Dave Asprey - The Bulletproof Executive’s Approach To Revolutionising Health And Performance Through Biohacking

Full transcript: Dave Asprey on London Real

5:13 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Paul G, who grew up in Texas via Russia. He studied mathematics at NYU and is now completing his master’s degree in London in computer science at Imperial College. Is that right?

5:28 Which is a good school, right? It’s not bad. Okay. And Paul may or may not have some recent experience with Provigil, but we will talk about that later. And our guest today is Mr Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Executive himself.

5:41 Dave went from a fat guy with a failing brain to being a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor and senior executive. That’s pretty cool, right there. Also, using brain systems thinking, he spent 15 years and $300,000 to hack his own biology, which included upgrading his brain by 20 IQ points, lowering your biological age and losing 100 lb without using calories or exercise. Did I get that right? And welcome to London.

6:09 Thanks, yeah, you got it right, all of it. All of it. Okay. How is London, and what’s it like making that trip? You came from British Columbia direct, or I came from Vancouver.

6:21 I just did a small puddle jumper over to Vancouver, went straight to London, hopped on another plane 45 minutes later to Edinburgh. It’s been a day there, flew down here, so it’s been a pretty intense week so far. I’ve been in, like, back-to-back meetings talking about upgrading your performance and your brain with a bunch of investment bankers and hedge fund traders out here in London. It’s been a pretty fun week. That sounds cool, actually.

6:44 Yeah, those guys are fun to work with, because they get it and they’re real quantitative, so, like, show me the numbers. I’m like, well, you got numbers coming off your body as well as numbers that come out of these bank accounts you work with. So it’s kind of a pretty interesting dynamic to say, what if you did exactly what you’re doing for trading, but you did it up here? And, like, I want to do that. Yeah.

7:01 Paul and I both spend some time in banking, and we all know it’s about the P&L at the end of the day, which is profit and loss, and you can talk all you want, but the numbers on a daily basis tell you whether you’re doing something right or wrong, which sounds like the perfect guys for your system, cuz they want feedback, right? Right, they want to change things, so that’s cool. Um, I wanted to know this. You said you started the Bulletproof Executive blog in January 2010 as a quest to upgrade the world’s and I was wondering if you could quickly walk us through your personal story.

7:29 What is biohacking, and how you came to where you are today? So, here’s the thing, I spent a good half my life being overweight and basically having brain fog and not being anywhere near the level of performance I’m capable of, and it’s not really fair. Then I made 6 million bucks when I was 26, and I got to spend about $300,000 upgrading myself. So I’ve had unusual access to the experts, cuz I run an anti-aging nonprofit, groups. I’ve had 10 years of talking with top leaders in those fields, as well as all this, one to throw out the problem.

8:00 So yeah, I hacked myself really extensively. Like, my brain is different, my face looks different than it did, you know? I’m, I’m 100 lb lighter. All that stuff is real, but most people are not going to be able to do that, because they don’t have, you know, 10 years and $300,000 to spend on that. So I wasted a lot of that money, cuz it didn’t work, right?

8:20 So maybe I could just do the Cliffs Notes and give that to people, and that’s why all the stuff on the site’s free. Like, there’s 200,000 words of blog on the site and all kinds of forums, and it’s all there, just because I think most people, if they know how, actually want to be high performance. I don’t believe fat people are fat because they’re lazy or they deserve it. They’re fat because they keep doing stuff that doesn’t work. So you might as well measure whether it works.

8:46 When it doesn’t work, whoever told you to, you know, go for a gentle walk three times a week and eat rabbit food, if you measure it and it doesn’t work and your butt’s bigger than it was last year, and you’ve actually been doing it, it’s time to give the middle finger to whoever told you that and find someone who really knows what’s going on. Dude, lost 100 lb, kept it off for 10 years. It works. Did you ever think about keeping this knowledge secret, and that way you could fly around the world and meet with these hedge fund guys and give them the secret knowledge?

9:11 You know, I thought about it, but here’s the deal. I want to live in a world where, like, there’s lots of people who, you know, are not so exhausted and tired that they just can barely get by. Like, I actually think that I’m in a better place when the people around me are kicking more ass too. So if you intrinsically think that people are good, then you want to empower them, and if you think, transi, think everyone’s a jerk and they’re out to get you and take what you have, then you’re going to keep it secret.

9:36 And the bottom line is, I help a lot of people, you know, to the point that I get emails like every day from people I don’t know who are like, I lost 45 pounds in two months, and my brain turned back on, and I got a $30,000 raise when I got a new job, because I have more energy, and, like, thank you, what can I do to help? That’s why this blog is here. And, you know, I have a full-time job. I’m, I’m senior executive at a big tech company, so I do this to help people, and you know, the fact that some people like to buy my coffee too is, you know, an amazing, an amazing thing, but like, this is just about helping.

10:04 It’s about sharing the, the wealth and the knowledge that I’ve been fortunate enough to have, you know, a lot of these diets and, and sort of regimens to life. Usually require a lot of adherence. Yeah. How do you, how, how do you build that into your system? Adherence is pretty easy when you have no food cravings ever, when you can go 18 hours without eating and be like, I guess I could eat now.

10:25 So building resilience in and removing the things that cause you to be weak doesn’t take a lot of adherence, because once they’re gone, once you feel for one day that bulletproof state, that high performance state that I talk about, you just need it once, cuz that becomes like your new goal. So if the best you’ve ever felt is here, and then you have Bulletproof Coffee for breakfast and you stop eating toxins for a week and maybe do some neurofeedback or something, and all of a sudden you have a day and you’re like, holy crap, I didn’t know life was like that, and then the next day you’re not there, you’re only here, and you’re like, what do I do to get back there? And then you get here and you’re like, oh my God, there’s more up there.

10:58 If no one ever experiences that, you don’t know it’s possible. So the whole point of all this is to just feel it once. Once you do that, adherence is no big deal. It just happens. It seems like the foundation now of the Bulletproof Exec is the Bulletproof Coffee, and so we might as well just jump in and talk about it, because if you, I’ve been hearing about your stuff for a while, but if you walked up to someone on the street and said, this cup of coffee is going to change your life, they would initially think you’re crazy.

11:21 So I was wondering if you could talk about the theory behind the Bulletproof Coffee, how you make it. I’ve seen your videos on YouTube, how you make it, and with your stir, your battery-powered stir, that’s cool by the way, but yeah, tell us about Bulletproof Coffee. So, Bulletproof Coffee is a really precise recipe that I designed. It requires upgraded coffee beans. I’m drinking some of it right now, actually.

11:43 You didn’t bring us any. Sorry, they took it at customs. I’m kidding. It’s totally legal to fly with coffee anywhere on the planet, and I fly with ground coffee all the time, and no one’s ever even probed in there to find drugs, so I’m pretty sure it’s legit. But, uh, here’s the thing: you need beans that don’t have toxins in them, because 91.7% of coffee from South America, this is not my research, this is a study that I referenced on the website, comes with toxic mold.

12:09 And you might say, well, roasting kills the mold. Yeah, it does, but it doesn’t kill the poison that the mold made. And unfortunately, we turned on some really nasty toxic molds when we started spraying antifungals on our crops to increase agricultural yields 30 years ago. So we’re basically dealing with that now, because the stuff that grows on coffee when they ferment it creates histamine, which triggers allergies, and it has things like ochratoxin, which is not even regulated in the US, and it has things like aflatoxin, which is regulated but not tested that well in coffee.

12:38 So if you’re drinking coffee that has all these performance-enhancing benefits but it has these other things in it that aren’t actually coffee, they just come from the way coffee has been processed, because we didn’t have better ways, then you end up with, like, I feel good from the coffee, and then I crash, and I feel good, and I crash. And the crash makes you actually want sugar, and it makes you crave things you don’t want to do, that including, like, just get on the coffee yo-yo. I gave up coffee for five years, even though I, I love coffee.

13:02 It’s been kind of a religion for me. I paid for my computer science studies paying or selling caffeine t-shirts, said caffeine, my drug of choice. I sold those to 12 countries over the web. It turns out it was the first product ever sold over the Internet, so I’m like the first e-commerce guy. It was either me or Virtual Vineyards, the guys who became Wine.com, like on the same day we started selling.

13:21 How did you take payments? How did I take payments? What was the name of it? Virtual currency. There’s the name of some B, the very not Bitcoin, wish was the very first online payments you could do.

13:31 People like could fill out and fax you a copy of their check. It was so old school. For your comment back then, it was insane. But, um, there wasn’t the browser either, so that was part of the problem. So anyway, I did this.

13:41 So coffee’s been a part of my life forever, and I’m like, all right, what am I going to do here? I’m going to have to give up coffee, and that sucks. So after about 5 years of not drinking coffee, I’d drink coffee once. I’d be like, dude, I’m rocking, I love this, and then next day I drink it and I’d crash, and it finally occurred to me that it’s not me that’s the variable, it’s the coffee that’s the variable. So I put on my biohacking hat and I read all this agricultural research, all this biochemical research.

14:04 I figured out the mold problem, and then I created something called the Bulletproof Process to make coffee that doesn’t have performance-robbing toxins in it, not to mention what ochratoxin does to your kidneys and all that. And here’s a quick thing: if you drink coffee and you have to go pee right away, that’s your kidneys going to get this out of here. It’s not the coffee that’s so much the diuretic, it’s the toxins in the coffee. So I figured out that, wow, this is kind of amazing stuff.

14:26 You start with this coffee and then you add two ingredients. One of them is grass-fed butter. Depends on what country you’re in, you can buy it in most countries. Even in Asia, they usually import Anchor butter from New Zealand. Around here, you carry Gold Irish butter.

14:38 Some of the British butters are grass-fed, and you can usually find it if you look around a bit at a gourmet grocery store. Okay, you add one tablespoon, two tablespoons, sometimes five if you’re, like, exercising heavy and you’re not going to be sleeping for a while. You just go for it, and you’ll find over time that you actually like less butter in it. When you first want the butter that much, it’s because your body’s like, give me more of that, cuz I can make better cellular membranes with saturated fats, cuz they’re, they’re stable.

15:03 They don’t oxidize. So after a while, you replace your cells themselves, like the outer layer of the cells, and then you’re like, I don’t need quite as much butter. I’m down to about one or two tablespoons, whereas when I first started this, I was like six. I’m just going to go for it. That’s a lot of butter.

15:17 It’s thick, it’s thick, it’s creamy and amazing, and then you’ve got to add MCT oil to it. Okay, MCT is medium- chain triglyceride, and you get a lot of people out there who are like, I’ll just mix like coconut oil in, and you know, all Bulletproof Coffee. Well, it’s not the Bulletproof recipe. It’s actually not Bulletproof Coffee, because MCT oil is officially about 60% of coconut oil. You’ll hear this all over the place, but here’s the thing.

15:39 There’s four lengths of medium chains, and only two of them have the real effects you’re looking for. 15% of coconut oil has the active ingredients that we’re looking for. So I take straight MCT oil, which is the most active part, six times stronger than coconut oil, and I put a tablespoon of that in there. Why? Cuz it would taste gross with six tablespoons of coconut oil in there.

