How to use biohacking to achieve peak performance

Dave Asprey:

Stop doing the things that make you weak first, then do the things that make you strong. That’s the order of almost everything you can do in biohacking. All life follows four basic rules, and this is slime moulds, coral, zebra fish, dinosaurs, humans, trees. It doesn’t matter. We all do this in our cells and then we end up rolling it up and becoming aware of it. But it happens before we think. Step one, if something might be scary, run away from, kill or hide from it. That’s because if something eats you, you’re lost. So this is built into your operating system before you can think. And, that’s fear. It’s the first F word. Second F word is … Oh, by the way, fear gets 10 times more focus and energy than you might want to allocate to it. Second one, five times more energy goes into eat everything. Famine might kill you. So, food. Fear of food.

The other thing that you have to do if you’re a life form and you want to stay around forever, that gets about three more energy than necessary is the other F word. And, you know which one I’m talking about.

Dave Asprey:

Fertility. That’s what you were thinking.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, the not four letter version, right? So that is where in our early 20s, that’s where a lot more energy goes, because by the time you’re in your 40s, you’re like, “I’ve done that lots of times. I’m okay.” You still need love in your life.

Dave Asprey:

Right, and you’re like, “I’ve lost my embarrassment or shame or whatever. I’m done. It’s all fun.” It’s a recreational sport now, not a life or death sport. And then, the fourth F word is friend and every life form is wired to support things. This is why without thinking, you’ll jump in front of a car to save a small child that isn’t yours, because you don’t have to think because it’s in our operating system. But since all of these things are in there and they’re sucking energy at different times, in your 20s, the amount of energy that you allocate to fear versus the third F word, it’s higher. You have more energy, but you generally have more fear because you haven’t figured out how to deal with what’s scary or what’s not scary. And, that’s okay. Your prefrontal cortex only fully baked when you’re 24, 25. So, there’s that.

But in the meantime, so much energy is going into those other things. So if you get your energy up, what comes out the other end is you’re nicer, but you’re also a more conscious entrepreneur.

Dave Asprey:

Alex, thanks for having me.

Dave Asprey:

Biohacking, it’s a movement and in a community, and I started it about 10 years ago. And the definition when I came out with it was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. And since then, Merriam-Webster’s added it to the dictionary in 2018. My name’s there in the online dictionary, but they’ve tweaked the definition to make it more boring. But the point here is having control of your biology. It’s not about monitoring. It’s not really about hacking, even though it’s in the name. It’s about saying I’m going to do this stuff that lets my body and my mind do what I want. And as entrepreneurs, we want different things than normal people, but whatever it is, it’s there for you. And it unites I want to be the biggest, I want to be the fastest, I want to be the most successful. Whatever you want, it’s your body. You do it.

Dave Asprey:

Well food and exercise [crosstalk 00:04:18] and supplements, those are pretty easy and obvious ones but the definition is to change the environment around you. So, it turns out changing the light in the environment around you is one of the lowest hanging fruits with the highest ROI. And, who would’ve thought vibration matters or electromagnetic frequencies. There are bad ones and there are actually good ones that you can use to totally change the state of your brain. And your friends are part of the environment around you. The colour of this, the air, the water, the temperature, these are all variables you can turn up and down and there are certain settings on all those variables where you go, “Oh my God, I didn’t know I even had this much in me.” It’s about tweaking those things to make the results you want happen. Same thing in your business. How much you spend on digital marketing versus direct calls or whatever. You tweak those things into, “Well look, the numbers are going up.” It’s not that hard. It’s the same way for the body.

Dave Asprey:

One of the most important things you can do is recognise that your eyes are actually an extension of your brain, and if you don’t take care of them, your brain gets tired, you have sugar cravings, and you feel like crap at the end of the day. So my monitor where I’m looking at you is five feet away from me. It’s a 55 inch TV. This is my primary monitor. My secondary monitor is three feet away from me, and it’s over here. Right out there, there are trees. There are some 20 feet away, some 100 feet away and some on Salt Sprint Island two miles away. So, I change my depth of field. I also have surrounding lighting that is not harsh. If you’re under an LED light right now, which it looks like you are on your left side, that is trashing your vision.

If I was sitting next to you, I’d have on on … This is one of my companies so this is a blatant pitch. These are the TrueDark glasses. These things block 75% of blue light, but not all of it. Because if you wear blue blockers during the day, you will trash your biology, and they don’t do enough at night so you switch to a different lens for when you’re going to sleep. But the idea here is you’re going to be tired at the end of this interview. I’ve got halogen bulbs behind diffusers on both sides of me so my lighting is good, but it doesn’t make me tired. And I can do this all day every day. This is my fourth interview today. Two I’ve conducted and two I’ve been the interviewee of, and I’m still going strong. It’s about the lighting. It’s about not having eye strain. It’s about changing my depth of focus.

That’s just one thing.

Dave Asprey:

Temperature. Temperature during the day, there’s some things you can do that will give you hours of energy and endorphins. Very brief cold exposure, a cold shower. I’ve been an advocate of this for more than 10 years. At the end of your shower, do one minute of cold water hitting your forehead and your chest, and doing a very brief exposure like that, the first three days you do this, you’re going to swear at me. The first day will be eight seconds, maybe 10 before you jump out. The next day, 20, 30. The next day, you’ll go a minute and you’ll still say, “Dave Asprey’s a jerk.” And, the fourth day you’ll do it and you’ll come out and go, “That wasn’t bad at all and now I feel great.” It’s because you’re actually manipulating part of the lining of your mitochondria that make the electricity.

