Full transcript: Brian Rose on Bulletproof Radio
0:07 Dave Asprey: Today’s cool fact of the day is that in a recent study, 19 baseball players from UC Riverside trained using a visual program for 25 minutes a day for only a month for 30 days. The basic idea was that they were going to train their visual cortex to process information quicker and more clearly. What happened is that the players had less strikeouts and they created more runs and they were able to increase their overall visual acuity by 31%, which is kind of cool.
0:34 I’ve done some of my own vision hacking and I’ll be writing some stuff about that coming up here. The bottom line is that you can train yourself and train the lenses and the muscles in your eyes to focus better. I went from 2060 back down to 2015 in both eyes and this is after having had LASIK many years ago. So it turns out you can really do things in a relative short amount of time just with the right exercises. So it’s not like you should just be doing CrossFit for your arms. You should be doing CrossFit for your eyes.
1:02 Today’s guest is from London and I’ve seen a lot of things online about how people would like it to be easier to find Bulletproof products in the UK. I’m working on making it easier to get them all over Europe and in the meantime, check out xbrain.co.uk. They’re expanding and you can get Bulletproof coffee beans, brain octane oil and all the other upgraded stuff you’d expect to get. Speaking of London, today’s guest is Brian Rose, the creator and host of London Real, a weekly talk show exploring human experience and challenging the status quo.
1:37 He’s also the guy who started Silicon Real, a show dedicated to the London tech startup scene. You guys may also know I’ve been on Brian Rose’s show before last time I was in London and Brian’s just a cool dude. Brian, welcome to the show.
1:54 Brian Rose: Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. I think this is the second podcast I’ve ever done so you’re lucky to have me. I don’t do any media typically.
2:04 Dave Asprey: That’s because you’re always on your own camera, right? You’ve got some pretty amazing notes.
2:11 Brian Rose: Yeah, I never have to answer the hard questions. I just get to ask them which is pretty easy so it should be fun.
2:19 Dave Asprey: Well, you’re kind of an interesting guy because you live in the UK but you’re a Californian. You’re also an MIT engineer by training.
2:28 You’ve been a CFO at a New York startup and you’ve been a banker, one of those 1% guys. You’re into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you’re basically kind of a crazy guy. Is that an accurate way of describing your career path?
2:43 Brian Rose: I guess no one thinks that they’re that interesting but now that you’ve given me that CV, I guess it does sound kind of peculiar but yeah, all that’s true. It’s weird because London Real is hosted by an American so it’s kind of a weird thing but I’ve been here for 12 years now.
3:03 I’m a dual citizen so I’ve got passport, British and an American. Yeah, I’m here to stay. A lot of yanks when they come over here, they kind of want to get back home sooner or later but I came here for finance originally I think in 97 and then back for good in 2002. Yeah, it’s kind of morphed into now I guess I’m a talk show host, I guess you would call me. It’s hard to figure out what my role is but I have been a CFO.
3:33 I was in the dot-com bubble in New York City in 1999 to 2002 and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, black belt, sorry, purple belt, black belt someday maybe. Yeah, Silicon Real is now the show about London technology startup scene so we’ve just shot our 42nd episode there. It’s kind of like a mini London Real but just tech startups but still we say it’s about the people so it’s like about the people behind the tech. So it’s busy over here. We do two shows a week just like you.
4:06 Dave Asprey: You’re a busy guy.
4:07 You know how hard it is to do two shows a week but you do them live too. I record and then broadcast but just setting it up, doing the research and all that. I find it’s a full-time job almost to do two shows. How much of your week do you spend on podcasting not just the actual act of talking like we’re talking right now but going out there and just making your brain ready to ask intelligent questions. You’ve had like Richard Branson on there, is that right?
4:32 Brian Rose: We didn’t have Branson on. Soon, man, soon. Yeah, we had Neil deGrasse Tyson on recently. Peter Sage, guys like that. Peter Sage, yeah. I mean like Neil deGrasse Tyson was here and then like a week later he’s posting a selfie with President Obama on his Twitter feed.
4:49 So I’m like, okay, I guess I’m one degree of separation away from the White House. But we’ve had some fun names like Tim Ferriss and Graham Hancock and it’s weird because if you’re a person I can probably mention a guest that you’ll care about because we probably had someone on Twitter. Because we probably had someone on that you’ll find really interesting. But when we first came out, we actually said to anyone in the world if you want to start your own podcast, you can call it Your City Reel.
5:20 We’ll try to help you out. Just send me a pilot. And we got a bunch of people that started. There was a Melbourne reel. There was a Midwest reel that’s still around, LA reel, Limerick reel, all these other reels.
5:31 And I think what people found hard after the first few weeks is just booking the guests and keeping it going. It takes a lot of time and a lot of prep, which I’m sure you know.
5:45 Dave Asprey: Yeah. Bulletproof has passed about 110, 115 episodes now. And it’s a lot of work.
5:51 But London Real, where are you guys in terms of?
5:54 Brian Rose: So we’re at 145 on London Real and yeah, I guess 4243 on Silicon Reel. So yeah, they just keep going. I mean, I’ll have 100 people in the studio this year and I’ll get to sit down and like really meet them. And you know, it’s weird when you have a podcast with someone.
6:11 I think it’s like knowing them maybe for like four weeks or going out with them maybe 10 times because I can meet a guy and then I sit him down on the show, turn the cameras on, and I can ask him the most intimate questions about himself. And he has to answer them. So you get this real bond and I call it like when the podcast is over, I turn the cameras off and we end up having this conversation. And it’s kind of like glow time. Like I’m not comparing this to like after sex, but it’s kind of like after the show, then you can have this real conversation where they’re like, yeah, you know, this is what I think and this is what I couldn’t say on camera.
6:48 And you end up building some really important relationships. I mean, you were here just under a year ago. You were here in May of last year. And on the back of that, we’ve become partners and big fans of everything you guys are doing. And it’s funny, that all started really from the show.
7:06 And we probably would never have had that connection if you hadn’t been here in the studios and hung out with us for a couple hours.
7:13 Dave Asprey: Yeah, the honesty sort of the idea that you’re just going to say things as they are. A lot of people didn’t know, but after I finished the show with you, I was kind of wiped out. I’d been in London for a whole week. I was meeting eight or nine people a day, giving them like a one hour talk, mostly investment bankers and guys like that.
7:29 So I was coming off of like five days of intense, like literally have a meeting, run down the stairs, go to the next meeting, talk about Bulletproof diet and mental performance for these guys with like lots and lots of zeros in their bank accounts, and just like rinse and repeat. So I was kind of thrashed. I was using a little bit of nicotine as a laws engine on Bulletproof coffee and all this kind of stuff. And it’s like, man, that’s cool. So I thought holding it together pretty well, I was a little tired.
