In the mid-1950s, the first company on the planet to make a thing that could track your number of steps, they made it up for marketing. And to this day, we're still going, we got to do 10,000 steps a day because of some marketing crap from the 50s.

Eight glasses of water a day. They ever tell you how big they are? No. Sounds like stupid made-up advice to me.

I take do that because you're much less likely to get Alzheimer's disease. What would you say to the people that aren't even going to make it to 80? You can do something about that.

First and and I think the most obvious, how much of the health advice we get today today is complete BS. Almost all of the health advice you get today is complete BS. Even something like 10,000 steps a day, you know where that came from? Where in the mid-1950s, the first company on the planet to make a thing that could track your number of steps, a pedometer, was a Japanese company. They made it up for marketing. And to this day, we're still going, we got to do 10,000 subs a day because of some marketing crap from the 50s. And eight glasses of water a day. They ever tell you how big they are? No. Sounds like stupid made-up advice to me.

Eight hours of sleep a night. Everyone needs that. More is better, right? Except in studies of millions of people tracked over multiple years, the people who live the longest sleep 6 and 1/2 hours a night. They die less from all-cause mortality than people who require eight hours of sleep to fully recover, really. So healthy people need less sleep. But getting more sleep if you don't need it is not good for you at all.

So almost everything needs to be personalized for you, and it needs to be based on your goals. And different people have different goals, right? You want to be solid muscle or do you want to be one of those scrawny marathoner guys? Totally different everything. And if you're not a professional athlete, you're probably getting terrible advice that was meant for those guys. So everybody's kind of individual, and that and that means that everybody needs kind of their own individual plan.

Yeah. And I've been working on that since the beginning of the biohacking movement. Major book on longevity. And even then, is your goal to live longer or have a brain that works really well? Which one's more important? And most of us don't know.

So when I work with people now at Upgrade Labs, we got 30 locations opening across the US and Canada right now. People come in and we measure where's your body, and then we ask you what do you care about? And then based on that, what's the fastest path to get you there? And it is probably not working out an hour a day.

And this is part of my revenge because when I was really fat, 300 lb, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, 6 days a week, 18 months straight without fail. And I went on a low-fat, low-calorie diet, and I never lost a pound. And I still had a 46-inch waist when I was done. Now, I was strong, but I was still fat. And these people who sit there have never been fat and they tell you, "Oh, if you would just work out more and eat less, you lose weight. It's physics." They're idiots. It is not real because I did it.

And I'm sitting there at Carl's Jr. And with all my thin friends, they're eating double western bacon cheeseburgers. I've got the chicken salad with no chicken and no dressing because of calories. And I'm like, I work out more than all my friends combined and I eat less than any of them. And I'm still fat. Maybe it's too much lettuce. Or maybe that's not how it works.

And at this point, there's so many different ways to just poke holes in the people who tell you just eat less and work out more. It is a way to break your body, break your hormones, raise your cortisol, drop your testosterone, and get injured. But it's not a good way to lose weight.

Well, it's interesting that you say that because I would have said, "No, dude. You have to lose weight. If you if you work out 90 minutes a day, you reduce your calories, you're gonna lose weight. Like, you can't run five miles a day and be fat." You know, I absolutely believe that until 18 months of doing it didn't work. Do you think it didn't work because it was you or it just didn't work or it wouldn't work for anybody cuz that works for some people.

It does work for some people. It just doesn't work sustainably because constant gnawing hunger lowers your willpower. And even some of the angriest calories in calories out guys online, one of them's like, "Wow, people can lose weight on my programs that are based on eating less and working out more." He says, "But a lot of them are starting to use Osimpic because they just don't want to use their willpower up every day on eating random stuff."

Yeah. It it if you do it right, you should lose weight and you should never be hungry. Like I have not had anything to eat today. I had a little bit of butter and some MCT in my Danger coffee. I don't know, eight hours ago or something. and I probably won't eat till dinner, and it doesn't matter because my metabolism works. Do you do you

So that's intermittent fasting. It's a form of intermittent fasting. I don't do that every day. I do that maybe twice a week.

Well, doesn't the coffee and the butter in the morning kill the the autophagy and the intermittent benefits? Not at all.

Well, I'm going to start copying you then cuz I'll tell you I Dude, I I some dude named Andy Elliott. I don't know if you heard him. He's like Andy Elliot.

Yeah. He's a sales trainer. He's getting kind of popular online cuz he's controversial. Well, he bet me 50 grand I couldn't get a six-pack in 90 days.

Oh, dude. That was pretty chunky. So, I bet him and took his 50 grand. And all I did, dude, and I went through the same [ __ ] Like, I used to weigh food and eat tilapia. And I It was like the dude, it's not sustainable.

No. And I knew it wasn't. And I said to myself, listen, I'm going to get to a point where I'm going to do I mean, I can I can be uncomfortable, but I'm going to do something that I can sustain. Otherwise, what good is it? Cuz you go up, you go down, you go up, you go down.

Anyway, so he bet me money and I had already tried. I mean, I've already been in shape before, but it never lasted. And so I said, "Screw it." And my wife lost a whole bunch of weight just like this. And I didn't even realize what she was doing. She said she did intermittent fasting. So I said, "Screw it. I'm going to do intermittent fasting." Dude, it works. It works like a freaking champ. I tell everybody, dude, that is the thing that has by far worked the best. And it's effortless. I mean, yeah, you And again, I'm not hungry in the morning either. I eat at 2:00 every day.

Mhm. You You were coming, so I ate right before you got here. But but I'm telling you, or I'm not telling you. I'm I'm telling the audience, folks, intermittent fasting was the best thing for me. Now, what do you think about it? And what's the best way to do it?

The first book promoting intermittent fasting was the bulletproof diet, about 11 years ago, I published that and it started the intermittent fasting trend and I've been doing it reliably. It's one of the ways I've kept all the weight off, but I only do it a couple days a week because once your metabolism works, you don't have to. So, I agree with it. The best time to eat is 2 o'clock. So, I usually eat between noon, sometimes even 10:00 a.m., but I stop eating at 5 or 6. So, earlier dinners is really important. And if you look at the cover of Heavily Meditated there, that's not airbrush. And I didn't take diuretics. I didn't diet at all. I just got off an airplane and went into the studio. I'm 5% body fat in that photo. I might be 6% now. And I was a 300 lb fat computer hacker with a lot of extra skin.

And how do you do that without ever being hungry and thinking about food? Get enough animal protein. Don't eat bad fats and have an empty stomach some of the time. And people have been freaking out since I started talking about putting butter in coffee. We used to call it bulletproof coffee. I have nothing to do with bulletproof anymore. Danger is my new brand because who knows what you might do. But people say, "Well, it breaks the fast because of calories." No, there's two things that happen when you're fasting. Your insulin doesn't go up and your blood sugar doesn't go up and your mTor, that's three things. MTTOR doesn't go up. MTOR is a thing that basically tells the body to go into grow mode. So, as long as those things are low, you're still fasting. So, you can have some butter and some MCT oil. And what those do is they make it so you don't even think about food, and they give your brain a substantial kick. And if you're doing it with danger coffee, it's got about 22 bucks worth of trace minerals in every bag. And these trace minerals also help your cells make more energy. So you you do that and you're going, "All right, I just don't care about food." And then everyone else is trying to grab Doritos or something in a meeting and you're just dialed in and they're all crashing because they don't know how to eat.

So you were a fat b uh computer hacker, you said. So what got you into this whole thing?

I was in Silicon Valley, 26 years old. I made $6 million. Uh these were what? Um this was the company that held Google's first servers, the first data center, really the first data center company in the country called Exodus Communications. I was a co-founder of their consulting group. We grew my part of the business to 100 million a quarter in revenues. And this was back like pre-Biden dollars. Money was worth something back then. And we uh yeah, I made six million when I was 26, lost it when I was 28. That was not fun.

How'd you lose it?

I was blacked out because I was a member of the leadership team. So, I knew all the inside information. Couldn't sell my shares. The whole industry crashed. It was It was pretty crappy. And so, I've been an entrepreneur on and off ever since then, mostly on. And today, I've got nine companies in my portfolio. And, you know, Bulletproof is probably the most famous of the companies. And um I've they fired me from the board a few years ago and uh sold it off to some kind of hedge fund thing. Not a big win. Would have liked it for it to be. I write about that and heavily meditated just like what happened. It's best I could talk about.

Well, that's going to make everyone get the book cuz I was about to say like what the hell happened.

Oh yeah. Venture capitalists, man. They're like hitchhikers. What they do is like, oh yeah, you can use my credit card to fill up your tank with gas and as soon as you want to go sideways instead of just getting out, they try to kill you and steal your car. Like that's the VC business model in a nutshell.

So you raised money?

I raised $90 million.

Damn.

Yep.

So you say you're going to live to 180 at least, man. Don't Don't limit me here.

Well, how how old do you think you're going to live?

I want to die at a time and by a method of my choice. When I'm done, I'm done.

When do you think that'll be?

You know, there's a lot of stuff to work on in the world. I'm not anywhere near bored. It's It's like there's so many problems to hack. So, I don't know. If I get really bored and I'm like, I got nothing left here, then I'm done and I'm okay with that. I'm not one of the one of the don't die kind of things like, you know, dying is I'm I have no problem with death. I just don't want to do it yet cuz I'm having fun.