15:58 Plus, you know, you’d probably throw up. So you put that in, you blend it, you get a huge head of foam on there. It’s creamy, just like the creamiest latte ever. But okay, flavor is one thing, but you don’t have any food cravings or any hunger at all. You just have that for breakfast, no sugar, no protein, and your body doesn’t think you’ve eaten, so you get all the benefits of fasting, like an intermittent fast, except you get all the energy from the fat.

16:21 And MCT oil is the only fat out there that’s burned without going through the liver. So basically your body kind of treats it like a car, but it’s an oil, and it helps to trigger ketosis, which is fat-burning mode in your body. So what you get is this huge boost in, like, cognitive energy, to the extent that there’s a guy out there who wrote a book about the uh, the Singularity, about the economic impact of artificial intelligence, like a super cerebral economics kind of textbook.

16:48 And it’s killing me that Singularity Rising is the name of the book, but I’m forgetting the guy’s last name. His first name is James, and I forgot it too, and, uh, right in the middle of the book, he just sends it to me. I don’t know him. He sends me this book, says, Dave, look on page 207 or whatever it is, and you open it up, and it says at the end of the chapter, you know, what, thanks to Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Coffee recipe, I just cut my dose of Adderall in half.

17:09 Adderall is like prescription methamphetamine, right? And I’m not saying that, like, this recipe replaces drugs. I’m just saying it gives you so much brain energy that someone who is on a prescription with his doctor, like, made his own decision to say, wow, I feel so good. Like, I want the coffee. And that’s kind of amazing stuff, but it is so strong that you just get this amazing focus.

17:29 I’ve got mixed martial arts guys, like some of Joe Rogan’s, um, followers, who literally called me up. Guys, guys like Jason Lambert. He’s a former UFC heavyweight who now fights in Southern California. He’s like, Dave, you know, can I put your logo on my trunks? Like, your coffee rocked my world.

17:44 Got two or three other guys like that who are like, Bulletproof-sponsored guys, because the coffee just completely did. They’re like, please can I have some coffee? Dude, of course. Like, I’ll send you some coffee. How many calories are in that cup?

17:54 Just as a rough idea. It really depends how much butter you put in it. It’s pretty variable, few hundred. Um, probably more than that. I mean, it depends on what you’re going to do, and all, I, I eyeball it.

18:03 I used to measure it, like 80 g of butter when I was making the full recipe, 30 gram of MCT, and, you know, 5,600, you, between 400 and 600 grams or milliliters of coffee, and you put it all in a Blendtec blender. You want a big badass blender when you can do that, cuz the more foam you get, the better. And it turns out the first step of digestion of fat is when the bile breaks fat into tiny little droplets. Like that. They’re called micelles.

18:30 Okay, if you blend it, you’re helping your digestion of fat, and most people don’t know how to digest fat anymore, because they bought into the low-fat propaganda, and they eat basically sticks and twigs with a light dose of low-quality protein, like a chicken breast or something on there, and then they walk around with a metabolism that just isn’t ready to burn fat when they get it past that first, that first level of digestion, their body’s like, oh yeah, I know what to do with this, and it goes right to the head. If you brew the coffee right, you brew it with a metal filter, and coffee oils have some amazing effects in them. They’re called diterpenes, and it’s cafestol and kahweol.

19:05 These things go into the brain, and there are studies out there that show that cafestol and kahweol have an effect on inflammation in the brain. So if you brew your coffee with a paper filter, then the paper filter absorbs the diterpenes. You don’t get these things. If you brew your coffee with a metal filter, then these things, which are present in all coffee, can go into the brain and do their business. So if you use a recipe like this that’s designed to turn off inflammation in the brain.

19:31 Oh, by the way, in butter, butyric acid, which is why we use butter instead of cream, one of the reasons, anyway, turns off inflammation in the brain and causes gut healing, and this is, you know, a normal food. You know that any grass-fed butter is going to have. So all of a sudden you’re like, wow, I helped my gut, I helped my brain, and I got this energy that’s like nothing else. So people do it one time and they’re hooked, and they think it’s going to be gross, but it tastes amazing, and can you put anything sweet in there?

19:56 I saw your, you’ve got, like, a PDF, I think, if they sign up for your, your newsletter, where it shows the whole Bulletproof diet as well, and I saw like no artificial sweeteners, which I’m guilty of. Sorry. And no, and no sugar. I’m guessing as well, so you just have to get over needing any kind of sweets. It actually tastes really good without it.

20:12 Part of the problem is that coffee is well, most coffee is kind of gross because it’s acidic. Like, they use crap beans, and then they burn it to hide the acidic taste. Like, that’s why a certain green-logo coffee company has the dark roast. It’s not that dark roasts are sexier. They’re not even better for you.

20:29 A medium roast has more intact oils and better antioxidants, but the dark roast is to hide the acidic taste. Beans like mine that have never been fermented, that go through the Bulletproof process, aren’t acidic, so it doesn’t need sugar. And a lot of people have said, just when they drink it black, like, this is the first time I’ve had coffee that doesn’t need sugar. So that’s part of it. But if you want to sweeten it, there’s a way to do it.

20:48 You can get sugar alcohols. It’s called Xylitol or orthol. Xylol comes from hopefully hardwood, good. Zotol comes from hardwood, bad. Xotl comes from Chinese GMO corn.

20:59 Don’t eat the corn-based xylol. eat the wood-based xylol. You put it in there, it looks like sugar, about 40% sweeter than sugar. If you have a lot of xall and you’ve never had it before, you’re going to be running into the bathroom, because it’ll give you the runs. By the way, too much MCT oil will also give you the runs, so if you’re a Bulletproof Coffee virgin, you put in half a cup of MCT and half a cup of zotl.

21:18 Um, I want a video of what happened. It’s going to be bad. But if you put in, you know, start slow on the MCT to find out what works for you, and then xyl, same thing. Put in a couple teaspoons, and you can get as much sweet taste as you want. Arrol is a similar thing.

21:31 It comes from corn, but most arrol comes from GMO corn, so you’ve got to watch out. And Stevia you’re okay with as well. Stevia is totally legit. Unfortunately, I, like, 20-30% of people have a gene where Stevia tastes bitter. Like, I eat Stevia, yeah, I don’t like it.

21:44 The other thing that I add a lot of the time now, and it’s kind of a sin. Like, I’ll brew black coffee, cuz I like black coffee, and then I’ll make Bulletproof Coffee, cuz I like the taste of that, and I also like the performance effects of the fats. But, so I’m a coffee purist, you know, coffee snob, and all that, but I take the upgraded vanilla, which is another product that I made. Vanilla has a serious mold problem, and real vanilla, like the herb, has a very different profile than vanillin, which is a chemical product that’s basically, like, smells like vanilla, that they sell most of the time.

22:13 Vanilla extract is imitation, so when you get the real stuff, it’s like a dark, rich powder, and you put that in there too, and it adds, like, different notes. Do that with a little bit of xotl. It’s like a really rich vanilla kind of thing, and that’s nice. And you’re having this coffee every day. Do you skip days, and do you miss it when you when you skip the days?

22:31 I don’t skip days. What the hell? I mean, let’s, no. I have coffee for breakfast with butter every single day, and I used to stop, and I guess I should have you know, eggs and bacon or something, but I feel better when I have coffee with butter for breakfast. It doesn’t trigger all the energy that gets used by digestion.

22:48 I just get this laser focus, and then it’s, oh, it’s lunchtime, 2, 3 in the afternoon, I guess I could eat, or maybe I’ll just wait till dinner. Like, it just turns off any need to pay attention to food and hunger, all that kind of stuff. It’s just convenient, and I like the energy a lot. Okay, now, I don’t want to start a biohacker feud, but, um, Tim Ferriss was here a couple months ago, and he has this 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up thing that he talks about, and I, I think I understand the, the, the theory behind that, and I think it’s to keep people from, you know, eating those bad carbs right when they wake up.

23:19 I think it’s kind of a bit of a trick, but Ur is obviously very different to that suggestion. Uh, what are your thoughts on 30 before 30? If you’re lifting heavy, go for it, man. Having some protein is a really good idea, and you don’t necessarily want to do intermittent fasting every single day. Depending on what you’re doing, there’s another school of thought, and I’m kind of one of those guys, that says even if you are lifting, you should do Bulletproof intermittent fasting.

23:40 Don’t eat anything except coffee and butter, and then at the end of that period, before you eat lunch or dinner, lift heavy and do what you’re going to do, and then eat, and you’ll get the maximum benefit there, because of insulin sensitivity and everything else. So, tough call, but if you’re someone who feels like you need breakfast, and I’d say maybe 20% of people, particularly women, they actually do a little better when they have protein for breakfast some of the time, but for the most part, if you eat protein, one nasty secret about protein is protein raises your cortisol levels, not as much as sugar does. Sugar raises it the most, protein raises it the next most, and fat doesn’t raise it very much at all.

24:18 So in the morning, if you have a bunch of protein, you are going to spike your cortisol when you might not want to be spiking your cortisol at the same time. You sort of look at this and say, too much protein, or the wrong kind, protein’s inflammatory, and that’s why the Bulletproof diet focuses on moderate protein but extremely high-quality protein, and people who listen to the show probably know not all proteins are the same. But if you look at, like, the ends of the spectrum, like here’s a bowl of, like, snake venom, that’s actually protein, and here’s a bowl of, you know, collagen protein, which is kind of amazing stuff.

24:51 In fact, I’m launching a grass-fed collagen protein, um, coming up here in just a little while, and the difference in biological effects, the difference in acids, is profound. So when someone says, you know, eat 30 g of protein, like, was that tofu? It’s a broad statement. It’s like too broad. So what protein would you do?

25:06 Would it be hydrolyzed, would it not be hydrolyzed, does it have MSG, does it have antinutrients and toxins in it or not? So, bottom line, if I’m going to have protein in the morning, and I do that maybe once or twice a week, especially if I’ve decided I’m going to exercise, you know, for my one time that week, if I get around to it, um, I’ll put 30 gr of collagen in the coffee. Collagen’s heat stable at those temperatures of coffee, and it adds no flavor at all the way I do it, cuz it’s all prehydrolyzed.

25:32 When I think of collagen, I think of, like, some amorphous amoeba, like liquid. Is it not that bad, or no? Because it’s hydrolyzed, it mixes smooth in water. It’s not like a clump of gelatin. Like, gelatin contains collagen, but it’s not broken down.

25:44 So the stuff that I finally managed to create, it’s been like a six-month process to get it right. It’s from grass-fed cows, low temperature the whole way, and we use enzymes to cleave it, so you get all the di and tri peptides, all the collagen peptides that you’re looking for. Um, and it’s totally legit to put in coffee. So you blend the coffee up till it’s really nice and foamy, drop the protein in, and this is important. If you’re going to add protein to a blender, add it at the end, cuz the more you chop up a protein, like the upgraded whey stuff, or any good-quality protein powder, you blend the crap out of that stuff, you break it up.

26:16 You actually want the di and tri peptides. If you damage them through mechanical agitation, you’re getting less benefit from it. So maybe I sound like a really picky guy, but seriously, you’re making a smoothie. Does it really matter what you put in there, in what order? No, put the protein in last and just blend it a little bit, and you’ll get a better result from doing it that way.