It takes three days of brief cold exposure to change what’s called cardiolipin in the cells. You don’t have to know the science. You have to know this practise. Practise with somewhat regularity equals more energy throughout the day. Huh? That’s probably worth doing. And then you look at, “Oh, well I was going to drink coffee every day. Heaven forbid I put some butter in there instead of milk and I put some NCT oil and I’ve created a multi-billion dollar industry with stuff like that. Wow, you mean I got a better outcome from my coffee than I did when I put crappy milk and other stuff in there and I used coffee that was mouldy?

You were going to do it anyway. I just made a cleaner product that had some energy enhancing things instead of energy reducing things in it. So, small changes, habits you already do. And those are a couple things. Skipping breakfast. You can go to FastThisWay.com, the most recent book … I think you had that in your stack. As an entrepreneur, okay, you wake up. You can take some time, you can cook yourself some eggs or make yourself some fancy, dumb green smoothy that probably is giving you kidney stones if you put kale in it. And then, you drink it-

Dave Asprey:

I only talk about what works. And by the way, I was a raw vegan for a long time. I never challenge things unless I’ve tried them and punched myself in the face a few times and figured out, “Oh, that doesn’t work.”

So, you do all that stuff and now you’re out $10 on some kind of vegetable stuff, and you spend some time, you did some dishes, and then 10:00 am rolls around and you’re really hungry anyway, so then you eat the muffin that someone brought into the office because no one can subsist on that crap for breakfast. That wasn’t a win. Now, if you do what I’m talking about with intermittent fasting, you wake up, you’re going to have probably coffee anyways. So, you can have black coffee or maybe you put the butter and stuff in. It still counts as a fast. But then when your metabolism works, you shouldn’t have any cravings for food. You don’t think about the muffin. Someone sets it in front of you and you actually don’t want to eat it.

And then, noon rolls around and instead of “I will die if I don’t have tacos I’m so hungry. I’m starving.” You’re like, “Actually, I guess I could eat. I don’t really have time. Maybe I’ll eat a little bit later. I’m just going to power through this.” It’s because you have more energy.

So, if there’s one thing you can do in the morning, the return was before I had to spend some amount of money and time and energy on breakfast, none of that, so I got paid up front for the investment. And, the first bout of interest payment was all morning long I had more energy than if I ate something for breakfast. And then, longterm, my metabolism improves so this is one of those investments where you walk into the bank and they pay you when you walk in the door and then they give you interest on what they paid you, and then they give you longterm interest on what they paid but you never had to put money down.

So, this is a really good deal for entrepreneurs. I teach stuff like that in all of my work, and that’s’ a manipulation of the timing of energy. The reason that works, and the reason many of the things that I teach works is if you just go back two billion years ago when there were some single celled organisms floating around, some kind of a cell. We think it was a parasite. And, another cell, an ancient bacteria, rod shaped now called mitochondria, and we tell ourselves, “Oh, the cells were floating around. They saw the mitochondria. They used the mitochondria as a mobile energy source.” The reality is a bit more complex.

The mitochondria were floating around and they saw these cells like, “Look, mobile Petri dish.” So these guys moved in and they took over and they’re still running things because they’re environmental sensors. They make electrons that make energy. They make hormones and they make inflammation, and they make signalling molecules. They’re factories and they’re environmental sensors that make what’s necessary based on what dumb little bacteria see in the world around them.

Well, how do they know what time of day it is? Because, they need to know. You have a trillion of them and they all need to work together. They look for the intensity and angle of the sun. At noon, it’s above you. It’s the brightest light. There’s the most algae to eat between noon and 2:00 PM. There’s no sunset or sunrise, so you don’t have much of that sideways red lighting, and it’s warmest during that time period.

So if you shape your temperature that way, then what happens is magically all of the systems in your body are rowing at the same time in the same direction. And you get much better biological performance. The biggest signal is light, the second biggest signal is food, and the third biggest is temperature. So, if you manipulate those variables in your environment, especially around sleep, then it works great. One of the biggest things that ruined me as an entrepreneur when I was young is I liked to stay up late. So, you’re staring at screens. You’re reading under a bright light. You brush your teeth in the bathroom. All those things are just terrible. So what I do now is I have dimmer switches. I dim the lights after the sun goes down. I eat before the sun goes down. I don’t eat after the sun goes down, and if I’m going to be exposed to exterior lighting, if I’m going to be in a hotel or something, I’ll wear the sleep glasses that my company, TrueDark makes.

Because when I wear those, my brain perceives that it’s dark because certain frequencies of light just don’t count as part of what the sun makes. If you have one green or blue LED in your bedroom, or if you have the amount of light that leaks around curtains in the average city, your chances of depression go up by 69%. That’s from a study of 800 men. It’s out of Japan. Well, you are going to sleep anyway, right? Maybe you could have functional black out curtains and you could either unplug or tape over all the little blinky shit in your bedroom. These are simple things every entrepreneur should be doing because they’re one-time changes and they provide a continuous return on energy versus a return on investment.

Dave Asprey:

Technically, yeah. It should be, but it doesn’t matter as much during the day.

Dave Asprey:

What matters though is at night.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah. In the first half of the night, if it’s substantially cooler, even if you have to use blankets, then you’ll get much more deep sleep. And in the second half of the night, if it’s warm enough and not too cold, not too hot, you’ll get more dreams. So what I do is I have a couple different devices that change the temperature of my mattress. It automatically changes itself. I get more quality sleep as in more dream sleep or more deep sleep for hormones in six and a half hours than even someone half my age gets in eight hours of sleep. So, my sleep efficiency is off the charts.

