Dave Asprey - Smarter Not Harder: The Biohacker's Guide To Getting The Body & Mind You Want

Full transcript: Dave Asprey on London Real

2:55 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dave Asprey, the serial entrepreneur, author, and world-renowned biohacker, as the founder of Bulletproof 360. You spent the last 10 years making products that focus on enhancing mental and physical performance through nutrition, supplements, and technology. You’re best known for creating Bulletproof Coffee, a mix of high-quality coffee, grass-fed butter, and MCT oil and you’ve written several books, including bestsellers Game Changers, Headstrong, and The Bulletproof Diet.

3:24 While your work has been featured in Forbes and the New York Times, your latest book, Smarter Not Harder: The Biohacker’s Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want, reveals how anyone can maximize their well-being with minimal efforts. Your goal is to keep as many people as possible, teach them to optimize their health and mental well-being. While on a personal level, your mission is to live to 180 years old. Dave, welcome back to London Real. Brian, it’s so cool to see you again.

3:54 I’ve been on London Real enough times to see the evolution from the early days to now, and it’s so impressive. Thank you, Dave. You’ve been coming on for like 10 years, or yeah, like 10 or more. You came back in the old, old studio before we had the leather chairs, and you put on that, I think, that head EKG monitor, and that episode and all those clips went crazy viral, all the stuff from modafinil and all the stuff you were doing, and that was a long time ago.

4:25 You know, you were going viral, Dave. So, yeah, always appreciate sitting down with you. We’ve had so many great conversations. So I’m really looking forward to this. Behind me too.

4:34 Let’s do it. How can we, how can we help your audience the best today as well? First I find the age thing really curious. As I get older, I’m thinking about it. So 180 years old is gonna be for you like 21.50, something like that, ish?

4:48 Oh, it’s way beyond that. Is it, am I, am I under? Oh, 2150 not 20 50. Yeah, yeah, there you go. About 21.50, yeah, that’s right.

4:55 Okay, is that possible Sure. Do you need to biohack yourself? Did you want me to? Yes. It is possible.

5:07 Do you believe you will live that long, or you could live that long? I believe that if I choose to live that long and a piano doesn’t fall out of this guy or a truck doesn’t hit me, there’s no reason I can’t do it. Okay, got it. And by following the protocols. I mean, I’ve heard you say that when you actually test your biological age, it’s like 11 years younger than your current age.

5:33 So I mean, through all of your practices, you’re already tracking to be much younger than your numbers. I’m 20 younger than my actual age, basically, slightly more than 20, maybe 25 percent and there’s a great debate over which epigenetic clock you should use to measure that, but the deal is I used to weigh 50 more than I weigh now. I have a history of autoimmunity. I had chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and high risk of stroke and heart attack and pre-diabetes and cognitive dysfunction before I was 30.

6:06 I started out not strong. I’m like the guy at the Olympics who like falls over coming out of the starting block and then gets up and is like running and then catching up, but I did that, so if I can do this it’s probably easier for you. It’s probably easier for someone listening to the show right now, because it’s unlikely they’re as trash as I was. And it also, unfortunately, I got to spend a lot of money to do that, but because I’ve done it, because other people are willing to go to crazy lengths.

6:33 We’re highlighting the way, we’re lighting the torch to say, well, here’s how you might do it, and the reason I could even do this is I started in my mid-20s running an anti-aging group where 80-year-olds taught me their secrets, so I’m just, you know, passing it on and enhancing it and polishing it and handing it off, and there are now 25 year-old biohackers who have joined the movement that I started, and they are, I’m taking this thing: what would happen if I just didn’t age in the first place? And they’re getting profound results, and they’re walking around with more energy than all their friends, and they don’t age like their friends because it’s easier to do preventative maintenance than it is to, you know, go in and repair everything after it breaks because you wore it out.

7:20 Yeah, I think the public now is much more in tune with having a conversation that maybe aging isn’t a foregone conclusion. Much more than maybe 20 years ago or even 10 years ago when we started the show, probably. It’s still a long way from being a common thought, but a lot of people now are starting to really say, well, yeah, maybe aging’s disease, maybe aging isn’t something that’s just a foregone conclusion, and if that’s the case, then you might have solved one of the, you know, the biggest cons on the human psyche, which is you just gotta let it go and not try, and all this crazy stuff.

7:57 You know, these mindsets. I mean, you mentioned my Instagram videos. I mean, I’m 51 and I’m doing head spins as a break dancer, and right, you know, I bet Dave 30 years ago I wouldn’t have done that, because it would have been so much subliminal messaging that I had to act my age, or old people didn’t do that, or I should feel these pains that maybe I wouldn’t. But being around ideas like yours, I just think, well, why the hell not? So the mentality of it makes a big difference.

8:23 It makes a big difference, and I find there’s two groups of people now there’s the forward thinkers who are saying, well, that might be interesting, to live, you know, way past 100, but still the majority, but the smaller majority says, I wouldn’t want to do that. I would be in a wheelchair and diapers and I wouldn’t know my own name, and my skin would be so thin that you could see through me, and there is no evidence that that is the only way to age. That’s just what we’ve seen so far, and those are the same people who said, you know, a week before the first airplane flew men can never fly, and all this made-up nonsense.

9:02 Same thing with the four-minute mile. It’s impossible. One guy breaks the four-minute mile, and the next year four guys do enough, and now it’s like, in high school, people break a four-minute mile. So what happened? We just became aware it was possible, and we started doing it, and that’s my job right now.

9:19 It is possible to be healthy, strong, focused, high energy, have a good sex drive, and to be more than a hundred. I know because I’ve seen it, and those are people who did not have any of the benefits we have today of AI of the ability to access more information than a king or a president 50 years ago could. You can get it for free online, and, it, we’re at a point where if you’re willing to put in the time, you’re willing to pay attention, you can completely change what aging looks like.

9:51 And the New Vision that I have for when I’m 180 is that I am at least as strong as I am now. I am way more wise than I am now, because I’ll have seen even more government tyranny overthrown, and I will actually have been in a position to share a lifetime of knowledge what people are interested in, and I, I see it that way because I’m so lucky that people literally, I had an 88 year-old mentoring me when I was 26. It was so much knowledge and so much wisdom, and all that.

10:23 I can’t imagine what will happen when I’m, you know, 150 and I’m working with people in their 20s saying, man, here’s the stuff you should have known, and if only 10 of them are open to it and they take that, and then they live 150 years, we’re gonna change the shape of society with that kind of stuff. We need our village elders back We used to always have those, and now our older people are largely too tired and just not even respected, and so if you’re too tired and your brain doesn’t work, of course you can’t do your job. And I’m looking to make some changes there.

10:58 I still find friends who are 20 and 30 years older than me, and I learn from them, and I have friends who are much younger than me, and I learn from them too, and that’s, in a healthy society, that’s how it works. And it’s not normal to be segmented only by your age. That’s, it’s, that’s a very recent invention, and it’s not healthy for humans. Yeah, I’ve had recent contact with three of my guests in their late 70s, guys like Robert Kiyosaki, Jim Rickards, and Dan Peña, who you know because we were both at his castle in Scotland about, I don’t know, seven years ago, and these guys are in their late 70s not only are they crushing it, they’re like creating new intellectual property, they’ve got like big plans, they’re almost at the top of their game, and it’s like fascinating to see, and you’re thinking, wow, if you can keep this up for another 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, you get some super powerful people and ones that can pass on so much knowledge also at this part of their life, a Dave, they’re usually giving a lot back or trying to give a lot back, so imagine if that continues and there was more of it.

12:05 Yeah, the world would be a better place for sure. That’s a really important piece of advice I think your listeners in particular would appreciate, and this isn’t the stuff that’s in my new book or anything, but when I was in my 20s I was really focused on being an entrepreneur, even my very early 20s, and by the time I was 26, I was quite successful. I did it, but I had this mindset that no one wanted to help and that I had to do it myself, and that if I accepted help, I would be burdened with some kind of responsibility, like I would owe people.