26:32 So that’s what I do. Bulletproof Coffee, add that in. I get a lot of people who I haven’t tried this, but they really like to put in, um, the Hemp Force protein that it makes, and, you know, that’s in terms of vegetarian proteins, hemp has the most globulin of any of them. Uh, so you know, that would be the vegetarian protein choice, but I don’t know why you would actually go for vegetarian protein at the same time when you know you could get animal-based protein that’s probably more effective, effective in my experience.

26:59 Just roughly, what what’s an example of a good protein and a bad protein that you would eat later in the day? A good protein, why I try not to eat bad protein, but, like, tofu would be it, or corn, that, qu, RN stuff. Okay, that stuff is like not food. There’s all sorts of weird allergy problems happening. You don’t like any of these derivatives, these turkey bacons, or I try to not eat process foods.

27:20 You know, the turkey bacons, all you look at, the first ingredients wheat gluten in half of them. It’s like, do you not understand basic human fuel? Like, the fact that it has gluten in it only means that more animals died to make it than if it was made out of beef. Like, if you eat a cow that didn’t eat grain, a grass-fed cow, you can eat 2 lbs of cow a day, and you kill 0.7 animals per year. Okay.

27:43 If you eat one of these amazing vegetarian gluten-based grain concoction things with soy and corn and whatever else in it, the number of animals killed to cut down that field, the habitat destruction that was caused to do monoculture for that, do turtles, rabbits, mice, insects? I, some of those bunnies had faces and everything. I’ve never heard of it, looked at this way, but it’s, it’s actually really sad. And the person who taught me this was actually in Tibet, so I was at a Tibetan monastery, spent some time, you know, doing that kind of thing, and I got, this 10-day vegetarian, uh, retreat in Nepal, where I was learning about, like, Buddhist meditation style, and the whole time it’s like vegetarian, and, like, everyone in the room, it’s like super quiet while meditating, and you hear like, and then over there, it’s like everyone there was, like, farting while meditating, and it was really messing with, you know, getting in the zone, and it’s because of this vegetarian food.

28:38 So then I get to hardcore, like, high-altitude Tibet, and I ask the Lama, the head of the monastery, like, um, that’s a yak skin on your prayer pole, like, what’s up with that? Like, this, do not kill thing, you’re a hypocrite. And he totally laughs at me, and he goes, one death feeds everyone, and he just, like, walks off. And you know what, he’s right. You look at the total animals killed in a system of feeding you.

28:58 It’s not just what’s on your plate, it’s what died to get to your plate, and what you’re doing is you’re burning fossil fuels to fertilize the soil, and unless you’re doing all organic, which, you might be an organic vegan or vegetarian, but even then, the whole place used to be a forest. It used to be a wild prairie, and you’ve destroyed all that to be able to grow something, cuz you’re afraid to basically eat something with a face, which is gluten in this case, or gluten, or corn, or any of the grains that are out there, and then a tractor comes through. I know this because, like, in the South, I went, I visited a cousin a while back, and we went out after, um, with, there was a threshing machine that went through the field with a big bag, and we picked up frogs and snakes, and we had frog legs for dinner, but they were all killed by the tractor.

29:37 They were just like sitting there flopping around. I didn’t really see any bunnies that time, but it’s well known. Like, there’s field kills all over the place. Okay, so, like, you got to think about the whole system of what you do. It’s not just what’s right in front of you.

29:48 Like, if you open your mind up a little bit, you realize that you’ll perform better and live longer as a human being. You’ll actually need less food if you eat more fat, and if you’re doing grass-fed meat, you’re actually helping to prevent desertification. There’s a new TED talk about this that just came out, and it turns out this poor guy, I wish I could remember his name off the top of my head, but if you do a search for TED talk elephant soil destruction, you’ll find it.

30:12 In the 1970s, this guy went to Africa and looked really carefully at the carrying capacity of the land, and said we have to kill 40,000 elephants in order to make this reserve. So in his TED talk, he says it’s the largest mistake he’s ever made in his life, and, like, he’s, like, almost choked up about it, because they killed all the elephants to make room for the ones that were there, and the landan turned a desert. And what they recently discovered is that if you have animals with hooves on soil, they break up the algae that forms on the top of the soil, and the water can penetrate.

30:44 If you don’t, the water goes off, and they have all these videos and photos now of places. Look, we added cows back in, and now it’s a lush prairie, and without the cows, it’s a barren landscape. So cows and sheep and goats are an important part of soil ecology. So if you care about the Earth, your job is to eat grass-fed meat, because we need more grass-fed cows walking around where there aren’t farms. Right back at you.

31:06 I like that. So, so grass-fed beef might be one of the proteins you would eat later in the day. Oh, dude, ribeye, absolutely, cover in guacamole with some home-cured bacon on top. Okay, all right, now you’re talking. But, no, um, not a chicken breast from the, from the organic, sorry, from the, the non-organic farm.

31:22 That’s bad protein, and protein chicken in general, even if it’s, like, you know, raised by one-armed monks, you know, who, like, petted its feathers and all this stuff. We’re not dinosaurs, like, in terms of biological compatibility. The proteins in chicken breast aren’t that good, and the fats in chicken are mostly omega-6 oils. I go out of my way to not eat omega-6. My omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is like 1.28 to 1 in my blood.

31:45 Anti-aging guys are trying to get theirs down as low as 4 to 1, and the typical American has 40 to 1, because they’re eating crap oils. So omega-6 oils are not particularly your friend. They create extra oxidative stress in the body, and they don’t make good proper cell membranes. So tiny amounts of omega-6 are going to be present no matter what, and those are enough for your body to do whatever it needs. Okay, and salmon, you like salmon as well, as long as it’s not farmed.

32:09 Okay, so we’ve got a problem to farm salmon and just get a hot button for me, man. Do you plan this? Not at all. What’s the, what’s the problem, Dave, you have with salmon? So I live in British Columbia, up by Victoria, and sockeye salmon is the best salmon you can eat.

32:24 Sockeye, yeah, that’s the way it looks, or something like that. It’s a species of salmon, and the reason is that they don’t live that long. They spend a lot of their life in fresh water, and they have the lowest mercury count and the highest amount of antioxidants and the most omega-3 in them, because of what they eat. So they’re like the perfect food. In the last seven years, where I live, the count of wild sockeye salmon is down 90%.

32:44 And it’s down 90% because some Norwegian fish-farming companies put Atlantic salmon farms right along the river where the normal fish migrate, and they’re basically killing an entire species. And this sucks, because those, those natural fish, the wild ones that swim by, they pick up viruses that cause their hearts to turn to mush, so they can’t swim upstream, so they die full of eggs, but they don’t spawn. So where are they putting these farms? Why, where, where along the Fraser River, and all along basically between Vancouver Island and the mainland, there’s this channel where most of the sockeye swim, and they’re all getting infected with European viruses, because these, like, ecologically destructive Norwegian companies are coming in there and they’re saying, well, we’ll just raise the fish here.

33:27 But there’s a big CL of bacteria and antibiotics, and they don’t allow scientists to come in and test the fish. The reason we know these viruses and bacteria are even present is that a local researcher sat outside one of the fish farms, waited for a bald eagle to swoop in, pick up the fish, and then drop it outside, so it was legal for them to test the fish, and they found bacteria and viruses that are still present after the salmon is frozen. So if you’re eating sushi made from Norwegian farm salmon, you’re getting strange bacteria that are not killed by freezing, and we have no idea what they do to you.

33:56 So on top of that, I’m, stuff, they’re killing the sockeye that live by my house that I want to eat. So if you’re from Norway, you should be ashamed. By the way, my wife is from Sweden, and they invaded you guys all right? Oh man, and they have too much oil. In no way, no.

34:13 We, I love Norwegians, but I’m pissed about your company. So get your salmon out of my water. So people should, uh, just keep that in mind, and when they buy Norwegian salmon, they should not be buying it. I would just say flat out, like, boycott most Norwegian products until they fix this. It’s as big as the Japanese killing whales, to be honest, because these salmon in in Canada and in Alaska too are the foundational species.

34:35 No more bald eagles, no more bears. If you don’t have salmon, like, everything feeds off them. They bring all this nutrition in from the ocean, and the whole ecosystem is based on this. So they’re basically decimating a whole country. And the sad thing is, in Canada, we have these people called First Nations, and these are basically like the American Indians in the US, but they’re called First Nations, and Canada has been incredibly mean historically to the First Nations, just like the American government has been mean to American Indians.

35:03 And it, it’s entirely unfair, and, and kind of just downright evil, what both countries have done. Both countries have done their best to try and make reparations for, you know, past wrongs, but the problem now is that these native people, who have rights to the salmon and whose whole traditions and cultures are built around this, they’re the ones who are paying the price the most, and the one who makes the money is basically some big companies in Norway. So I think it’s actually time, U, for people to really pay attention to this stuff, because where you get your food affects the entire quality of what’s on the planet.

35:33 So if your sushi made from Norwegian farm salmon, or Whole Foods, for God’s sake, which advertises ethically farmed salmon, yeah, my ass, what you’re doing there is you’re basically contributing to a destruction of a very eco-diverse part of the world. So you got to be careful about where you eat, like what you eat, where does it come from? It really matters. You heard it here first, from, from Dave Asprey. Stay away from, people don’t get to plus they’re all tall and blonde.

35:55 What the hell? People don’t get to research every bit of their uh food intake before they do it. I mean, you, you have done so, but most people don’t get to do that. They have, they, they don’t drink Bulletproof Coffee. So what do you like?

36:09 How do you go about finding out, fighting these things out, especially when these companies go out of their way not to publicize it? Pretty much, if it says it’s farmed, it’s probably not good for you. If it’s meat and it’s not pastured or grass-fed, uh, and it’s not wild, then just don’t eat it. You don’t have to eat meat to survive. I’ll go to a restaurant, like, oh, I’ll take a large plate of vegetables, and they bring you, like, four stocks of broccoli.

36:32 Like, that’s a large plate, and you want to charge me $12 for that? Like, no, no, no. Like, I’m only going to have vegetables and maybe a little bit of rice, the least toxic of the grains, with some safe starch in it. So, oh, and by the way, you don’t have any good butter, so I brought, like, a stick of Kerrygold with me. So could you bring me, like, a lot of broccoli and a little rice, and I’ll just throw my own butter on there?

36:49 You’ll be full for days. You don’t have to eat protein every day. Okay, you’ll be fine, right? So it’s not a question of, oh well, there’s only farm salmon or farm chicken, which is another abomination. Just don’t eat it.

37:01 Another thing you disagree with Ferriss on, they, um, not to start a the, but, uh, the chicken, yeah, I love Tim. Work, man. Tim F is awesome, right? Um, but in terms of chicken, like, if you look at what’s in chicken, you look at what’s in people versus what’s in a sheep or a cow. The sheep and cow are better for the environment, and it’s almost impossible to find pastured chicken that’s treated well, well, even the stuff that’s, you know, Uber organic.

37:30 Generally it’s very high-density farming. Like, I live in a place where I get eggs that are dark orange, and I can actually get uh, get chicken that only ate bugs and grass, cuz I live in a small community surrounded by farms. My cow is from a mile away. My sheep is from a half a mile away, uh, and it’s, it’s amazing, and I eat the eggs, cuz the eggs are, like, just amazing. What they do, it’s hard to even crack one open.