Dave Asprey:

There’s a couple different brands. I was an investor and advisor in a company called Chilli. ChiliSleep makes a really good one. And, there’s a newer company called Eight Sleep that also makes one, and there’re pros and cons with both. They’re both awesome. Eight Sleep has very good sleep monitoring technology as well to tell you how well you did. And what I do now is I always wear an Oura ring, and mine’s recharging right now-

Dave Asprey:

Awesome.

Dave Asprey:

And the Oura ring … I’m also an investor advisor to Oura … it’s a powerful technology for just telling you how am I doing? And most entrepreneurs were looking at our daily income, how’s our ad campaign performing. When you wake up, am I recovered or am I not? Did I screw up my sleep? Did I have alcohol the night before? Oh, look what that did. Did I have a midnight snack? Did I watch TV till late at night? Yeah. Did I forget to turn down my phone when I was looking at Instagram before I went to bed, even though I know I’m not supposed to? Yeah. And that’s all it takes. Looking at a bright phone for even a minute, it tells the light timing sensors in your eyes called melanopsin sensors, “Oh look, nothing in nature makes that white light. It must be daytime.”

So, now the brain thinks it’s daytime and the liver thinks it’s nighttime and they’re not rowing in the same direction. All this is, Alex, every day take 30 pounds of air and some amount of food and you mix them together to make electricity. If you are fantastic at doing that, you have a tonne of energy. And then, if you waste less of it throughout the day, you have even more energy. The more energy you have, the more free energy you have after you’ve gone through all this stuff, the more longevity benefits you get but also you’re a nicer person because you enough energy to run willpower and to not yell at your kids and your coworkers and everything else.

It’s amazing how stop doing the things that make you weak first, then do the things that make you strong. That’s the order of almost everything you can do in biohacking.

Dave Asprey:

How old are you [crosstalk 00:17:17]?

Dave Asprey:

You’re 43? Okay. So, I’m 28%. I’m going to live to 180, so you can do the math. But, I think in terrestrial years, I’m something like 49.

Dave Asprey:

But I actually think in percentages because I do not identify as being 49.

Dave Asprey:

Let me go back to the point on that, Alex, because you’re saying that as a 43 year old … Okay, I’m 49 … there are enormous numbers of people … and, I talked with a lot of people, listen to my show and all, who are in their 20s. In fact, it’s one of the biggest groups who appreciates biohacking. They are not full of energy the way you remember being. They are tired. They have brain fog. They’re exhausted. They’re having a hard time sleeping. They don’t feel like they slept when they wake up, and it is endemic. It is a major change. You’re not supposed to be tired. You’re supposed to be able to drink Monday … Or sorry, not Monday. You should take Monday off, but basically Tuesday through Saturday night. You’re supposed to drink every single night and still pass your classes in college.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. I didn’t have that in my 20s because I weighed 300 pounds and my biology didn’t work, but it’s not like that anymore. There are a few people who can just do it, but they are the exception, not the rule. This is something for entrepreneurs at every age. The difference is your focus. In your 20s, you are wired to care about certain things more than others, and the number one thing in your 20s … Can I talk about the four F words real quick?

Dave Asprey:

All right. All life, we talked about the timing system of the sun. All life follows four basic rules, and this is slime moulds, coral, zebra fish, dinosaurs, humans, trees. It doesn’t matter. We all do this in our cells and then we end up rolling it up and becoming aware of it. But it happens before we think. Step one, if something might be scary, run away from, kill or hide from it. That’s because if something eats you, you’re lost. So this is built into your operating system before you can think. And, that’s fear. It’s the first F word. Second F word is … Oh, by the way, fear gets 10 times more focus and energy than you might want to allocate to it. Second one, five times more energy goes into eat everything. Famine might kill you. So, food. Fear of food. The other thing that you have to do, if you’re a life form and you want to stay around forever, that gets about three times more energy than necessary is the other F word, and you know which one I’m talking about right?

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, fertility. That’s what you were thinking.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, the not four letter version, right? So that is where in our early 20s, that’s where a lot more energy goes, because by the time you’re in your 40s, you’re like, “I’ve done that lots of times. I’m okay.” You still need love in your life.

Dave Asprey:

Right, and you’re like, “I’ve lost my embarrassment or shame or whatever. I’m done. It’s all fun.” It’s a recreational sport now, not a life or death sport. And then, the fourth F word is friend and every life form is wired to support things. This is why without thinking, you’ll jump in front of a car to save a small child that isn’t yours, because you don’t have to think because it’s in our operating system. But since all of these things are in there and they’re sucking energy at different times, in your 20s, the amount of energy that you allocate to fear versus the third F word, it’s higher. You have more energy, but you generally have more fear because you haven’t figured out how to deal with what’s scary or what’s not scary. And, that’s okay. Your prefrontal cortex only fully baked when you’re 24, 25. So, there’s that.

But in the meantime, so much energy is going into those other things. So if you get your energy up, what comes out the other end is you’re nicer, but you’re also a more conscious entrepreneur. Otherwise, you tend to be one of the stereotypical … and I’m not going to name the two multi-billionaire guys who started their companies in their early 20s and are well known for being, especially when they were young, pretty much douche bags. And they’re not the first ones. There’s people who started their companies when they were 25 from our generation, and the one before that, and generally speaking, they skipped some steps, but if they have more energy, that energy goes into developing themselves as they grow big companies. But if your energy is limited, it just goes into the company and you don’t evolve as a human being and then you look like Commander Data and you make weird decisions that ruin society. Not naming anyone in particular who is censoring what we say right now or anything like that. I would never do that.

Dave Asprey:

Absolutely. I’ve been tracking my sleep for 15 years, and when I started out, I would get five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep every night. I always get between one and a half and two hours of deep and one and a half to two hours of REM sleep, and I sleep in average of six hours and 28 minutes. That number is an average over the last eight years, so I think it’s a pretty good number.