What do you What would you say to the people that aren't even going to make it to 80? You know, you can do something about that right now if you want to. It is really easy to make yourself live 10 more good years using just the knowledge we have today. That's simple. And people say, well, in fact, one of the guys in the longevity field says, no, there's no evidence we can extend human life. We've already extended it by 6 and a half years. People just don't know it. But if you look at the numbers, it's already happened and we're just getting going.

If you were to go into your favorite AI tool, say I want a really serious longevity program, maybe give it some lab datas, it'll tell you all kinds of stuff. You come into Upgrade Labs, will measure 187 million data points a year, looking at the electricity in your brain, how your cells work, whether you have visceral fat, all that stuff. And well, here's what to do in 20 minutes to change it. So, it used to be guesswork, but we can tell you how old are you compared to your peers just with a blood test. You can get a single injection. I've done this of gene therapy that for the average person, it'll make you nine years younger in lab tests from one injection that doesn't even hurt. So this is it. This is at your labs. We don't do that. That's at a company called RMI done in Costa Rica.

I want to go. I'm all about anti-aging. It's almost it's almost vanity. Like I don't I don't want my neck to sag. I don't want crepey skin. And I I I just want to like I don't care if I'm 97 as long as I look like I'm 37.

Well, you want to know your name and not be wearing a diaper, too, right?

100%.

You know what's funny, dude? You say that, but the other day I was looking at a dude that I've known for a long time and I wanted to call him.

Mhm.

And I went and I'm thinking, "What the [ __ ] is his name?" And I sat there for like a minute and I couldn't get it wouldn't come to me. And I that's the first brain fog I've ever experienced. And it scared me. I'm like, is this is this like freaking the start of dementia? Like what is this? And so I started methylene blue.

What do you think about that?

It's good for most people. I've been on it on and off for the last 20 years.

It's weird to me that you're drinking fabric dye.

It's People say it's fabric dye, but they use it for surgery. So it's more of a surgical dye than

But what is it actually? Is it natural?

It's not natural. If you wanted the natural version of methylene blue, it's blue-green spirulina extract, probably does the same thing. But methylene blue, if you're flying or you're under extra stress with your mitochondria, there's pretty good evidence for longevity. If you take large doses of it though, you got to watch out because it's an anti-depressant and it'll mess with you if you're taking psychedelics. And some people take so much of it, like I feel so good. I'm like, that's cuz you're taking an antid-depressant at those doses. And when you take an MAO inhibitor like that, if you get erectile dysfunction, that's a side effect. So low-dose methylene blue probably good. High dose maybe not.

What what's a side effect?

A side effect of MAO inhibitors which is a class of anti-depressants is you get erectile dysfunction. So that's not a very fun don't nobody want that.

Yeah.

What do you do then?

Well, there's other medications for you can back off on your methylene blue. But one of the things that's part of my longevity strategy now I do 150 pills a day. I have no issues. I'll use any technology on the planet to extend my life to perform better as a human being, be more present, more conscious, anything. Like I'm non-denominational about that. I take low-dose Cialis and I take it every night before bed, 5 milligrams. And you do that because you're much less likely to get Alzheimer's disease because it basically holds your blood vessels open and it's part of my longevity stack. It's like a vasodilator.

Yeah, exactly. I don't do it during the day though because u it actually vasodilates me so much it drops my blood pressure. You don't want to be low blood pressure. It's way worse than high blood pressure.

Really?

Oh yeah.

So what about cholesterol? Cuz a lot of people are saying now cholesterol is actually good.

I've been saying that since my first book. So I started in my mid-20s. I had profound brain fog to the point that I bought disability insurance. How many 25-year-olds do that?

Were you like forgetting names?

I couldn't remember anything. I I forgot names. I would drop words in the middle of a sentence and I would sound like Kala Harris like word sal like trying to talk while your brain isn't finding the word. That was Biden. Actually, it was both of them. Biden. I couldn't believe he was not taken out of the presidency with his speech. I felt bad for him on that front. Like clearly there was something going on in his head. And I I run a neuroscience institute that that basically helps CEOs and entrepreneurs upgrade their cognitive function. I spent 10 years doing it. That's what heavily meditated. It's about it's data from 10 years of working with more than a thousand high performers to figure out what works and what doesn't on their brains. And I I felt like man Biden is adultled. But anyone who's listening, you felt this. You got shitty drunk. The next morning you got brain fog, right? But it sneaks up on you. So, I had this bad in my 20s and I said, "I got to do something." So, my first thing before I even learned about longevity, I learned about smart drugs or nootropics as we call them today. And I bought $1,200 of them from Europe back, God, this was in the '90s. And they came in this brown unmarked bag and I opened it up and I took a handful and I did it for a week and I thought, "God damn it, like these things don't work." And then I quit taking them and the next day I said, "Wait a minute, I'm thinking about words again." Because when your brain works, it's invisible. And when your brain doesn't work, it's scary. So right now, if I forget a word, even one time, it's so unusual that I pick it up and I know what I did that caused it. It's always my fault.

What What are the faults?

It's usually lack of sleep. It can be certain toxins, like you hang out in a room with a bunch of toxic mold, or my favorite one, if I do a book signing for a couple hours with a Sharpie and I'm breathing all those fumes, I'm going to forget a few words afterwards cuz I just poison myself, right? But I don't have cognitive dysfunction the way I did in my 20s. In fact, I've raised my IQ. And the ability to just bring your brain online fully at any time, it's a gift. And not everyone has that.

Is there products that you have that fix that?

Uh, one of them is called Brain 101. It's part of my my line of supplements. It's called Subgrade Labs, SU PP grade. And I'll send you some Brain 101 if you want. And I pair it with something called Motivation 101, which is all the stuff that gives you dopamine. Because one thing is, do my neurotransmitters let me remember things and think about stuff? And the other one is, am I motivated? And changing your dopamine levels is profound because dopamine makes you motivated to move towards a goal, but it doesn't make you happy when you get it. That's why like I really want that BMW. And then you get the BMW and you're not happy. You go, [ __ ] That's why when I made that 6 million bucks, I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I make 10 million. Like getting stuff is unsatisfying, but pursuing it is fun. It's it's the chase. That's what dopamine does. So, I take those two supplements, brain 101 and motivation 101. But the other thing I do is in heavily meditated and it's a new thing in the biohacking world. I think it may be as it may become as big as intermittent fasting and I call it bicep and it's it's not this bicep. It's brief intentional conscious exposure to pain.

What?

Well, when I was a kid, I used to just be horrified. You ever read about monks who like whip themselves?

Yeah.

Like, oh, it's because they're such sinners. That's not why they do it. And you read about yogis who lay on a bed of nails because they're showing off what a good yogi they are. Yogis don't show off. So, the reason that they're doing that and the reason biohackers like me will uh sit in ice water. And the reason Texans also like me will eat really spicy peppers. It's all the same mechanism. Intentionally doing something that's painful for a brief period of time changes your dopamine receptor sensitivity by up to 250%. So there's value in doing something that sucks for one minute every day that actually physically hurts.

Is that the thing?

One minute. 1 to 3 minutes.

Yeah. And so so the monks, they were just telling their body, be a good monk. Use less dopamine to pray all day. So they'd whip themselves. And the yogis lay on the bed of nails for a few minutes. And then their nervous system is primed to be a better yogi and more conscious and all that. So this is something that biohackers, entrepreneurs can do. And heck, I used to make a little bed of nails plastic thing maybe 10, 15 years ago and I'd sell that because if you do that before bed, you just drop into this deep sleep and I used to have a hard time going to sleep. Don't anymore.

Do you have a list of all your [ __ ]

It's on daveasper.com. It's kind of 3,000 blog posts and it's in most of my books. But you have to go through all that.

Well, you can also just

Why don't you just condense it down and give me the

Because I'm not a biohacker. I'm a bio follower. Uh, you know, here's the thing. Without knowing goals, it's hard to do. So, what I did is I wrote a book on here's how to eat so you have energy, you're never hungry, and you have the body you want. And that was a bulletproof diet. And then I wrote a New York Times bestseller on here's how to make your brain work better than anyone. And that's called Headstrong. And then I wrote here's how to book.

Yes.

Yeah. So that's the most condensed knowledge. Takes thousands of hours to write a book. Headstrong is that book. And then Superhuman is my I spent $2 million reversing my age uh book. And if you were to read those three, you've got okay, now my brain works. Now I know how to eat, so I've got my energy. And now I know how to live longer. But then you're going to have to buy heavily meditated. Because here's the deal. If you realize energy is not a problem, feeling good is not a problem, and you're going to live longer, you probably want to learn how to be in control of your emotions and your nervous system and how to be able to choose your state. So, heavily meditated, it it's taken me 25 years of study at monasteries and with gurus all over the planet. I just never talked about it very much because putting butter in coffee and using red light stuff on your face and all that, that was revolutionary enough when I started the biohacking movement. But I've been studying with shamans and masters of different lineages for 20 years. And that's what's in heavily meditated. People spend $20,000 a week to come and spend five days with my team at 40 years of Zen and we go through their brain. We hook electrodes up. We show you what's going on there. We teach you how to turn off all the alerts. Anything that triggers you, you just erase it. Because what most people do is something pisses us off and because we're functioning adults, we get pissed off and then we smile and we do the right thing and we're polite, but everyone knows that you're pissed off, right? So, we don't have congruence. So, your inner state is pissed off and your outer state is smiling and friendly and behaving. It doesn't work because it costs you a lot of energy to do that and everyone knows that you're full of crap anyway. So

What this reset process that I do for entrepreneurs does is it turns off the alert so you don't get pissed off anymore. So then your interstate and outer state match, and you're in charge of yourself; because if I can trigger you, means I'm in charge, not you.