12:42 This was just due to my parenting and my upbringing. The reality is that if you let someone help you, you are giving them a gift, because humans are wired. It feels good in our meat operating system, the automatic parts of us. It feels good to help another human. We’re supposed to do that.

12:58 It feels as good as eating feels. So if you’re like, hey, sure, I’d love to have your help, if you do that for someone and you let them help you, they feel good about themselves. You don’t owe them anything. You might want to help someone else or help them back, but if I would have been more relaxed that way, I would probably be a billionaire now, because in the early days of the internet and the web, I’m the first guy to sell anything over the internet before e-commerce had a name.

13:27 I sold a caffeine t-shirt out of my dorm room, and I was written up in an entrepreneur magazine, full-page picture, when I weighed 300 pounds. All that kind of stuff, and all I would have had to do was go to Silicon Valley. It was 80 miles from where I lived and start talking to people, but I, I just didn’t. I had the arrogance. I didn’t know how to do it.

13:46 I didn’t want to receive help. One of my contemporaries, Mark Andreessen, who’s now a very famous investor, he wrote the first web browser back then, so we’re both e-commerce, web browser. And I look at what he did. He was the same age as me. He called up the CEO of a company called Sun Microsystems, a many billion dollar, tech company, and said, hey, what do I do?

14:09 And Mark’s a multi-billionaire. I’m not. Right? It’s the, the willingness and ability to ask for and receive help, especially when you’re getting started out. Do that, man.

14:19 That’s a very smart thing to do. I chose the harder path, which was I’m just gonna forge ahead myself, and I was successful. Right? I made six million dollars when I was 26. I didn’t make 60 million dollars and I was 26 because I didn’t receive help.

14:35 Mark did. So there you go. Yeah, really well said. I was like, you, Dave, I never asked for help, and it wasn’t until you know, Peña came on my show, and you know, that he, I really started getting help from my guests as a side effect for what I was doing. But otherwise I was terrible at it, and in retrospect it’s helped me so much, and I wish I’d done it earlier.

14:56 So that’s kicking off with a great lesson for anyone watching you mentioned the meat operating system, which is a heavy theme inside your new book I want to ask you how it opens up where you tell people to tap the power of laziness last thing I expected you to say. What does that mean, Dave? All right, you’ve got to understand there is a system in your body that has kept all life on Earth alive for two billion years, and it runs without any visibility from you and I call it your meat operating system, and animals who don’t have the ability to think about time, for instance, and all of that, they somehow all stay alive, and they follow some basic rules, and one of the rules is don’t waste energy, and the reason for that is there might be a famine.

15:47 You might not find food, so just be incredibly efficient. And what that means is that this system that sits between you and reality can change what you see so the first thing I do in the book is I say, all right, let’s propose that there’s an operating system that’s invisible to you that’s doing stuff. What evidence do we have that it’s real? And one of the scary things is that if I do this clap my hands, then you would hear it right away, wouldn’t you? Except it doesn’t work like that.

16:21 What happens is that when I put electrodes on your head, and I do run a neuroscience brain upgrade company, so I’m, this is personal experience and validated as a standard measure of cognitive function. There’s a lag time between a sound or a sight and when your brain gets the first electrical signal that it happened. If you are a normal 50-year-old, 40-year-old, or even 60-year-old, it’s about a third of a second, and if you’re 18 years old or you have a hacked brain, it’s about a quarter second.

16:49 So there’s some time when your body does stuff to information from the world and then chooses to present it to you or chooses not to present it to you, so you don’t see that lag time. Do you? A third of a second delay on what I’m saying? No, not aware. I don’t see it either.

17:05 So some part of your body is hiding that from you, and in the middle of each eye there’s a dime-sized, I don’t know the European equivalent of a dime, but, whatever, a Euro coin-sized blind spot right in the middle of each eye some system in our body edits that out of reality, but we know it’s there, and we can find it. So okay, what else is that system doing? Well, it’s manipulating your behaviors. It’s the one that makes you go out on the date you probably know you shouldn’t have gone out on, but it sounded like so much fun.

17:38 It’s the one that when you’re faced with going to the gym or eating the pizza and sitting on the sofa, you choose the sofa because the sofa looks more attractive than it is, and the gym looks less attractive than it is. So there’s a system in there manipulating you by making some things look better than they are, and then we feel shame over that because that is laziness. It is the body saying, please don’t use calories, you might starve to death. So what we do is our coaches, our parents, our teachers, our society says, shame on you for being lazy.

18:14 Newsflash, your body is lazy, and that has kept our species alive. It is very effective, and there is nothing wrong with feeling lazy. That is a normal and healthy human thing, because laziness also caused us one day. I will say it calls a guy. Actually, I’ll just start that over.

18:33 Laziness is important for us, because, well, one day there was a guy and he was hoeing with by hand, and he said, I hate this, and he looked at his ox and said, I think I’ll make a plow. And then that guy, several generations later, said, you know what, I hate this, let me make a tractor. So laziness drives human progress. There’s nothing wrong with it. And if you feel an innate desire to not exercise, good, your body is working correctly.

19:01 So we drop our shame and our guilt about it, and then we say, all right, how do we use this innate drive to save energy? Well, use it to motivate yourself. The laziness principle it’s a new thing in personal development, and it’s the fact that our body amplifies certain signals to look more attractive than they are. Saving energy or saving money feels better than spending it. You ever, Brian, had someone in your family go to the, the shopping mall, the department store, maybe Harrods, and come back with some expensive thing like a purse or shoes or something, and say, I saved 200 pounds or Euros or whatever the heck, or whatever the store is.

19:40 If it’s Harrods, if he pounds, but you talk about the savings, you don’t talk about how much you spent. Right? Why did saving feel bigger than it was? Well, that’s our operating system. This is why coupons work.

19:52 So you saved a dollar. The, the amount of time it took you to cut out a coupon or use the code, and all that was actually worth less than the dollar, but man, saving money feels good. So if this is a motivator for us, why don’t you use that? What do I do in the new book? And this is the final cover, Smarter Not Harder.

20:11 This is at least the American cover. What I’m doing is I’m saying, look, use that as the carrot to motivate yourself. So when it’s time to go to the gym, instead of saying, I’m gonna go work out and sweat and try to pump yourself up, say, I’m going to do something that works better than lifting rocks and running away from tigers. In fact, it worked three times better. I’m gonna save 45 minutes at the gym today, and suddenly your resistance from your body to go into the gym melts away, but I was like, oh, I get to save something, I’ll go.

20:38 So you give yourself a coupon for the time you saved at the gym, and it’s worth more to you, and then it just doesn’t feel bad to go to the gym. And I teach you across five domains. Here’s the stuff that works better than picking up rocks and doing basic cardio, and that’s what all exercise is. Today we’re still exercising like it’s the Dark Ages. and I talk about it for your brain, for meditation, for stress management, for strength and for cardio.

21:05 It’s not just a gem. It’s pick a system you want to upgrade and do it in the way that works most effectively. That’s why I say I’m lazy, and Brian, you know, I’ve built a 100 million dollar company from scratch. I have five New York Times bestsellers, assuming this one also makes the list, and the podcast and all this stuff I could talk about. It’s because I’m lazy.

21:26 I only use the most effective tools, and I’m willing to work hard, but so many people, because of shame over this laziness, we’re told if you work hard you’ll get results. Working hard does not guarantee results, even a little bit. What you do is you choose the most effective tool with the most leverage, and then you work hard. So I don’t want to work hard. I admit it.

21:48 I wanted, I want to work out one minute a year and get all the results and be an Olympic-level athlete for that. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll get there, or as close as I can. And same thing: I don’t want to age. It might happen a little bit, but I will resist it every step of the way, not by working hard but by using every tool at my disposal. Nice.