Dave Asprey:

That’s actually pretty good for under six hours of sleep. Because, if you had gotten a little more sleep … Did you go to bed late or wake up early? Which one was it?

Dave Asprey:

Got it.

Dave Asprey:

Okay. So, if you go to bed late, it comes out of deep sleep and that’s where your testosterone, your growth hormone, your physical regeneration comes. And then, if you wake up earlier than you wanted to, that comes out of your REM sleep. And, REM sleep is where the mental regeneration, memory consolidation and things like that happen. So if you say had a night where you had a tonne of deep and almost no REM, you’ll probably still not feel right in the head but you’ll still physically feel good. And if, likewise, you had no deep sleep but you had a good amount of REM sleep, you say, “Well, I had a lot of dreams like that but I’m tired,” but your brain might work better.

It’s a nuanced and weird difference. But, the timing matters. One of the biggest things you can do, don’t eat after the sun goes down, or at least don’t eat within three hours of bedtime. I mean, no snacks, no nothing. That is a huge variable. For me, there was two things that controlled my deep sleep. One of them is the timing of the meal and the other one is lighting. I always wear my TrueDark sleep glasses. I’m just looking for my pair. They’re over there across-

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, I’ll show them to you. Give me one second.

Dave Asprey:

I want to be really clear. These are not blue blocking glasses. Blue blocking glasses are stupid. It’s a 1970s technology. We know there’s four colours and two other variables of light that control sleep, and blocking blue light during the day stops you from waking up and you can block some of it but if you block all of it, you’re in trouble. And at night, blue blockers are just an ancient technology. So these are called TrueDark glasses. And I know I look like I’m in training to be a rockstar, but these are controlling all five variables of the light. And you can still watch TV. The colours are odd at first, but your brain adjusts, and after a little while you’re fine. You can still use your phone, but this doubles my deep sleep and it causes measurable EEG changes in your brain.

I run a neuroscience institute that trains entrepreneurs brains, five day intensive brain upgrade kind of thing. It’s called 40 Years of Zen. So, I can do neuroscience level studies on people’s brains on my TrueDark glasses, and I will tell you those things work and they’re very different than just generic blue blockers. So that light thing, plus the meal, I get my hour and a half to two hours of deep, and your goal should be at least an hour and a half. Unless …. here’s the thing … if you’re in really good physical shape, I’m in pretty good shape. My cardio isn’t fantastic, but I’m 12% body fat. I carry a decent amount of muscle mass. I also have the genetics for that. I’m the Viking thing so I don’t have to work as hard as some people to put on muscle. In fact, it’s stupid because pants don’t fit me half the time.

Dave Asprey:

Because of my calves.

Dave Asprey:

I’ll tell you, I still have all the stretch marks from when I was fat so it wasn’t always as effortless as it is now. But, what you find is that if you’re in good shape and you didn’t do anything strenuous that day, you’ll get less deep sleep. So some really fit people’s stress, “I don’t think I out 40 minutes of deep sleep.” Your body didn’t need physical recovery. You didn’t do anything hard today. And that’s okay. You shouldn’t do something too hard every day. A heavy workout every day is bad for you. A heavy workout every three days is probably ideal. In fact, my newest company Upgrade Labs, where I’m focused, we’re franchising right now and finishing a fundraise, it’s all about this idea that you and me probably don’t want to work out. But if I can give you muscles in one-third of the time and I can do your cardiovascular stuff eight times faster, and in the extra time I can train your brain and train your metabolism, would you do it then?

Dave Asprey:

With an ROI … Yeah, well that’s Upgrade Labs does.

Dave Asprey:

Well, and it not only works, we have the technology there to measure what’s happening and show you that it’s working as we do it. So, there’s no argument about it. You look different. You feel different. You think different, and all of it’s quantifiable. It’s like, “Okay, that was worth it but if instead I do caveman, I picked up rocks …” Or plates, it doesn’t really matter. Or, I ran from tigers or you run a spin class. It’s the same thing. It sucks to do it and having someone yapping at you and playing music you don’t like probably doesn’t help either, if you’re an entrepreneur. Maybe it helps. Some people clearly love it. But most of them, they love that as much as they love kale. They actually don’t like it. They just told themselves they like it because they thought they had to to feel good and be a good person. It’s not true. You can spend way less time and get more results. That’s what I want to do.

Dave Asprey:

Sure.

Dave Asprey:

40 Years of Zen is has helped more than 1000 entrepreneurs, and this is a five day intensive 10 hours a day with neuroscientists who have actually custom built hardware and software to improve brain performance. We use some clinical grade studies of your brain, and then we show you your strengths and weaknesses. We set that aside. You spend three days learning how to turn off inappropriate alerts. If you’re cellphone’s constantly blinking and buzzing, your brain has so many of those you don’t even know. It’s a structured personal development technique that I came up with in conjunction with neuroscience.

We’re showing you a brain state. You go in and say, “I don’t like it that my brain does this.” You learn how to cancel that out permanently, to just turn it off, and as you do that, the amount of electricity that your brain wastes goes down so there’s more energy available to do new states that you didn’t know you could do. And, the end result is your brain can do what it normally would take 20 plus years of daily meditation to do.

And then the final two days is like taking your car to a racing mechanic. This is where we can increase neuron firing speed. We can turn up or turn down other connections inside the brain so that your brain handles the way you want it to handle. I’ve spent six months of my life doing this. That’s why I started the company years ago because I wanted this for my own brain. There’s no way I’d be able to do a podcast with more than a quarter billion downloads, multiple New York Times bestsellers, six companies. One of my companies has done $500 plus million in revenue. I’m a dad and blah, blah, blah. I could brag all day long.

