What it do you have a current favorite because you I mean you are the father of biohacking. Current favorite biohack
Hmm. Well, right now, I am playing around with a couple variables. One is I'm in the process of developing a new protein supplement that hasn't existed before, that is enormously powerful and I don't I developed this for my own use all my Subs like I can't buy it, I just go make this and whatever. I don't know if I'll commercialize it but I probably will. I have to raise some capital or
something, you're kind of like the Willy Wonka of Wellness, I suppose that's
A good. It's a good thing. Has anyone ever like coin that for you? I don't think so, huh. Well, it's just like you like you know you're like a kid in a candy store you just like dream something up and you're like let's I'm going to will it into being.
I do kind of do that. It also in helps that I worked in Silicon Valley for a very long time and I like I've done most of the executive things and I have an MBA and like I know how to instantiate things in the world and also somehow not a great them and I don't even I think some of that comes to my meditation practice and just deep body awareness, but whatever it is,
Playing around with composition and types of protein. And I think I've got something amazing and it's one of the reasons I just people that's like Dave you you lost some weight here? Did you like shredded? Thank you and I think 8% body fat right now. Damn and it's not because I wanted that. It's because the stuff I was doing just worked. And I was like, oh shit, I actually just ate an ice cream sandwich made of plant-based stuff. Coconut not other bad oils for lunch, along with some grass, fed steak, because I'm actually eating more
Carbs, including sugar just to get my body fat back up to eight or nine because that's actually healthier percentage. So if I can accidentally drop body fat and never be hungry, and not try, that seems like a cool protein. So I'll probably find some funding and, or partner or something for that. And so that's one of the bohack's. The other one is I've been playing around with the type of testosterone that I use. Now I'm kind of the opposite of liver king. And you know, I actually
I think Larry King's a badass because of just the amount of work that he does like to incredible dedication and grit and like all these workouts. And of course when you do that kind of work, you should be using a ten thousand dollar month stack of testosterone and peptides I would, I mean like that's awesome. He just should have told us like it's okay man, like the welcome to being a biohacker. So I'm not that, but when I was 26, I was diagnosed with having less testosterone than my mom and I mean it shows I look
This in my future, I see myself Mike. Uh, doesn't even look like
me. Hmm. So I've
been on testosterone therapy all except for two or three years. When I was developing, the bulletproof diet. I went off testosterone to remove that as a variable and my testosterone. If I did everything perfect, I could get up to like 600 but maybe because I was Abby's, maybe genetics, I don't know. So I take my testosterone. Keep my levels around 900 and I have for a long time but there's different forms. There's testosterone sippy innate and testosterone infinite.
Most of the world uses Anthony which is cheaper and the US the use sippy innate. But when I switched from sippy Nate to end the Nate, I believe my body just loves Anthony and I tend to hold less water when I do that and I tend to get less aromatization but I do block it with natural compounds as well. So, I was also like, let me play with the amount of estrogen, that's, that's there. So people don't know this. If you want to be horny, you need.
D HD, which is the stuff that makes you go bald of you up too much, and you need some estrogen. But because I was a beast, my whole life. Because I used to have a very nice set of a cup, man, boobs when I was a base moobs, exactly. As soon as I dial down my testosterone aromatase blockers, which are all-natural use Crimson mostly then I'm like man, I got like Tender nipples and I got a bloop okay I got a not do that. So I'm like playing around with with how I can do those things but
But I think that there may be a problem in the US with the type of testosterone were prescribing. So those are my two areas of interest is like hormonal tightening and and there's probably an AI model and up with its which mix of subpoena Tintin, 8 and other stuff you should take. And then this new protein thing is is ridiculous. So I think I got to find out that some kind of partner for that, but it's, it's cool.
So I feel like you probably know some
people, I do this. I also have eight companies, I'm right.
Right now.
It's like damn, you
know, upgrade Labs that's a big Focus to so I'm like, do I want to make sure we get all of our franchisees opened and that's own and upgrade labs.com. So one of the reasons I moved to Austin recently, in addition, to being to being single is that we're opening three franchises there. So I want to be able to be there and I'll be flying all over the country to help support franchises open. So, like, do I need another company? No. Do I want another company, Maybe?
But maybe someone else could run at this
time. That's amazing. And by the way, I was going to ask you. I didn't know if I could ask you about the about your newly found singlehood but but ladies, Dave asprey, he's on the market
about. I'm not that on the market about a year ago, a little more than a year ago. My wife and I had a very every kind and mutually beneficial conscious uncoupling. Hmm.
So you could say that
I'm dating but I don't have any any interest in being tied down at any time in the
The near
future, love it a lot. I mean, I definitely appreciate that, but I just had to pose it to the listeners because every time I go on your podcast,
turnabout is fair play. I mean, I was going to auction you off on stage at the Bayou. I can conference. That I went. Oh, can we talk about that biohacking Conference.com in June? Hmm, we're expecting up to 5,000 people in Florida this time. You can be there
so sick. Yeah, if I can, yes, you can. Would love to would love to attend, are always, welcome. I always have a wonderful time at a, at the conference. So
so I'm looking forward to that. Well, this was super fun and we're can listeners pick up your wonderful new book smarter not harder and working. They can connect with you on social media,
go to Dave asprey.com and that same thing on Instagram and anyway, likes my books. But Dave asprey.com has all the links. There's a quiz you can take to help you find your type, of course, should you focus first? What's going to work for you? And I'm just looking forward to people reading the book or listening to the book, I read the whole thing. My sincere ask of your
Audiences that of my work has been helpful. If you would order the book, now it helps other people find the book it this is not about money for me. You don't get paid very much as a writer. This is about impact. So if you're going to read it and you order it now and read a next week man it makes a difference with thank you in
advance. Yeah, pre-orders are super important you guys and and yeah thanks for being here. I feel like we exposed like a kind of a more sensitive side of you over the over the past. It's always been there man. Yeah. Past hour and a half so thank you for being vulnerable.
Thank you guys who are listening. Really appreciate you share this episode of the show with friends and loved ones. Leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast app of choice and appreciate you. I'll catch you next time. Peace!
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