And so the real game is how do I be in charge of my inner state all the time so I can choose what it is? Because it turns out high performance altered state, creativity altered state, healing altered state. So this is like the bible of things you can do that change your state, and this one heavily meditated. Heavily meditated. I think it's my most important book about—Is it out right now? It's—you can buy it right now. It comes out May 20th. Folks, go get *Heavily Meditated* on anywhere you get books. *Headstrong* is the other one. Yeah, *Headstrong* is the one for your brain, and *Superhum* is the one for living way longer than you're supposed to.

Now I see a couple of superhumans nowadays. Isn't there some sort of infringement going on? I—I think my book came out before they did, but I didn't—Who can own that word superhuman? I did own the term bulletproof for a time. Well, somebody owns *Monetize Your Knowledge*. Seriously? Yeah, cuz I put an ad out for Lightseed because I've never advertised this company. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm going to start running some ads and see if I can blow it up. *Monetize Your Knowledge* has a trademark on it. Yeah. So, I—I—I put in the ad, *Monetize Your Knowledge*, and I get this letter. I give it to my lawyer, and they're like, "Yeah, this is a—this is existing. You—you need to say like, sell your—your know-how." I'm like, how do you—how do you protect a freaking English sentence? You know, I'm wondering is—was that a registered trademark or just a common law? Have a circle R on it? Yep. See, the people who—who issue these things in the government, they're supposed to stop descriptive things like that. That's kind of a lame—like—Yeah. Like, you know, hey, uh, make yourself well. Oh, that's protected. It's stupid. Yeah.

Now, now what about nicotine? That was what I just put in my mouth. Ah, nicotine—that, you know, people used to say nicotine is bad for you. Nicotine's now being found to be wonderful for you. It's not just now. So, 10 years ago, I invited Dr. Nicotine on my show. He's a researcher from Vanderbilt University. His real name is Andrew. I just call him Dr. Nicotine. In 1986, he published the first paper showing that nicotine reverses Alzheimer's disease. And when you read *Headstrong*, my cognitive enhancement book, I talk about how to use nicotine as one of the most potent and powerful smart drugs right after caffeine. Smoking is bad for you. Tobacco causes cancer. Pharmaceutical nicotine is good for your brain. It stops neuron death in your brain at low doses. At low doses. What about high doses? If you take too much nicotine, and again, this is unrelated to smoking, but if you just take too much nicotine, you could notice your hair starts to get thin, or you get erectile dysfunction. That means you're taking too much. If you have active cancer, you don't want to be taking it because it causes new blood vessels to grow. You want new blood vessels to grow because it's part of muscles. It's part of your heart, part of your brain. It's very good for you. But if you have cancer and you're on western cancer treatment that's trying to restrict that, you wouldn't want to take nicotine.

If you got cancer, would you take any western treatments? What I would do is I would figure out what the cancer was, uh, and then based on that there's whole sets of data that show for this kind of cancer, these approaches actually work from the west, and these alternative approaches also work. So what I would do is a combination of the two, but there's a very good chance I would just do the natural approach. The problem that people have is they start believing that a natural approach is going to work when they have no evidence whether it will or won't. But they just say, "I'm not going to look." So whether you're going with a western or an alternative approach, get the data, track it every month. If what you're doing is working, you'll see it. And so I'm non-denominational about that. But I wouldn't want cancer and radiation and all that unless there was no other choice and I was convinced it was going to meaningfully change things. Most western cancer treatments, they're just worried about don't die. They—they screw up your life and they give you three additional months and they drain your bank account. I'm not doing that. Feel like [ __ ] Yeah. I'd rather jump off a cliff if that's my choice and give the money to something that matters.

Well, nowadays they're saying that most cancers are just parasites. What do you think of that? There was a—a woman who first proposed that in the '90s. Her name is Hulda Clark. The book is kind of half crazy and half maybe futuristic, and I don't think most of them are parasites, but we do know that antiparasitic drugs treat cancer—things like ivermectin and fenbendazole—and they do it reliably, but not because they're killing parasites—well, how come people don't just take that? It's almost like you can't really make a lot of money because ivermectin and fenbendazole are, you know, old drugs—cheap and easy—cheap and easy—same thing with things like—like herpes—Right? They have all these expensive herpes drugs. There's an oil, a synthetic oil antioxidant that we used to take in the '80s for longevity. It stops all pox viruses, including chickenpox in their tracks, and it cost you 15 cents. I wonder why they don't talk about that one. Where do you get that? It's called BHT. You can buy it on Amazon. BHT. So, if you get cold sores, you take BHT and it'll go away. Yeah. 300 milligrams a day. What about actual herpes? Same thing. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. So when they say herpes is incurable, that's [ __ ] It'll stop herpes. It may not ever leave the root of—was the axon, wherever it lives, but it'll never come out again if you do that for a while. And I've—same thing with uh—when you get herpes or not herpes, when you get chickenpox on your skin, what's that thing called? Uh—um—I never had it so I forget the name of it, but chickenpox. Yeah. When you get chickenpox as a kid, when you're older, you get something. Shingles. Thank you. Um, yeah, it works for shingles, too. And BHT, you don't want to have small amounts of it in your food because it's an endocrine disruptor, but herpes is associated with Alzheimer's, early death, all kinds of problems. So, you got to get that out. So, take it for a couple weeks and you'll probably be fine. I've helped hundreds of people with that. I've never had herpes, but the guy who wrote that book about BHT and herpes is one of my mentors. His name is Steve Folks. All the—by the way, the book is free online. I didn't write it. I'm not trying to sell you BHT. I wouldn't put BHT in my breakfast cereal, but I would use it if I had herpes.

So, there's all kinds of cures that are cheap, right? And they're never promoted. In fact, oftentimes they'll tell you not to. The fact that ivermectin actually did work during the pandemic, what do you think they really—really fought to make sure that you didn't take it? Because they couldn't make any money on it. So, I'm all about getting the pharmaceutical industry out of my food and out of my decision-making. It's none of their business what I do. Yeah. And it's criminal what they're doing. What they did. And I mean, why are they in jail? I had a buddy in the Philippines cuz I was dead set against any vaccines. Mhm. I—I don't care. Well, they—you got—I have to fly. I don't care if I had to freaking farm in the jungle. I ain't getting that [ __ ] No way. So, my buddy is from the Philippines. I call him. I'm like, "Dude, can you get ivermectin?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Why don't you send me a bunch?" That's right. And he tried to, and they wouldn't accept it. The—the United States would not allow him to send me ivermectin, which, by the way, he had someone there that was rightfully a doctor to send it. No deal. Then I went down and—and I had a doctor here, fortunately, who prescribed it. I walked into the pharmacy, and this is the first time I found out pharmacists outrank doctors. Yep. And I turned it in, they said, "Oh, we're not filling this." I said, "What are you talking about? It's my doctor." Nope. They wouldn't give me ivermectin. Yeah. Now, that's illegal. That's like criminal. It should be illegal. And the reality is, why do you need a permission slip from your doctor or the pharmacist to get whatever you want? Are you an adult or is the government your daddy? I—I find it offensive. So, I order all of my pharmaceuticals, uh, from India. Well, they don't ask no questions. The law says very clearly that you can import a 90-day supply of anything that's not outright illegal for personal use. So the people who stopped your ivermectin at the border were breaking US law. But hey, the government's allowed to break the law, right? Yeah. So that whole thing is just insane.