I wasn’t always like that. I’m smart, yeah. I’ve had an early success in my career in Silicon Valley, but I never could do this and it’s because I got my energy production system working really well. My energy wasting system doesn’t work very well. And then, I did this software upgrade by turning off a bunch of crappy alerts that didn’t anything.

Well now, it’s easier. It’s still work, but it’s easier.

Dave Asprey:

It’s going to start in the US but it will … Well, I would like to say it will definitely come to Australia but I’m not sure that Australia, between the barbed wire fences around the outside of the country right now, I’m not sure that they’ll be allowed to.

Dave Asprey:

Assuming that anyone is allowed to go to Australia and it’s not just a penal colony again-

Dave Asprey:

Sorry, a penal colony. I can’t believe I said that. That was Freudian.

Dave Asprey:

Dave Asprey:

TrueDark’s. Yeah, okay.

Dave Asprey:

Let’s just call it what it is. The drug for Limitless is actually called Modafinil. And, I took Modafinil every day for eight years. It is how I went to Wharton while working full time at a company in Silicon Valley we sold for $600 million. It improved my meditation practise. It taught my brain how to function at a much faster speed than a muggle. And yeah, now I sound like an arrogant asshole and I think that’s okay. I’m not trying to. It changed my life. Then again, I used to have Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD, and I probably would’ve dropped out of business school if I hadn’t have taken it because I don’t think my brain would’ve worked well enough. And I did take it under a doctor’s advice. I did a radioactive sugar brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen, who’s a dear friend, and the psychiatrist who first evaluated this thought I was one of those college students, even though I was in my 30s hitting him up for Adderall so I could get more study drugs, but I wasn’t.

He saw the scan and he said, “Dave, I don’t know how you’re standing here in front of me. Inside your brain is total chaos.” There’s study’s on this drug, and I was on Nightline, the ABC show talking about it and I was the only one who wouldn’t wear a bag on my head. I’m like, “I’ll talk about this. Yes, I doped during business school. I’m okay with that. And, it worked.” I don’t take it every day. In fact, I rarely take it because my brain doesn’t need it. I run like that all the time. My actual brain response time before I think about something, just when my brain notices things, it is the average response time for an 18 year old, not a 49 year old. And that is something that is not a willpower thing. That is an automated system thing.

It’s just from having a very young brain because of things like that, and from teaching it to work at those speeds. Modafinil was a part of that. So if you are desperate, you have jet lag, you need to do it, pretty much everyone should have this. You don’t drink with it. Five out of a million people can have a life-threatening skin condition come out, the same as they would from taking ibuprofen. So there’s a small genetic thing that there’s a slight risk to it, but generally it’s pretty safe. It increases intelligence in studies. It’s one of the best studied smart drugs with the most evidence for it. In fact, your odds of having a bad side effect from that are slightly higher than the odds of a child under 12 dying from COVID.

So by the way, they drown more often than they die from COVID. There’s that. But of course, that’s an age range thing and children under 12 don’t take Modafinil so it’s maybe not a good comparison. But I’m just saying it’s relatively safe in the overall world compared to alcohol, I would say even.

Dave Asprey:

Yes. Well, most people just order it online because that’s a doctor somewhere writes you a script. When you go to the doctor, you say, “I have shift workers sleep disorder,” because it’s a narcolepsy drug and then they usually will give it to you. If you come in and say, “I want to perform like the Limitless drug,” then they laugh at you and say no. So, you have to use Wikipedia to know what to say.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, and this stuff, it’s the drug. You’ll take it go, “Oh my God, why is everyone around me so slow?” The problem is that if you’re already a jerk, it will make a bigger, faster jerk. So you’ve got to be more aware of impatience because literally everyone around you looks dumb when you take it, so if that pisses you off, you will be a pissed off person. So, you have to sit with how big of a jerk you are. That’s one thing.

The other thing, and I’m just going to say it because it will have zero impact on my life if every listener of your show does or does not Bulletproof Coffee. In fact, I don’t even work for Bulletproof anymore. I’m starting another company that actually does a different kind of coffee, so this is not about me trying to sell you something. But, I will tell you that if you take a clean coffee and you put butter and you put MCT oil, the C8 MCT, which I’ve taught everyone to do. You see it in stores now. No one called C8. That’s all original Dave stuff. You do that, and you blend it up, it reliably and repeatedly helps the world’s highest performers.

Half of Hollywood, half of the recording industry, most pro-athletes, huge numbers of entrepreneurs … Jack Dorsey and I tweeted about it years ago. It’s out there and it is reliably used by the titans of industry across industries and Wall Street … So, it works. And, I’m not saying that to brag. I’m telling you right now, if you’ve never done something as stupid as taking good coffee, putting butter instead of milk, no sugar and some of this MCT oil and blending it up, that will reliably for 90% of people make you go, “That was the best day I’ve had in a long time.”

That’s the success of one of my portfolio companies. It’s because it worked. I have to tell you that out of belief. There’s also strategies for mitochondrial enhancement. This is some of the stuff that I do at 40 Years of Zen, my brain clinic. Some of the supplements I formulated when I was at Bulletproof, and a variety of other things. So there’s in my books, I talk about how to do this. Headstrong is the book that tells you the most about all of the Limitless drugs, and the other one is going to make half of your listeners, Alex, are going to get pissed at me for saying this. I think it’s the second most studied smart drug, if not the most studied smart drug. We already hit caffeine and coffee as number one. Modafinil, not that well studied. It’s got 50 studies but it’s not crazy.