37:52 But when I buy a chicken and go to eat the chicken, the problem there is that you get a little bit of inflammation from the omega-6 oils. So then you throw away all the skin, or you give it to your dog or something, and then what’s left is some basically kind of mushy white meat that isn’t as amino acid-rich as steak would be. So why are you eating this again? I, I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t I eat a sockeye fillet?

38:11 Or that you can say it, because chicken’s cheaper, except if you go to bulletproofexec.com, I list places that sell grass-fed beef. You can buy a pound of grass-fed ground beef, some of the best stuff ever, and it’s going to cost like $5.40 a pound, and you don’t need a pound of hamburger meat every day, so you’ll spend two bucks a day, 250 a day, to feed yourself grass-fed steak that was ethically raised, humanely slaughtered, and carefully butchered. So the only thing that’s going on here is you’re lazy.

38:42 You want to go to a restaurant. So when you’re lazy and you want to go to a restaurant, that’s cool. Have sushi. Just don’t eat the farm salmon from Norway. Don’t, Norway I’m going to make this change.

39:12 You know, it’s different than paleo. Paleo is awesome. I, I love the Paleo guys cuz so much awareness has come out from this, but there are certain food toxins that are in some of the Paleo foods, and the ratio of fat andol is kind of different. So a lot of Paleo people love Bulletproof Coffee, and I’m a huge fan of Paleo, but there’s some differences around, like, fermented foods. And you know, do it the way caveman did it.

39:34 Sorry, caveman didn’t have to get exposed to BPA. They didn’t have fluoride in their water slowing thyroid function. They didn’t have all the pollution we have today. So if you want to get your food like a caveman, you should also get your toxins like a caveman. Okay, and your, your diet, you’ve been described as a kind of a Paleo 2.0, although somebody use that.

39:52 But if they go to bulletproofexec.com, they can see your whole chart. Yeah, it’s a free infographic, and it’s one page. Print it, put it on your fridge, and it doesn’t even say only eat these things. It says this is superior to this. For instance, chicken is better than tofu, but beef is better than chicken, so you don’t have to always eat you know, the perfect, most green side of the Bulletproof diet, but at least you can make an informed choice.

40:11 Just shift your behavior a little bit in the direction of better, and you’ll improve. Okay, fair enough. Now I have to ask you about a topic which is almost synonymous with you, which could be one of the greatest marketing ploys ever done in the history of biohackers, but that’s with Provigil, which is a marketing ploy. What’s up? I took it for eight years straight.

40:31 I plan this? When people think of the virual, they think of you. Now, which is, it’s just ridiculous. Well, it’s, it’s great, but, uh, you’ve been a, a proponent of Provigil for a long time. I believe it started off as a narcolepsy drug.

40:43 Um, I think, uh, it’s very possible Paul G might have a little experience with Provigil, but I was wondering if you could tell us what it is, how you’ve used it, if you took any today, and for people that don’t know, if you could explain what it does. So, Provigil is, like you said, designed for narcolepsy. It came out in the mid-1990s, and stuff’s amazing. I took it every day for 8 years, and I started taking it because I actually had some brain fog. I was going to Wharton and getting my MBA full-time and working at a startup that we sold for $600 million.

41:13 So very high performing. This is the only executive MBA that’s the same number of classroom hours as a full-time MBA, so it’s basically full-time MBA, full-time work, balls out for 2 years, extremely stressful. You’re in Philadelphia the whole time. I was actually in San Francisco. They fly the professors to San Francisco for this one, so I was down on the corner of Howard and Spear Street by the water, by the Bay Bridge.

41:33 It’s a pretty cool location, and they let you clump all your class time into, like, three insane days of, like, 12- and 14-hour days, where you get lectures, and then you do work, and and all that. It was a really awesome experience with the Wharton Executive MBA. I think they called it EMBA West, and, but that, on top of working full-time, was just a lot, and I thought, you know, I’m going to try Provigil. I went to the doctor, got a prescription for it, and honestly, the doctor thought I was hitting him up for Adderall, cuz a lot of students want to take Adderall.

42:00 Okay, this is 8 years ago, uh, oh, this was more than that. This was 10 or so years ago. I took it for eight years straight, and I take it varying amounts now. Okay, so I just did, like, pretty much every day for eight years. I took off, you know, weekends here and there, but for the most part it was always there.

42:14 And did you consider Adderall? I tried Adderall first. In fact, insurance companies want you to try Adderall first, and, man, that I don’t think that’s good for you. For one thing, but another thing, man, I don’t know, whenever I take it, I’m like, don’t touch my skin. Like, it made me tweak.

42:27 Like, you know, okay, so some people can take it and they feel really good, but I mean, people who’ve tried Adderall, even for long periods of time, a lot of them, when they try modafinil, or Provigil, the trade name for it in the US, they’re like, it’s like meth but cleaner. Like, you don’t get the buzzy high. It’s, you just feel more like yourself, and that’s pretty profound, and your ability to pay attention just goes way up. That could be the new slogan: like meth but cleaner.

42:54 You know? I’m sure the drug companies would, would, you know, just love that. And in fact, people accuse me, after I was on the Jo show, the Joe Rogan show, of being like a paid shill for the pharmaceutical industry. I’m like, I’m all over big Pharma. Like, you guys suck, right?

43:09 But this is a drug that actually does some amazing stuff, and I think the safety profile is pretty good on it, and people say, oh, there’s no long-term studies, but there’s lots of things that are sold and then recalled with no long-term studies. The stuff has been around since, oh, let’s see, the company got sued in 1997 for claiming it improved performance, performance, so they quit marketing it that way, but it still does improve performance. They’re just not legally allowed to say it does, so I’ll say it does.

43:34 Like, okay, you’ve never been shy about it. You’ve never hidden the fact that you’ve been taking. I, I actually put modafinil in my LinkedIn profile almost 10 years ago, right? And I figured, it, like yeah, I figured it was like, this, people who see it and know what modafinil is will want to talk to me, and people who don’t, who see it and don’t know what it is, we’ll just ignore it. Again, marketing genius.

43:54 Neutral term. Well, it seems like, like, one in 10 Silicon Valley executives that I’ve talked to over the years, they’d see that and also put, like, yoga and meditation and stuff in there, and they’d be like, oh, and all of a sudden they’d open up and tell me all the stuff that they also did, but it was like this little secret. So I’m like, screw it, why should it be a secret? Like, if it works for me, why shouldn’t it work for, you know, a 25-year-old who’s like struggling to get his brain to do what he wants it to do and working really hard?

44:16 If it’s not going to harm him and it’s going to improve performance, or who knows, maybe it will harm him a little bit, but the performance benefits are really great, and he judges, as an functioning adult, that it’s what he wants to do. I think it’s our right to do that, because it’s our right to drink a beer. And honestly, drinking a beer every day is far more harmful than taking a little bit of Provigil, especially if you don’t, you’re not going to take it every day.

44:38 So we can smoke, and we can drink, and we can even use coffee. All those are drugs. Uh, but for some reason, there’s a special class for modafinil, and it’s cheating. Yeah, okay, it’s cheating. Fine.

44:49 At least I admitted I did it. The things you mentioned have, you know, hundreds of years of use, so at least we know the exact side effects. Yeah, but we know it kills you, and people still do it, right? Like, smoking is just bad for you. Nicotine, probably not bad for you.

45:01 I actually have a milligram of nicotine dissolving in my mouth right now. Okay, go. I’ve got some of the nicotine gum. Apparently it’s good for creativity and stuff like that. I haven’t used it that much.

45:10 The nicotine gum, though, has, uh, some unsafe sweeteners in it. The little lozenges that Nicorette makes, the very smallest ones, I take half one of those some days, a very low dose. Yeah, it helps with creativity and energy, and, like, it’s good for you. And you’re taking some right now? Absolutely.

45:24 Tricky, it’s tucked in right there. Okay, so now with you and Modafinil, something you still use, don’t use as much as you used to. Um, you know, I took it in decreasing doses. I used to use, like, 400 milligrams a day, like the maximum dose, and I cut myself back to 200 milligrams. I experiment with dosing, and then after, what’s the maximum dose?

45:42 You should take the maximum dose. It’s 400 a day, 2×2,200, and there’s a new version of it out, Nuvigil, which is basically the new patented version of it, that’s one of the isomers that’s even cleaner than the normal modafinil, but it’s harder to get and much more expensive. So I, I took stuff, and I’m like, all right. I found that I needed less of it over time, in part, I think, because my brain got so used to being in the high-performance, like, ability to focus whenever you want to.

46:05 It just gets wired that way. The other potential reason you might want to take it is that if you’re going to be tired, being tired itself is a psychological stressor for you, and you walk around going, God, I’m so tired, am I going to get everything done? Well, when you do that, it raises your cortisol levels. So it’s possible that when you’re tired but you just take away the tired feeling, that itself may have a protective effect. So if the fact of the matter is that you have jet lag, or that you only got to sleep three hours last night because that’s what your job or your life demanded of you at that time, you want to walk around as a zombie the next day, or you want to walk around feeling great?

46:40 Well, feeling great actually is less stressful than feeling like crap all the time. So there isn’t a study that says this is true. It’s a theory. It’s a theory from a, a physician friend of mine, so who knows, but the bottom line there is that I took it in decreasing doses, because I found that I just needed less of it. Then after I went on the Joe Rogan show, a lot of people, especially the day after I was on Joe, was like, well, Dave didn’t tell us about his, his model.

47:06 And I’m like, dude, I told CNN, and Nightline flew the host of Good Morning America to my house and filmed for two days. I, I feel like I’ve disclosed this adequately to the world. But in case I, in fact, sitting in front of me on the desk on the Joe Rogan show was the testosterone that I use. I’ve been a bioidentical testosterone replacement since I was 30, because that’s when my blood test showed, cuz I used to be obese, and I’ve been on Provigil for a long time, and I don’t hide it.

47:34 So some people like, well, you’ve been hiding it. I’m like, no, we just talked about more interesting stuff. So anyway, uh, after that I’m like, all right, I’m just going to stop taking it for a while. So I stopped taking it for a lot of months, and one of the things that that made a big difference there is, about 18 months ago, I started using a new kind of brain training that hasn’t existed before, and, uh, I thought you might ask about this, so I brought a little toy here.

47:56 Oh yeah, all right. I’m going to show you the coolest-looking superhero accessory ever. So for people listening to us on iTunes, he’s got kind of a band that he’s placed around his head. Looks like it’s got some electrodes and a cord. If you do a screenshot now, I’m wearing orange glasses with a blue headband.

48:10 I totally need a superhero name. I’m sorry, like, I’m wearing Spandex too. Kidding. You like a cool hippie, babe. What is that?

48:17 So what this is, let me turn this around. Can you see that? This is called the Upgraded Focus brain trainer, and, yeah, I have it on Upgraded Self. I’m not trying to sell this. In fact, if you want to get one of these, they’re made by the inventor by hand.