So you—you have been doing this a long time. Like I've known about you for a long time, and it was—I think bulletproof coffee that started the whole thing for you, or were you doing it way before that? I wasn't writing about it before that, but I was running a longevity nonprofit group in Palo Alto since my mid-20s. I started hanging out with people in their 80s who had more energy than me, and every month we'd bring in these top experts before anyone thought longevity was real. And then they—my elders mentored me. They taught me what's now biohacking. And I was in a remote part of Tibet walking around for 3 months and learning all this meditation stuff. And I'm just like, I got a branding problem. No one under 60 is ever going to care about longevity. But the things that make old people young make young people powerful. And everyone cares about control of their biology. So I came up with the name biohacking. And I'm like, here's all these things you can do. Your body's listening to the world around you. Set up the world around you so that your body will do what you want, and then change whatever's going on in there so that you can have the state you want. Whether it's physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, all that, it's all choosable if you just know what buttons to push. That's why I wish you would come out with one source. Yeah. I mean, here's the list. Yeah. It's—It's more than just a list. Cuz if I gave you the list of 150 supplements I take, you're probably not going to swallow that many pills. I will. Nice. All right. We—We can work on it. Like I said, I won't try [ __ ] like you did. Like I won't go find it and try it, but I'll take someone who did and say, "Hey, if he's telling me that it works, I'll try it." Here's the problem with that. And there are people out there like, you know, I did all these—you—55 things, and you should do it, too. And in fact, one of those cases, 80% of people who tried it had side effects because I'll tell you, I need way more of a rare form of vitamin B6 and biotin than normal humans because of my genetics. If you took my stack, you'd probably just [ __ ] yourself. So, we have to customize it for your goals and based on the current state of your biology. You look like you're pretty healthy, right? So, we look at you—go, you know, you probably need a little bit more copper, right? So, let's get you some of that and give me your blood work. And we say, all right, you need this, but you don't need this, right? So, you want to make a custom stack. So, I've never published all 150 in one article because I know there'd be 10,000 people right away go out and do everything I did. I spend three grand a month on supplements, and it's a great investment, and my brain works, my body works, like everything is so good. But if you did exactly what I did, you wouldn't get those results. But if you did 80% of what I did, the right 80%, you would love your life in an amazing way. And that's what I'm doing with Upgrade Labs. It's like, let's get their lab work. Let's measure them. Let's have them come in. Let's have them do these biohacking things in the facilities. And it's a franchise. So, we got nine locations open. We got 30 in the process of opening. Any here? Uh, in Las Vegas. I think we just signed a franchise here. I'm pretty sure we did. Um, I got to check. Well, where's one nearest to here? Uh, we've got one opening in Boulder. There's a couple in Salt Lake. There's one in Austin. There's one in Belleview. Uh, so I'm going to go—Do—Do you do the uh stool samples? We don't do that there. And it's funny. We just send someone to your house. It's—It's easy. They draw your blood and all that kind of stuff. If you want to do a stool sample, the best one is called Viome. Well, nobody wants to do one. Of course you do. Don't you want to know like why you're farting death all the time? You should probably fix that. I mean—like—like if you got a problem, you should fix it. What's farting death? You never been to like a gym and it just smells like the end of the earth. That's too much protein without enough digestive enzymes. So basically, if you got something going on in your gut, I was on antibiotics for 15 years every month. I had the worst digestive problems. I could empty a room like no one's business. I don't have that anymore. But if I did, I said, "Well, what's going on in there? Let's measure it." You get a Viome test. They look at your saliva, your poop, um, just a little smear of it, and a prick of blood. And they'll tell you how old are you? They'll tell you—um—in fact, they can tell you with 95% confidence whether you have throat cancer just based on the bacteria in your mouth. How do you—But I mean—have you vetted those? Because again—I—I always wonder when people say—well, they can do this and they can do that. Well, then why can't people stop being sick? Oh, they can. You just have to have the right data. So I haven't vetted every gut bacteria test out there. Some of them are nonsense. Viome's vetted. I'm an investor. I've been an adviser to the company for eight years. I met with their chief scientist board. I hang out with their CEO. Like that stuff is very solid. And when the FDA saw the evidence, they fast-tracked their early detection for cancer—for throat cancer. And you don't get an FDA fast-track cancer detection thing unless you've got really solid data. So I think Viome's a legitimate thing. Do that. They'll even tell you this food is going to mess up your bacteria. This food is going to be good for your bacteria. Yeah. They believe—they believe that your gut is the—what's in control. Most people think it's your mind, but it's your gut. Your gut controls everything. It's not really your gut, but it's part of the dance. Here's what's really happening. And—and this is the whole thesis in *Heavily Meditated* is that all life on Earth, whether you're a single-cell bacteria or whether you—you know—you're a—a deer or a tiger or a—a piece of grass, it doesn't really matter. Every individual cell runs the same operating system instruction set. And since our bodies are made out of trillions of ancient bacteria called mitochondria that are now part of our cells, but they still act like and think like individual bacteria and they coordinate with each other. What's really happening is your gut bacteria talk to your mitochondria, and there's cross-talk, and they're communicating with each other. And people say, how do you know? Because we can measure it. That's how. And they do it with biophotons and with chemical signals and probably with some other things. And the way consciousness works—that includes your gut feelings, your intuition and all that—is that if I do something like—like clap now—you know that it took some amount of time for the sound to reach your ears and then you heard it, right? That's not real. Because if we had electrodes glued to your brain, the sound hit your body, and your body held on to it for a third of a second while your body decided whether it was going to make you think one way or another about it and how you're going to feel about that sound. And then the signal gets to your prefrontal cortex, which takes another 700 milliseconds. So now we're at 1 second of lag time before you knew it was a clap. And you didn't see that 1 second of lag time because it's invisible, but it's happening. What that means is all the stuff in your body that processes reality before your brain gets a signal is making you feel stuff, and it's not doing it based on very good rules. Here's what all life does. Number one, these are f-words, by the way, is fear. If something is scary, run away—from—kill or hide. Okay? And it's going to decide that before your brain ever does anything. Like you ever lean on a hot surface and go, you know, that's pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand. No, you jerk your hand away before you can think, and you say, "Good thing I pulled my hand away." Except you're lying. You didn't pull your hand away. Some other system in your body—you're taking credit for—did it. It's not you. It's a separate consciousness. So, it's fear first and then food. Eat everything. This is why you said, "I'm not going to eat the cookie," and you eat the cookie anyway because you got another conscious, and they're making you want the cookie more than you should. So, fear, food. Third f-word. You have to do it for all life to be around for multiple generations. You know that one. What? [ __ ] There you go. Fear, food. Call it fertility if you want to be fancy. But yeah, fear, food, and [ __ ] So when anything happens around you, your body before you can think says, "Do I need to fight it? Can I eat it? And should I hump it?" All the time—without me, the answer is always yes. Exactly. Right. Like it's just a doorknob. But I think it's like—what are you going to do? So understanding this is your body. If you could reprogram that. So things that weren't scary wouldn't trigger fear, right? But your body doesn't know. It's dumb. So if you were bullied, anytime there's a situation that's vaguely similar, you're going to feel that same emotion, and you're going to think it's reality, right? And one-third of the—a one-third of the thoughts in the average person's brain are about tacos. It's about what's for lunch. And if you turned that state of hunger into a state of nourishment because you learned how to eat, then it frees up a third of your thoughts every day to go into your willpower and to do stuff, right? And if you could turn porn and OnlyFans into a relationship that actually puts you in altered states, like a healthy relationship, that gives you a ton of energy. One of the chapters in *Heavily Meditated* is, you know, 20% of people meet God during orgasm at least once in their life. But you're not going to know because they're just laying there twitching. But that is as valid as psychedelics or breath work or anything else. You want to enter an altered state, intimacy is a way to do it. So fear, food, [ __ ] before you can think.

Is there anything you've ever done that you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those? That was a what? It wasn't one of those three things. I'd have to think. Um, like stole some [ __ ] So, that's usually fear, right? You stole some [ __ ] because you didn't have it. You wanted the thing. And you wanted the thing because it's going to give you love. Because it's going to give you safety. It's going to give you social standing. That ultimately comes down to fear. Yeah. You boil them down to those three. Yeah. It's always those, and they're not even you. This is an ancient system in there. And the saving grace is there's two more f-words. And the next one is friend. All life on Earth is wired to support its own species and life around it. That's why we have an ecosystem. That's why we have forests. That's why we have tribes. Like you don't have to worry about it. Humans are wired to be kind to each other. Just not if we're afraid, not if we're malnourished, and not if we just don't have any love in our life. So fear, food, friend. And the final f-word that's in *Heavily Meditated* is forgiveness. You're like, "What?" Forgiveness is a felt sense where you go in and you turn off triggers that aren't useful for you. It's how you reduce fear. And your body's allocating energy every second without your awareness on things that aren't scary that it thinks are scary because it's a bunch of dumb bacteria trying to figure out what's a threat. And then it's worrying about food when you don't have to worry about it because you haven't trained it how to not worry about food. Then it's worried about sex because you haven't learned how to manage that, how to turn it into an energy source. And then it's worried about loneliness because you didn't—you don't have a community anymore because you're on social media all the time. But if you took away all the energy—and fear becomes peace, and hunger becomes nourishment, and we'll call it sexual loneliness becomes a source of power and connection, and then your community—there's so much energy left. You didn't waste those first three. Now you can give back to your community, and it gives back to you, and you got enough energy left at the end of the day to do the deep work. It's just—you think it's hard to know what supplements take to live a long time. What meditation or breath work or other thing do you do to turn off the mean voice in your head so you can make better decisions? That's even harder. That's what *Heavily Meditated* is. It's like everything you can do depending on what you want to do, right? What's your goal? What about hydrogen water? That's—that's so funny. Hydrogen water quenches free radicals inside your mitochondria, and it quenches the bad free radicals and allows the good ones to continue existing. So, strangely enough, if you drink hydrogen water, what's going to happen is your mitochondria have more energy. And because they have more energy, you can overcome the fear and you can overcome the hunger and you can overcome the loneliness, and you still have more energy for willpower at the end of the day. So, hydrogen water is really good for you. It's just—it's kind of a pain in the butt to carry it around with you. Well, someone just sent me this new thing that's supposed to be the next greatest thing—was the old box thing. Well, it's a—it's a hydrogen water maker, but not the little tiny one. Yeah, it's big. I've got a big black one at home. I did it—I did it last night and I drank it. I'm like, you know, see, like, am I just drinking bubbly water for shits and giggles? It—cuz doctors never agree. And I always think like, you know, there's people that say you're full of [ __ ] Yeah, I know. There—there's people that will say Dave Asprey's full of [ __ ] My body's fat though. Have you noticed? No, I've never really paid attention. But—but—but I mean the—what I'm saying is like—there's people that—if I could find them—and they will disagree with you, and you will disagree with them. So like, how do you know who's right and who's wrong? One of the things I learned to do early on was to interview experts to see if they were full of [ __ ] I did this in my career in tech, and I did this in the longevity movement for years, and I've interviewed 1,500 people on my show. One of them is a guy named Tyler. And Tyler talked about 800 studies out of Japan and Korea showing that hydrogen water works and showing what it does. And I understand what it does, how it works, and why it works. And I also know that most people don't feel it unless they're pretty blown out. You might feel it on an airplane. You might feel it after a—

Workout. But is it a longevity substance? Yes. Is it going to feel like you had a cup of coffee? No. No. I just felt like I drank water. Yeah. But it was water that had a benefit that wouldn't have been in there otherwise.