7:54 But afterwards, I remember we were chatting. I’m like, man, all right, I think I’m about done because it was at the end of this crazy week. So yeah, you’re right. You just say the things that you wouldn’t have said on the air. Yeah, it’s a real hour of honesty.
8:08 Brian Rose: I mean, people have said it before, you can’t really fake 90 minutes. Because sooner or later, you can script eight minutes or 15 minutes, especially if you edit something. But if you’re here in my studio, I mean, I’m going to ask some hard questions and you get the essence of someone. So like your show, people still watch your show. People still tweet me about your show.
8:28 And the shelf life of your show is going to be years from now. People will be watching that. So it’s a really interesting medium. I think we’re only starting to understand it right now.
8:38 Dave Asprey: Well said.
8:39 One of the things I wanted to ask you about, on this show, we have somewhere around right over 5 million downloads for Bulletproof Executive Radio. And a lot of times, I’m talking about the latest in ketosis or butter or nutrition or human performance, but not as much about some of the career stuff. And you and I have something in common that we’ve both come from one industry, in my case, tech, in your case, I guess tech and then banking, and gone into like a totally different life, really, as podcast hosts and bloggers and sort of this weird online media thing.
9:15 And a lot of people ask me, like, how did you do it? And there’s like this huge overhang of people who want to do the same thing. So what was it like when you went from going banking to podcast hosts? Like, how did you do that? Like, what made it work?
9:29 Brian Rose: It was, yeah, it was pretty terrifying. So I was nine years at the same company here in London. It was called ICAP PLC. It’s a FTSE 100 company. And, you know, I was on the phone every day connecting different major banks.
9:44 So I would close a deal between Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan in a credit derivative instrument. And I would do, you know, 30, 40 of those a day. And it was kind of a 12-hour day. I would entertain guys at night. We’d go on weekends.
9:57 And I mean, in retrospect, I could make it sound glamorous, but after a while, it gets kind of tough. And I went to the Best Ronsouts in London, and I went to the Monaco GP and Skeen and Verbier and da-da-da-da-da. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t very creative. I think a lot of people say that in finances. It’s not very creative.
10:14 And, you know, as you work for a big company, it can be in any sector. After a while, you know, you’re not being creative anymore. And I just had enough. When I told my clients I was leaving, I was like, I’m not really feeling this anymore. And one of my clients said, Brian, you haven’t been feeling this for two years.
10:30 And I was like, really? It shows? And, you know, they know. I mean, most people can tell. And I was just phoning it in.
10:40 I was dragging myself to work every day. So, you know, I quit. When I look at it in retrospect, it was actually about four or five months after I started meditating twice a day. And, like, I don’t know if that had something to do with it. I don’t know if my subconscious brain was taking everything in.
10:56 But I walked out of there, and I really had no idea what I was going to do. I was just completely, you know, done with the industry for a while. So, you know, I didn’t plan on doing this. I didn’t start doing this. About nine months later, my Brazilian jujitsu instructor and I were hanging out during the day because no one else hangs out during the day, except for martial arts instructors and unemployed bankers.
11:21 And I was listening to a lot of podcasts, and we’d walk around the west end of London, and we’d talk about philosophy or about girls or about health or whatever. And we’d have a great conversation for two hours, and I’d say, that would make a good podcast. And I remember saying we should start a podcast. And he was like, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it.
11:40 And I was like, okay, as soon as I start a podcast, I have to finally tell people I’m not an ex-banker. I’m now a podcaster out of my house. And so I really had to get my own self-dialogue. I had to get it in my head at one point just to go out and do it. And so we started the show October 2011.
12:01 Dave Asprey: Yeah. Well, congrats. It’s been a successful transition for you. I mean, London Real has become, I think, a very respectable and respect-worthy podcast. So it’s cool.
12:14 I love it, too, that you’re in an international city, so you get all these guests. I’m up here on Vancouver Island, and I’d love to do some live stuff, but there aren’t that many people who come up here except for vacation. So I’m in the process of building a biohacking facility. So I’ll be able to lure good guests up here.
12:30 Brian Rose: Oh, up where you are.
12:31 Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah. So I’ll be like, come on over, and we’re going to hack the crap out of your brain. And then we’ll do a podcast. So they’ll have electrode glue left on their face. It won’t be that bad.
12:39 But I’m hoping I get some live guests. But in the meantime, Skype is awesome, right?
12:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, Skype is awesome, and you can get some great flow with Skype, definitely.
12:47 Dave Asprey: But I’m curious how you find it when you get people up there. If you find the dynamic in the studio is different, and you can have both, obviously.
12:55 Brian Rose: You know, we’ve always done shows being with people live in the studio. And I remember the first Graham Hancock interview we did, it took us like five months to get him here, six months. And he lives in Bath, which is nearby. But he wanted to do it at his house, and then he wanted to do it on Skype. And we were a new show, and I kept having to say, no, it has to be here, it has to be here.
13:16 But once he got here, he really opened up really well. So it’s worked out well for us. But, you know, we’re lucky, we’re in London. So we do get flows of people. And we can also be lucky, because if you’re an American and you’re coming to London, then you’re kind of out of your element.
13:31 It’s not like I’m competing against Fox and CNN and things. So when they’re over here, it’s kind of a novelty. And they’ll be like, oh, yeah, we’ll drop by London Real. So it’s been really lucky to be that kind of an international city. But it’s hard.
13:45 I mean, you know, Midwest Reel is one of the shows that started kind of with our real name. They’ve done a fantastic job, but it’s hard. I mean, how many people are rolling through the Midwest on a regular basis?
13:56 Dave Asprey: Yeah, they don’t call them the flyover states for no reason. No offense, my friends, on the flyover states.
14:01 So I’ve had two guests come up to my house up here. Abel James came up from Fat Burning Man, and Chris Ryan, the guy who wrote Sex at Dawn, a book about evolution and polyamory and things like that. And, you know, I prefer hanging out with people live, and you get that nice, like, post-interview discussion, and you’re really good to connect. So I prefer to do it live. And, you know, people are going to be up in, you know, sunny Victoria, especially during summer, who should be guests.
14:29 And I’m always game for doing that. I just have a camera guy come out. But part of that, too, is, you know, you’ve got a whole studio, and I don’t have a studio right now. I’m working on making more of one, so.
14:39 Brian Rose: Well, if you have that biohacking facility, you can lure people up there.
