Episode 64 – Dave Asprey – The Bulletproof Diet

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our scent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a chip we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening what’s

up guys so this is our interview with mr. Dave Asprey if you have not heard of date you are in for quite the surprise dave is one of the most remarkable human beings I think that is that is doing the work that he’s doing and just fascinating individual who I have looked up to for quite some time and it took some time to get Dave on the show and it was worth all the work because this conversation gets real it gets raw we get into some deep core fundamental

issues and you guys are you guys are brilliant really truly going to enjoy this conversation and I encourage you to go pick up a copy of Dave’s book bulletproof diet it’s more than just a diet book it has more information than just diet related material so I think you’ll enjoy the book also we are listener supported so the reason that we I mean it would be easy for us to go out and pick up a sponsor and feed you guys advertisements I’d I really want to be

different than other podcasts I want to be different than other shows and so if you guys donate and if you guys value what we’re doing and and you value that principle that we don’t want to shove ads in your face every time you listen to the show then get to our donate page the human XP calm / donate and and help us at least cover the overhead costs of operating and you know what we’re doing and just the everyday cost because right now I am paying for

that out of pocket so if you enjoy this and I really think you will make sure that you get to us on Facebook Twitter at the human XP and if you can get on itunes and leave us a review you guys are gonna love this episode I had so much fun talking to Dave and we’re definitely going to be seeing more of him Oh on HX p so thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is becoming bulletproof as we speak to my guests mr. Dave Asprey Dave it’s an

honor sir welcome to HX be there you’re happy to be here so Dave I mean you your story is so empowering you’ve done so much you went from weighing 300 pounds to completely turning that around you were selling t-shirts on usenet you made six million dollars by the time you were 26 why don’t you kind of breakdown that story for us and sure i would like to say that i made six million dollars selling t-shirts but i didn’t i made six

million dollars at the company that hosted google’s very first servers when Google was just two guys out of Stanford and well thousands and thousands of other e-commerce companies like yahoo and and other big brands that you know today I was a co-founder of a consulting group at a company that really held most of the Internet as it grew in its first big spurt after the browser was created the t-shirt business though was the first ecommerce ever I sold I didn’t

know it at the time that it was impactful I sold a t-shirt that said caffeine my drug of choice with a picture of a caffeine molecule to 12 countries out of my dorm room who would have thought right right along the way though I had been fat as a teenager as a kid and after my effect right about when I was selling t-shirts I hit 300 pounds and my sort of fat proof photo is a picture of me from entrepreneur magazine when I was about 23 weighing 300 pounds and i put

it up on the screen when i give a talk and no one thinks it’s me because i don’t even look like the same person yeah i also ended up I’m in Silicon Valley and working really hard I’m running a program at the University of California to teach working engineers how the internet works so they can take like old-school engineering and make it work with these big scalable systems and I’m also working in this demanding job like designing infrastructure for these

companies and I started to have brain fog like I couldn’t remember anything that happened in a meeting and I was just not just not feeling good and things weren’t working it was it was pretty scary to be perfectly honest and I went online and I found something from the 80s called smart drug news and I’m actually good friends with the guy who wrote it and this was about nootropics almost before they had that name and i ordered a thousand dollars with

nootropics from europe and i started taking them and i got my brain back and i used that to continue my career I got an Ivy League MBA at Wharton using a big handful smart drugs I ended up taking modafinil the kind of famous limitless drug for eight years almost every day and I’ve been off of it for almost four years now because with all the other hacks that I do I I don’t need it like it doesn’t even do much for me anymore compared to where my brain is every day

it’s like I’m on it all the time without needing to take it so that that’s kind of my story I ended up spending now it’s well north of a half a million dollars and 15 years looking at everything you can do to increase human performance cognitively and to some extent physically but I’d or itís my knees when I was 14 I’ve been fat my whole life I had three knee surgeries before I was 22 like I’m not interested in running a marathon in fact the first guy ran a

marathon died and I I’m pretty darned interested though in living to 180 years old or more and that’s that’s my goal so I look at things from an anti-aging perspective I’ve run an anti-aging nonprofit group called Silicon Valley Health Institute for more than a decade where we bring world-class people in to give talks guys like Aubrey de Grey have been there to the lay public about here’s what you can do to have more control of your biology so this is the

basis of my work I now I’m a New York Times bestselling author bulletproof radio has we’re pushing almost 40 million downloads which is well I’ve actually killed at this point about 135 people if you look at if you look at the number of hours that bulletproof content has consumed it’s about a hundred and thirty something I feel a great sense of obligation there to to just not waste people’s time so I a bulletproof radio and in the content do it it’s it’s got