NAD+. That's a big one. I started just maybe two or three weeks ago. I'm still what what they call leveling up. Yep. But I can feel that. Oh yeah. You'll feel that if you're deficient.

How are you taking it? Injection subq. Got it. So, and I got to say, I mean, I didn't feel it massively, but when I when I took the shot, like I can I can feel kind of a energy like five five minutes later, I'm feeling like, you know, a little little bit of energy.

Mhm. Here's what they're not telling you. So back when the first studies came out, I started taking NMN and NR, um, got to be 15 years ago now, and I did 20 intravenous treatments with NAD, and it's expensive to do that, and you feel the energy and all, but after about 6 to 8 weeks it's going to stop working, and here's why. You have cells in your body with something called CD38. CD38 is an inflammatory part of your immune system, and it loves NAD. It utilizes 20 times more, a little bit more than 20 times more, um, NAD than the rest of your cells. So when you first take NAD, you get a whole body energy surge, but then the inflammatory parts start getting bigger and bigger. So if you're going to inject it, which you don't have to, you can just take something like Quia NAD, uh, which is a a supplement that you take, it raises the amount inside your cells very effectively, but you got to take something that blocks CD38. Otherwise, NAD becomes pro-inflammatory after 6 weeks. And this is a you don't want to be inflammatory.

No. So you should be taking green tea extract at a minimum called EGCG if you're going to be doing that. And you should also be taking something called TMG or trimethlycine because the reason you get that flush when you inject NAD is because it's stealing methyl groups from other cells, and if you provide extra methyl groups in the form of TMG, you don't get the uncomfortable parts of it.

So NAD is proven. In fact, David Sinclair is the guy talked about that the most. He texted me yesterday, and he's been on my show a couple times, and increasing NAD is good for longevity and blocking CD38 at the same time is also good for longevity. You got to do both. And it's these nuances where people say it doesn't work, it works. Like do you know how it works? Do you know the steps? Because if you ask a typical western trained doctor, which means pharmaceutical trained, you could ask say a pharmaceutical company even, is there such a thing as bread? and they'll cross their arms in their white lab coats and they'll say, "We baked the salt, we baked the yeast, we baked the water, we baked the flour. There is no bread." And you're like, "Dumbass, you got to have a recipe. You need some of this and some of that and some of that."

All of longevity is a recipe. All of human performance is a recipe. Even all of meditation is a recipe. And people say, "What? Meditation?" 98% of people have been involved in agriculture throughout most of history, which means that most meditation works well for farmers. But if you're the kind of person who runs towards a fight to go fix the problem, you run towards the explosion to go help people, you are not a farmer. And if you try to do a farmer meditation, it's just going to [ __ ] you up. So maybe let's figure out who you are and let's figure out what you're trying to achieve, and then let's choose our meditation, our breath work or our visualization or whatever else. That's why heavily meditated is important. It's not like meditation is good or bad.

Which meditation were you doing? Cuz if I take some of the devices out there and I do that, I just feel like I took a Valium all day. It ruins my focus, right? And when I get the right ones for my biology, I can do things I couldn't do before.

What about breath work? You keep mentioning that breath work is a way of accelerating meditation. One of the problems is that throughout history like, oh, you want to meditate? We'll just get you a cave and you'll spend eight hours a day meditating and maybe you'll become enlightened. I don't have 8 hours a day to meditate. I got stuff to do. So, I want to meditate for 1 second a day and get all the results. One second. I want to. I'm not there yet. But here's the deal. Hurry, meditate faster is a thing, right? Like I I took an Uber to get here. I didn't walk. Why' I do that? Cuz it was more effective and more efficient. So, why do we think we should meditate for 2 hours a day? Maybe there's an accelerator. Every accelerator that I know of is in this book. And breath work is one of the fastest ways to change your state. Far faster than meditation. And that's why when I'm going to shaman school, they have you do breath work. You go to traditional Chinese medicine monastery stuff, breath work. You go to India, breath work. And there's three buckets of breath work in heavily meditated. There's one that's calm and it's just for calming and reducing stress. There's another one that's for being calm, focused, and grounded. And they're different states. And there's another bucket of breath work that's for leaving your body and going into outer space.

When I first did breath work, I was 30 years old. And I had no idea what I was getting into. Turns out I was doing holotropic breathing, which is a replacement for LSD. And I've had the honor of interviewing the guy who who created it when he was 94 years old. I actually hosted a breath workshop with him. His name is Stan Grath. He's a father of transpersonal psychology. And when LSD became illegal, he was writing scripts for it in the 50s for his psychiatrist patients and he was curing them. He said, "Well, okay, you take away my LSD, I'm going to have to invent something." And he invented a kind of breath work that really is what they do in some yoga practice. So, you do holotropic breathing and you trip balls like you took drugs. And I've taken all the drugs in the chapter on drugs and I've done all the breath works and that is profound. So if I'm going to meditate, I can meditate for an hour and you know sit there and close my eyes and visualize whatever or I could do this special kind of breath work and I am going to blast off. What was the goal of my meditation? Was it before bed? Because if I do holotropic breathing, I'm going to have to have some integration afterwards like I'm I'm going to go have a spiritual experience. So you got to know the right tool for the job.

Is it inherent? It's all in there. the holotropic holotropic is in there. Absolutely. You're going to get everyone buying it just to see how to trip balls. You know, it is profound. And I mean, when you're in a that kind of altered state, people report you meeting deities, seeing past lives and all that. I've seen more of that kind of stuff from holotropic breathing than I have from psychedelics. And I've seen more of that from neuro feedback like at 40 years is in than I have from psychedelics. And I've, you know, done the sham the shamanic training. And, you know, I I go to Bernie man. I think this will be my 12th year.

So, if I'm watching you in a room through a mirror, do I see you trip balls or do I see you just sit there and look at the wall? With holotropic breathing, you are going to be on your back. It's very deep, very rapid breathing. And after a little while, your your fingers and your toes and your feet, they start getting pins and needles. In fact, they feel like they might not even be there. And I have seen people just absolutely they're they're twitching around. They're having condundalini experiences. Uh I've heck the first time I did it, it was at a 10-day workshop. So people went really deep. And there was a woman in the room had about 20 of us doing breathing. When you do holotropic breathing, you need one friend or more watching you just like you would if you were taking, you know, a big dose of mushrooms. And one of the women and she ripped off all of her clothes and just started jumping up and down just from breathing, right? And she was letting go of some old trauma. I don't know. I didn't talk to her afterwards about what it was, but it was not a recreational thing. This is deep heavy duty work on what's going on in my operating system. Like what are the triggers? And your only goal really is if anything on earth can trigger you, you're not in charge. So, you want to be able to find them, hunt them down, and reprogram your biology so you don't get triggered by bullies from fifth grade or whatever happened when you were one year old and, you know, your mom stopped breastfeeding you and you got pissed off. This is why people are so reactive. It's a bunch of dumb [ __ ] from childhood and maybe sometimes from past lives if you want to believe that or not. I personally believe that.

Do you think people can have a relationship with money that will prevent them from getting any? Oh, hell yeah. It happens all the time. I' I've seen it over and over.

How would you solve that? Well, you want the western answer or you want the shamanic answer? Shamanic. All right. All here's a story. Early on uh on this path, this has to be I don't know 15 18 years ago. Friend of mine just finished shaman school with Dr. Alberto Viodto. Alberto is speaking at my bioacking conference uh coming up in a few weeks here um May 28th 2930th in Austin at bioackingconference.com. So one of my teachers is there. She just finished his full course and she needed hours. We're at a party and I said hey you need to do some more shaman treatment stuff. Why don't you do something on me? She goes, "What do you want?" I don't know. Just use your intuition. So I lay down. She shakes a rattle. I pass out and come to an hour later and and I'm so I don't I don't remember that. I was somewhere else and she goes, "That's weird. you had a financial curse on you. And at the time, I wasn't sure I believed in that stuff. And and I said, "Well, okay." And she said, "Well, I pulled it off." All right. The next day it started raining money. The money that I used as my seed capital to start bulletproof. I got a call one to two days after she did this thing and it was an investment bank saying, "Hey, can we hire you and we want you to fly around the world and meet with billionaire hedge fund managers that teach them how to raise their IQ?" and they'll let you into the room and then our sales guy can go with you. So, I was like the booth babe but for billionaires. And I got 50 grand from doing that. And that was my first um my first round of at the time bulletproof coffee, right? So, and it was really weird because I'd always sort of struggled. I made I made six million, I lost 6 million. There's two other times I didn't talk about in Silicon Valley where I made 800,000 on paper and then it evaporated. Always some weird stock transaction. So, yeah, that can happen. But usually it's money trauma. It's not something that shamanic. It's because your your parents taught you that having money is bad.