14:43 You might be able to lure me over there.
14:45 Dave Asprey: It’s going to be cool. I’m excited. So I’m working on making that a reality. Give me another few months, and I should be able to give people a reason to come up here.
14:54 Brian Rose: No, you guys aren’t slowing down, man. I mean, it’s funny, because some people asked me the other day, someone said, asked me about Bulletproof, and they’re like, yeah, that’s that coffee company. And I was like, you know what? They’re a lot more than a coffee company. There’s a lot going on over there.
15:08 And it’s just, you know, you guys have so many new things, new products, podcasts, all this crazy stuff coming out. So I don’t know. It’s been a lot of fun to be kind of a part of it over the last, you know, what, 12 months or so. I appreciate the way you demo the coffee for people and all. And it’s cool.
15:26 Dave Asprey: It is more than coffee. And it’s a human performance, is what I’m most interested in, largely for my own sake. And also, I like to help others. So if it helps you perform better, it’s something that I’m going to be interested in. But it also kind of confuses people because they’re like, wait, how is there a relationship between whole body vibration, you know, brain hacking equipment that sticks to your head and coffee?
15:48 I’m like, no, there’s a common thread in there. It’s just not one you probably thought about before. So it seems to be working, helping people. This company wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Internet because, like, in what single place would you find people who are, like, looking at all these different angles? But there’s a community, a pretty strong one, of people who really are dedicated, not just to, like, feel-good self-improvement, but, like, quantitative, measurable stuff like that.
16:14 And, all right, well, you’re one of those guys. So what is your next thing? Like, how are you going to grow and develop professionally or personally coming up next? Like, how’s biohacking fit into all that?
16:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a great question.
16:26 I mean, you know, I guess I’m pretty new to biohacking. You know, I mentioned that meditation piece about three years ago. I mean, I’ve been training, you know, for a long time as far as martial arts and kind of fitness for maybe 10 years. But I wouldn’t call that biohacking. I was experimenting with my diet, but I wasn’t doing, like, very specific changes and trying to get that feedback loop.
16:47 So, you know, I started the meditation about three years ago. I’ve been on Bulletproof now for about a year as far as the coffee, and I’ve been doing a lot of sleep-hacking pieces on the back of what you guys have done and speaking with, you know, Zach Garcia. You’re head of marketing, and he put me in touch with the Sleep Cycle app, and now I’m using the Sleep Induction Mat every night. And so…
17:09 Dave Asprey: Oh, cool.
17:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love that thing. I was on it last night, and we did a sleep-hacking video with my stepdaughter and my girlfriend. And my 10-year-old tracks her sleep at night, and I do, and my girlfriend. So three people are tracking her sleep on our iPhones every night, you know. And the little one loves it.
17:31 I mean, she’s always comparing her percentage to mine, and, you know, she sleeps 11 hours, so she always gets, like, 96%. That’s like cheating, you know.
17:40 Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s a total cheat box.
17:42 Brian Rose: I told her that. I’m like, this is a total fix, but she wasn’t feeling that, so…
17:47 And people really like that stuff, and so I’ve been really enjoying the sleep-hacking. You know, based on the ayahuasca I did a couple years ago, I kind of went gluten-free on the back of that, and so I’ve been kind of trending toward a lot of your Bulletproof diet stuff, but every time I hear different things you’re doing, you know, I think more about that, and, you know, incorporating, you know, different pieces of choosing the right foods, and, you know, I’ve read your Better Baby book, and, like, you know, all these different things. You know, Zach tells me he takes your brain-optane oil to the sushi restaurant with him instead of soy, and he puts sea salts on that or a Himalayan salt.
18:28 So, like, little things like that.
18:30 Dave Asprey: I think I taught him those things, and… Yeah. But it’s like the lifestyle tweaks, you’re like, wait, what was the difference in the quality of my consciousness from putting on this stuff that contains excitatory neurotransmitters, the soy sauce, as well as actually quite a lot of histamine usually? So you’re like, did I feel differently when I had this really good piece of sushi that now tasted more like sushi or more like soy sauce?
18:50 I would have never thought there was a difference, but there was. So you’ve gotten into that, right?
18:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’ve gotten very much into that, and I kind of want to keep expanding. I just feel like I’m getting a little bit better. I think it helps with age.
19:03 I think… I wish I’d started earlier. I mean, I wish I’d started in my 20s. There’s a lot of recklessness, as I remember, in my mid-20s.
19:12 Dave Asprey: What you can remember of your mid-20s, you’re saying?
19:15 Brian Rose: I just remember… I don’t know if I was trying to push my body to the limit or if I was trying to some days kill myself or I don’t know what I was trying to do, but I don’t remember thinking about ways I would biohack myself, but I believe if the information was out there, I would have trended toward it a bit sooner, maybe by the time I was 30 as opposed to by the time I was 40. I know you’ve talked about that before, too. I think it’s just something… It’s interesting.
19:40 My 10-year-old, I mean, she’s thinking about her sleep now. So what’s that going to do to her in her teens and 20s? I mean, she now knows that eight hours of sleep is important. It’s like… I don’t know.
19:53 These are big steps, I think. Or gluten-free, she’s now thinking about gluten in her diet. So there’s a big…
19:59 Dave Asprey: It’s a gift to give that to a kid. But how did you go from ayahuasca to gluten?
20:03 And I mean, just so people were listening know, ayahuasca is a hallucinogen that’s used as a sacrament with shamanic medical traditions. It’s a pretty strong hallucinogen related to DMT, which is the active ingredient in it, just if you’re getting caught up on that. And just in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve done ayahuasca in a shamanic ceremony in South America about a decade ago, and it does tend to do things to you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think I missed asking you that when you were here.
20:31 And I read it in your bio later, and I was like, I was like, damn, I missed that.
20:36 Brian Rose: You’d be surprised how many people have done it. I mean, I had Dorian Yates here, who was the sixth time Mr. Olympia, almost one of our biggest episodes ever. It’s been viewed almost 300,000 times.
20:48 Wow. And an hour through the show, he’s blowing my mind when he talks about, I mean, let’s be honest, his own biohacking to become Mr. Olympia. He said he would never go out past 11 at night. Obviously, his sleep, his diet, his training, everything.
21:04 And then he’s like, oh, yeah, I went on an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil. And I was like, Dorian Yates is in my house talking about ayahuasca. And you’d be surprised. I’ve had other people tell me off camera that they’ve done it and they’re going to do it. So it’s interesting.