22:08 And so talk about the gym when you go in there, because, like you said in the book, you kind of break down these different types of systems, like cardio, and then brain activity, and then metabolism. Like you said, in the gym it looks like we’re lifting rocks and running away from tigers. You know, you’ve always been on the cutting edge with with all sorts of different training techniques, and I used to have that vibrating plate, and you always used to have these ways that would get yourself trained really efficiently.

22:38 What, what do you see as better, more efficient, smarter ways to train or to go to the gym than the ones we have right now? What are some of them? All right, let me tell you how we got here so I can give you the categories, and then once I have the categories I can tell you, specifically. We’ll drill down. Eight years ago I said, I’ve got to start a company.

22:59 That’s the first biohacking center where you can come in and do all the stuff that works so well, and I opened it underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in Santa Monica, California, and since then I figured out what technology works and what are people actually looking to achieve, and how do we make money on that? As we’re speaking, people are opening dozens of locations of Upgrade Labs as a franchise across the United States. This will be my next billion dollar company, at least in my forward vision, after after Bulletproof.

23:34 So what’s going to happen there? Well, you go in and we scan your body electrically to see where you are. Are you inflamed? Are you not inflamed? Where’s the fat, where’s the muscle, how’s your bone density?

23:47 We can do a medical-grade scan without having to be a medical office. Once we have that data, well, where do you want to go today? Right? Some people want their muscles back. Some people want to lose weight, or they want to get their energy back because they’re just tired all the time.

24:02 Other people are stressed all the time and they want to know, how do I how do I handle stress better, or I want my brain to work better. Those are different things. You can train, or I want my cardio. So for each of those, we have a set of technologies that just works better. It works differently, it’s about getting a new kind of signal into the body, which is, instead of work hard, it’s get a signal that causes you to transform and improve, and then have space to do it.

24:33 And for each of those things in Smarter Not Harder, I say, all right, can we pick a goal? Like, what’s your top goal? You only have one top goal, and you get a second goal, and from those two we’re going to zoom in and find which techniques are going to work for you. And there’s things you can do for free at home, there’s things that cost a little bit of money, and then there’s what the crazy billionaires do, and I, that’s what I put in in Upgrade Labs. So the idea is you don’t have to have an AI-driven everything, which is what I’m usually doing, but you can use these principles so that you can, instead of just not exercising because the ROI is bad, and let’s face it, ninety percent of people don’t exercise as much as they should.

25:14 It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because their bodies are lazy, and it’s not because they’re dumb. They actually have recognized that you don’t get very good results from it. And let’s talk about cardio. What do you think, should we talk about that first?

25:26 Yeah, that’s a common one. The working hard mindset on cardio is what I did when I weighed 300 pounds. I said, look, it’s ridiculous that I’m this fat. It’s my fault. There’s guilt, there’s shame.

25:39 So I decided I was going to go to the gym. I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week, without fail, for 18 months. 702 hours of sweating. I did 45 minutes of cardio and 45 minutes away. At the end of that, I did not lose a pound.

25:55 I could max out all the machines. I’m sure I got some muscle, but I still have the same size pants, and they’re 50 bigger than my pants today. So that wasn’t a win. In fact, that was doing it the hard way, because I believed that working hard would get results. It was a false belief.

26:12 Let’s look at cardio now. A typical person would say, all right, I’m just going to do an hour a day, maybe 45 minutes a day. I’m going to sign up for the spin class. I’m going to get on a bike, and someone’s going to yell at me in spandex while I ride, and I’m going to improve, and the data supports that. So you spend five hours a week plus showers and getting to the place, and, well, you’ll improve by two percent.

26:36 So you will have spent five over two months. You’re looking at, oh, 20 hours, if I’m doing that right. Right? Five, and actually 20 hours a month, 40 hours. So you’ve got 40 hours of exercise, two percent improvement.

26:51 If you do what I talk about in Smarter Not Harder, you will spend 15 minutes a week and there will be no sweating, but you’ll improve by 12 percent. It’s like five hours versus 15 hours per week, 12 improvement, two percent improvement. This is absolute scientific proof with three studies backing it up from the University of Colorado that says working hard for cardio is actually counterproductive, because if I did instead of three 15-minute workouts, if I did five of them, I would get worse results, not better.

27:25 So we’re using the power of AI. This is an AI-driven system that I’m using in Upgrade Labs to adjust the intensity on your body for a very short period of time. I like to talk about cardio as an example, because the same principle, that’s what the book is really about. It applies to almost everything you do. Our belief system, our, our veil over reality is that working hard gets results, but it turns out what gets the best results is very quickly ramping up intensity, changing state rapidly until the body thinks it’s going to break, but it doesn’t break, and then, this is the big trip, how quickly can you return from that to a baseline state of calmness?

28:08 And when you do that and you have adequate nutrients, there’s only one or two chapters where I talk about the kind of nutrients you need. We have adequate nutrients, adequate energy in the form of calories, and an adequate signal, then the body will change, in this case six times faster. And we can talk about why the body does that. It’s actually kind of interesting. Yeah, please tell me why.

28:30 I’m curious and I also want to hear more about the AI involved, of course, but yeah, why? Well, you have to imagine your body has its own intelligence. It doesn’t even really recognize that the conscious you is in there, and it doesn’t like it that you’re in there, because your body wants to be in charge of itself, and you keep making it do stupid things like say no to the milkshake and go to the gym, and the body is like, why would you turn down calories, and why would you spend calories?

28:56 Don’t you know there could be a famine at any time? So there’s this unconscious argument between your tissues and your conscious brain. And it gets really interesting, because when you decide you’re going to run, say, up a hill during a cardio thing, the body says, something must be hunting me, because why else would the body be doing this? So it starts releasing stress hormones and getting a little bit worried, and normally if you do that, you’d run away from the tiger.

29:26 You get away, and then you’d sit in your cave and knit or something, whatever caveman did, right? So what we do, though, in a typical cardio class, because we know working hard gets results, is as soon as we get away from the tiger, we run at 50 percent, and then we run again on another hill, and then we run at 50. Then we run again on another hill. Well, from your body’s perspective, that means you’re still being hunted. You didn’t get away the first time.

29:53 You didn’t get away the second time. You didn’t get away the third time. Now it shifts into danger mode. Okay, I’m not going to allocate all these calories, all these protein, all these minerals to building capacity. I’m going to allocate them to defense and to stress and survival.

30:09 It’s that simple. If you do what I’m talking about, where we use AI to rapidly load the system as fast as you can, as in, and you can do this in a park, I tell you how to do it, but you want to deplete everything as fast as you can, like you were going to die, and then you want to quickly, with breathing exercises, very specific ones, return back to baseline. Let’s do that twice, and you’re like, did I even get a workout? I wonder. Yes, you’ve got to work out.

30:37 That works so much better that your energy comes back. So burning yourself out by working hard wasn’t good. All I’m telling you is if, instead of spending an hour in a spin class, do you spend five minutes doing what I’m talking about well, what are you gonna do with the other hour? Maybe you could do one of the other hacks in the book. Maybe you could do the one about gratitude.

30:56 Maybe you could do the one about forgiveness. Maybe you could actually put some muscle on, or maybe you should just go for a walk with one of your kids and hold their hand. It’s free. time, there’s no social merit. There is no goodness to working hard unless you are working hard with the best tools, and you also have a similar mechanism with strength training, right?

31:18 I think you did some work with Mark Bell, and you had him doing it. It sounds like a similar piece where you really tried to stress this with this kind of AI component and get the most out of them, but do it in a safe manner. Am I getting that right? You’re getting it right, and Mark came up and tried out the technology, and he’s just a fantastic guy, really kind person, and you know, what we’re doing at Upgrade Labs, whenever we can, there’s AI involved, because it just helps to customize the signal that goes into your body.

31:47 So we have AI-driven cardio because it’s very efficient on time, and then AI muscle stuff, which puts muscle on three, maybe five times faster than lifting up rocks or concentrated rocks. So Mark is like a hundred times stronger than me. He’s one of the top five power lifters in the world, just a wallet muscle, and he’s used to be able to pick up almost anything, so I put him on a computer-controlled zero-gravity system, so there’s no gravity, there’s no weights that you’re throwing around.