Well, me, I get money, but then I spend it. Yeah. That is a different problem. I got to figure it out. There's there's a trigger in there, right? Or something. I I believe it's always something subconscious that that keeps you like I tell people, listen, if you want to raise your net worth, raise your self worth. Cuz when you start to believe that you're worth more, you stop accepting less. Yes. And then and then next thing you know, you're making more and you're like, "God, that was easy." Well, you it that works, but it doesn't work. People like, "Well, why aren't you a billionaire?" Well, I must not think I'm worth a billion dollars, I guess. I don't know. But well, there there's two things you're working on. One of them is making money. You know how to do that. The other one is keeping money. It's a different skill, different energetic, right? And if you have a mindset and I have the same problem, actually I don't know if it's a problem. I can always make money. I've known how to do that since I was a kid. Well, that's why I'm so willing to get rid of it. Yeah. Right. So, I'm willing to spend a lot of money on living longer and on saving five minutes. Right. And people say, "Why would you do that?" Like, because I don't want to waste the time and I wanted to reduce friction in my life and I'll spend money, right? There's another mindset that's out there that's around financial management. And I'm actually working on that one right now. But here's the thing, you don't have to do everything yourself, right? So if you hate finance, hire a CFO, right? If you hate sales, hire a salesperson, right? So if you hate managing money, take some money, give it to a guy, and say, "It's your job to manage that." Right? And that's probably the easiest thing is just outsource. But then your trust issues kick in. Yeah. I've had a couple wealth management firms screw me over occasionally here and there. And this is maybe the other important part of heavily meditated.

What is the nature of intuition? How do you know if you can trust someone? And intuition has a very specific signal. And we can actually measure this with electrodes. And I know how to teach people to be way more intuitive. And this has helped me enormously in the last few years. Intuition is the very first signal you get. It is small and brief. It will be followed by an emotional reaction, which is all bad programming, followed by a rational, logical story that justifies the emotion. And most of us learn when we're young to use our brains and our emotions to squaltch and to turn off the intuitive signal. And when you can reduce the self- judgment enough, you know, like the intuition is there. It's always there. It's just invisible until you have enough presence in order to sense it. So, your body will tell you, "Don't hire this person." And then your brain will tell you, "But they have a good resume. Hire them anyway." And I'd probably have another hundred, not another, I'd probably have a hundred million dollars uh in my pocket if I had learned how to listen to intuition earlier.

So, you would say to people, listen to your intuition. Yeah. But you got to know what it is. Most people think their intuition is an emotion, but it's the thing that happened before the emotion that you ignored and replaced with the emotion. Yeah. So, a big part of the reset process that's in this book is how do you turn off emotions that are not reality based so that they quit bothering you? And the old approach, you go to a monastery, they're like, "Well, sit still. Imagine the Buddha. Notice emotions flowing through. Gently set them aside." And I'm like, "Fuck that. I don't want to waste energy on noticing the emotions, on making the emotions, and on setting them aside. I would rather find the root cause and then reprogram that. So, I'm not feeling fear when there's nothing to be afraid of. I only want to feel fear when I'm actually at risk.

How do you reprogram it? It's called the reset process, and it's what people spend 20 grand a week to come and hang out at my neuroscience place at 40 years of Zen. Entrepreneurs come there, we measure the brains and it's a step-by-step, eight-step process where you go in and you go, "Oh, so what is the sensation of the resistance I feel there? How's it in my body?" And you show the body the bad signal and then you flip the switch with one state and then you go into another state that happens after it and that state cancels out the other one permanently. So you get people who just like a lot for a lot of people it's disrespect. Someone cuts you off in traffic and that go kill that guy and you get real pissed off. Well, the other guy's in charge of your nervous system. If if that happens, what about a cop driving behind you and your gut feels like you're drunk when you're not, but you still feel that like, oh [ __ ] feeling. I used to have that so bad. That's just fear. And you know what? Cops can smell fear. They're going to pull you over if you feel that way. So when I was younger, I get pulled over all the time because I had that serious cop thing and just all this emotion about it. I learned how to change my nervous system around that. So now if I'm going to walk through TSA, if I if there's a cop around me, I I learned how to shift the state of my nervous system. I'm no longer attracted to them. I don't get pulled over very often at all. Right? I don't drive any slower, but it's it's a shift in your state. So, if you're triggered, they can feel it. I'm not triggered anymore. But that was that one was a lot of work. A lot of people have deep-seated hatred of cops, and I'm friends with some cops, and those guys don't deserve it. Sure, there's some bad cops. There's also bad everything else.

Are there any bad shamans? Oh, [ __ ] yeah.

Is that all in the book? Mhm. This is in the book. All right. What doesn't work that everybody talks about or pretends does? M uh are we talking in the field of meditation? Just in the the biohacking field like you always hear these things like the hydrogen water and so there's a lot of things that don't have much evidence behind them that probably don't work. Like I've had so many people send me these stickers for the back of my phone. Yeah. These things. Yeah. Some someone just gave me one. Yeah. Exactly. That one might work. It might not. I'm like what is the evidence for it? Uh well this question here. How dangerous is your phone in your pocket or Wi-Fi in your house? Those are really dangerous. So, by the way, I don't want to say that all those stickers don't work. There's probably a few that do. In fact, there's one company that has 36 double blind clinical trials showing that their stuff works. Well, you remember those bracelets where they'd say, "Put your hand up and then you do this, then put on the bracelet, and then all of a sudden you're stronger." Y like I I saw a whole expose on like all that's [ __ ] That's that's [ __ ] the the muscle testing thing they're doing is not [ __ ] with the bracelet probably was. Yeah. They're saying like the bracelet's what made you stronger when in reality you could do it without the bracelet and the same phenomenon takes place. You can uh and this is a crazy thing. I've done this in rooms with people before and you have someone they come in and you you tell everyone ahead of time. So the guy comes in, he just doesn't know he's out of the room. You tell everyone, "Hey, send really good thoughts towards this guy." And he puts his arm out and there's someone hanging from his arm. And then the person who's running the little thing will like scratch their nose and at that point everyone thinks like just nasty negative thoughts and that same person just takes one finger and their arm drops and it's repeatable like that that stuff that stuff happens. We don't want to believe that it happens because that's the invisible nature of reality and your whole your body's whole job is to throw away everything in reality that doesn't help you survive. And knowing the quantum nature of reality is not very functional for living. Because if we look at the math, we look at the science, look at the physics, time is provably not real. Space is provably not real. Everything is just a bunch of quantum energy fields. Just that's not a very good way to live your life. So your body translates all that. So I see you and you see me and I see this microphone here. Doesn't mean it's there. And if we take it apart, there's almost no matter there at all. So, it gets real interesting and you could say Dave sounds like he's on crack, which is fine. I'm talking about a field called bioentrism and the most advanced PhD physicists are saying this is the the actual best description of reality. And this is why people can affect other people's energy fields at a distance. I didn't believe any of this. I'm a computer science guy, hardcore skeptic, rationalist until I learned how to do it. And when I have people who are close friends, they can do work from four feet away from my body and I'm like, I'm twitching and I'm not choosing to twitch. So, we have the ability to affect other people with our emotions and our energy. Our energy and and there's other evidence. If you measure the heart rate of a horse and you measure the heart rate of a person when you walk into the stall, the horse's variability of its heart rate will change to match yours. And this is why tweakers can't ride horses because if you're internally chaotic, the horse is going to buck. And if you're calm, it won't. This is why they take autistic kids or addicts and they have them work with horses because the horse is just a bio feedback signal for the person so they can realize what's going on in there. Right? So we have all these unseen forces that affect other people. And this is why I truly believe, and I did not used to believe this, that hating on another person, holding a grudge, I know it costs me energy and it's a waste of time. I think it actually harms the other person. This is why sitting there in social media and getting angry and pissed off about things. If you do that, it costs you and it probably costs the other person, too. And there's no benefit to it. So, why would I waste my energy doing that?

Well, screw the other person. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to harm another person, having a vague grudge is not the way to do it. And you're talking about are there bad shamans? Of course there are. And there are lots of bad things you can do to people. It's just it's not ethical to do that. Yeah. There's some crazy I call them phenomenons or you know like [ __ ] you can't explain.

What about uh Joe Despensza? His his beliefs. Joe is one of the speakers at my biohacking conference May 28th. So you you obvious believe what he excuse me I don't believe or not believe I look at numbers he's data he's coming up there and his lead scientist runs a $50 million lab at UC San Diego Dr. or Hamilton Patel who's also a friend who will be at the conference.

Where's this conference? Austin. It's at the Fairmont biohackingconference.com.

Is it sold out? Not yet, but it's getting close. And and it's all about biohacking. It's all about biohacking, longevity, consciousness, performance. Steveoki's actually coming. He's going to be playing a private concert for us. And this is it's like CES for human performance session. Dates May 28th, 29th, and 30.

Oh, so the end of the month. End of the month. Yep. I might see you there.

Oh, man. I'll I'll I'll get you a pass. I know a guy. So, this is the conference, by the way, that started the biohacking movement. It was 100 guys in a bar uh 14 years ago, and it's just grown and grown. I don't know why anybody wouldn't go to it.