48:30 There’s about 200 in existence, and there’s a six-week wait to get them. And what it does is, this is a very bright LED, and over here is a camera sensor, and what it’s doing is it is shining a bright light through your skull, right into your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that you use to pay attention, and then it’s bouncing that light off the blood there to let you know how much blood is there. You hook it up to your computer and you play a video game, and the video game, you just concentrate and make it move forward, and when you move forward in the video game, more blood is moving to the front of your brain, so you can raise the blood flow, as measured by this device, by about, oh, 20%.

49:06 Pretty amazing stuff. And the cool thing is you get a really fast feedback loop, so you can consciously learn to pay more attention. So I’ve been doing this since it was a prototype, you know, before it was all, you know, approved for sale and all that. So in my executive coaching practice, you know, I, I coach entrepreneurs and investment bankers and CEOs and people like that on, on human performance. So the guys who try this, like I tried it three times and had a different day at work.

49:30 So if Provigil was something that enabled me to really pay attention, and I’ve now trained my brain to pay attention in a way that I didn’t know how to do, even with all the neurofeedback and the other crazy brain hacking stuff I’ve done, I think this has actually made me less, let’s just say, made Provigil less effective. I don’t want to say less effective. It’s still effective, but it doesn’t, uh, it just doesn’t give me the same focus I had before, cuz I already have the focus.

49:51 Okay, it’s like I’ve, I’ve upgraded the functioning of my brain, because I can consciously move blood to the front of my brain, and I don’t have to try and do that. Once that ability is there, when I need to pay attention, the brain just goes, oh, that’s how you move the blood, and it just does it. So it’s kind of amazing what your brain can do when you just give it a little bit of feedback. It’s almost like the plot from that Bradley Cooper movie, by the end he didn’t need the pills, cuz his brain was already conditioned for it.

50:13 I’m actually controlling both of you. Now, Paul and I watched your CNN interview a week ago when we were here, and, um, um, I want to hear what Paul thinks of Provigil. Yeah, I’m currently studying for some exams, and, uh, just been sort of taking it on a daily basis. Actually been mixing some butter in, in my coffee in the morning as well, and I just been able to sort of be in a book about abstract topics about object-oriented programming for five or six hours, or was before I would.

50:41 That’s some exciting stuff, man. Uh, whereas before I needed maybe like half an hour, and then I’d look at Twitter or something, and then go back to it. So that’s, that’s the biggest thing, but what I would have hoped it would make me do is just be smarter and get it faster, which it didn’t do. So it doesn’t make you smarter, but it makes you more focused. And I did a really cool little experiment when, uh, Nightline was at my house, and we did one day when I was off Provigil, and I did a battery of cognitive focus tests.

51:11 This was on a website called Quantified Mind, quantifiedmind.com. A friend of mine runs it, and this is the same site that we used to do the cognitive performance study of, um, upgraded coffee beans. So it’s actually, like, University verified executive, fun, fun profiling. And so I went there, and I said, what’s my response time? What’s my reaction time?

51:32 What’s my working memory stuff, like that. And then the next day I did Provigil, and it was really interesting when I was off Provigil, my response time for questions was highly variable. So sometimes it would take me a minute to come up, and I, a minute, like, it take me half a second to come up with an answer, and the next one I would get it in, like, 0.2 seconds, then 0.5, and 0.2. So it was pretty spiky, but when I was on Provigil my average was slightly, uh, slightly, slightly higher, but it was very consistent.

51:57 So it was a very narrow band. So I could always answer pretty darn quickly on Provigil, but off Provigil, sometimes I’d answer more quickly than average, but other times it would take much longer. So the predictability of my response went up. My overall accuracy went up. So things like that change.

52:14 But if you’re looking to, like, upgrade your working memory, there’s ways to do that, but you need to train your brain, and that’s going to be a different thing than, uh, and that actually does make you smarter, raise your IQ. That’s a very different animal than taking Provigil. You, you’re currently the VP of a publicly traded internet security company. Are you doing that, and you’re also flying around the world giving these, what, consulting? I usually fly around the world and I give a keynote about the future of cloud security.

52:40 So I work for a company called Trend Micro, where the number one ranked cloud security company, and I helped to create like modern cloud computing. The very first product I rolled out, you know, 15 years ago, was a provision on-demand cloud computing service. So this has been my career. Like, I love big complex systems with lots of moving parts and toys and stuff like that. So that’s what I do for a profession, and the cool thing is, like, this is a week of vacation that I’m taking this week, so I’m burning a week of that in order to be able to be here for this and to hang out with some of these investment bankers who wanted to hear about upgrading their head.

53:09 So this is what I do for fun. Like, this is my passion, but cloud computing is also a passion. So yeah, I’m holding down a job. I do a lot of writing, blogging, and keynotes and strategy and stuff like that for my day job, and then as soon as I’m done with the day job, it’s like time to put on the biohacker hat. So I think there’s still some skepticism about cloud, and I think the biggest problem is security.

53:31 Mhm. And specifically, it just moves the point of failure from the company to somebody else who you trust. So how do you, like, what do you think about that? How do you respond to the whole cloud security thing? Yeah.

53:43 Security is about operations, and if you’re good at operations, you can be secure. Unfortunately, for most companies, cloud providers, where I’ve spent half my career, are better at operations than most companies, so yeah, someone’s always going to screw up or, or not on security. In the case of, uh, Hurricane Sandy, a bunch of web services went down because there was a, a cloud warehouse in the area, and so all of a sudden some company in Chicago may not have their product up because New York is suffering.

54:10 So there, there’s a lot more interconnectedness in the system than there is, but the interconnectedness also increases average availability. So it, it’s kind of a, a long, interesting debate for, like, a certain type of, of computer science tech person. But I would say, for the most part, what the cloud has done is that it’s made big compute really available, and the cool thing about that goes right back to the Quantified stuff that I do all the time, and it’s that it used to be really expensive and really hard in order to, say, get a lot of data on a server and crunch it.

54:42 But now there’s these amazing companies out there. In fact, here’s an example of something like that. Yeah, device number two is not a personal pleasure device. You put that right up to the camera in front of you. Okay, and for our listeners, it looks like something you would grip with your hand.

54:58 It kind of looks like one of those, um, uh, forearm strength, is a forearm strength trainer, but it’s got a computer on it. In fact, there you can see that come up. These are on Upgraded Self too, and what this does is it tells you to rest, and then it’s going to tell me in a minute to grip. I’m at a weird angle, but we’ll see what happens. So I’m gripping really, really hard.

55:19 And you might say, okay, why would I do something like that? The reason I do that is that not only is grip strength on a daily basis a really good indicator of how you’re doing that day. So if your, your grip is weak, you got exposed to toxins, so you didn’t get restorative sleep, something bad happened to you. And if you plot this on a day-to-day basis, you can do some cool stuff. But it also turns out, if you grip exactly how this device tells you to grip, it retrains your vagal nerve in your body, and when you retain your vagal nerve, you can regulate your blood pressure.

55:46 So people with problems there can basically improve the performance of the vascular system in very rapid order. So subconsciously, it’s not subconscious. It has to do with the fact that you squeeze not too hard and not too loose in a narrow band, and it actually, like, tones the nervous system in a way that’s amazing. Okay, so why is this tied to cloud computing? Because there’s a little port down here.

56:06 It’s a USB port, and this thing goes directly to the cloud, so your data gets uploaded, and it gets compared to everyone else. Right. The Zeo, the sleep company that unfortunately just went out of business, kind of bummed about that, same thing. They have more data on people’s sleep habits in the cloud than anyone’s ever had before. So if you really want to upgrade your performance and, like, kick more ass, look at what, like, 100,000 other people did when they gripped something like this, learn from all of their data and apply that back to you.

56:35 So this is, like, completely revolutionary, because companies don’t really do that on their own. Um, so the ability to upload data from all these crazy devices, these biohacking devices, is awesome. If you’re wondering, this is called the Zona Plus. It’s on upgradedself.com. It runs about 500 bucks, but, man, if you’re dealing with, you know, making your blood pressure exactly where you want it to be, this is a really cool device.

56:55 It’s crazy. So, so upgradedself is a different website than Bulletproof Exec. Yeah. Bulletproof Exec is a free information site, and I put, like, stuff I could sell as a book or as, you know, like, like there’s lots of very valuable stuff, like, like my best secrets, like the stuff that I’ve spent $300,000, um, including the last year, where I’ve spent a lot of money, um, on biohacking, and it, and it’s like all that stuff is there, and I don’t want it to be too commercial.

57:21 Yeah. I sell coffee. I have a few other devices. Everything that I put on upgradedself, it’s stuff that I use myself, stuff that I give my kids. Like, I teach my kids heart rate variability training.

57:31 My three-year-old can totally rock it on breath exercises. I don’t know if either of you have kids, but you ever see a three-year-old? You say, stop screaming and take a deep breath, and they go, and it’s not a deep breath, and they just freak out more. Well, after a few of these little games, where he’s like, well, I can make the light green by breathing, I go, hey, Allan, take a deep breath. He goes, I challenge anyone with a three-year-old to get him to do that.

57:55 If you don’t have biohacking equipment, it cannot be done. So everything on my website there is, like, stuff I would give my kids, including coffee. By the way, my kids get a tablespoon of coffee. They help me make every morning, and they love it. W a tablespoon is in, just a tablespoon, to, to, to eat a tablespoon of coffee to drink, and they actually get two beans each.

58:10 They love coffee beans. They think they’re like peanuts. Wow. You know, that’s the thing that I noticed about you, especially when you talked about Provigil in CNN. You said it makes me a better entrepreneur, businessman, and father, and you have a book that is the Better Baby book as well, and, like, you don’t hear that a lot from your typical entrepreneur.

58:26 It’s most, it’s usually about the Benjamins and about the IPO, but you do talk about your family a lot, and so that’s why every entrepreneur worth his salt is really working. Right? If you’re not working to make the world a better place, you probably suck as an entrepreneur anyway. Like, that’s what it comes down to. Right?

58:41 In retrospect, but when you’re in your 20s and your late 20s and coming off of a Wharton business degree, you’re like, let’s go and kick some ass. Probably. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with kicking ass for a good cause, and, you know, if you kick ass at work and you’re so tired when you come home that you don’t function very well and then you’re a total jerk to your family, like, that was not a win. So if, you know, if it takes a little Provigil uh, at the beginning of the day, which gives you more energy at work, and you come home and you play with your kids instead of, like, collapsing on TV and watching the couch.

59:10 Dude, Provigil rocks. Okay, we had a guy here, um, from Denmark recently. He has a book called Winning Without Losing. He’s an entrepreneur as well, and he works, you know, he’s he’s proud the fact that he works 35 hours a week, and this whole work-life balance is a really important thing for him, and he was from Denmark, nor they, um, like you, like him already, so he’s bulletproof approved. But how do you, how do you maintain that balance, the work-life balance?

59:37 Yeah, I mean, like, look at you, you’re flying around the world right now. I guess the family’s not with you, but how do you, how do you do it? It’s really pretty tough. I’m actually burning a lot of vacation this month, because when I get back, um, in another week, I’m going on the low-carb cruise, so I’m going to be giving a lecture on the cruise about, you know, low-carb diets and all that to a whole bunch of people who are really interested, but I’m bringing the family.