21:19 But typically, people go to Peru and do it. It’s a brew that’s been used there for, I think they’ve proved thousands of years based on some archaeological evidence. But it’s something that we did early on on London Real. And it was controversial. I mean, to be honest, Dave, before I did that episode, I was like, am I ever going to be allowed back in the banking world if I want to go?
21:42 It was like one of those pieces where I was like, okay, is the Financial Services Authority going to be like, eh? My burning bridges, but ultimately, we had to do it. And we did the ceremony in the UK, and we were quite open about it. We did it before and after. And it was, to date, one of our best episodes.
21:58 I think people really like to see when you put yourself out there. But part of the ceremony was going on a diet, and the diet was really restrictive. And part of that was gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free, alcohol-free, drug-free, spice-free. I mean, it’s pretty limiting. I think it might be a bit of an extreme case, but it was great to do for 10 days as a test.
22:23 And then once you drink the ayahuasca, you come out of it. Part of you tells you that, I don’t know, maybe you should stay away from those grains. And it was weird, Dave. I could have gone right back on it, but since then, I’ve really steered clear of it, and I’ve been a much happier person since. With biofeedback, with the kind of internal awareness that you get from using ayahuasca in a ceremonial, spiritual context, not as a recreational drug, which it’s not.
22:54 Dave Asprey: But if you develop that sort of self-awareness, some of that goes into the Bulletproof Diet. People are always complaining, like, Dave, why do you say no garlic in the Bulletproof Diet? I’m like, well, there’s some historical precedent for it, but I can see it on an EEG, what it does to my brainwaves. But as someone who’s learned to achieve some advanced sense dates from 40 years of Zen and all that, my brain won’t do what I can normally do with it when I eat garlic.
23:17 It’s just like that. So garlic’s a powerful medicinal herb, and we should use it in such a way. But if you’re medicating with it every single day, you might be missing out on some of the nuances of what your consciousness can do. And I don’t necessarily want to be restrictive the way a shaman would be, but what I’d like to do is map out. Look, how much mental clarity and focus do you want?
23:35 Let’s move your diet in this direction. Maybe you don’t go all the way here. You might just be in the middle. But at least you have a direction. You have a roadmap to follow.
23:43 And you want to address inflammation. You want to do all these things. So I was intrigued when I first learned the dietary recommendations that come from practices like Jainism and things out of India, things out of Tibet, and then things out of the shamanic things happening in South America. And there’s some interesting common overlapping threads around overagitating the body, which affects the mind. So I’m impressed that you picked up on the gluten thing as a result of using Ayahuasca.
24:12 That’s pretty cool.
24:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, you’re all about feedback. I mean, that’s what you’ve done. I mean, I know from your early days, the feedback was, you know, when I drink this coffee, I feel ill. When I eat gluten, I mean, I know you’re very sensitive to these things.
24:27 And so, I mean, that’s kind of why we’re even talking about Bulletproof, is because you managed to identify these sensitivities you had. And so there’s so much going on in our subconscious about, well, everything around us we’re looking at and then obviously ingesting. And so it is about that feedback. And you might not be able to explain maybe today why a specific substance makes you do something. But if the feedback is there, you know, and if you said thousands of years of multiple traditions around the world have tended to trend in the same way, then we can probably get some information from that and kind of act on it.
25:03 And the Ayahuasca, I mean, I have a scientific mind. I have a mechanical engineering degree from MIT. I was taught if it’s not on the paper, and then, you know, if it’s not science and proven, then it can’t happen. But, you know, I’m here to say that I just avoided a lot of foods after that Ayahuasca ceremony, and gluten was one of them, and, you know, certain, you know, pork products and other meats that just didn’t feel very clean, I’ve avoided as well, and I don’t know, there’s something there, even though I can’t explain it.
25:38 Dave Asprey: That says a lot. It’s actually harder for engineers to do that. And at a certain point, for me, I just realized, okay, I’m doing all the hard science things that should result in, in my case, weight loss and other things like that, and I’m like, they’re just not working. And that was kind of a scary thing, because, like, I followed the rules, I did what science says I should do, and it turns out the science was accurate, but the assumptions behind the science were wrong.
26:03 You know, in my case, the assumption that the calorie in equals, you know, x amount of weight gained in this sort of calories in, colors out thing, that assumption was wrong, and that is not the way to sustainably gain or lose weight. You can certainly induce a famine, but it doesn’t work as a long-term lifestyle. In fact, it’s highly destructive. So it’s fascinating when you take those things and you deconstruct the assumptions and you figure out what happened.
26:31 And it sounds like Ayahuasca, for you, changed some of your assumptions, which the first was, it has to be on paper, and when you were done with it, you’re like, I have to feel it and see it on paper. Am I reading that right? Or you’re just more, I have to feel it, and hopefully see it on paper.
26:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, I think that’s true, and I think it’s kind of both. I think part of me just kind of was repulsed by the certain of the foods, and then as I research a bit more and look past, I mean, you have to remember, I grew up in the 70s, my mom gave me skim milk in California.
27:00 Dave Asprey: Oh, me too.
27:01 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah. You too. And so it was all about low-fat, non-fat, and all this whole mantra of kind of the 70s and maybe the 80s. And so we look back on that now, and it’s, well, especially from the Bulletproof diet, it looks ridiculous.
27:14 And so now, I might not understand why I’m staying away from these foods, but we’re getting more information now. You publish a lot of that on your site, and we’ll probably have some more in the future. But it’s just, once I’ve lived through one of these diet cycles, and we’ve seen them all, whether it’s Atkins or Paleo or this or that, you kind of see as a society, we kind of necessarily kind of get on the bandwagon. So I guess you’re a contrarian kind of in what you’re doing, but you probably feel very good about it based on your research, right?
27:47 Dave Asprey: I’m a contrarian, although it’s becoming more mainstream. Sweden just changed their recommendations. So now, oh, you should eat a high-saturated fat diet. Sorry, we were wrong. So when things like that happen, I’m like, I like to think that I’m a thought leader there, but I’m also sure.
28:02 My email signature says, I guarantee that something I’ve said on my website’s wrong, and I don’t know what it is. I’m saying all the things that I know to be true to the very best of my ability and the ones that are super scientifically rigorous, I’d call those out, the ones where it’s like garlic. There’s a whole lot of hints and there’s a lot of observation there, and there’s an EEG experience with more than just my head. I’m like, okay, it’s good enough for me to make that recommendation, but if you love garlic, just do it.