32:17 And he gets on it and he pushes, and he’s pushing and going, what the hell? And after four or five reps he’s completely blown out. He’s like, what, what did you just do to me? Here, right? And it was, it was really interesting, and I, I have so much respect for Mark and all the strength he’s built up.

32:32 When you’re fighting against a computer that could literally pick up a truck, what we did for Mark, and what we do for people who come in to Upgrade Labs, is we change the signal going into the muscle, so instead of being I’m fighting gravity, I’m fighting something else, and then the local systems in the body, here, like, I don’t know what that guy I’m fighting, I better get stronger. So in Smarter Not Harder, I teach you, okay, here’s all the things we know that build muscle better than just fighting iron and gravity. And so at the high end, there’s that kind of a system with AI-driven resistance that doesn’t look at all like picking up rocks.

33:09 There are other things that work also, faster than just lifting, and I’m not opposed to lifting. I’m just saying, if you only have five minutes, what should you do? Another one is resistance bands. You’ve probably seen people use same systems like TRX or other things like that, big rubber bands. They actually look kind of dumb, but the reason they work is your muscles are expecting gravity, and they get something else, which is a stretchy thing, and they have to adapt.

33:35 And so you do something like that and you rapidly exhaust with a different signal than you’re used to, and the body says, God, I’m gonna have to adapt to this new signal. Okay, as long as you have the protein and the minerals, your body will do it, and this means you just get more results in less time. And it’s funny, I, I don’t use the word optimal on a regular basis, because this isn’t about being optimal. This is just better. Like, you don’t have to give anything up in order to get more muscle and less time.

34:02 You just gain it. It turns out you were wasting stuff beforehand, and now you can take what was waste and you can put it into something you care about. So there wasn’t a trade-off here. There was just an improvement. Wow.

34:14 You mentioned getting the right raw materials. I’m going to have to ask you, what are those things, or what aren’t those things? I’m guessing we’re talking about diet and supplements in terms of the nutrients to get it in there. Yeah, yeah, I do talk about protein in the book. There’s been such a concerted marketing effort from the big food industry to convince us that peasant survival foods are health foods that it’s starting to harm people.

34:45 Proteins are not all the same. Calories are not all the same, and the old game was, if all calories are equivalents, you can have bad oils like canola oil, and you can have corn syrup, and they’re just the same as an egg, because they have calories. A calorie that’s just not how it works, and many people have finally realized that you just don’t eat that kind of food, because it’s bad for you. It doesn’t matter the calories. The next evolution is protein.

35:09 Oh, it’s high protein, no gluten. Is a protein, so there’s a company making paleo cookies made out of extra gluten, and then people eat them and wonder why it doesn’t work. It’s because plant proteins all do different things than animal proteins. So if you’re going to get results in life, any kind of signal you put into the body that causes change requires protein, may require some fat, and always requires minerals. Carbs can help, but carbs are for energy more than building blocks.

35:41 So if you eat plant-based proteins, they come packaged with anti-protein enzymes so you cannot absorb them, and they always come with things like arsenic or inflammatory proteins that you don’t want. That’s why I just talk about the fact that meat and dairy, if you tolerate it, Are superior proteins. They actually work better. And if you’re under this false assumption that when you eat a plant-based protein you’re somehow not killing animals, or you’re somehow helping the environment, or somehow helping your health, those are marketing messages from people who do not care about your health.

36:20 So I felt obligated to point that out as a former vegan and a former raw vegan who really, really went down that path and got sick from it, like millions of other people who tried. I mean, it’s a big problem in society. That’s not the point of the book. It’s one chapter saying, if you’re low on protein or you’re eating plant protein and not getting results, you need to know this. But the big thing is that plants, they come packaged with these anti-nutrients that steal minerals from your body for our bodies to make things, like to fold proteins, to make ATP for energy.

36:57 We use small amounts of trace minerals, and we use those to make enzymes. If you don’t have something like boron or magnesium, which is a larger mineral, or manganese, some things just won’t happen. I don’t care how hard you work, how hard you try. Your body can’t do it because it didn’t have that one key ingredient. When you eat plants, especially a very high plant diet, especially nuts and seeds, and maybe worst of all is oatmeal, when you do that, that sucks minerals out of your body and it doesn’t put any in there.

37:32 So what you do is you create deficiency over time, and it’s one of the causes of aging. It’s one of the causes of osteoporosis. When you do what I talk about in terms of supplementation for minerals, it’s going to take three capsules of a multi-mineral formula, and when you get that, your body has enough of the macrominerals, and then there’s about 50 trace minerals and ultra- trace minerals, and I put those in Danger Coffee. This is my new coffee brand, and it’s called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do.

38:02 You’ll be at full power. So that’s where I get my trace minerals, and you can go to vitamindake.com, which is where I put the multi-mineral formula that I created. I’ll just tell you, if you’re in Europe, wherever you are, three capsules from any reputable brand of a multi-mineral formula can change your life. You need to do that, and then you need to take fat-soluble vitamins, D-A-K-E. That’s why it’s vitamindake.com.

38:32 And if you get those, which come from animals, not from plants except for vitamin E, those allow minerals to go into your cells and stay where they’re supposed to be. So these are not sexy supplements. They’re not the nootropics, they’re not modafinil, they’re not the stuff that you and I have talked about. The stuff I’ve created. It’s just that if you’re going to spend twenty dollars a month on supplements, this is where you spend first, because these are the most foundational.

39:00 You wouldn’t want to build a house on sand, and that’s what we’re doing these days, because if you don’t have those minerals to make your tissues work, working out is kind of a waste of time. The last time you were here, Dave, I think you and I had a steak at the Hoxton Hotel, and I remember you brought some MCT oil with you, and you brought some salt with you, I think, and you’re having the steak, and I think I’d ask you about salt, and you’re like, no, salt is good. You want salt, and you want MCT oil.

39:29 And it’s funny, Dave, I just looked in my drawer in my office, and I’ve got a bottle of MCT oil and a thing of Himalayan salt. Yeah, it’s because of what you said that day, and, and you were like, no, this is good for you. And now I really incorporate that into my meals, including now animal proteins. I went a year of vegan as well on a challenge, and I did an Iron Man on one, etc. Remember, I was worried about you.

39:55 Actually, yeah, yeah. You know, I think the initial time when you change is, it’s getting to know period, and my body did okay, but at the end of the year I just really asked myself, am I doing this because of my own dogged determination? And I’ve done this things before, where, you know, stayed an alcoholic or stayed a drug user for too long, and I thought, am I doing this just to be dogmatic? And then I had a little meat and a little sushi, and it just, it just felt right, and I’m so kind of glad that I did.

40:24 But, yeah, those are my memories of you, of having that, that grass-fed steak, and you know, I, I appreciate you being outspoken about that, because it can be a hard thing to do, especially with the craze, you know, vegans get really mad at me. And, and here’s what happens. So I, I have a lot of compassion, even though sometimes people think I don’t, because I use humor sometimes. But what happens when you go vegan is for about six weeks, maybe up to three months, you get the glow.

40:53 Yeah, and you’re a little bit frenetic, but you have all this energy. What happened is you stopped eating saturated fats that help your cell membranes, so the body says my energy efficiency just went down, let me make more thyroid hormone, so your efficiency drops, your thermostat gets turned up, and you’re like, yeah, I feel so good. I’m sure this works because look how good I felt, and now you’re convinced you’re like kind of on the crack. And then after that six-week or so period, like, oh man, maybe my joints are starting to hurt a little bit, or usually the first thing that happens is your sleep quality goes down, and suddenly you wake up like, I don’t think I slept that well, and maybe if you’re tracking your sleep now, you realize, oh, I, my heart rate variability dropped, that’s weird.