Do you think there's people out there thinking, "Ah, this is all rigomearroll." Oh, sure. There's a ton of them. And you know what? They're generally unhappy and Yeah, but you can see it. Like, that's the thing. Like when I that's what I was going to say when I said I first knew of you because of the uh butter coffee or whatever the hell bulletproof and someone's like you know bulletproof coffee. I'm like dude butter you're not supposed to eat butter and da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d and sure enough that person lost weight, energetic,

Focused, got in shape, started being a biohacker, and I've seen it work. And then I start, and then I started doing it, and it worked, and I'm like, "See, that's how I believe." I, I'll listen to you, but then I'm going to go try it. That's why I said I'm a bio follower. I'll try it, and then if it doesn't work, I don't believe you.

Yep. I say try it first. That's why I want to go to that conference, because you guys are all talking about all the things and the latest findings.

Yeah. Plus 120 vendors, the guys who make all the tech that I talk about, they're all there. You can try it on the show floor. And early adopters in this case, dude, end up becoming the guinea pigs. But guess what? That like, if it doesn't work, big deal. If it does, you're the first one to find the fountain of youth.

Yeah. You, you get the powers that come with it. And it can just be the power to feel like yourself all the time and to have more resilience and energy. I have more energy now than I did in my 20s. And I have more energy than most of the 20-year-olds who work for me. And I, I can bring it all day long, every day. I can do, like you, I do eight one-hour shows back-to-back without eating. And I never lose concentration or focus or like my desire to do it. I did not have this when I was 30.

How about when I was 40? Even if they're not interesting?

Yeah, I can. Look, boredom is just an ego thing. So, I can, I, I prefer that it be interesting. And if it's not interesting, I'm probably going to stir it up. Like, I'll make it interesting.

Well, out of 800 or whatever episodes I've done now, there's only been one. This is really boring. That like, I, I when he left, I'm like, "We're not dropping that." That'll, that'll cost me followers.

Yep. And I forgot to tell the team not to drop it, and they dropped it, and it c, and it cost me followers. People were like, "Freaking terrible. This podcast sucks."

Yep. It's a, it's a high bar, and I've had a couple where like I don't know that I agree with what they say, but at least they're saying it pretty well. And sometimes it's surprising. Like sometimes the ones that perform the best, one of the biggest surprises to what we were talking about earlier was a guy I write about in this book named Dr. Barry. He's one of nine living grandmasters of an ancient Chinese discipline, and he's not even Chinese. Uh, they called him to write the script for Doctor Strange because he's a UCLA doctor for 30 years who went to a monastery and learned all that stuff. And the first podcast he ever did was my podcast, where he's telling his actual story of how he learned all this crazy stuff. And I think he did his, his Dr. Barry voodoo magic stuff on there because unknown guest published in October, more downloads and listens of that podcast than any other podcast that year, and he only had three months to do it.

I can't explain it any other way. Right? So there are people who can affect reality, and this is interesting when I look at people's brain waves at 40 years as I've got the data. There's a certain pattern that people can just make stuff happen in the world that they have that other people don't have. Right? And if you have that pattern, shockingly, you're probably flying on your own jet because you make reality happen more easily than other people. And some people say, "Dave, you got off the deep end." Dude, I don't care. This is what I see. This is the data. And universally, people have that, man, just stuff happens around them. Like they're just always successful. They're like, "How did you do that?" It's because of their way of being.

Can you develop it? I actually did develop that technology. The problem is, you know, the, the Midas touch, you know, that, that whole story about King Midas, I want everything I touch to turn to gold, right? So then all of a sudden, you know, his daughter and all of his food turns to gold, and it turns out to be a curse. If I deployed that tech, and actually I don't even have that code anymore because it's, it's too dangerous. But if I deploy that tech, if you have any ego going on, you're going to have that thought. And if you could instantly manifest all the bad [ __ ] that the average person has in their brain, I don't think I'm that enlightened. I still think bad stuff about people. And if I really truly train my brain in those brain waves, I'd probably hurt people. I'm not going to do that.

To where like you're basically telepathic?

Oh, telepathy is relatively easy compared to this stuff. This is about making [ __ ] happen in the world around you. And people, "Dave, you're going off the deep end." No, there's something called the yogic cities. Have you heard of these? So in ancient Sanskrit u, in ancient Hindu practice, there's a book that documents a little bit less than 50 well-understood states that humans are capable of that are just rare. And if you look at something like the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was started by one of our first astronauts down in Palo Alto, they met a couple blocks away from the nonprofit longevity group I used to run. They've been studying this for a long time. And if you look at, uh, their president Dean Raiden, he has a book called Becoming Supernormal. Uh, Alberto Vodto the shaman also wrote a book about this. The yogic cities are states that some humans will enter into as they become more enlightened, if you believe in enlightenment. And one of them is telepathy. Another one is telekinesis. The other one is the ability to heal other people. And you can say this is all a bunch of nonsense religious mysticism. Except Dean Raiden publishes studies, and they show over and over people who meditate make these things happen in a nonrandom way. So if you look at the average person, this is impossible. You look at a group of meditators, and there's an effect over and over and over. And you've seen things like the telepathy tapes and things like that. Why throughout every lineage I've ever studied, every culture that I've come across, do we have the same stories about telekinesis, about telepathy? Because a few people develop the ability to do that. And it usually takes a lot of work. So the more you get your ego out of the way, the more you deprogram yourself, the better you are at sensing reality because you have more energy left over to sense reality. And a lot of these things emerge as you become more and more resilient, more powerful, more conscious.

So, the ability to heal other people. How many people say that they're hands-on healers and they can do this? Some of those are real. Others are just self-deceiving. You seen that one guy that does this and then starts a piece of paper on fire?

Yeah. Pretty incredible stuff. Like, "Oh, that's just a trick." No, I mean like, dude, that's like, I, I wasn't there, but like it looked pretty real to me. Those are the kind of people that I've studied with for the past 25 years. Not that guy particularly, but people who can do things they're not supposed to be able to do. All I care about is outliers. If one person can do it, it's possible. And you get all these people going, "It's not possible." And then you get Neil Degrass Tyson. No, was it him? No, it wasn't him. Some famous science guy said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That's [ __ ]. Is it science or is it not science? I need one solid data point that disproves the story we tell ourselves. And now it's a useful story, but it's not true.

Yeah. Right. Even Newtonian physics, it's all fake. It's not how it works. It's just a very useful story. So, let's keep using it. Well, like psychic ability, I think that's real. I've called, I know it's real. My, my wife and I were drinking on a Super Bowl Sunday, walking through I think it was Arya, and I called five roulette numbers in a row, and they kicked me off the table.

Yep. And all I did was I just said, "What's the next number?" And I just closed my eyes, and, and, and whatever number popped into my head, I, I told them, and I hit five in a row.

That's epic.

That is not luck.

No. Something else it was. I was tapping into some sort of universal knowledge. Intuition that it's all right there. It's funny. I similar story. Back when I was first learning, in fact, the first energy manipulation technique I, I learned, um, I had a place in Tahoe, and I meditated like for a while, and I was, I was like, "I'm going to go to the casino later. I'm going to gamble, and I just want a number." I figured I was going to go to account card something, and this number like pops into my head. So, I went to the casino, and I'm like, "I don't know what I'm going to do." And I just walked around, and I was like, "Oh, it's this electric, uh, uh roulette thing. You know, the digital roulette." And I just sit down, and I had 300 bucks I was going to blow. I didn't even have time to put 300. I just put five bucks down, hit the number on the first one, and after that, I have no desire to gamble anymore because it's not random. It's no longer amusing. So, similar thing, I just tapped in, and it's there.

So, what's in the way of tapping in? That's why I wrote heavily meditated because I know what's in the way. It's the stupid meat operating system here. And if it's just less afraid and less hungry and less lonely, there's so much happening in the world. And this makes you a better entrepreneur. It makes you a better lover. It makes you a better partner. It makes you a better friend. And you'll live longer and you'll be happier, too. And if you do all the cool biohacking stuff, put butter in your coffee, and you don't get this, you'll just be a more powerful [ __ ].

Do you believe in God?

Absolutely. I've met God.

Do you believe in the traditional?

I met the traditional god, and that is one incredibly powerful deity.

Did you see him?

Yeah. I thought I was going to blow a, a fuse, like, like I was doing healing work. This is actually at one of Joe Despenszo's workshops. There's eight of us around. This person was sick, and like I know how to inter altered states. It's wrote the book about I can very quickly go into different states of healing and stuff. So, I'm in a really powerful state, and yeah, I, I literally was like, "All right, it, it sounds try I couldn't talk about it for two days afterwards because I just start crying, but uh, I'm like, 'I'm not worthy of this.'" Like, I'll, I'll hold as much of this energy feeling as I can, but like it's going to melt me, like, like it was too much, that kind of overwhelming power.

Yeah, I've had a direct interaction there, and it's a, actually a little bit scary, but there, there was no negativity there. It was just like, "I'm a powerful guy, but this was, this was octaves of power higher than I've ever seen before."