28:27 So it’s one of those things where there’s always going to be improvements in our knowledge and our practice, and there’s the whole genetic thing coming in. I just wish when I was 20, that someone had told me all this stuff because I was 300 pounds and unhealthy and my brain wasn’t working, and I was angry all the time, and all that stuff, and literally, that’s the whole reason I’m writing this. Maybe if a couple people read it, it would help them, and then they could avoid all the crap that I went through.
28:51 So it’s kind of a win no matter what, from my perspective, if 10 people read the blog.
28:56 Brian Rose: Let me ask you a question. I mean, you live in America. I’m over here in the UK, but we read about the obesity issues and Americans’ health, and right now, the equivalent of you has all this information from where you were, say, 10 years ago or 12 years or 15 years ago, that people have all this information, but will they use it? Will they act upon it, or do you find that the trend is kind of going the other way?
29:18 Dave Asprey: Well, I live in Canada, and I travel to the US all the time. I have people down there, and I do my work in the US. So people always have access to more information than they’re going to act on. In fact, if you looked around me, and you can see all the crap stacked up here, biohacking stuff, I have this new temperature control, cold control glove. It’s been sitting here for like a month, and I haven’t had a chance to play with it, but I’d like to be like putting my hand in ice water with basically a way to turn my temperature down on my body pretty heavily before I go to sleep.
29:55 It’s like an athletic recovery thing, but I want to use it for sleep hacking. I just don’t have time, and I have over here an exercise prescription for basically changing the balance between the hemispheres of my brain, and I’m supposed to be turning off my right eye and changing my sensory input on my right nostril and then doing things with my left hand. Honestly, I know that I would probably benefit from that. I don’t even want to say I don’t have the time.
30:19 I just have a lot of stuff, and I’m going to pick and choose. The goal behind the recommendations I’m making on the site is I’m trying to identify the lowest-hanging fruit so that if you have five minutes to spend on doing something good for yourself, what would you do, and how would you stack rank it? So if you had six minutes, what do you fill the next minute with? That is a big challenge, and some of it’s personalized, but even the diet itself, it’s a spectrum.
30:48 Okay, don’t eat perfectly, but you had a choice between squeeze margarine and coconut oil. Well, I’m pretty sure coconut oil was a better choice, and if you like them both, and it didn’t cost you anything to choose one versus the other, just having the knowledge of which one is superior is going to change the quality of your day. So it’s building an end, so it’s painless. That’s kind of the challenge for me, and that’s where I’m trying to take the Bulletproof blog so people can just go, oh, that’s just an obvious move.
31:16 I’ll make that. That make sense?
31:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. I was wondering, when I think about Bulletproof coffee, it seems like the Trojan horse, and I was wondering if this was by design. I’m guessing it wasn’t, but it’s funny because if you tell people about biohacking in a general sense, they might start to go to sleep.
31:34 But if you say, try this coffee that tastes brilliant, as we would say in the UK, and I serve it here on the show pretty much to every single guest, and I’m at 100% approval rating. People are like, this tastes awesome. And this is when I make it in my kitchen. I put butter in there, and I show them the MCT oil, and I get some funny looks from people. They’re like, are you sure?
31:57 But once they taste it, they’re in. So I was just curious if you ever thought that that would be maybe the Trojan horse to get people, because once they taste something that makes them feel good, and it tastes good, it seems like it would open their mind to explore other pieces of hacking their bio. And so I guess I’m asking, was that always a plan with you, or was it kind of a serendipitous?
32:21 Dave Asprey: The goal for calling Bulletproof in the state of high performance is that I really want people to just once experience how well their brain can work, how good they can feel, how much energy they can have.
32:34 There’s lots of ways to do that. I’m working with the Flow Genome Project on a couple of things right now. You could try an extreme sport. There’s all these different things, but if you want to really reliably put someone in that, wow, I’m liberated from food cravings and I just got this massive, my brain works for the first time, stacking the stuff the way I designed it in Bulletproof Coffee where you’ve got the different lipids and you’ve recreated these micelles and you’ve done these things, you’ve eliminated the toxins that are common in coffee that have an anti-effect compared to what you want.
33:07 Just getting them to feel that one precious moment of clarity, like oh my God, that’s what I want. That turns on the desire for biohacking because you want to feel that way every single day. It’s not like being high or something. It’s just like I feel like I’m fully myself and all of my faculties are there. That’s it.
33:26 I would use electricity. I would use electromagnetic frequencies or color therapy or anything else. This is just the fastest way I know of to be like there. That’s how you’re supposed to feel. Now what are you going to do to feel like that all the time?
33:40 It just works. It is the one thing you can do in an instant to get people to, I guess, understand what you’re talking about as far as their own personal performance and potential biohacking. That’s what it’s there for. There’s a lot going on from a biochemical perspective when they get the grass-fed butter and when they get the additional energy in the brain that comes from burning fat, even though they’re still consuming carbohydrates and the way we’re blending it and the fact that it’s these MCTs and they’re not really with the brain octane oil.
34:11 It’s even not MCT oil. It’s just one of the oils out of coconut, but it has that strong brain-boosting effect and they’re like, not only am I thinking really fast, I got my work done, but I wasn’t tempted by the bagel. In fact, one of my friends in the UK, she was such a food-craver that she didn’t have any food in her house. She’d go out down the street to Tesco and get one of the little pre-made meals they have at work and she’d know all the candy drawers so she could go and get a piece of candy.
34:42 She tried Bulletproof Coffee while I was there for the first time and she’s like, I went all day and I didn’t have any candy. It was a whole different world for her because her biology was so prime for that. For her, it was the experience of no food cravings, owning her life that happened in a day. I just want people to feel that state. We’re like, wow, what do I do with all this?
35:04 Because when you start asking yourself that question, you’re going to be nicer with people. That was kind of what was behind it. When I started making it, I’m like, I want coffee that makes me feel like this all the time. What’s wrong with other coffee water? I feel like a zombie some days.
35:17 Brian Rose: There’s a lot of bio-macking there. It’s an interesting question. Yeah, when you talk about that, not craving sweets effect is another thing which I don’t even know if you can quantify the science that makes it not happen. It’s funny because you don’t even notice some of the things that you’re doing differently. She obviously noticed because she could probably watch herself all the time picking up those sweets.
35:38 Dave Asprey: I think it’s a lot like meditation, a bunch of these other things, is that doing them makes you behave in a much better way. You’re not always able to quantify exactly what it is. It’s like that with smart drugs too. I first learned this with paracetam a long time ago. This is one of the very safe smart drugs I’ve been taking for a long time.
36:00 I took it and I’m like, paracetam doesn’t work. It’s no good, so I stopped taking it. Then the next day I’m like, I had to think of a word. It didn’t come to me automatically. I realized my memory wasn’t quite where I wanted it.