41:37 It’s, but you keep doing it because you already know it works, so you go even more vegan. Like, maybe I won’t eat that honey because a bee touched it. You’re not going to think about the fact that the almond was also pollinated by a bee that was forced in a box to do that. So I guess you shouldn’t think too hard about what’s animal based or what’s not, but we can talk about that later, but you’re on it, and then you wake up one morning and there’s no kickstand, or your monthly cycle doesn’t work very well, but you keep pushing, and then you start getting thinning hair, or if you’re like me, you get that, and then you start cracking teeth, because those health foods are sucking minerals out of your body.

42:14 Plants don’t want us to eat them. If you are going to eat plants, which I highly recommend, you choose the ones that don’t deplete your minerals, the ones that are not high inflammation. We’re fortunate that we can eat some plants to survive when there’s no other energy. It doesn’t mean they’re all good for us. Yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting piece.

42:32 Do you think the, do you think the excitement about, you know, plant-based meat products, supplements, is, is waning or is it still going up? I mean, you’re in the States. I’m not. I mean, it’s, it’s fantastic. When I’m here in Texas now, in Austin, and when there are ice storms or things like that and people do a run on the, the supermarket to get all the all the food to stock up, there are lots of photos of the entire store stripped bare except for the meat replacement thing.

43:02 People just leave it there. People would rather starve than eat it. People recognize it for what it is. It is an ultra-processed, chemically enhanced product, and what it is, is it’s an attempt to sell you the lowest-quality peasant food and make you pay the most for it. And I have calculated deaths per calorie.

43:24 I learned this from a a lama, like the head of a monastery in Tibet, where we had this great conversation in 2004 when I was traveling around Asia doing meditation training and things like that. And this guy had a yak skin on his prayer poll, and I said, I thought you said no killing, and he just laughs. He says, one death feeds everyone. And I’ll tell you, to this day, Brian, I don’t really eat chicken. I don’t think there’s a good, I don’t think chicken’s a great protein for you, but you have to kill a little chicken to eat it.

43:55 When I eat a pound of steak every day, it’s one animal, maybe half an animal a year. And if it’s grass-fed steak, that animal didn’t cause any environmental destruction. But if you were to go eat one of these fake things, they sterilized acres of land with chemicals, and then they went through with a tractor, and any animal that still was left, and there aren’t that many, gets chopped up by the tractor, and then birds come and eat all the snakes and salamanders and turtles and foxes and everything else that got killed.

44:25 Food is not without death. I will tell you, grass-fed large animals restore soil, and you kill fewer animals, and you can kill them with respect. And I say this as a regenerative farmer with 32 acres on Vancouver Island, wherever is my own food for the last eight years. Yeah, I remember you went really deep down that, and you were literally out there in the fields actually doing it, Dave. You just mentioned heart rate variability, and you just pinged my brain, because you’ve been talking about that since the early days.

44:55 I mean, you probably dropped heart rate variability in your first show here 10 years ago. I got an Oura ring now, and every day it shows me my HRV. But like I said, I remember a time where you were the only guy talking about HRV. I also did some videos in the past, a Bulletproof in your sleep and doing all these sleep regiments, which now are kind of commonplace. I don’t know, maybe speak on that just as a quick segue, because you’ve been doing this for a while.

45:25 I, I believe I’m one of the, the earliest voices talking about hacking your sleep, where you want to get better sleep and less time, and there’s a kind of a sub chapter in Smarter Not Harder about sleep, but most of the time people’s goal is something else, or if they have a problem with sleep, it’s because something else is off and they need to fix it. So I didn’t make that one of the top five goals in the book, but there’s a sub chapter on how to fix your sleep so everything else works. And there’s also one on sex, because a lot of people, like, okay, yeah, I want to have muscles or something, but I don’t want to deal with Ed, or I don’t want to deal with the female equivalent of that, where there’s just a lack of libido, or things don’t work the way they used to.

46:14 All of that is hackable. Yeah, I remember all that early stuff on sleep. I remember you telling me to, like, cover up the, the blinking lights on the electronics, and you know, turning the phone off, all the stuff that honestly at the time people thought was crazy, and now it’s totally common knowledge now. My sleep tracker will tell me all the different parts of my sleep and the quality of sleep, in the time in bed versus this and this. So yeah, it’s, it’s just fascinating how it’s Ryan.

46:41 I, I have to be a little inappropriate and share my favorite URL of my entire career. It is sleepwithdave.com, and that’s where everything I know about hacking sleep is. It’s free. I just, so many people were asking me about this over the last 10 years, that I just compiled it into, kind of a free little two-week training with all of the stuff. You can buy a mattress cooler or a knot, but you should just know what exists, and for most people the basics are: get better curtains, get a dimmer switch, or a red night light, and if you just did those things and maybe have dinner a little bit earlier, all of a sudden the six or eight hours a night that you invest in sleep, you get better returns.

47:27 Yeah, and I did all of those things early on, yeah, because of you. And again, back to what I said, my ring now tells me if it thinks I ate too late before I went to sleep. You know, it’s funny how that’s kind of some of these technologies become full circle on that. You mentioned sex a couple times. Is that something people are asking you about?

47:45 Is that something that on people’s minds, and is there anything you can tell people about that? Well, your body is your meat operating system, is terribly worried that the species will end, because it’s not a very smart body, it’s just very fast, and it knows that if there is not love and sex in your life as an adult, that something is deeply and profoundly wrong. We usually look at sex as something kind of embarrassing or, or shameful, but also is something fun.

48:19 So it’s kind of like sticky and attractive at the same time, and there’s this inherent tension in it, and that tension comes from the fact that our, our conscious mind doesn’t like it that our body wants to do certain things, and our body doesn’t like it that our mind tries to stop us. So there’s always an inherent tension. The correct way to look at sex is that it is a nourishing act that feeds your body. It regulates your nervous system, and it’s actually a spiritual thing you do, and when you look at it that way, you drop a lot of the shame and guilt, and you realize, okay, can you have more desire?

48:56 Can you be better at sex? Not better, as you know, lasting longer or whatever, but better at making a connection, right? And, and fully doing what’s possible there. Twenty percent of people report that they meet God in the bedroom during orgasm, but to their partner it just looks like they’re flopping around for a little while. Like, this is a deeply intimate spiritual act that we’re doing when you do it right.

49:24 So what I talk about in Smarter and Not Harder maybe that’s the wrong title for this topic, but what What I’m talking about there is what are the things that cause it to work better mechanically, and then what are the things you can do that calm you down, so that you can go into it, to enact that, and regulate your own operating system and out of the person you’re with. And it’s something that people are talking about in the world of biohacking, by choice, at the last biohacking conference. By the way, the next one is in June of 2022 in Orlando, and at the last one I had the creator of The Erotic Blueprint on stage for a big interview in front of a few thousand people.

50:06 We’ve all heard of Love Languages by now, but would you imagine that there’s something called an Erotic Blueprint, where it’s the same kind of thing, but instead of, you know, I do well with hugs, which is one of the love languages, physical touch, you are going to do to your partner what you like done to you, and there’s five big types of things that your partner may like that you don’t know they like. Right? So it’s pretty interesting how that works. And I’m introducing these kinds of things into the world of biohacking, because humans without sex and love were lessened, and I think it’s important.

50:42 I’m really glad you did. I had a guest on about eight years ago, well, seven, eight years ago, who made me super uncomfortable in my studio. His name is Master Mantak Chia. And yeah, I’ve interviewed him too. Yeah, Mantak Chia at the time.

50:57 Like, I just didn’t know what to do with him. Dave, again, if you grow up in the West, you have this weird relationship with sex, right? Because, like you said, it’s dirty, but it also is stimulating, and the church tells you it’s bad, but then we have to do it. And again, the Puritans left this country and went to the America, and so it’s messed up. And so here’s Mantak Chia coming in, and he’s in front of me in the leather chair, and he’s like, Brian, you have to sharpen the so forward, and I was like, what, and he’s like, you got to do 50 times to the left, and get the baby oil on the penis, and I’m just like, what are you talking about?