It’s nicotine. Nicotine. Smoking is terrible for you. Don’t smoke. Don’t chew tobacco. Tobacco use, bad. But, pharmaceutical grade nicotine we have know since 1986, it reverses Alzheimer’s disease. I interviewed … I call him Dr. Nicotine … on my podcast on the Human Upgrade Show. So, what? Yes, you can take nicotine in a patch or a lozenge, one milligramme, along with that cup of coffee I just described and maybe with 100 milligrammes of Modafinil and you will actually feel like Bradley Cooper. If you’re an entrepreneur and you seem to have the best day of your life, that is the best day of your life.

Dave Asprey:

No, you don’t put it in the coffee-

Dave Asprey:

The most effective thing, and I believe you can buy these in Australia … Are most of your listeners there or are you global?

Dave Asprey:

I’m pretty sure you can get a spray that goes under your tongue. That hits you the fastest. Nicorette makes it and it’s approved in most of the world, not the US. It’s approved here in Canada, where I live. So that works. One spray. You can get mini-lozenges, and you take half one of those, which is one or two milligrammes. They have some bad sweeteners in them. All the gums that you can get in Australia are full of crappy sweeteners. They’ll make you dumb. Don’t take those. And then, you can use the patch. The patch is long-acting but the quick hit from the spray is the one that’ll work but you need to metre it. If you have the thing in your pocket, you’ll just keep spraying. After a while … I use nicotine one to three milligrammes a day for seven years straight. These are very safe doses. A cigarette is 20 milligrammes.

And, these are anti-ageing doses. And eventually, I’m like, “I love this stuff,” and I’ll just spray it all the time. I’m like, “You know? This is probably bad.” So, I went to using a patch because the patch is slow delivery and I take about four milligrammes a day, which is appropriate for 50+.

Dave Asprey:

Can I swear?

Dave Asprey:

Vaping is fucking stupid. The flavouring additives and the stuff they put in there makes it more addictive than smoking, and smoking is highly addictive because of flavourings and things like that. So, vaping is provably harmful to you. It’s just a bad thing to do. If you really want to do something like that, put on your I’ve Been to Dubai hat and do the shisha, where at least you’re smoking but they run it through cold water, like you would a water bong for pot. But seriously, just take a little bit of nicotine stuff and put it between your gum. They have little packets. Pharmaceutical nicotine is not tobacco. Vaping is bad news. Very bad news, especially when we have COVID going around. It’s a respiratory thing. Come on, don’t be dumb.

I’ve had COVID. I recovered just fine. I’m immune and all that, whatever, but seriously, don’t smack yourself in the lungs with vaping.

Dave Asprey:

We know a lot about the things that allow it to vape easily. They are way, way more addictive than nicotine by itself. The washout period for nicotine is three days same as coffee. It’s all the other crap that’s hard to give up. Just like diet soda. It’s not the caffeine that’s addictive. It’s the aspartame that’s addictive, and we know it is. And, there’s people who will do bad things to you if let them.

Dave Asprey:

Alcohol is bad for brain. I don’t care if, “Oh, but I like wine.” You might like heroin, too. It doesn’t matter if you like it. It is bad for you. You shouldn’t do it.

Dave Asprey:

A tiny dose of heroin is actually an anti-ageing substance. There’s part of that in my anti-ageing book, so I take that back about heroin. But, wine? I’m sorry, alcohol is just bad for you. Even the, “Oh, I’m just going to have one glass.” Measure your sleep for a week and try it with and without alcohol and watch what it does. Alcohol shrinks and ages the brain, increases cancer risk. It’s just bad for you. I’m sorry. I don’t want it to be. It’s just bad for you. It is not worth it. If you’re a high performer, you owe it to yourself to say I only drink alcohol older than me, and then your budget will limit what you drink. That’s just how it works.

Dave Asprey:

And there’s some things you can do when you drink to minimise the damage, but really it’s never worth it. The second thing, and also I apologise, your all going to hate me for this, fried foods are worse for you than smoking a cigarette. If you eat a plate of french fries, you’re going to have two days of inflammation throughout your body. It’s going to damage your cell membranes. If you smoke a cigarette, you have about eight hours of inflammation. Now, I think they’re both dumb.

But if I had the choice, I don’t do it. I would not eat fried stuff, especially at restaurants. The liquid seed oils that are all of our diet, that’s why you’re getting diabetes and cancer. You cut out the bad oils, don’t eat fried stuff especially at restaurants where they reuse the oil, your brain will work better for a very long time. Those are the worst things. And people say sugar’s the way thing. Sugar’s not that good for you, but your brain actually likes sugar. So I’d much rather see you have a scoop of ice cream after dinner than have the French fries for dinner. It’s not that bad of a thing. It’s not that good either, but it’s okay.

Dave Asprey:

Oh, and kale. Kale makes you dumb. We have to say that.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah.

Dave Asprey:

The summary of this is my book Superhuman, which it’s got all the stuff in there. Step one … Thank you. So, you’ve read it. Step one is don’t die. There’s four things that are going to kill you. None of them is COVID, by the way. One of them, the most likely is diabetes, because it’s a precursor of everything else, and this is something 80% of people are getting this. I mentioned those bad oils. That’s a part of it. So, don’t get diabetes. It can kill you. Don’t get cardiovascular disease. It can kill you. Don’t get cancer. It can kill you. And, don’t get Alzheimer’s disease. If you avoid those four things, you’re probably going to live longer than most people, so let’s start with avoiding those. And a lot of the stuff we talked about is going to get you there.