it’s a little bit of humor in it but it’s not a bunch of dick jokes and I just believe in adding as much value as I can and I I look at everything I write as if if someone had told me this when I was 16 or 20 or 25 if I just known these things what would met life had been like like it would have been easier and I would have done more so I just put myself back to where I was and sort of send a message back through time and my first work on on the bulletproof blog

was literally if only someone had told me this if only someone had told me this I would have changed my life so maybe five people will read this and it’ll have that big of an impact and then it’s a huge win even if I spend hundreds of hours making content but it affected it tens of thousands of hours of other people’s lives i would actually felt really good about that I was already a VP at a big company already on stock options like I didn’t do it to

start a company I just did stuff that I wanted yeah yeah and I mean when you say that you’ve explored different biohacking techniques I mean you you really mean that I think I think I saw an image of you in it the other day you’re in surrounded by this sort of red light and you’ve got you’ve got this this meter on measuring something I don’t know what you were doing I’m still wearing that right now okay what what is that that’s that’s a 14-day heart sensor

like a hospital grade EKG and it collects data on every single heartbeat and then at the end of a couple weeks you send it in they download the data and then they look for how your autonomic nervous system is doing and it’s a very advanced cardiac function tests usually used for people who are like gonna die or are you checking variability with your heart rate with that well I’m tracking every single heartbeat so you can certainly calculate

variability and that’s the measure of autonomic nervous system function but it also just gives you a 24-hour picture to see okay what happens with exercise what happens while you’re sleeping and it’s one thing to take your resting heart rate when you wake up it’s another thing to have a graph of your heart rate while you’re resting all night long every single second there’s a lot of powerful info in there but I I did something bad

last night so I’ve been wearing the same for a couple days and it’s it’s a little bit bittersweet because I helped to create a competitor to this company in 2003 a venture-backed startup that didn’t go so well so here it is i am using our competitors stuff more than 10 years later i hopped into one of the giant pieces of biohacking gear i have here it looks like a fact it is a cockpit like thing from a jet fighter and you sit in it for 20 minutes and it

brings the air pressure down to the same air pressure you’d have it Mount Everest so 22,000 feet and then back to sea level and then back to 22,000 feet so it rapidly changed air pressure which changes the water in your cells like it’s a very powerful thing Robbins also has one of these things it’s something that I have at bulletproof labs down in Santa Monica which is opening soon and the problem is the rapid changes like that I think I’d

crack to the sensor because it started blinking and looking very strange on my chest and then now it looks dead so I’m sad okay so I mean to backtrack a little bit here I mean if out of all these different sort of biohacking mechanisms that you’ve used I mean is there a single one that is your favorite or something that you kind of recommend to others to use the most the single most powerful thing you can manipulate in the environment around you is your food

there there’s a definition for biohacking one that I wrote in the very early days like liquid I was working to create biohacking as a movement it’s not anti-aging it’s not health and wellness it’s biohacking and the definition was and still is it’s changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology so you can do whatever you want right so there’s someone listening this right now I was like dude I want to

put on 50 pounds of lean muscle mass and look like a balloon animal and like like I’m totally cool with that I think it’s amazing and I’ve learned so much for bodybuilders and I use body building techniques but my goal is to look quote almost muscular which is an only slight insult that the New York Times pointed at me that I actually love because that’s what I want to be like if you’re too muscular it doesn’t make you live longer and if you’re not muscular enough

it doesn’t make you live longer so I want lots of lean mass but not excessively in mass even though I kind of would like I’d be really cool to look like a bodybuilder but I don’t think I want to do that to my biology so this whole perspective you change the environment around you we have more control of the environment than we ever have and the whole universe of things you can change is light is terribly important and it’s getting much worse in

the last three or four years LED lighting is trashing people’s biology and I’ve been talking about this for cheese almost 10 years even with compact fluorescent lighting before that people don’t know it affects their brain it affects their mitochondria it affects their sleep I manufacture screens that shield some of the more harmful parts of the spectrum so they don’t get into your eyes before you go to sleep when you look at your iPhone so

those are all important that they’re quite important actually the magnetic fields you’re exposed to and the EMFs they do affect biological function at a core level and all of those things though pale in comparison to how you’re going to feel if you eat a bowl of msg covered in sugar and in hydrogenated fat like like you cannot out hack crappy food it’s just not going to be done if you fix the food as an input to your biology and that means so I wrote a