36:13 Then I took the drugs again. I realized when things work, it feels so natural that it’s not obvious. Like, oh yeah, this is how I’m supposed to be feeling. You’ll notice a degradation in performance more easily than you’ll notice feeling like you’re supposed to be feeling all the time because it’s just so natural. Once you get used to being in the bulletproof state of high performance, you’re like, okay, this is how it is.
36:36 When you’re not in it, you’re like, that’s irritating. I had to stop and think. I didn’t have the endurance I expected. I couldn’t stay awake, whatever else. My focus drifted because that just doesn’t happen.
36:46 I’ll tell you, if I can’t find a word, I’m digging, and it doesn’t come to me automatically, I make note of that because that means I did something wrong in the previous 24 hours because especially coming from where I used to be cognitively, I’m amazed to always have access to that. My memory IO works all the time. If not, it’s a bug, it’s a glitch, and there’s something wrong, and it can be hacked.
37:09 Brian Rose: Right, right. I mean, it’s weird when humans experiment on themselves because by definition, we taint the experimental result.
37:16 I was wondering if you, after all these years, are pretty good at monitoring your own wellbeing, memory, all these little pieces, or do you sometimes get it wrong, or do you sometimes have to use a device whether it’s your heartbeat or a temperature feedback or something to make sure you notice reactions when you try to hack yourself?
37:34 Dave Asprey: I use devices whenever it’s possible and convenient.
37:37 Brian Rose: That’s the purest form scientifically, right?
37:39 Dave Asprey: It is the purest form scientifically, but there are some things we don’t know how to measure.
37:44 Take heart rate variability, which is something that you’ve done as well right after we talked about it and all. Heart rate variability, there’s an algorithm, and someone had to figure out that it’s useful to know the spacing between your heartbeats and to map the spacing of the last heartbeat with the one before it and to compare those. So there’s math in there. That’s why they call it heart math, right? The problem is, before that math, you could also sit and do the breathing exercises and practice forgiveness or open heart meditation.
38:13 You could feel it in your body, and you could know when you’re doing it. It took years of teaching to do it. So meditation, going back to the Buddhists and all that, is really the art of becoming your own biohacking instrument where you don’t have to have external sensors. It’s just easier and faster with sensors because when the sensor beeps, you’re like, oh, that beep corresponds with a twitch in my left shoulder. You’re like, wait, that twitch in my left shoulder is correlated with the brain state, so this is a reliable indicator.
38:41 So I found that my own awareness went up very rapidly when I did 40 Years of Zen and heart rate variability training, other forms of neurofeedback and all these things much more rapidly than they would have if I just sat and meditated and did yoga, which I’ve also spent a lot of time doing.
38:57 Brian Rose: I know you’ve done the 40 Years of Zen, and we could probably talk an hour just about that, but I was wondering if you found any correlations between, say, ayahuasca ceremony, 40 Years of Zen, and maybe heavy meditation over a year or two.
39:11 Dave Asprey: There’s huge correlations.
39:12 40 Years of Zen, for people who are not familiar with that, it’s an eight-channel EEG neurofeedback done over the course of a week that teaches you to put your brain in the same state as someone who’s done 20 to 40 Years of Daily Zen practice, and it’s correlated with increases in intelligence and creativity and focus. I’ve been through five and a half weeks of this training and about to do another week of it. I bring some of my clients through it. I can tell you I’ve had more hallucinations with neurofeedback in 40 Years of Zen than I have on ayahuasca or DMT or psychedelic mushrooms used in a spiritual ceremony.
39:50 I’m not a super heavy psychedelics every weekend kind of guy. I don’t know anyone that does that. You have to be really kind of messed up for that, but once a year in the right setting with the right intent, I think it can be beneficial. There’s actually really good evidence for ayahuasca and even more so for medicinal psychedelic mushrooms where they treat PTSD and they do some other things that are really cool. So not being, hey, let’s all get high at all from that perspective, I’ve had more progress from holotropic breathing, which is another hallucinogenic thing without drugs, and from 40 Years of Zen than I have from ayahuasca or DMT or mushrooms, but I think they’re all valuable, and even sitting in a dark room for 10 days in Vipassana, we’re all circling the same basic truths and the same basic knowledge and self-awareness.
40:43 There are many paths to get there, and I think there’s definitely some relationships and some correlations there. What’s your take? I mean, you’ve done a lot of meditation. You do martial arts. You’ve done ayahuasca.
40:53 I mean, it’s almost like I could ask you the same.
40:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, it’s an interesting point you make. I think also you’ve probably trained your mind over the many, many years to where when you go into 40 Years of Zen, you’re ready to go to different places and you can relax your mind to go to these places where I would say a newbie or a first-timer. I’m sure they would have some breakthroughs, but maybe not from the hallucination standpoint, but maybe so. All the experts that I’ve had on the show, whether it comes to Graham Hancock or people on DMT or Psilocybin and all of the smart guys, even Tim Ferriss does what he calls an ego reset every year where he goes and takes a large dose of psilocybin, and he’s been talking about that for years.
41:36 Dave Asprey: He’s a cool dude. He’s a cool dude. Yeah, he was great when he was on here, and I know you guys are in touch. He was saying that before it was something being popular to be said, and so all the people I know, including myself, it’s something that you go, you take a look at what’s going on, you try to get some lessons. I think any more than every three or six months, I wouldn’t even understand it.
42:01 I think it’s too much information to process. It’s probably after you do 40 Years of Zen, you want to come back and then observe and process all of that new information, and then just see how your own subconscious mind and self is changing because a lot of times, you don’t even know what you’ve learned, and it’s applying that.
42:22 Brian Rose: I find sometimes with psychedelics, people can get really caught up in this new world or these visions or these speaking with aliens, but ultimately, we all live in this world, in this quote-unquote real world, and we all have to deal with each other in this world, and so I think you have to bring those lessons back here.
42:43 I think psychedelics can be great, especially for people that have no idea that they even have a consciousness, or they have no idea that everything is just a signal, and it’s nice to just perturb it, as Terrence McKenna would say, or Graham Hancock would say, where once you perturb it, you know that you’re in something, kind of like a fish doesn’t know what water is, and you don’t know what your conscious is until you give it a bit of a twang, and then maybe you can start looking at things differently and starting to understand that maybe you’re not in charge of your brain, maybe you’re not in charge of everything you think you’re in charge of, and I think that’s a bit of what biohacking as well, I think biohacking in a way is saying, wait a second, my body and my mind might be doing its own thing that I’m not completely aware of, so let me just do these things, let me meditate, let me eat this, let me do that, and then all of a sudden, wow, it’s great, I can now control things so much better, and so it’s kind of all interrelated, and I ask a lot of people here, whether they’re health people or business professionals or guys that preach success, sooner or later I ask them if they have touched psychedelics because there is something about questioning your own being or your own wants and desires that ultimately is related to consciousness, so it’s been a theme of our show, but by no means what we’re about.