Then there’s seven primary causes of ageing. And if you look at say maintaining a car, you’re saying, “Well, I rotate the tyres however many kilometres. Therefore, I maintain my car.” And you go, “Well, I wonder why it’s quit.” Well, you also have to change the transmission fluid and the oil, and you do a maintenance schedule for different systems at different times. The body is like that. And, we know the seven primary causes of ageing, and there are practises you can do that are free. Some that cost $50 and some that cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I did all of those for that book. So I’ve had stem cells injected in every joint in my body. I’ve had them injected into my cerebral spinal fluid, in my spinal columns that go into my brain. I’ve had them injected in my male reproductive equipment.

I mean, all sorts of things like that, that you can do. So I just want to make it really clear. You don’t have to do all that stuff. I’m exploring the very cutting edge of this. Here’s the real thing. Today, we have 120 year olds alive. Not that many of them, but that’s our current best. They go couldn’t spell DNA because it hadn’t been invented. World War II, when they were alive 100 years ago, was fought with horses and by planes. Do you know there were no antibiotics. They would put honey and sugar or maybe ozone if it was highly advanced. We didn’t even have public sanitation. It was a whole different world, yet they’re alive.

Now, I just think 100 years from now, much less 130, 140 years from now, if we can do 50% better than today’s best given how easy it is for us to have this conversation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet … if we can’t do better, it’s because a comet hit the planet or because we let Monsanto and big agriculture destroy our top soil so we had nothing to eat. That’s about 60 years away if we don’t start bringing cows back into nature. So we’ve got to solve the ocean problem and the soil problem over that timeframe. Those are the risks to not living to 180, and just making sure a truck doesn’t hit me, so I drive a heavy vehicle. That’s my other antiaging strategy.

Dave Asprey:

That’s the downside or the upside of having more of elders around. Most of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from people two and three times my age. I remember when I was 26, I had a board member for the antiaging nonprofit that they asked me to run. He was 88 and he had more energy than I did. I was like, “How does he do that?” A couple years after his wife passed away, he was dating and in love with a 36 year old who loved him back. You can say dirty old man. Whatever. No, he just had the young person’s energy and there was real love there.

Okay, if that’s even possible, which it should not have been possible given what I believed when I was 26, it blew my mind that you could be like when you’re old. He taught me so much. His name was Mike. What I realised is that if you’re going to be here for 150 years, you are not going to pee in the sandbox because you know you’re going to play in it again. You’re not putting the plastic wrapper in the ocean. And you can start looking at 50 and 75 year problems instead of four year election cycles, and you realise those are for chumps. And, when you see what’s happening in the world today, I’m sorry, I was around in 2001 and I was an adult and I saw all the power grabs they did back then. I see what they’re doing again.

And, all of the people who have functioning brains as they age are sitting there going, “We’re not going to let you do this garbage.” You might be able to fool someone who’s 20 or 25 because they actually believed in the goodness of certain things that actually are usually not good. So, you end up getting the elders, who’s job it is to shake a stick and say, “That’s not okay.” We need wisdom back in the world, so anytime I can talk to someone twice my age, I’m all in.

Dave Asprey:

Oh, you called it.

Dave Asprey:

That’s why I’m that 28, 29%. I don’t see myself as 49. In fact, there are a lot of people, particularly in North America who get very upset when you ask them to identify their gender, because they want a list of 47 things. Why is it okay on a survey that I have to identify my chronological age, because my biological age is quantifiably better than my chronological age. If you measure me, I’m at least five years behind. You measure at least five years younger than … I’m sorry. That must be agist. So, I identify as someone who’s going to live to at least 180 and I identify as someone who’s 28%.

Dave Asprey:

And, how dare you ask me for my actual numbers. That’s just not okay.

Dave Asprey:

My first thought is that Australians made a big mistake when they gave up their guns in the 90s. You guys see why that was a bad idea now? Okay, enough about that. You still have pitchforks. Use them. Now, what else can I say about COVID? Look, it’s a real thing and there are some people out there saying viruses don’t exist, and it’s true that the terrain in your body influences how viruses and bacteria all show up, but COVID is a thing. It’s real. And, you don’t want to get it. However, the survival rate is ridiculously high for everyone, and the highest risk average person is above … I think it’s above 70 or above 65, depending on whatever data I’ve looked at. The risk rate, if you don’t do anything about it to treat it and you have average, which is very poor health at that age, the risk is 5%, 5.3%.

That’s bad. And, it’s okay to acknowledge that. Now my perspective on this is that every natural therapy … I am in touch with hundreds of high end functional medicine doctors. I’m married to an emergency room doctor from Stockholm. These are not crazy people. These are some of the best doctors in the world and they are outraged that their medical boards have banned them from talking about treatments that they know work. I have talked with respiratory experts who have 30 years of emergency room experience saying, “Why am I not allowed to do anything that I know works for any generic virus?” So, there is clearly bad stuff happening. There is manipulation of our consciousness around COVID. But, COVID is real. It’s just the survival rate is very high.

The amount of damage to our society is shockingly high for making children wear masks. Because as a child, you learn to identify 10,000 different facial expressions. Is someone flirting with you or are they about to rape you? Well, you learn how to identify a threat when you’re 10 or 12 or nine. I don’t know what age, but when you can’t see anything but someone’s eyes, it is toxic for neurological development, and how dare anyone try and make kids do something to protect older people that harms the kids for life. So what do we do to make ourselves more resilient? There is very clear, super clear evidence, eight times less chance of being hospitalised from having adequate levels of vitamin D. By the way, that is better odds than any major pharmaceutical treatment that they are selling right now. So for the $8 trillion the US government has spent, they could have bought vitamin D for the next 20 years for every person on the planet. This is how stupid our response has been, except that’s not why the government response is what it is.