whole book about it’s called the bulletproof diet but that means eating a much higher specific fat diet and if you eat a higher canola oil diet it doesn’t work and what you’re doing is you’re increasing the percentage of calories from the right fats to more than fifty percent of what you eat and for a lot of people at seven you’re eighty-five percent you’re going to be a ketosis this fat burning mode that was popularized by Atkins you’re in that

some of the time but not all the time and you cheat you use something called brain octane oil which is now the largest source of exogenous ketones and what that means is ketones are fat burning molecules that fuel your brain in a different way and exogenous means from outside your body so literally I pour a special fat on my food that converts to fat energy that certain cells in the brain prefer to sugar my brain runs on sugar and fat at the same

time which is biologically very difficult to do most people they’re only running on sugar or they’ve been fasting for four days or they’re on a crazy aggressive paleo or a concise and then they’re only on ketones for the most part so for me things aren’t easier because I’m kind of powering my brain in a different way and that’s what I would recommend to people get rid of inflammatory foods and start eating more of the right kinds of fat including

grass-fed butter including coconut oil which is a really cheap source of lauric acid which is a pretty healthy oil that’s falsely been sold by some companies that like a super mct oil it actually doesn’t have the magic powers of real mct oils mct oils are something I popularized as an ingredient in bulletproof coffee which is what I’m best known for I mean I think one of the funnier things going back to kind of food and being healthy I

think one of the funnier things that you’ve said about is that women can smell men who are fertile and healthy that’s so true and it’s it’s kind of funny but women and men smell each other anyway and that’s a part of why we’re attracted to someone there are pheromones and things like that but if you have bad bacteria in your gut like our systems are so finely attuned we want to connect with someone who is is fertile and if you are fertile as a man

or a woman you actually do smell better I don’t mean fertile as in i’m ready to conceive right now you know I’m I’m ovulating I just mean fertilized in my biology is healthy enough to have a healthy baby that’s why guys are attracted to curves because a woman with curves has more DHA fat stored in her hips and thighs and that’s actually why the first child is usually the most intelligent because they get the mothers DHA into their brain and affect my first

book was about how to have a healthier smarter baby and it’s just that that sort of thing we’re wired that way so yeah if you’re eating junk food you’re not going to smell good at a very subtle level and you can probably still meet people who also eat junk food but when you’re really healthy your Bo drops and your pheromones go up and that does change your attractiveness potential going back to you know just kind of hacking your brain and your brain waves

and it the idea of neural plasticity and how Sciences is changing the way kind of we see the brain and I mean the old paradigm was that the brain was one specific way it stayed that way through your life and then you died and now it’s it’s more of yes your brain has the ability to regrow these synapses in your brain and and create new pathways and I mean that’s that’s something that you’ve kind of focus on right I spent a lot of

time looking at my brain because it turns out i had brain damage I was getting my MBA at Wharton I almost failed I would sit down to take a test and I would get a hundred percent of the first question I get seventy percent a second 30 on the third and after that I felt like I was completely disabled like I just couldn’t think why I thought I knew that but I I was starting to like question my my self-worth literally so I went out and I got radioactive sugar

injected in my arm and then we did something called aspects can which is now pretty well respected dr. Daniel Amen who’s become a personal friend is the guy who popularized this over immense opposition from science trolls and now he’s been proven right I think you could say at the time it was it was a life-changing thing because here I am thinking I’m failing because either I’m not good enough I’m not smart enough or I’m just not trying hard enough and I’m

working at a company wind up selling the company for six hundred million dollars in value and so I’m doing all right there but at school then I’m just scraping by so what what happened there is Daniels scan the spec scan showed me that when I tried to pay attention to something though I had no metabolic activity in the front of my brain whatsoever in fact the the psychiatrist who interpreted my results just looked at me and you said Dave I don’t know how

you’re standing here in front of me inside your brain is total chaos you have the best camouflage of anyone I’ve ever met his perspective was that I was hitting him up for adderall like any decent college student would and when he saw my actual quantified like metabolic activity in the brain he was floored and my reason for sharing this with you right now is that look okay I AV League NBA like one of the top three business schools in the country depending on what

ranking you want to look at successful startup acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars I was kicking ass and I was pushing so hard and I wasn’t getting the results for the level of pushing that I had and I I was liberated by these results because I Mike wait it’s not a mole failing it’s not an effort failing it’s a biological thing and I can hack biology right hacking your morals is very different like hacking some inherent weakness or character flaw