44:05 Dave Asprey: It’s interesting that we have that in common, and so many of the high performers I know, if I’m just willing to drop a hint about either smart drugs or hallucinogenic stuff, they’re willing to talk about it, about, wow, in the very early days of LinkedIn, I was one of the first Silicon Valley guys to embrace that, and I put modafinil and yoga and meditation in my LinkedIn description, which you just wouldn’t do back then, right? And all of a sudden, people start opening up, so I think it kind of takes a certain set of balls to ask a guest on the show, like, do you use hallucinogens? What benefits have you gotten?
44:41 Brian Rose: It’s cool. It’s kind of the psychedelic closet, and it’s really weird, and we’ve had a lot of people on the show, and it’s like, what can people do? Should they ask their politicians to legalize this or legalize that? Most people say the biggest thing is to come out of that closet, so whether that means that you talk openly about smart drugs, which is something you did early on, something Tim Ferriss was quite open about when he was on the show, or just to come out, we’ve had the UFC fighter in here, Dan Hardy, and he was openly talking about his IOWASK experience, his mushroom experiences, and afterwards, I was like, Dan, what are you doing?
45:16 I mean, he’s a commentator now for the UFC. I mean, he’s in international shows over here, and that was a year ago, and he’s like, Brian, he’s like, I have to be honest about everything. He’s like, that’s the way I’ve found the best experiences, I’ve met the best people, so he’s like, I’m just going to be open about this, and so the more you see people doing that, I just think we get bigger and bigger, but there is the occasional guest that doesn’t want to go on record because there are still some stigmas to it, and it might take away from their message if they start mentioning that something else is involved.
45:51 Dave Asprey: There’s also some risks, too. I think some people are concerned. I know a lot of people will use Solutions & Gens recreationally. I think that’s outright dangerous, and I’ve seen people harm themselves that way, so it’s like, if you’re too enthusiastic about it, especially for younger people, I think you really can do some core damage that requires a lot of repair if you’re not careful, so there’s that kind of precautionary thing, like, let’s talk about it, but maybe not overly encourage it because it is a dangerous thing, even though it’s a very beneficial thing, too.
46:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I think I’d probably just like, I’m lucky, or I’m a bit restricted here because I get all these people that come through that have thought long and hard about these things and written books, so they’re usually not those people, but something Dan Hardy said when he was here is that he’s like, in Vegas, I get a lot of people that are serial DMT smokers, and they’ve done it, like, a hundred times. I mean, like, for the record, I’ve smoked DMT once. It’s our biggest episode ever for some weird reason.
46:49 Over 300,000 people watch it on YouTube. I did it once, and that was enough, but, you know, Dan was alarmed. He’s like, these people do it a hundred times, and they’re like, I don’t want to go to this place, and so, yeah, there’s something there to be concerned about, and that’s a whole other question, you know, whether we, you know, restrict that. I think it’s a great conversation to have, and so people know that it’s something to think about, but I never understood that side, but I never got into this until I was a bit older, so.
47:16 Dave Asprey: Yeah, that’s a big difference. You know, if I’d have been doing it when I was 16, I don’t know that it would have been a positive thing, but, you know, maybe it would have, who knows. Well, we’re coming up on the end of the show, Brian, but I haven’t done before on the show. I always ask, you know, what are your top three recommendations for performing better and being more bulletproof and kicking more ass? But I’m going to turn it around on you, because you’ve got some questions that you ask at the end of your own show on London Real.
47:40 So, first one, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old you, what advice would you give?
47:45 Brian Rose: Oh, man. I wasn’t sure if you were going to hit me with this. It’s funny, because, like, I rarely even think about the answer to that, but if you don’t know, that’s a question I pretty much ask every guest here.
47:56 Dave Asprey: Right, that’s why I’m doing it to you.
47:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, and Dave’s turning it around on me. You know, it’s, you know, the 20-year-old Brian was a sophomore, a junior at MIT. He was in a fraternity. He was, you know, studying really hard. You know, I was having a good time, but, you know, I was about getting that 5.0 GPA or a 4.9, and I was like, I had to get everything right, and I was looking at a career on Wall Street afterwards, and I was, like, super motivated.
48:26 I was really intense, and quite honestly, I was really selfish, too, in retrospect, and I think my first 10 years, to a certain extent, I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole, and I was, I need to get out of my own way sometimes, and also, I think I needed to give a bit more, and so it’s something we do now. It’s like, the first thing I do, like, when I met you, it was like, Dave, come on the show, and let’s do a show about you, and, like, I get this great reaction from you, because you’re like, wow, I love these guys, and so, like, I wish I had done that sooner. I wish I had just thought, Brian, couple things, two things.
49:06 First of all, you know, take it down a notch, and maybe just try to get out of your own way, because you’re doing all the right things, but then you’re ripping yourself down, like, here and there, and the second thing is, is try to help some other people and try to give a little back, because, you know, humans respond to that energy, and, you know, we had a guy on here by the name of Adam Grant, and he was the, he’s the youngest tenured professor at Wharton Business School at UPenn, and he has a book called Give and Take. Oh, is it really? Oh, fantastic.
49:36 And he’s a really cool guy, and he has a book called Give and Take, and he said, you know, you can classify everyone into givers or takers or matchers, and that are people that always kind of match up favors, and anyone who’s a giver hates a taker, and you’ve met a taker before in your life, and we’ve met takers, and, like, no one wants a taker, because they just, you know, they want everything they can get out of you, and they want to move on, and I got to think that maybe I was a bit of a taker when I was younger, and I just think that I got a lot of that negative energy back at me, and I got where I wanted to go, but I think it was just much harder, so I think that’s the advice I’ll give to the 20-year-old, and I definitely would not have taken that advice at 20.
50:16 Dave Asprey: That’s the rub.
50:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, I would have told me to fuck right off, and yeah. Damn hippies. Shut up, old man. That’s what I would say.
50:26 Dave Asprey: Well, what’s the best advice you ever have received? Another question you ask people.