It cannot be. It is orchestrated. It is global and it is incredibly absurd what we’re doing for the level of danger. If this was Ebola, if 30% of people were dying, if emergency rooms actually filled up, which they almost never have, it would be a different story. So I’m not saying that you want to get COVID. I was pretty sick for 10 days. I did not like how I felt. I have been much sicker. And some people do have long term problems with all viruses. It’s a normal thing. And these are very hackable long term things. The fact that many posts, including my post about something called Interleukin 6 that I wrote two weeks into the pandemic … Well, it was taken down and many of my posts have been censored. I’ve been shadow banned for talking about not even ivermectin, which apparently seemed to work in India but doesn’t work in North Australia and probably doesn’t work in Australia. It’s weird.

Okay, so fine. Don’t talk about that but the basic vitamin stuff like that. So the number one thing you can do, if you don’t want to die from any cause, is be metabolically mostly fit, which means don’t eat those bad Omega-6 liquid seed oils and have enough vitamin D. If you just do those two things, you’re going to be way healthier than you would’ve been. And, that’s it. If you just do those, you’re not average. The average risk is this, your risk is eight times lower. Your risk is so low that you should worry about drowning and you should learn martial arts to protect yourself from potential people with batons coming after you or something. I don’t really know, but it becomes vanishingly small, and you start looking at the mass of your car in case you run into someone, you want to be in the heavier car, because that actually really does matter.

So just lower your risk so that you’re not average, but in this case, the average risk, if you’re older, it’s not great. 5% is not okay. So if you’re there, I would say if you’re at that age … I identify as something called vi-curious, vaccine curious. I’m totally open to vaccines. I have vaccines. And, I think you look at the neurological … the immune system risk of an individual person and then you look at the risk of getting a disease with side effects and dying and all that stuff. You work with a doctor and the doctor says this is worth doing. Or, the doctor says that’s actually probably not a good idea. It’s not medically advisable. And you say, “Hey, you don’t have to do it.” I support that 100%. I support schools saying these are the list of vaccines you need to get, unless they might kill you because you’re sick, because you have a disability.

And at that point we support those members of society who have immune system disabilities and say, “All right, it’s okay.” Because if the vaccines work, which apparently they do, we don’t have polio anymore, then maybe it’s okay if someone doesn’t have the polio vaccine if it was a very high risk for them. So all I’m saying here is mandates are evil, and if you are subject to one, if you get any mandated medical treatment, your risk is not average. Your risk is your risk. And if you have a history of severe anaphylaxis, maybe you should be ready for whatever happens. But here’s the deal. Most people who get COVID live. Most people who get the vaccine live. It’s okay to be curious. It’s okay to be not fearful, and it’s okay to think about it. It’s okay to make either decision, but it’s your decision and anyone who makes you make a decision at gunpoint or by taking away your job, they’re evil. And that’s how it is.

Dave Asprey:

Even in Australia, and I love Australia. I love visiting there. People are so interested in health and there’s good grass-fed butter available and there’s grass-fed beef. I really appreciate Australia. It’s been a Bulletproof stronghold forever. Even there, you spend a lot of time in the sun, you’re going to spend so much time in the sun that you’re getting skin ageing and increased risk of skin cancer. By the way, no sun increases the risk of skin cancer a lot but if you’re spending four hours a day with your shirt off every day in Australia’s hot sun, you probably still won’t have enough vitamin D.

Dave Asprey:

And, that’s because of changes in what we eat. Unless you eat a lot of egg yolks and butter … saturated fat helps with making vitamin D … you probably won’t. So, what it means is supplementing almost for everyone. But, your vitamin D receptor genes can vary so greatly that in fact you might need four times more vitamin D than the person sitting next to you, and there’s no way to tell by looking at you. Well, if you have dark skin, you need more by definition. But, I need about as much vitamin D as the average very dark skinned, a black person would need, because I have the vitamin D receptor genes that just don’t work very well.

The reason if you have dark skin you need more is that your skin filters out the sunlight so you don’t make as much vitamin D per hour in the sun. Good news is you don’t get sunburns either, so there’s that.

Dave Asprey:

Yeah, I don’t know how Australia does the numbers. The Americans metrics would be you want it to be between about 70 and 90 but I don’t remember what the metrics … You can Google that. For most people, it’s 1000 IUs of vitamin D for every 25 pounds of body weight. I know my metrics are wrong there but you can convert pounds.

Dave Asprey:

You guys can do that. So, 1000 IUs per 25 pounds of body weight, and get a lab test whenever you can because those numbers may be substantially off for you.

Dave Asprey:

Supplements are the frosting on the cake. They can be expensive. They work. And, I just want to say for all my friends and Australian people I haven’t met, we know what’s going on over there in the rest of the world, and I’m sorry it’s happening and stay strong and keep your pitchforks handy. Do not back down. If you look at what I’m posting on Instagram, Dave.Asprey, I’m posting about what’s going on over there so keep up the protests. Do not let this happen in your county.

Dave Asprey:

Well, if you’re a podcast listener and you like Alex’s show, you’ll probably like mine. It’s called The Human Upgrade. It’s got a quarter billion downloads, top whatever some slight percentage on iTunes. That’s a really good one. And if you go to DaveAsprey.com, you can sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you the stuff. Also on Telegram. There is all sorts of truthful stuff about what’s going on in Australia and elsewhere on Telegram. There’s also a lot of bat shit crazy stuff. But many of my posts have been taken down on Instagram and Facebook. They’re deleting content left and right. It’s heavily filtered right now, but Telegram is wild and free and there I’m Asprey Official. So, I’d love to see you guys on there where we can have a real conversation about what works and what doesn’t.

Dave Asprey:

All right. Thank you, Alex.