But do you think the creators, what created those little bio mechanisms and mitochondria? Because if they're billions of years old and they evolved, did he, did he, did he plant the seed? Or because a lot of people are like, "That's the difference is you're either you believe in evolution or you believe in God. You don't believe in both." You know, that non-dual thing really threw me for a loop. It took me a long time to understand I am simultaneously rational and irrational at the same time. There's parts of my system that are nonlinear. They know stuff I don't know. They're not rational part of it. And also I have a rational brain. So I have no problem holding two ideas that both might be true some of the time or maybe even if they're opposing it. It's a, it took me a lot of work because I'm a computer science guy. I'm a computer hacker. Uh, come from a line of physicists and engineers, and the world makes a lot more sense when you realize it's simultaneously can be more than one thing. And so from that perspective, evolution seems like a bunch of [ __ ]. And epigenetics doesn't. And one of the biggest things that proves it's not random is they took a bunch of bacteria that could only eat lactic acid as a fuel source. And they put them in a petri dish with no lactic acid and they put in some other kind of fuel that they're not genetically equipped to handle. Well, in that sealed environment, you'd expect them to starve to death, but they didn't. They changed their genetics to be able to eat the only fuel that was there. So, there's this really cool interaction between mitochondrial DNA. Those guys are really calling the shots and your nuclear DNA. And there's a lot of non-coding DNA in there that can be turned on under the right circumstances. And the cool thing about this is, show me one data point that breaks a paradigm, and the paradigm is broken. It's still a helpful belief system. It's just not fully accurate.

So, do our bodies change really rapidly based on our, our environment that we're in?

Yes, they do. There's also this question. When a woman gets pregnant, there's one cell, right? Sperm, egg, come together. What tells the eight cells that come out of that what parts of the body they're going to be? It is not in your DNA. It is a field. Is the only way it can be done. So the instructions are there, but it doesn't tell which part of the body to grow into an arm or an eye. Somehow it knows, and it knows by fields. And how do we know this? Because you can run electricity or you can mess with fields that affect fertility, including cell phone fields. So we know that there's unseen fields guiding us. Why would we not think that an unseen field is shaping our genetics? Uh, it does. In fact, the two fields that are most likely that are information fields or quantum fields. And those are the underlying nature of reality. We're just not supposed to be able to see them. Doesn't mean they're not there, right? You can't see X-rays, but you know they're there, right? We can detect them, but we don't see them. The fact we don't see them doesn't mean we can't influence them. And we can and we do. And that is why things like telepathy work. Like the mind.

Mhm. You can't see that.

Exactly. And everyone agrees that it's there.

Yeah. And you can't see love. Like how do you see love?

Love is real.

Yeah. So, so a couple more questions. Um, number one, what do you think like the main reason people feel like [ __ ] is? That's that goes kind of to where the one like the biohack that everyone says is working but doesn't. What's the one reason most people feel like [ __ ]?

You feel like [ __ ] because your body does a terrible job of combining 30 pounds of air and some food to make electricity. 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial insufficiency. And everyone over 40 has it unless you're on a longevity program. It just means you're doing a bad job making energy because when you're at your full power, you're not going to feel like [ __ ]. You might still be a jerk, and you might still have a bad day, but you have enough energy to do something about it. But if you're running at half power or 20% of power, that's why you feel like [ __ ]. You simply have a power generation problem. And once you use biohacking to fix your power generation, then you have a power allocation problem because you put all of your available energy into being afraid of criticism, right? Instead of doing something useful, and then all of your extra energy goes into thinking about tacos, and then the rest of it goes into OnlyFans. So number one, you don't have enough energy. Number two, you waste it. It's just an energy problem. So if I were listening to this, I'd be like, "Ask him, how do you fix it?" How do you fix it? Well, this is why I write all my books. So, if you're interested in the energy problem, start with a bulletproof diet. It's in 20 languages, almost a million copies sold. People have lost millions and millions of pounds on the diet, but most importantly, you get your brain back. That's going to turn your mitochondria on. And the second book that you should read is heavily meditated. It's my new book because that's going to tell you how do you allocate away from fear and towards peace, away from hunger towards nourishment, away from loneliness, towards nourishment. So all you got to do is make sure everything that your body is processing in the world, it gives you energy instead of taking energy. And if you do that, if you, I have so much energy left over, I think I'll be more aware. I think I'll be more powerful. I think I'll do something that matters in the world. That's it. Make more energy, apply it better, and then the world's completely different. Folks, I should have been dropping bombs the whole time.

So last, last question. What do you think's more important? Sleep, which you answered earlier, or nutrition? In other words, if, if you had to pick, you can eat, you have to eat fast food every day for a year or, uh, not get sleep for a year, which would you pick?

I think sleep is more important. And by the way, when I started the biohacking movement, I didn't believe that. I managed to lose weight on 4,500 calories a day, sleeping four hours a night. You can do it. Biohacking lets you get by on way less sleep. I started, you know, a company that did 750 million in revenue while I was working full-time at a, as a VP at a public company. You can do that, but getting high-quality sleep is non-negotiable, and it will allow you to eat some junk food. But I will tell you, if you eat crappy food, you'll get crappy sleep. So, there's a bit of a problem there. My only the two things I look at because I feel great. I have energy. I, I am never like out of energy. But I can't sleep for [ __ ]. I go to bed at like 11:30, wake up at 5, and I, and when I wake up, I've trained my brain to be like almost like surprised and excited that I get another day. So like I wake up and I'm like instantly grateful that I get another day, and I'm out the bed like, "Man, I want to enjoy this day." So, I can't seem to get more than five, six hours sleep. There are some people who only need five or six hours of sleep.

Do you know how much REM and deep sleep you're getting?

No. So, get a sleep tracker. Um, you can get the Ultrahuman Ring. You get the Aura Ring, but really your best bet is to buy something called Eight Sleep. Eight is a mattress cover. It'll monitor your sleep all night long. It'll change the temperature of your mattress so that you get more deep and more REM sleep. And it works. It works, and it'll give you a score. The first company to do that 10 years ago launched on my podcast. Eight sleep is, it's really cool, and it'll give you every morning a score. It says, "Here's how well you did." So if you're getting 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM in six hours, that's a gift. But the single biggest thing you could do is have more darkness in your life. The glasses I'm wearing now are called True Dark. It's the first circadian glasses company. It's the first modern one. We make glasses, and I write about them and heavily meditated. We published in a medical journal. 15 minutes of wearing the, the darker red color. This a very specific tint that True Dark makes. 15 minutes of that shifts your brain waves like you've been meditating. And you wear those for an hour before bed, especially if it's bright. And it's the temperature, the color, and the brightness of the light. That's what's messing up your sleep. So, we have all these LED lights in our bathrooms. It takes two seconds of bright light for the timing system in your brain to think it must be daytime. Because throughout all of recorded history, the brightest light you could have at night was a full moon or a campfire. And when you get this, these bright lights indoors, it messes up your central timing system. Circadian rhythm.

Yep. Basically, there's a, a thing called the SCN inside your brain. 5% of the cells in your eyes are there just to figure out what time of day it is. So, it can tell you to be insulin resistant or not. It can tell you make energy or make recovery. And if you look at bright lights, you look at a bright screen before you go to bed, that timing system gets broken. So you're still going to sleep, you just get junk sleep, just like you're having junk food. So for me, what's changed both my weight loss, my cognitive focus is my house has red lights at night, and it is dim. I have dimmer switches on everything. If the sun goes down, it's going to be dim in my house. The dimmer the better. And if I want to make sure I go to bed at 10:00, by the way, my entire life, I went to bed at 2:00 a.m., like I could not go to bed before then to save my life. By using the True Dark glasses, I shifted my go to bed time by 4 hours. And the earlier you go to bed, the better sleep you're going to get. First half of your sleep is for deep sleep, for your hormones, growth hormone, testosterone. Second half is for dreaming, memory consolidation. So, you go to bed a little bit earlier. You're not going to want to go to bed, but if your house is dark, you're not looking at, at screens, or if you are looking at them, they're as dim as you can get them, put on the $2 glasses. And I have no idea how many tens of thousands of people have done this and just said, "That changed it. Now I can sleep." So, same thing for me. I was a terrible sleeper, and now I'm an amazing sleeper.

And you think that's more important to the longevity and health and anti-aging specifically?

Yes. But eight hours is [ __ ] provably, people. And there's three studies now of multiple millions of people tracked for years. People who live the longest sleep 6 and a half hours a night, right? And it, I'm not saying, "Well, that's me." Well, maybe not six and a half, but five and a half to six. My average is 6 hours and 32 minutes on my, my trackers. I've been tracking for 17 years because I was so bad at sleeping. It's the quality you're talking about. It's the quality. And the reality is healthy people need less sleep. So that's why they live longer.

Would you rather live 200 and look like an old saggy [ __ ] or live to 70 but look 35 the whole time?

I'd rather live to 200 as long as my brain works and I'm not in pain. Like I can handle looking like [ __ ]. It doesn't really matter as long as I have my brain. And I guess I'd like to have my reproductive system intact. That's useful. That's a good one. So brain, dude, that's what's power. Bulletproof diet. That's the name of the first book. And I'm not associated with the Bulletproof Company at all. They, they kicked me off the board and fired me a while ago, and they sold it off. So Danger is the new coffee company, but the book is still called The Bulletproof Diet.

Yeah. So go get the Bulletproof Diet book. Get some Danger Coffee. Definitely get heavily meditated. Hopefully you can come out to the conference in Austin. Maybe I'll see you there.

Yes.

Biohackingconference.com.

Well, Dave, I appreciate you coming in. I appreciate you doing all the work you do to give us all the findings.

Thank you, Brad. And folks, you guys can follow him on social media, Dave Asprey, right? And it sounds just like it's spelled A S P R E Y. Till next time, folks. Keep it real. [Music]

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Biohacking Expert Exposes Health Hacks Everyone Still Believes | Dr Dave Asprey

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