51:29 And I’ve had him on many, many times. He actually has our most watched video on YouTube, with like eight million views, of him talking about male sexual health and female sexual health, but ahead of his time, made me really uncomfortable. I’ve had him on about seven or eight times. He’s been to our live events, and, now I realize he’s OG, super smart, and it’s, it’s so important, Dave. It’s just so important what he talks about.

51:53 It is really important, and in the early days of, of creating biohacking, I, I’ve followed his work and that of others, and there’s an equation that the Taoists would talk about for men, and it’s how frequently should you ejaculate if you want to be healthy. And I thought, this is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen. I’m going to disprove it. So for a whole year I tracked ejaculation, orgasm, sex frequency, all that stuff, against daily happiness, and I was, I’d really tried to disprove it, and they said, if you want to live forever, just ejaculate once every 30 days.

52:31 That sounds impossible. I learned how to do it, and it was actually life-changing. So I found out that they were correct, and I published all the data, I think, in Game Changers. But there is an ejaculation hangover for men. Your testosterone drops substantially after you ejaculate, and to this day, that’s not something I do very often.

52:52 I get to have as much sex as I want, and I ejaculate occasionally, but you can have orgasms without ejaculating, and that’s just part of practice. Someone has to talk about it, because if everyone’s depleting their testosterone in a world full of testosterone-depleting pollutants, we’re lessening ourselves, we’re diminishing our species that way. And there are practices you can do, like Mantak Chia. I got, I I also felt a little uncomfortable. I did a live event with him in Oman in the Middle East, and it was okay.

53:21 Women leave, and they had a female teacher for them, and then there’s a bunch of, you know, very wealthy guys, because okay, everyone stand like this, grab penis, and you’re like, what, with clothes on? He said, no, you know, stretch, and okay, I’ll try anything once, but I just watched, looked around the room. There were guys who were just about to lose their minds. But it turns out when I did these exercises years ago, I went 30 days with no stimulation whatsoever, and there was substantial shrinkage as a result, and like, oh my God, this is a disaster.

53:55 So I went out and I found probably something similar to what Mantak Chia teaches in one of the books I have in my library, and for another 30 days I did exercises that restored, the volume and all the other measurements that you would want. And since that time, and I’m very open about this stuff, without being raunchy or anything, I’ve had stem cells injected. I’ve done other technologies I write about in my books, and you can actually change the shape and size at will.

54:23 Including like enhancements are possible. So I’m going to be doing a lot of content this year on the technologies of biohacking that there’s an equivalent for women as well, and I’ve been with women, without disclosing anything because I’m single. I just, I don’t want to say anything about any one person or not, but I’ve been with people who have had stem cells injected vaginally, and like it. A week later, it, there’s just so much happy. I’m like, oh look, my toes curl again.

54:53 So as we age, or even if we’re young, all these variables are in your control, they always were, but no one would tell you. And that’s what biohacking is about. Hey, how do you get a signal in to make yourself sexually maybe happier, or to make yourself not hungry all the time, or to make yourself look the way you want, or to have the brain energy you want, or maybe it’s just to be able to look at someone in the eye and just be calm instead of losing, and just being, being anxious.

55:24 And that’s why the last couple of chapters in Smarter Not Harder, they’re about meditation and spiritual. I’m going to call it hacking, because Brian, I don’t think you or I have time to go spend two months every year sitting in a cave meditating, right? It might be kind of interesting to do that, but we would have to give up something else to do that. So I just go through, all right, what are the technologies and techniques that work better than sitting and just emptying your mind, which is, it’s valuable to meditate, so we can do that as well.

55:57 And I go through a set of technologies, like just breathwork plus meditation, works better per minute. It just does, or maybe chanting. And then from there there’s technologies. I have a whole 40 Years of Zen company, where people come and spend five days with my team of neuroscientists tuning and tweaking their brains, which is also meditation, but on steroids, kind of, so you can go from the very high-end neurofeedback to all these different technologies that change how your brain works within your conscious control.

56:26 And from there you get to the spiritual side, where, okay, my brain works, my body works, but I’m still easy to trigger, and if you are easy to trigger, it’s because you are a loaded gun, and when you learn how to do the spiritual stuff, you take the bullets out of your gun, and you cannot be triggered anymore. And that is the ultimate end of the road for biohacking, where when you’re done, everything works and you’re fully aware of the world around you. You choose your state and you keep that state as long as you want.

56:58 And in Buddhism it’s the highest state, and they call that equanimity. This is the monk in the middle of a hurricane saying, I’m going to meditate. That’s really hard to do. And underneath that, and not as good as compassion, which is hard to do, and compassion is automatically wishing well for everyone around you, even if they’re jerks. And then underneath that, the lowest state that’s still a good state is empathy.

57:23 I can feel other people’s pain. It doesn’t mean you automatically wish them well, right? So the path of evolution is, let’s get our bodies working, let’s get our bodies less reactive, let’s, let’s get it so our energy is back, let’s work on making sure that there’s an appropriate amount of healthy love in our life, and let’s do the calming practices where our brain can work better, and then let’s move into these advanced states, but let’s not spend lifetimes doing it.

57:49 Let’s do it as rapidly as we can with the tools available now, so that if you spend one minute exercising or meditating, it was the minute that brought you so much good that you’re willing to do another minute, because it was the best possible use of your life. Yeah, and I was telling you before we started, like, that’s what I really enjoyed about this book, because from the beginning till the end, you kind of wrap all this stuff up as, as why it’s important. Like, we’re not trying to optimize just to optimize, or to get the best HRV score.

58:19 We’re doing it ultimately to live the life we want to live, right? And it really ties it all in, in a beautiful way. And I think most people these days have probably tried to pick up some spirituality, some meditation practices, but they’re probably doing a really base-level, inefficient version of it. And you mentioned 40 Years of Zen. I mean, that’s something you’ve been doing for a long time, where I mean, literally, you’re taking 40 years, trying to push it down into five days with your technology and a coach and a trainer and scanning the brain.

58:49 I mean, you were talking about that here again 10 years ago, so seven patents in the neuroscience field for that company right now, and we’re continuing to evolve instead of trying to fix a broken brain. We have a database of 1,500 super high performers. Like people have built giant things, and we can compare my brain or your brain to a group of very high performance people. It’s a very different model than comparing you to a bunch of brain scans, mostly of people whose brains are injured, who are weird.

59:19 So the standardized test that they have, not, that’s not the bar that I hold myself up against. So I’ve had profound changes in my life, even my ability to write all these books and my abilities to do the things I do, because when you do the practice, I call it the reset mode, or the reset in in the new book This is a practice of turning off notifications in the brain. So we all know by now, if you allow your phone to just notify you if every app is just popping off all the time, you can’t even use your phone.

59:51 So you turn off notifications. If your brain is popping up notifications about reality, is your meat operating system, that might be a threat, that might be a threat that triggers me, that makes me angry, I’m worried about that, I just can’t stand that. All of those are big distractions. So what if you could turn those off? And that’s what spiritual practice is, and the fastest thing I found is the reset process, which is why I’m giving it away for free in the book.

1:00:17 I do it with electrodes at 40 Years of Zen, but it’s at the core of the stuff that I teach. And there’s another word for this reset mode. It’s a combination of gratitude, forgiveness, and kindness. But it turns out you can measure those with electrical flow in the body. They’re mystical, but they’re also provable, and when you can learn how to do that on purpose, you can change everything in your life.

1:00:43 Dave, you live in America now. You know, where most people are walking around with a mobile phone that’s buzzing all the time. It, from what it looks like over here, it’s a very divided place, and you know, social media is ramped up, the information wars, etc. How do people even begin to practice some of those words you just said, gratitude, kindness, compassion? Is it harder these days than it used to be, or is it just a matter of focus?

1:01:12 I think it’s always been hard. The reason that we hold a grudge, the reason that we, we get triggered or anxious, the, the anxiety may come from a body that’s just lacking copper or zinc or something, so physical deficiencies can create anxiety and, and dullness. But assuming that’s not what’s going on, holding a grudge is something that we’ve known about for thousands of years. There are fables about this, about how holding anger towards someone or something actually eats you up inside.