you’re probably screwed if that’s really what it’s about and most people believe that’s what it’s about it’s not about effort it’s not about trying harder it’s not about willpower its aftermath biology wow that’s it’s ingenious man I and love it I uh you know I admittedly I work really hard as well and I i am i’m not the best with diet I mean I I eat what I can as a necessity type of thing and and and that’s kind of how it stands

for me you know and and there’s a desire to change that there’s a genuine desire to you know match how hard I work to putting that effort that same effort into my food and what I’m putting into my body where I mean where do you think your greatest breakthrough as far as what you were consuming and and how it affected you where did that where did that happen for you well a long time ago I was in my early 20s I’m 43 right now so this is about 20 18 20 years ago I

was probably around 280 pounds I’ve lost a little bit of weight and I have lost hundred pounds of fat I’ve actually probably lost like 200 pounds of fat cuz you lose 20 pounds you gain 30 lose 30 gain 40 and everyone who’s fat and has been fat for well understands that dynamic it’s horrible and there’s a hormonal reason for it it’s not because you know you have no willpower it’s because of a hormone called ghrelin and one called cck by the way you can hack

those with bulletproof coffee and things like that but for me I decided I was not going to have any more knee surgeries and I would decide I was going to lose the weight and it was the most important thing I could do in my life so I’m still finishing up my sixth year to get my four-year degree and I which by the way is a BS in computer information systems with a concentration in decision support which is part of the the artificial intelligence world so

that was what I ended up graduating in but I’m going to classes i’m working in IT at a hospital and i’m working out for an hour and a half every day six days a week no matter what else is on my calendar i put it as the most important thing I could do I did this for a year and a half right half cardio which is a treadmill at 15 degrees not running but walking really fast with a backpack on some of the time and the rest of his weights heavy weights so at the end of

this time I can max almost every single machine at the 24 hour fitness I can benchpress my thin friends will they french fries and i’m eating salads and crap i was still fat and i was just like man it’s because I’m weak right because I didn’t try hard enough it’s because I couldn’t say no to you know that one extra leaf of lettuce and all that stupid programming that people have because we believe that it’s about exercise more and eat less well I pushed

that as hard as it could and one day I just kind of throw my hands Mike this just isn’t working what what’s wrong like and I thought it was me and there’s this moment run equate it’s not me I’m doing what they said like I’m eating less than 2,000 calories a day are using around 1800 I cut my fat you know I I’m not doing I’m not doing well so I was at this coffee shop I was getting like a triple espresso something or another and

there was a body builder magazine now i’m in a farming community in central California in 1990 something and I don’t know back then you didn’t really read bodybuilding magazines unless you like to look at pictures of guys in bikinis and stuff at least not in my high school like like that we had a future farmers of america chapter that was pretty strong there and I so I’m at this coffee shop and there’s magazine with these a big ripped bodybuilder on the cover and

it’s like how you can get abs I’m like I want abs like I’ve got flabs right now and I’m in my wits in but you know I’ll be damned if I’m not strong so I opened up the magazine and there was an article I wish I knew which one it was I wish I’d saved it and it was a guy saying you know what even fruit can make you fat like carbs make you fat who would have thought and I’m like are you kidding me like that’s what I’ve been doing so I started cutting carbs and I wasn’t

that good back then I hadn’t done my homework so I was having like lots of cottage cheese in the morning but I was also having some orange juice with it because I didn’t know any better and i ended up losing 50 pounds like half the way to had to lose in about three months and in retrospect i also cut out gluten which was a major thing for me when I got rid of lots of the the carbs and I get rid of gluten not not only did I lose that 50 pounds I also had a

personality change I actually became a nicer person and the people closest to me my family and girlfriends and whatnot they all said it like wow you’re nicer I noticed that my middle finger wasn’t quite as muscular after driving and I just felt something shift in my brain and now this is actually widely recognized you look at books like wheat belly and grain brain both written by by friends I’m I’m kind of blown away but yeah that did happen to me and I did

notice it and that set me off on a path it was like well if that much of how I feel and just the way I interact with the world is controlled by my food I better own that food and I should make a study of it I i mentioned earlier my my degree decision support systems this is how do you use technology to look at huge amounts of data to make better decisions yeah that’s what I do in my life that’s what I did to help build Internet infrastructure like the world’s

first pay-as-you-go cloud computing thing I just just everything that I do it’s like I’m a walking a ventilation yeah yeah it’s a way of thinking and it’s a hacker way of thinking and I really was a computer hacker likely yeah that’s why this works and that’s why i like the word biohacking and my job at bulletproof is to teach people how to think about this the the other thing that I put in as part of my mission Xavier is something that I learned at UC