50:31 Brian Rose: Wow, that is another one, and you’re really hitting me cold here with this stuff. You know, the best advice I’ve ever received, and I’m trying to think if I have, like, an epiphany, you know, to be yourself or anything like that. You know, I think some of the best advice I’ve received, and this is a weird way of putting it, but, you know, I grew up with my, both of my grandparents were farmers and ranchers in, say, Colorado, Arizona, and these guys, like, grew up basically working the fields or working the ranch, and, like, there was no option to quit, and I remember I interviewed my dad, which was like the precursor to London Real like three or four years ago, and I interviewed him one time just with some cameras, and I said to him, I was like, dad, did you ever think about quitting, because he went to Caltech when he was younger and he got really horrible grades and almost flunked out, and I was like, did you ever think about quitting?
51:21 And he’s like, Brian, on the farm, you don’t quit, because if you quit, you die. You literally die. And so I think I grew up around these grandparents and then these parents where they never told me, you can’t quit, but, like, it was in their DNA never to quit. So, like, you would never, ever consider quitting. And so I think we just grew up watching these, like, hard old men, grandparents, like the hard farmer’s hands and, like, nice guys, but it was never in their DNA to quit.
51:50 And so I think I got that message subconsciously, you know, and which, for a young kid like me, that’s the only way I could have got that message, because if you would have sat me down and told me that, I would have told you to fuck off. So in a weird way, that’s probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten.
52:09 Dave Asprey: That is an amazing answer, Brian. And you must know the last question I’m going to ask you for the end of the show. For young people watching, what advice would you give them if they want to not have a soulless career and then go off and be a podcast host?
52:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s funny, when I left Finance, I was like, oh, Finance is the devil and it’s the horrible thing and all these kinds of things. And now that I do this show, you know, now Silicon Real, and so I talk with startups every week and some of these guys, you know, have three employees. I mean, you know, Instagram had 15 people when it was sold for a billion dollars. And so you get these companies where they scale so fast that you get three guys out of college who are making these big companies.
52:50 And so I still think there’s real value in kind of going a traditional route and, you know, going and working for a big company and earning your stripes and being told what to do and not liking it. And I remember when I had my first week on Wall Street and I got into this trading floor and there was 300 people on this floor and it was just a big intimidation place. It was like, you know, I’m going to sell these bonds and I can sell more bonds than you and my cock is bigger than you and everyone was dressed in a really pretty suit and they were swearing like sailors and like I didn’t know what to make of it because no one ever taught me this at MIT.
53:25 No one ever talked about posturing and politics and it was really hard to deal with and it was just ego crushing on a regular basis and I saw people dressing other people down and yelling and but it was a great maturing process for me because I got tough and I got to know when someone was gaming you in the head and so now it’s really hard for people to kind of intimidate me on that level or even if a guest challenges me and calls me out, I’m like, okay, it’s, you know, I get it. So I think there is something for going that traditional route and so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to university, getting out of your hometown, getting away from mom because it gets you out of your comfort zone, go work for a big company, you know, go pay your dues a bit but then after that, I think, open your mind a little bit and go see what’s out there and then go try to create something and build it yourself.
54:14 So I guess that’s my advice to people out there. You know, I do think starting your own thing whether it’s a blog or a podcast or you know, even a business on the side, you know, you’re going to learn so much and I’ve learned so much on this show. I’ve transformed like notably, my own persona has transformed so much just by having people over to a studio and asking them questions every week. So it’s been great for me and if you can learn something from that, then God bless.
54:43 Dave Asprey: Amazing answers to your own questions and for young people listening, double down on that last answer. I would not be where I am today if I hadn’t had some kind of unpleasant jobs or I got beaten down a few times and learned a lot from people who’ve spent 30 years learning. That whole mentoring thing or apprenticeship thing that Robert Green likes to talk about in mastery, it really comes down to that. Like I know a lot of the things I know because I work for some amazing people who imparted their knowledge and wisdom on me even if I was resistant to it.
55:19 So your answer is spot on and I wish I had understood the importance of what I was going through when I was younger because like you said, you learned a lot that way so it’s not that you want to avoid a career so you want to wring every drop of knowledge you can from people who have a lot of experience and that’s at least as valuable as your salary and that sets you up to go off and do your own thing when you’re ready.
55:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, and you can’t get that from a blog. You have to be in there taking the hard hits.
55:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, so well said. I’m sure I could ask you a lot more questions about you but thanks for asking me those, David. The London Real community is going to love you for asking those things.
55:55 Dave Asprey: Put me on the spot. No problem, man.
55:57 I’ve had a few people do that to me. I’m like, it’s finally my turn to put someone else on the spot so it’s cool. Hey, Brian, I’m a fan of your show. I love what you’re doing there. I’m jealous that you get to have all these people live versus on Skype and I’m really looking forward to the next time I’m in London.
56:11 I’ll be sure to stop by the studio and we’ll do it again.
56:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’d love to have you, Dave. I just want to say big fans of everything you guys are doing at Bulletproof. Your team is awesome. Everyone I talk to, and I’ve talked to a big chunk of your team, so positive, such cool energy.
56:25 They really feel like they’re doing a higher mission and you guys are. You’re making the world a better place. People go to your website and it’s like free information, like rafts of it. I think you guys are paying it forward like we try to do. Put out all this great information and then that’s what you do first.
56:42 Yeah, big fans of you guys and it’s all good. Thanks for having me on, Dave, and definitely come back when you’re in London.
56:49 Dave Asprey: You got it, Brian. People, when you’re listening to this, if you want to check out Brian’s podcast, Londonreal.com. Got that right?
56:57 Dave Asprey: It was a .co.uk. I can never read.
56:59 Brian Rose: Londonreal.tv. Okay. But if you type in London Real on YouTube or iTunes or whatever, you’ll find us.
57:06 Dave Asprey: Beautiful. Brian, thanks, man.
57:09 Brian Rose: Dave, as we say, it’s about the journey. Peace to you.
57:13 Announcer: If you’re looking for a way to know which foods are making you weak, check out the free app called Bulletproof Food Sense.
57:23 You can also take a step further. Check out Bulletproof HRV Sense. That stands for Heart Rate Variability Sense. Bulletproof HRV Sense goes a step beyond Food Sense and it works with a wireless heart rate monitor that goes around your chest. Number one, Bulletproof Food Sense is free and number two, Bulletproof HRV Sense is a few dollars and it makes a huge difference in how you manage and control your stress.
57:50 Pour the coffee gently and slowly through the grounds for ideally about four minutes. One of the reasons I like the pour over method is that it’s one of the few times I slow down during the day. It’s a little bit meditative when you just gently, slowly pour just the right amount of hot water over coffee to make the most delicious coffee.