1:01:45 As a biohacker, I want every electron my cells make to go towards the things that matter to me, and if my meat operating system is stealing electrons and making me think bad things about people, because maybe they wronged me, maybe they just looked dumb, or whatever, maybe they were a politician, well, if I allow that to happen without my conscious control, it is stealing energy from my life. So the process of resetting that I write up in Smarter Not Harder, it includes a step of forgiveness, but forgiveness isn’t what people think it is. Forgiveness is about not holding a grudge towards someone, because they don’t even know you’re holding a grudge.

1:02:26 Only you know. So how would you forgive that way? Well, that’s about going into there, a certain state you can go into, where you, you see things from the other person’s point of view. Nothing that person did, do you say it’s okay? You don’t condone it.

1:02:41 Nothing that person did is somebody you ever have to talk to them about again. All it is, is going in and finding a switch inside your brain and flipping the switch. And when you flip that switch, magically that person can’t trick you anymore. No energy flows towards them. And I will tell you, I was a pretty angry young man early in my career.

1:03:02 I was like, I’ll prove it to you, and I’ve taken a lot of hits for just standing firm by the things I say, and many of the things I started talking about have become way more mainstream since I did it, but for me to stick to my guns, with all the, the stuff that happened, like the stuff with Joe Rogan, and all. I had to do a lot of work on forgiveness and on gratitude, and the secret that I think is most important for listeners right now: if you really want to let something go, the first thing you have to do is find something you’re grateful for. So you say, what do you mean?

1:03:33 Like, I just got mugged. Okay, well, what are you grateful for? And you find that the tiniest spark of gratitude can light, like, the fire of forgiveness, and forgiveness isn’t like, it’s okay that they did it. It’s not okay, but your body can understand that it’s no longer under threat of that, and when you turn off that automatic threat thing, you get more energy, and then you don’t yell at your kids, you don’t, you know, your boss, and you’re less stressed in traffic, and everything in life gets easier.

1:04:00 I can say this with great certainty. I’ve spent six months of my life, developing 40 years in, with electrodes glued to my head measuring my brain waves when I worked on how to do forgiveness properly and how to enter this reset mode, where you pair this forgiveness with another state, and all of a sudden the biggest betrayals, the biggest traumas, the things that just are, you just think of it and you tense up, it all just goes away, and then you’re just present, and the mean voice in your head just shuts up. And then what’s left is something different.

1:04:35 That’s why I write books. That’s why I wrote Smarter Not Harder. I want people to get that. Yeah, it’s so powerful, Dave. So powerful, that stuff, and you talk in depth in detail about a lot of the ways that you’ve done your forgiveness in the past, and I appreciate that.

1:04:47 And when you do it with those electrodes, then you can really start to see how it works and know that you have to totally forgive and not just pretend to forgive or tell yourself you’re forgiven. And yeah, it goes back to those basics: be grateful for something. Dave, you’re always into biology, optimizing biology. What do you, what do you make now, three years later, of COVID vaccines? New information coming out, the whole nine yards.

1:05:13 Do you have thoughts on it? Do you have comments on it? Do you have anything to learn from all that? I was just greatly reminded that I pay my government, my chosen government, to protect me from violence, and that that’s the role of government. If their job is to stop criminals from stealing my stuff or killing me, governments failed in this case.

1:05:35 So what I learned was we should be holding our governments a lot more accountable and reminding them that it is not their job to keep us safe from everything. It is safe from violence. That’s what I pay them for. Coercing someone to do something against their will is an act of violence. So whether you were for or against whatever treatment, you should actually be asking yourself why you were put in a position of being for or against something that was an option, whereas there are many, many options every single day, like what you put on your plate.

1:06:09 So I’m frankly embarrassed for our species for the way we were so easily programmed. This is why my new coffee is called Danger Coffee, because people who have their full energy are unprogrammable. You cannot trick us that way again. And psychological manipulation techniques from the marketing and propaganda industries were absolutely used for industry marketing that created many billions of dollars in profit. Whether or not it worked or not is not what I’m saying.

1:06:39 What I’m saying is the people who took away your choice are enemies of humanity. They don’t get to do that, and they will never get to do that again, because there are plenty of people like you and me who saw what they did and were aware they can’t do this again. Yeah, really well said, Dave. I appreciate you saying that too. It’s fascinating to watch how the narratives have almost gone 180 over that three-year period.

1:07:04 I mean, no one’s gone to jail yet. Yeah, I know. I mean, I’m publishing videos now on YouTube, and the same exact videos got me strikes and almost de-platformed three years ago, that they, the exact same video, you know. So who knows, for holding the line. You, you and I both did that.

1:07:22 It cost both of us a lot socially, just in terms of algorithms. I, I got a shadowban, where I, I actually was like, it’s your choice, I’m not even telling you not to do it or to do it. and I, I created something that I think stopped me from being fully canceled, And I actually had to come out of the closet. Brian, did you see when I did that? No, I didn’t.

1:07:44 Well, it turns out that some of my friends will let you stick anything in them with no standards, and other of my friends will never let you stick anything in them no matter what. And neither one of those felt authentic to my true self. So for me to live in my proper identity, I just had to come out of the closet as being bi-curious, which is vaccine industry curious. Which means that, you know, I work with my care providers to decide what’s best for me. So that was my stance for the entire pandemic.

1:08:18 Was, look, look, I actually think mRNA vaccines may be a key to living to 180, but they actually should be tested, and not for that kind of stuff. But if I could do an mRNA vaccine that was tested for 20 years that would stop all cancer and stop all diabetes, line me up. But I would like clinical trials first. So I’m not opposed to them in the slightest. Just don’t force people to do stuff.

1:08:42 I’m not going to make you eat a donut, and you’re not going to make me eat kale. It’s okay. So well said. And you were in Canada, so it was even harder up there, right? Why do you think I’m in Austin?

1:08:55 Yeah, yeah. It’s fun. It’s funny. So we’re making a documentary film about everything I went through for 46 days, where we had our initial you know, conversations to where we were banned, and then we had to create our own platform to stream. And it’s funny because on my first conversation, March 18th, I was like, look, I went to MIT, I’m taking the vaccine.

1:09:17 I’m doing all this stuff because I’ve been told it works, and by the end of it, after speaking to all these people, I’ve kind of changed my mind. And then when I, I talked to the Great Barrington Declaration people. I talked to Robert Kennedy. I talked to all these people. Of course nobody else could listen to them on the digital platforms, but I could, and by the end of that I was just like, you know what, I, I feel like I want to make my own decisions on some of these things.

1:09:44 And, you can really see me turn this narrative. And it’s kind of fascinating to watch. I was watching you, Brian. I mean, you, you, you do good stuff. You’re curious and willing to change, and so am I, and I, I, for people who decided to do it or to not do it, that’s awesome.

1:10:02 You can also decide to be a vegan or a non-vegan, and you can decide to ski, which is relatively dangerous, or to not ski. Like all of these things, they’re just choices. But anytime a person says they’re going to take away your choice to make you safer, that person is a sociopath. That’s how they work, and the only appropriate response for people like that is to build giant wood chippers to put them in. And you’re so right about our government.

1:10:28 I mean, it’s there to do a couple simple things for us, and then that’s it, and like, leave us alone. And it seems like Texas embodies that, so I’m really happy about your move down there. I, I am still, you know, I still have a residence in Canada, and I still really appreciate the Canadian people. I’m very concerned about the direction of Canada, and I’m happy to be, by country. Yeah.

1:10:48 Dave, what’s next for you? You got Upgrade Labs being franchised, obviously this book’s dropping now, you move to Austin. Like, what’s on, what’s on your horizon? Well, I am really working on being the, the champion of the biohacking movement that I started all those years ago. There’s a 25-year plan in my head about how we continue introducing new technologies, AI, the actual science of consciousness, into biohacking, and when people go to my biohacking conference who’ve never been like, I didn’t think I was going to feel this way when I was done.