Santa Barbara I took a class called religion and violence this was taught by a rabbinical scholar and this guy was really good and we were listening to Jim Jones and looking at Hamas and all these these times when religion would cause violence and I was really kind of tormented by why could this happen and my assumption was that all all these religious radicals were just irrational and I said that and it when he ain’t as an answer to a question

to the professor in class and he laughed and said no no no these are very rational beings I’m like how could you blow people up and drink kool-aid and all this stuff it doesn’t make any sense and he said you know it doesn’t make any sense because of your assumptions if you look at their assumptions about reality what they’re doing makes perfect sense and if you look at what you’re doing with your son’s about reality it also makes sense so I realized that with with

bulletproof I can help people to reset some of their assumptions or at least to question their assumptions because my assumption work out more and eat less will make you lose weight it was false in fact the vast majority of the assumptions about how the human body works we practice behaviors because we think they’re going to work because of assumptions that we never questioned so I learned to question those things and I teach people to question them and then

to think differently once they’re willing to question their assumptions yeah and that’s what you know that’s what I love about what you’re doing and what you do and how you’re able to affect people and it’s literally about kind of the art of living and minimizing the things that affect us adversely and kind of taking you know the power back and you know gaining gaining the power to control what we put into our bodies how how what we put into our bodies

affects us and and you know really just just having that sense of okay well you know it’s it’s my body and and I will choose to live this way hey here’s what few people teach it most people will say here’s what you to get stronger but they don’t tell you here’s what to do to be less week and they’re different in in the the bulletproof diet book I did my best to to highlight that difference and the first thing you do is you make sure you have enough energy by

eating fat eating enough food that your body can use the second thing you do before you even think about micronutrients all that stuff is you get rid of things that make you weak and I came up with a list of suspect foods that for large percentages of the population they cause problems so one in five people listening to it as twenty percent of the population they get rheumatoid arthritis from eating potatoes and tomatoes and eggplants

right because they have genes that cause them to express certain types of polysaccharides on cells in their body that stick to chemicals that plants make so we won’t eat them it’s a stupid thing right but if you don’t know that that could be a problem and you’ve lived your entire life with musculoskeletal pain and if you stop eating that stuff for one week you could figure out if you were one of those one in five like it doesn’t matter how much you exercise how

many performance-enhancing substances you take or anything else if every single day you’re smacking yourself over the head by doing something that’s biologically incompatible with you it seems to me that stopping the stuff that makes you weak is a lot easier than adding more muscle mass or adding more IQ points for anything else so most of my best hacks are actually about stopping things that were limiting me not doing things to enhance my

performance yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense actually that that makes more sense than the other way I mean I know that you you work hard and you’re always kind of on an airplane or something and you’re you and you’re put you’re pushing your body a lot and so how do you deal with stress the impacts of you know stress on your body and and just the hard work aspect of it there are two kinds of stress on the body there’s a hermetic stress which is stress that

makes you stronger and then there’s a chronic stress or non hormetic stress which is stuff that just makes you weak I minimize very religiously the stuff that makes you weak so exercises for medic stress it tears down muscles so you’ll grow muscle back you expose yourself to something that you’re afraid of so that you can wire yourself to not be afraid of it anymore so that you can face your fears and things like that those are positives

dresses if your body feels like you’re going to die every time an email comes in which is actually the case for most people because our bodies are really bad at sorting out whether an email that might be a threat is any different than a tiger that might be a threat so our threat detection systems are woefully inadequate for the world we live in and they keep getting triggered by stupid stuff so i rewired a lot of that and I say rewired I’ve spent ten weeks of my

life doing 40 years of Zen neurofeedback training where literally i’m spending all week with electrodes glued to my head in a chamber in on the chamber 24 hours a day but to the extent i can be in it listening to my brain waves and learning how to control them and going through every single bad programming in my mind and pulling it out and putting in more appropriate biological responses emails when i do not feel a stress response from emails my inbox is full i

do not feel a stress response from it in my inbox is empty i do not feel a sense of relief from that i have let that go so i also minimize a physical stress that isn’t beneficial so I don’t eat foods that cause inflammation in me I’d rather fast in fact fasting isn’t that’s actually a hormetic stressed if you fast a normal amount eating foods that are bad for you is oftentimes not a hermetic stress it’s just something that makes