59:55 Like, we’re going, went on a cruise to Bise. You know, we’re going to have a good time, so I’m getting some really quality time there, and then I’m going to have to work my ass off in my day job, because I took two weeks of vacation in the same month. So, you know, I manage as best I can. One of the things that works amazingly well is that I work from home, so I get to have breakfast with my kids, and then my commute is I walk about 100 yards to my biohacking lab, slome office.

1:00:18 It’s surrounded by four old-growth cedar trees, has a little deck overlooking the pond, and it’s tough, man, but I work my ass off when I’m there, and then I go in for lunch, and I have lunch with the kids if they’re home from school, and then I have dinner with the kids, and I play with them, put them to bed, and then I go back to work. Right? So if I had to go into an office every day, I wouldn’t be able to do the quality of writing and the quality of work, and even, like, the webinars that I do for my day job, um, and my life would suck.

1:00:43 So if I spent two hours a day commuting, this wouldn’t work. So kill the commute. You’ve got to do it, and if your job makes you be there in person, live near your work. You’ve got to do it. Okay, and kids can eat Bulletproof.

1:00:53 You’re saying not only can they eat it, it’s the only way you’re ever going to be sane if you’re a parent. Try and give your kid gluten and watch him go bonkers, then take your kid off a gluten diet, and take him off bad fats, take him off weird food colorings and MSG, and give them lots of butter and lots of vegetables and lots of salmon and beef and things like that, and watch what they do. They get calm. They get focused. Their ability to self-regulate goes through the roof.

1:01:16 The worst thing ever is when kids are at someone’s house and they accidentally get gluten or some kind of weird, like, Omega-6 crap, and they come home, they’re like, ah, and you can just see them acting like all these other kids. But when you feed kids right, man, they, they desperately want to cooperate, and they desperately want to regulate. They’re just learning how to self-regulate, and the last thing you want to do is, like, oh, you’re trying to learn how to control yourself, are you here?

1:01:37 Have some crack. And that’s what happens when you give gluten to a kid. It’s not even fair. Would you give your kids Provigil? Um, no, I wouldn’t give anyone under 23 Provigil, because your prefrontal cortex finishes forming when you’re 23, and it’s not a good idea to mess with it until then.

1:01:52 And I’ve had a lot of people ask me that on the blog, and all, and, like, let your brain do what it’s supposed to do. Like, I would, I do neurofeedback on my kids. Yeah, you bet your ass. When they turn eight, they’re doing neurofeedback. Before then, it doesn’t work very well.

1:02:03 If you have, like, ADD or autism or something, your feedback I’ve seen it do miracles for very young kids, but when you get to be seven or eight, you can actually picture yourself outside your body, like your ability to be self-aware goes up, because your prefrontal cortex really starts to turn on. Then before then, you’re basically kind of in a theta state, La La Land, most of the time when you’re a kid. So it’s, you know, some drugs are appropriate for adults, and some, some aren’t, and this isn’t about, you know, rights.

1:02:28 Doesn’t 18-year-old have a right to take Provigil? Probably. It’s just a stupid idea, just like you have a right to do other stupid things. No, fair enough. We had, uh, one of our listeners from New Zealand, his name was Ash, and he put a video question for you, and you mentioned MMA fighters earlier, and I think he fights MMA, and he was wondering what do you recommend for carbohydrate intake for someone like an MMA fighter, who, who obviously probably needs more carbs than the rest of us?

1:02:50 Um, so yeah, just that question. It, it depends on your own carb tolerance. On the days you train really hard, having some carbs that evening is not a bad idea. Have it in the evening. It helps, it helps with sleep and it helps with recovery, so there’s nothing wrong with having carbs, but do white rice and sweet potatoes, and the less toxic carbs.

1:03:08 The problem we have is that a lot of the sources of carbs that people rely on come from basically seeds and vegetables and things that have very strong self-defense systems, so naturally occurring pesticides and things like that, and even like white potatoes, which, you know, some even paleo people are saying are okay now. If you look at what actually goes into making a potato good to eat, yeah, if it’s a freshly picked potato at the right time of year, and it was either not stored or stored properly, it’s okay, but there’s like 20 different ways you can make a potato make a lot of self-defense toxins, and the chances of you getting problems from eating a potato are reasonably high, which is why they’re in the middle of the Bulletproof diet. They’re no, nowhere near as evil as eating wheat, which is going to mess you up.

1:03:48 So you got to pick the right carb, and then experiment, right? So you work out. There’s guys who can completely kick ass on no carbs. I don’t think there’s very many of those. In fact, I think a no-carb diet is dangerous over long periods of time.

1:03:58 I gave myself some food allergies. I did three months, one serving of vegetables a day, the rest fat and meat, and after a while, like, your ability to make mucus goes away, so your eyes are dry, your sinuses are dry, but worst of all, the lining of your gut can stay intact. So I got leaky gut, cuz I didn’t have enough mucus to keep the stomach acid away from my stomach. So you got to basically measure what works for you, but it’s probably going to be, you know, at least 100 grams of carbs at night, and it may be a lot more.

1:04:23 But if you do it, just cycle in and out of ketosis. Make sure, in ketosis once a week, and, you know, see how it works. Do you fast for, like, a whole day at a time, or 36 hours at a time? Or, really, I’m a big fan of the Bulletproof intermittent fasting protocol, where I basically stop eating at 8:00 or 9 at night, and then I don’t eat again except for Bulletproof Coffee with the fat in it. Other than that, I don’t need anything else until 2 or until 6:00 the next day.

1:04:46 Okay, so I’ll basically go, was that 18 to 22 hours, or something like that, every day, basically? Uh, most days, yeah. I mean, the earliest I have lunch most of the time is around noon, and sometimes there’s a business meeting, and so, like, I have lunch an hour early or something, but for the most part, yeah, that’s what I do. I did that today, like, you know, I spent all morning talking with investment bankers and, like, these really intense guys about, you know, all the stuff they could do to perform better, and, you know, I was like, oh, wait, I haven’t had any lunch yet.

1:05:10 Fin. At the end of lunch, I guess I should eat something. And you said you used to get, um, laded when you would not eat, like, back when you’re heavy, days when you wouldn’t eat for a few hours at a time, and I, I used to get that way. And if I started the Bulletproof diet tomorrow, I mean, I’m reasonably healthy, I don’t eat much gluten, I start with the coffee and everything. How long do you think it takes for someone to adapt and get to where they can do this?

1:05:30 What do you call, what kind of fasting is it? It’s called Bulletproof intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting, and there’s plenty of totally legitimate intermittent fasting protocols out there, which basically um, Lean Gains is a site that has a lot of really good info about intermittent fasting, and Lean Gains even uses coffee, but what they don’t do is they don’t use the butter, and especially for women, it’s a big difference. You put women on intermittent fasting.

1:05:52 I have a whole post about this people should see, on the sites, like the truth about women and intermittent fasting. Women over time, when they intermittent fast, it raises their stress levels higher and faster than it does for men. Their cortisol levels. So eventually they start getting hormonal irregularities, and they can even lose their menstruation entirely. So you can save this off by increasing fat, because when you have the fat, your body’s like, oh, there’s enough calories in the world here.

1:06:13 I just don’t have to do any digestive process, so I’ll keep autophagy going, and you get all these benefits, but you don’t get cold and hungry and shaky, which is what can happen, especially when people start intermittent fasting. I also get people who post on the forum like, yeah, I was doing plain intermittent fasting, which is a perfectly good protocol with lots of studies behind it. I’m not opposed to it, like, but then I hit a plateau, and then I added Bulletproof Coffee, and I went through the plateau, and there’s actually a reason that I’m not going to disclose here, because it’s coming out in my book on the Bulletproof diet that comes out probably in about 90 days.

1:06:42 Okay, but there’s a secret about why Bulletproof Coffee is doing what it does, and, uh, when it comes out, it, I think it’s kind of going to rock some parts of the Paleo world, cuz it’s pretty legitimate science. Okay, is this your first book? My first. Well, it’s my third book. Oh, you did the Better Baby book which is, like, what do you do, and what do you eat, and, like, what are all the things you can do before and during pregnancy to have kids that are smarter and kids who will actually be able to pass better genes onto their kids.

1:07:07 So this is what you do for basically 9 or 12 months in order to have healthier grandkids, as well as to have healthier kids. Wow. And my goal in writing that book is I want there to be 10,000 less kids with autism when the knowledge in this book gets out there. I had the symptoms of Asperger syndrome till my mid-20s. I wasn’t formally diagnosed with it, because I fixed it before I ever really realized what was going on there.

1:07:28 My grandmother has a high-level degree in nuclear engineering. She won a lifetime achievement award for achievement in nuclear sciences, um, all of my aunts and uncles on that side of the family test very high on the Asperger scale. and so that, combined with the fact that we had our kids around age 40, age 39, and age 42 for my wife, means that our kids were at very high risk of having either autism or Asperger’s. So part of what went into the Better Baby book was, you know, 1,300 references, years of anti-aging research all focused on turning off neurological inflammation and creating more resilience.

1:08:04 We put the program together. My wife was actually infertile. She had polycystic ovary syndrome when she was 35, so using this diet, using recipes like, to get some ice cream, which is like ice cream with enough fat in it that it makes you want to reproduce, so you go to the bedroom after you eat it and you do this sort of thing, and after a while, fertility kicks back in. And we’re seeing this on the Bulletproof diet too. You know, I just got this great email.

1:08:27 We’re putting a blog post up this week. This guy was like, Dave, you didn’t put a warning label, and I’m like, what do you mean? And he says, well, I lost 90 lbs. I had to buy a new belt. He goes, oh yeah, and my wife is pregnant.

1:08:38 You know, she’s in her 40s. We haven’t had a kid for six years. We didn’t think it was possible, but she lost a bunch of weight too, so it turns out when you get stuff right with your gut bacteria, when you eat enough fat, your hormones actually start to regulate again. So that happened to us, and our midwife said, uh, you guys need to write a book about this, because of the 700 or so children I’ve delivered. Um, Lana has the healthiest midwife, sperm, maternal tissues of any woman she’s ever delivered a baby from, of any age.

1:09:06 So here’s a 40- or 42-year-old woman who has better fertility stuff than people in their mid-20s, and this is a function of what do you do with your stress, what do you do with your food, and what toxins do you not put into your body. Seems like women would be extra sensitive to that stuff. They are. They’re more sensitive than men, reproduction cycle and stuff. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true.

1:09:25 Okay, it, if we were to invent a test for sperm motility that worked really well, and, like, every 3 days we, like, you know, kind of took a little sample, um, it turns out that we’re more sensitive than women over a short time frame. So, like, the best indicator of your overall health is the health of your, your little swimmers, right? You know, if your semen are strong, or your sperm are strong in your semen, you are going to, basically, you can use that as an indicator.

1:09:50 But the thing is, you have a three-day window there. So, oh yeah, I was drinking last week. So, you know, I’m going to reduce my toxins, and time, vitamin levels matter, but for the most part, it’s a short window. But for women, it takes longer. So I suggest, like, 3 to 6 months before you decide to have kids.

1:10:03 You need to, like, clean stuff up and get your hormones going, right? Get the toxins out of your body, and then your chances of having a healthy pregnancy go up, and that’s what we’re trying to do, and healthy pregnancy makes healthier kids, and healthier kids make healthier grandkids, and it’s actually multigenerational. Okay, so that’s the first book. Right? Second book is called Upgraded Chef.