1:11:24 I didn’t think I was going to do breathwork. I didn’t think I was going to hook electrodes to my head, and it was going to make me feel this thing I haven’t felt before without any drugs. Like, what is going on here? Well, what’s going on here is we are now becoming aware of the invisible systems in the body. We’re learning how to interact with them to help them do a better job of supporting us, because I studied AI, and because I designed distributed systems like cloud computing when I was a computer hacker in Silicon Valley.

1:11:52 I understand that inside your body there’s a distributed collective consciousness, through your mitochondria, these tiny little bacteria embedded, likewise, humans as a species are a collective consciousness, and we use things like culture to share ideas and to share mass behaviors, which is why we were easy to program during the pandemic, because bad people figured out that they could use that against us. But the more aware we can become of these systems, the more we can choose to manage them, and that’s what biohacking is. It’s the art and science of changing the environment around us, including propaganda and inside of us, so that we have control of our own biology.

1:12:32 And what I know from my studies is that when we are operating as dangerous people, at Danger Coffee, reference again, but dangerous because we are now able to make the best decisions naturally, those decisions will support all humanity and the planet we live on. And when we are not free to perform our individual role in our collective consciousness, we weaken ourselves, and we weaken and wreck the planet. So the only path to fixing the environment is to fix each node in the giant network of humanity.

1:13:05 That’s what I’m working on. Amen to that. Amen to that. Dave, you mentioned AI a couple times, and you come from, like you said, a serious background in technology. You spend time in Silicon Valley, etc.

1:13:16 What do you see with the current fascination with AI, because of ChatGPT, that narrow AI? What do you see? Is there an AGI on the future, or general intelligence? Are you worried about it? Are you not?

1:13:28 What’s your take on this? Well, there’s something I learned in university, and certainly in my career. It’s a principle we talk about a lot. It’s garbage in, garbage out. ChatGPT was programmed by the internet, which has a lot of suspect information, and that information has been very carefully manipulated by Big Pharma over the past, well, maybe 30 years.

1:13:58 So journal articles that have been deleted during the pandemic, or bad articles that were funded by special interests saying things are true or not true. So you can ask ChatGPT and you’ll get an image of manipulated data from the past 20 or so years. You will not get a real answer. And if you want to see anything new in the world, you don’t use ChatGPT, because all it does is change the signal to noise ratio. In an ideal world there is one person or one source, one site, that’s going to tell you everything about something, and, like, wow, everything there is new and interesting and orderly.

1:14:39 But what the internet has allowed is a bunch of copycats to come out and play The Whisper Game and weaken information, and ChatGPT just turns that on, times a thousand. Since the start of my blog, every post that I do, I’m looking to share information that is uncommon or not known. And as soon as I got a little bit of notoriety, there’s a few people where every single post on my site, they would hire someone to copy the post and put it on their site, right?

1:15:06 And I’ve literally had one guy stalking me for 10 years. Like, every guest on my show gets a phone call the next day, right? And it’s, it’s slimy, right? But with ChatGPT now, there can be hundreds of people who are copying good content, diluting it. They don’t know what they’re doing.

1:15:22 They’re saying, oh yeah, sure, yeah, that’s a vitamin C, to that, even if it’ll kill you. They just don’t know, because there’s no understanding. So we just created a giant echo chamber that’s been salted with marketing and propaganda. So I’m not hopeful that ChatGPT is going to be helpful unless you have your own instance. And so that’s what I’m working on: is an instance of ChatGPT that has all of my podcasts and all of my words, all the thousands of articles, all eight books, so that you could say, what would Dave say?

1:15:51 And then it’ll know. Nice. Okay, good. And what about an AGI? we were, is it only a matter of time before that happens, and do you think that’s sooner than later, as in 10 years?

1:16:04 Yeah, what makes you think we don’t have one now? Explain. What do you mean by that? Well, the first, AGI, like, or artificial general intelligence system, once one country has one, or maybe one large corporation has one, why would they tell anyone? There’s a large investment bank that has one.

1:16:35 I’ll bet you they’ve been working on it for the longest, with the most money. The 2008 meltdown, was it influenced by one of those? There’s a great chance it was. Is a lot of the global data on economics shared by all the countries. At this point, is it created by an AGI?

1:16:54 There are people who think it is. I think it’s highly likely that we do have one, and if you look at game theory and you look at human behavior, and just how you would play it, why would you tell people you have it? As a matter of fact, if you had it, you would use it to spot other ones, and then you would send people in to stop those efforts. So the first general intelligence will probably be the only one. So then, but if we never know about it, does that mean that it’s not going to be potentially that dangerous?

1:17:25 Oh, it’ll be even more dangerous. Okay, because whoever is setting its settings will end up controlling society. Well, we see a major shift in the world, or will it just keep grinding toward a dystopian future that we don’t want, and then later we’ll look back and say, oh, maybe it was because of that? Well, it seems like we’re kind of grinding towards a dystopian future right now, a little bit, and you and me and a bunch of others are stopping that, right?

1:17:50 But one of the things that we will deal with is, artificial general intelligence. If it’s programmed by good people with good information, good assumptions, then it’ll probably help the world. And if it’s programmed by private people who are traumatized, it’ll probably harm the world. And the very notion behind my new book, Smarter Not Harder, working hard is bad for humans when we do it all the time. It is not great.

1:18:21 But if you believe that working hard is what all humans should do and you control an AGI, you will create a world where that’s all humans can do. I don’t want that world to exist. In fact, I won’t allow it to exist. So that’s what we’re doing. So yeah, if there’s one out there, and maybe if it’s listening, I just want to know, I’ve got your number.

1:18:41 But I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. Well said. On that episode of The Simpsons, I think it was. The book is Smarter Not Harder, the Biohacker’s guide to getting the body and mind you want. It’s a great book, Dave.

1:18:53 Really. Good. Good vibes on that, and a lot of your amazing IP from over the years. And, look, like I said, you’ve been coming on the show for 10 years, and I still remember we have flashbacks now to all the stuff used to send us that was in our kitchen for the mitochondria stuff, to the Bulletproof Coffee. I used to serve on all the shows till Peña was drinking it in the castle.

1:19:13 All the sleep hacking videos I did were all based on your ideas and IP, and you know, it’s changed a lot of my behavior up until the oil and the salt I have in my damn desk drawer. It’s because of you, Dave. So, yeah, I appreciate you putting these ideas out there, and, and, also not being afraid to speak up about what’s been going the last few years. I respect that a lot as well. So look, all the best.

1:19:35 This thing’s gonna definitely hit the best seller list, and, yeah, what’s the best way for people to get a copy and follow you? Go to daveasprey.com. I’ve got links to everything there, and if you want to follow me, maybe Instagram, dave.asprey is a good, is a good place to do it. Of course there’s the podcast and books and Danger Coffee and all that stuff. I just want you to understand you don’t have to ever buy anything I do.

1:19:57 You have to follow anything that I say. I want it to be worth it, so that if you spend one minute with me, you get at least two minutes back. And I know, Brian, you have the same kind of standard for your content, if people that they get, they get to invest an hour with you, and they walk away with two or three hours of new energy or new sense of wonder. There’s a ton of content out there that takes your energy when you watch it. I never want to be that guy, because with the kind of numbers, hundreds of millions of hours of time, I would be a mass murderer if I didn’t put out good stuff.

1:20:30 And that’s my standard, so it better be worth it for you, or don’t follow me. Yeah, really well said. Well, good stuff. Next time I see you, I’m expecting a big 10-gallon hat and some cowboy boots on you. But enjoy Texas.

1:20:43 I want to get down there and see you as well. I hear great things about Austin, so, yeah, love it. Dave, wishing you all the best. Thanks for the book, and next time let’s do this in person. Beautiful.

1:20:53 I’ll see you in London. All right, take care. There he is. Dave Asprey, Bulletproof exec. Thank you.

1:20:57 We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.