1:10:19 It’s ebook only. You can buy it on Amazon, and this is about how do you cook in order to produce less toxins, and how do you cook to taste good and be convenient and be on the Bulletproof diet? So it’s got some new charts for the Bulletproof diet, version three, like an early release version of that. Um, those are in the book, as well as, it’s really just three core techniques and 12 recipes, with, like, an infinite number of variations there. So people who do that are like, oh my God, I didn’t realize it was that easy to cook something, but it’s not just cooking something.

1:10:48 It’s cooking something with the lower amounts of toxins in it. The temperature you used to cook your egg, low temp, is, it ltin matters, especially for proteins and certain kinds of fats, whether the yolk is runny or not runny changes entirely what that egg does to you. A hard-cooked yolk has oxidized cholesterol in it. It’s inflammatory. You put that same yolk on a sunny-side-up egg cooked in the right kind of oil, it has a different effect on you.

1:11:11 So it matters, and I wish it didn’t matter, and, you know, you could just slam whatever you wanted, live on Snickers bars. So, unfortunately, the way it is, best way you can have an egg, toss the white, put the yolk in a smoothie. It tastes like ice cream. That’s what ice cream is. Is plus egg yolks plus something that tastes good.

1:11:28 So toss the white. It’s awesome, cuz that means Tim Ferriss could have my egg whites. I could have his egg yolks, friends. We got to hook you guys up. And what and what’s the latest book?

1:11:39 Then the latest book is going to be called The Bulletproof Diet, and I’m working on that right now, and it, I’ve basically got, like, 16 reasons, most of which are just not known to people, about why this is doing what it’s doing, as well as, you know, I need actually people who’ve had really major experiences on it to, like, send me a note about it, cuz it, it will have case studies in it as well. Um, so I mean, I’d say there’s 60,000 words of that written right now. I’m looking to be about 100, and it’s going to be a pretty solid book.

1:12:03 I’m hoping 90 days, probably 120 days is more likely, and, uh, there’s just stuff that isn’t ever talked about, even in, like, the paleo sphere, and all that, that really matters, and there’s really great research about it. It’s just that sometimes the different disciplines of science don’t get connected, because I’m you know, computer hacker, systems thinker, and kind of nonlinear. Sometimes I connect things from different disciplines and put them together, and it’s kind of intuitively obvious that that’s how it works because the results are very clear.

1:12:29 And then I’m hoping we’ll get more science around some of the stuff, know, sort of the, like, the devices you showed us, and, uh, Fitbits come out, and, uh, people using things like Strava. I cycle and run using this app, Strava. And do you see technology just completely taking over how we measure this and how we go about reacting to it? So I, I can foresee a scenario where your advice might not work for everyone. Now, it’s, it’s possible, because you’ve test, you haven’t tested on everyone, uh, just, you haven’t tested anything on everyone.

1:13:00 Uh, exactly, exactly. That’s exactly my point. So, do you see the technology will, will just completely dominate this sphere going forward? You know, anytime there’s, say, a healing event, like there’s basically three variables. There’s the person who’s having work done, there’s the technology or the method that’s used, and there’s the, the person that’s doing the healing, and sometimes the person who’s getting healed and the person who’s doing healing are the same person, but quite often it’s a third party, whether it’s a massage therapist, a physical therapist, a physician, or a naturopath, or whatever.

1:13:36 I don’t think technology is going to replace that. It actually doesn’t work, and most double-blind studies do their very damnedest to ignore one of the three variables, which is the person doing the healing, and my entire experience in upgrading my performance is that it really matters who you work with to improve your performance. So some people are better at fixing other people than others, and if we don’t acknowledge that, it’s very hard to do good work.

1:14:00 And any really competent physician that I’ve seen understands that there’s an art to being a physician. Any competent healer, whether it’s a shaman or an acupuncturist or anyone else who works in a modality like that, or even a therapist, all of those people, it’s the person who does the work, the person who receives the work, and also probably does their own work as part of that, and this modality, technology cannot take over. It’s a three-way discussion, and it always will be.

1:14:26 Can technology really inform both parties so they make better choices faster? Yes. Can technology measure whether that acupuncture treatment raised your heart rate variability? Yes, it can, and yes, it does. So we can verify some treatment modalities, especially the woooo ones?

1:14:43 Yeah, I don’t know what to think about homeopathy, right? Like, well, there’s nothing in there, it can’t work. At the same time, I know some pretty effective healers, including an ex-Johns Hopkins surgeon who now does homeopathy as part of his work. So either he’s a total idiot, but wait, he’s like a really well-educated guy who’s, like, cut thousands of people open, and now uses this to cut less people open. Okay, maybe he’s a nut job.

1:15:04 Maybe I’m a nut job, because I’m even willing to think about it, but actually, I just want the data. I’m willing to suspend disbelief. You show me the numbers, and I think that the number of sensors and the cost of sensors is dropping enough that we’re going to learn some really interesting stuff about what works and what doesn’t work, and one of the things we’re going to find that doesn’t work is drugs. Sometimes they don’t work the way we think they do.

1:15:24 Surgery doesn’t work sometimes the way we think it does, and some of these crazy, you know, healing modalities that people think work probably don’t work, but we’re going to get the data, and that’s what this is about. And if you don’t have cloud computing, you don’t have devices that measure data and send it up there and let us compare different things. We’re never going to understand the human condition the way we can now, and we never could have done this if we hadn’t built the cloud, and if we hadn’t built distributed sensor networks, and the internet itself, that’s now pretty much omnipresent.

1:15:50 What the kind of sensors I mean, I’ve never actually seen this kind before either, but I’m sure there’s a ton out there. This thing basically has a really, number one, the LED itself being really bright, and, you know, not burning a hole in your head and all this, but you’re sensing, you’re sensing blood flow. This is a blood, so I imagine I don’t know, people just have a sensor for whether they have AIDS or something, you know? Like, um, yeah, there’s systems on a chip.

1:16:10 People are certainly working on that, and there’s the implantable insulin sensors. There’s a new skin prick that can do cholesterol, which is kind of interesting. So it’s, it’s profound what’s happening, and we need a lot more of this. Uh, I’m working with a company called Talking 20, uh, they have a, they’re using a mass spectrometer, and you just, like, prick blood, and just actually quite a lot of blood out of your finger. It’s more than a normal little tiny diabetes monitor, so you have to kind of ring your finger out, but you get three or four drops of blood on a little blot, and you put it in an envelope to send it in, and for 20 bucks they tell you what’s in there.

1:16:45 Like, they’ll look for a protein, and they’ll tell you the levels. That’s awesome, because this used to be, like, a many-hundreds-of-dollars thing. So it’s one thing. Okay, now we have the ability to do these relatively low-cost sensing things, but then who cares if you have the data if it’s all broken up everywhere? We need to be able to crunch the data together so we can say, hm, 500 people who are in this age range, of this gender, who live at this latitude have this going on in their blood.

1:17:09 No one ever thought about that before. We’ve used this technology in, like, big retail, like Safeway, going back for almost 20 years, and companies like Nielsen, that does Nielsen Media for TV, Nielsen IRI, also does, like, who buys what groceries when, and they can tell you, you know, Friday night is beer and diapers night, and stuff like that. No one’s ever done that at a big enough scale for what’s going on inside our bodies. There’s electrical signals, how there’s magnetic signals you can measure coming off the heart, cuz it’s an electromagnetic field, right?

1:17:37 So what do we know about that? Stuff, just about nothing. You alone, if we took every instrument we could and we instrumented you, you could fill up all of the cloud right now, just the signals coming off your body. And that sounds like an amazing claim, but it’s not, because how many samples per second are we going to do? Well, an infinite number of samples per second will fill up the cloud, right?

1:17:57 And there’s so many different things we could sense, right? So maybe we should just stud your body with EMG sensors to know exactly which muscles fire, and then we can do an analysis of which fire and what pattern, why, and you find out that, oh, you’re, like, shrugging your shoulder in a weird way and you didn’t know it, and if you stopped doing that, something good happens. Who the heck knows? But there’s so much cool data, and we’re just at the beginning of this.

1:18:16 So that’s all for the future. For you, who inspires you? Um, who inspires me? I’m inspired pretty much every time someone, you know, reaches out and says, like, I just lost 30 lbs in the last two months, or I just had this profound change. So, people who are willing to, like, sit down and do the work, I find that really inspirational, as opposed to, you know, the armchair skeptic who, like, you know, I’ve got a 50 lb gut that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work.

1:18:45 So I’m like, if you want to step up and, you know, take a swing, and whether you win or not, like, I, I think that’s incredibly inspirational. And go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. Terms of, you know, people who, you know, really inspire me: guys like Ray CW are really interesting. Stephen Wolfram, like, these are guys who have really big brains.

1:19:04 They’re really interesting guys, but, like, chrisw, yeah, he takes a big handful of vitamins, kind of like I do. Like, I’m, we’re in alignment on that. He, you know, believes he can live a long time. I don’t actually think I’m going to upload myself to the internet, uh, I love sci-fi and all that stuff, but it’s probably more likely we’re already uploaded, like, more like The Matrix, right? So however all that stuff works out, maybe we’ll have the data at some point.

1:19:26 We’ll actually know, but what does inspire me about Rikers, well, is that before he did all of this kind of aging stuff he talks about now, this guy, like, wrote some of the first voice recognition software. So, like, people who are doing cross-domain things, like modern-day sort of Leonardo da Vinci people, uh, so I’m, I’m really intrigued by people who just go out there and, and hit problems from entirely sideways perspectives that other people didn’t think about. So people who are doing that sort of work just really are cool.

1:19:56 Okay, what do you want to be doing in another 5 years, or 10 years? Is it you think it’s going to be completely different than what we see you doing now? You know, it, it’s really hard to look at it on those time frames. I mean, if you’d ask me 5 years ago what I was going to be doing, I didn’t know I was going to be living in Canada. I didn’t know I was going to be working at Trend Micro.

1:20:14 I didn’t know that my blog would have a half a million people a month coming to check out the stuff that I’ve been doing for 15 years. Anyway, like, the future has a lot, you know, a lot of questions in it. Um, I do see myself not going into an office every day, because I’m done with that [expletive]. Will I, you know, be highly productive? Yeah, uh, I’m in the process of buying about 15 acres, and I’m going to be raising my own sheep, that’s for sure, my own chickens.

1:20:40 I’m not going to eat the chickens. I’m just going to eat the eggs, and then, like, feed the chickens to the dog. I’m totally legit. That, Jesus, and, uh, I mean, dogs have to eat, so, you know, stuff like that. So I’d like to actually do more around specifically soil ecology and the whole system of producing food, and what I learned from upgraded coffee, going through that, making the Bulletproof process, it is so precise.

1:21:04 When you talk to someone who’s a master of meat, let’s say, like, I, I did a podcast the other day, uh, with, uh, my friend Glenn from Alder Spring Farms, and, I mean, the stuff he spent 20 years looking at cows the way I look at coffee, and the little details are so important, and we never look at it from a performance perspective. Everyone out there today looks at things from two big perspectives. Everyone, like, the big companies, and all they look at the cost of something, how do we make it cheaper, and they look at the taste of something, how do we make it taste better?

1:21:38 Like, another guy who I admire is Nathan Myhrvold, you know, the former CTO of Microsoft. Guy’s total badass, right? He also pretty much popularized sous vide cooking in the US, and sous vide cooking is when you have very precise laboratory-grade temperature control. So I was a fan of sous vide back before we knew this was Nathan Myhrvold. There was a website that had lots of info on this, and he was just posting as, like, Nathan M, and I had, at the same time he was doing that, a sous vide cooker, like a commercial rice cooker, uh, and a laboratory temperature controller, because the only way you could control your temperature.

1:22:11 So I was like, what temperature should my meat be? And Nathan finally published the $600 volume of books, and he has this recipe for French fries, and you have to cook him, like, three different oils, three different times, to make the most delicious French fry ever known to man. So I admire his scientific prowess and the way he’s willing to apply laboratory techniques, but, dude, he’s fat. Nathan, if you’re listening to this, sorry, man, I love you. But here’s the thing: he optimized for taste.

1:22:36 Screw that. I want to optimize every single thing I can in my life, including my house, including the land I live on, including the lighting in my house, including the food I eat, including the way that food is made, for human performance and wellness. It is not about economics, and it’s not about taste. My experience is that when you optimize for human performance, it tastes really damn good, and if it doesn’t taste good, you need to find out why, because that’s probably your body telling you something.

1:23:00 Bacon tastes good. Butter tastes good. Steak tastes good. Vegetables taste good if you dip them in butter, like, okay, right? So we, uh, we need to think about this, because when you do that, you’re not just doing human performance, you’re actually doing quality of life.

1:23:15 And this gets much more into like the real reason we’re all here. You’re not here to just make a lot of money and be miserable. You’re not here to be really cheap and minimize cost and have a big bank account. Like, you got to live, and the way you live is you look at how do you live more, and you do that in an environmentally sustainable way that makes you feel really good and leave something left for the next generation. And that’s, you know, that’s how to live.

1:23:35 So what am I going to be doing in five or 10 years? More of that. Okay, do you think Bulletproof or do you want Bulletproof to be like a household name, or do you want it to be more a diet that more people follow? I, I’m certain that the diet, it already has. I don’t know, 100,000 people doing it.

1:23:52 It’s really hard to measure, but there’s, you know, half a million unique visitors a month, and it keeps growing, so I’m pretty sure some people are doing it based on the feedback. So in a long time, will it be, I’m on the Bulletproof diet? I don’t know. To be honest, if people are mostly thin and mostly their brains are turned on, and they aren’t walking around in a fog all the time, and they’re not dying of cancer and diabetes and heart disease. I don’t really care what the diet’s called.

1:24:13 Like, they can call it anything, so, like, I want that kind of change, um, particularly for kids. I think it’s, it’s just a little bit mean to feed [expletive] to kids and then ask them to perform, and to do the, the act of growing up, which is hard enough to do in and of itself. So, like, I would like to think my kids, kids, a lot of the side effects you don’t see until much, much later. That’s the problem. Yeah.

1:24:37 So I’d like to think my kids have a bit of an unfair advantage because they eat the right foods, but I’d also like to share that advantage with every single other kid out there. And if we do this right, we will actually change the environment around us to support the kind of food that’s useful, which is locally grown, locally produced. It saves fossil fuel. It works better, and it completely messes up big food. So there’s going to have to be some changes here.

1:24:58 And if not, what’s going to happen is already happening: one in eight couples can’t reproduce now. My wife’s, uh, fertility consulting practice is going crazy, cuz people, like, they read the book, and they’re like, whoa. So then they call up, and they do Skype coaching sessions, and they look at their hormone levels, and they look at their nutrition, and all of a sudden they can get pregnant again without doing strange hormone injections and IVF and all that stuff, just by, like, cleaning up what’s in their food, just by reducing stress level, LEL, and stuff like that.

1:25:25 But for the people who don’t do that, the one in eight who can’t reproduce now, it’ll be one in four in another 20 years, and our population problem will solve itself if we don’t fix this. So I worry very little about there being too many people for the carrying capacity of the Earth, because we’re messing ourselves up so much intergenerationally, epigenetically, that we just won’t produce that well, and when we do reproduce, the survival rate will be lower. It’s already happening.

1:25:50 Dave, I feel like I can keep you here for hours. You’re like an onion. Like, once I started doing things, I find other things. And I think you mentioned in one of your podcasts that you, you almost got a minor in religious studies. Is that, it was one class away from it?

1:26:01 Yeah. Okay. At UC Santa Barbara. We could probably talk for hours about that. Um, just for people that want to get your podcast and, and just your other stuff, how do they get a hold of you?

1:26:10 What Twitter should they use, and what Twitter should they not use? I think I screwed up. I was going to reply to that tweet, but then I thought people might see the wrong one. So here’s the deal. I appreciate you asking that.

1:26:19 Bulletproof Exec is where I talk about biohacking. I put up all kinds of cool personal stuff at Dave Asprey, which also has a lot of followers, is my cloud computing guru account. It’s got, I don’t know, 7,000 followers, and almost all of them are geeks in cloud computing and the security industry. So if you care about the conversation we had about big data, cloud computing, security, encryption, I will tweet about that there, and I tweet regularly on that account, but it’s kind of bifurcated.

1:26:44 Biohacker is Bulletproof Exec. The other one is Dave Asprey. Uh, so I appreciate if people, like, keep them in the right space, but I answer coffee questions on Dave Asprey sometimes. I just try not to, so people can find me on bulletproofexec.com. And if you’re interested in the stuff I talked about, or you want to try my coffee, thank you.

1:27:01 I appreciate it, and I tell you how to make relatively healthy coffee without following the Bulletproof process, um, on the blog. So, yeah, I offer coffee that’s the same cost as the Starbucks high-end stuff. That’s on upgradedself.com. So if you’re interested in the Upgraded Focus brain trainer and, uh, the Zona Plus and things like that, as biohacking devices, these things are really hard to find. Most people, I haven’t even heard of these before.

1:27:25 So they’re up there, and I do have researchers who work for Bulletproof Exec, and right now the site supports them, not me. So I put the money back into paying for more infographics, um, paying for people to help edit books and things like that. I just want to get all this info out there. I feel like I have, like, five books’ worth of info in my head that I just, like, want to share. So I appreciate it if, you know, you check out upgradedself, try the upgraded coffee.

1:27:49 Um, there is a study that we’re publishing soon about the difference in cognitive function of this coffee versus other normal mass-market brands. It’s real science. What else? betterbabybook.com is where you can go to read about the Better Baby book, if you’re thinking about having kids or if you’re pregnant. That’s the place to go. And if you see this and you want to buy the Better Baby book, it’s on Amazon.

1:28:11 Thank you so much for doing that. Um, we’re working on improving our sales on that. I just want lots of people to see the knowledge in that book. I’m kind of wishing I had just given it away for free instead of going through a publisher, but I’m thankful Wy sold the book, and thanks, Gary, to for introducing me to your agent. That’s how I ended up selling my book, cuz Gary helped me out.

1:28:28 So more power to Gary Taubes. Read his latest book, Why We Get Fat. It’s an awesome book, very cool. And we are giving away You got it, man. It’s been great fun.

1:28:56 Thank you. Yeah, it’s just, I, I, I, we’ve had a lot of people on that talk about diets and this and that, and I’ve watched a lot of people, but I don’t know with you, it feels like, I don’t know, you’re not selling it. You don’t have to convince me. I don’t know, and I like the fact that you take some chances and just say, say things like, yeah, I take Pridal, what you know, and, and so many people seem to dance around little diet things, and they don’t want to be too controversial, and sometimes you got to jump in.

1:29:19 You know, I hope I’m wrong about some of these things. In fact, my website says at the bottom we certify that at least one item on this website is wrong. Dude, I know I’m wrong. That’s why the new book that comes out, Bulletproof Diet 3.0, because the first two versions can be upgraded. Everything can be upgraded.

1:29:35 It’s a process. We’ll always upgrade everything out there, so the most important thing is we’re asking the question. Right? Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right, and thanks for your show, man. This is awesome.

1:29:43 I’m really, I had a good time, and you’ve got just a great series of podcasts going on. Cool, man. Well, thank you much. I, we’ve been working on this for a few months. Thank you so much to Paul G, who was our guinea pig for the week.

1:29:54 Uh, the MFOL guinea pig. What, 5 days? Yeah, about a week. And I also did the coffee as well, although I’m, I didn’t, I didn’t do your coffee, so I don’t know how how, how, what the difference is going to be. I’m still going to experiment some more going forward.

1:30:07 We’ll talk later about that. I’m, I’m going to jump on the coffee myself, and it makes a few changes. My girlfriend, I’m going to give your ebook, because, like, and she’s old school, and we have a 9-year-old stepdaughter, and she’s making her cakes, and I’m like, Jesus, honey, stop giving her sweets. But it’s this maternal instinct, but you know, you’re killing them. You’re killing them.

1:30:24 Here’s a little trick. She’s given him cakes. Make the cakes out of sweet rice flour, okay? It’s still full of carbs, but at least it’s not full of gluten, and the kids will benefit, and you can make pretty darn good cakes out of that stuff. It’s sticky enough.

1:30:37 I like that compromise. I like that. Okay, very good. Cool. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, um, please subscribe.

1:30:43 If you want to see the cool glasses that Dave is wearing, um, come and see us at YouTube channel London Real TV. Um, I think you, we can talk you all day about the glasses, but you want to get more about, um, about Dave, go to his website, and, uh, we appreciate that. We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Um, it’s always kicking off here They sell all the, on-it products.

1:31:08 I believe they’re going to have your coffee soon. They do. They actually are carrying it right now, so they’ve got the coffee, and they’ve got the MCT oil, which is like a requirement to get the full effect from Bulletproof Coffee. That recipe has to have MCT. And in, okay, good, cuz I’ve been doing coffee with coconut oil, and I usually serve it when people come here, and they love, love the taste, but it’s only 15% of the right medium chains.

1:31:27 Right. See, I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening. So, um, you can go to XRA if you’re in the Europe or the UK. Sometimes it can take 3 or 4 weeks to get stuff from the states, and, uh, I got some Alpab brain from XRA the other day, and it took 3 days, so, uh, yeah, check out the company.

1:31:39 They’ve got all that stuff. I need MCT oil. Bulletproof Coffee, is that it? Glutathione is really good stuff too, I believe. they’ll be stocking that, and Whole Foods in the UK would have that butter.

1:31:48 They carry butter, or I don’t know if they, I didn’t find any of the Kensington Street one the other day when I went there. Um, they had something that was probably grass-fed. It looked like it, but they weren’t that clear on the label, but I know that you can buy Kerrygold Irish butter all over the place. Probably have to go to, like, a Marks and Spencer or something. Okay, Kerrygold Irish butter, I’m on it.

1:32:07 Okay, awesome. Um, thank you so much, guys. I appreciate it. Until then, it’s about the journey. I’ll wish you guys both very well.

1:32:13 Thank you. Okay, take care. Thanks man.