you weak so I I manage my energy very very carefully and what I found is that I have more energy than people 20 years younger than me work for me like I’m up later and I’m full of passion and invigaron things I never had when I was 20 or 25 I was I was like a zombie half the time I was really tired I felt hungover even when I wasn’t drinking and I just didn’t have the energy to bring it so I’ve made a study of having the energy to bring it I practiced radical

recovery where I used to do this the exercise six days a week kind of thing now look at how much sleep did I get last night I’ll tell you last night i was up till four thirty in the morning because i’m working on my next New York Times bestseller which is about about mitochondrial function and about what we’re capable of doing when you really hack your biology and well that was 430 I know it’s 1130 now so I do the math right it’s been seven hours since then

but I’ve been up for several hours I made coffee with my kids this morning and all that do I sound like I’m dragging like I’m not no I can do that day after day it’s not good for me if I do that for a long period of time I feel it for a couple nights it doesn’t matter because my ability to make electrons and my cells is higher than it was and because I’m not wasting any of them on worry and on fear because I’ve trained my heart rate variability the way I

teach clients to do it where my fight-or-flight response is fundamentally different than that of a normal person and I’m an abnormal person kind of like that is is meditation and mindfulness a big thing for you meditation mindfulness is almost everything the only problem is try having meditation mindfulness without enough electrons in your brain it doesn’t work so what I recommend for people is number one get your biology in order and then number two practice

mindfulness practice awareness I’ve been to Tibet and learn meditation from the Masters on purpose because of like well I’m a Silicon Valley engineer I’ve tapped out everything I can think of here my-my strictly rational view of reality doesn’t match the experiences that I’m having and I’m not getting all the results I want from it so I’ve done ayahuasca with shamans I did that what 15 years ago in the jungles in Peru so I’ve done art of living breathing

exercises that are practiced by tens of millions of people mostly in India I’ve met Nobel laureates doing that kind of breathing and very powerful entrepreneurs we used to get together when I lived in Silicon Valley every every saturday morning at 7am we’d sit and do an hour hour and a half of these funky breathing sizes because it just was such a performance enhancer so I do all those things and even 40 years n which is where I’ve had the most progress it’s

called 40 years n because the idea is that in in a few days of training you can teach someone’s brain to have the same brain waves as someone who’s spent twenty to forty years of doing dailies and meditation so I cheat in my meditation if I meditate there’s computers telling my brain no do it this way do it better do it faster so I I might be one of those hurry meditate faster people but I walk with mindfulness like it’s built into what I

do and I pay attention to what I say I pay attention not just how I act but to whether my internal state matches my external state that gives you profound resilience especially when you get trolls and and just all these these crazy people the more successful you get the more of them you attract that was those gonna be something that I led towards so I mean how do you deal with that I mean there’s I mean being at the level that you’re at and you must get

you know a lot of people who are trying to debunk your work or just for no reason whatsoever just don’t like you I mean how how do you respond to that how do you react to that how do you psychologically deal with that when when I first was getting going there’s there’s just so much support and I just bring a lot of positive energy of what I’m doing like I i I’m already successful enough that I’m safe right hey so I’m doing something that that is

here for a mission I and it’s it’s important work and it’s something that I’ve worked for years and a non-profit role to try and bring about and I just couldn’t make it happen that way because nonprofits just aren’t structure that way so I’m taking something that for me is a passion and I am taking it out there and then all of a sudden a someone who had been a really big supporter I my work change his life a public figure basically invested in another company

that was competing with me and a long time Dave Asprey fans know exactly who I’m talking about and honestly I don’t really I just don’t care but he he invested in another company had a commercial motivate shin and literally went overnight to Dave Asprey is a scumbag and and since like a whole bunch of trolls to like to face my social media pages and all kind of stuff like that and it threw me for a loop for a couple months because I’m

coming at this from like a mission like I’m helping people everyday like like sometimes dozens of people are like they’ve got understand I just got my dad back like I got this one this one email this is a couple years ago but the guys like dave i’m emailing you personally because i hope you can help i’m in the UK this is before we roasted our coffee in the UK before you could buy bowl of fruit products there and he’s like my dad has terminal brain cancer he’s he

may have a month or six weeks left to live I can I only get one good hour a day with him and it’s right after he has bulletproof coffee he’s lucid and the rest of the day he’s gone it’s like I ordered bulletproof but I can’t like it went to Argentina instead of the UK and I don’t know why but it like I need it so I like personally fedexed it to him and to get around all the customs and all that stuff but so I come from that sort of thing I’m like okay my work just

helped a guy get quality time with his dying dad like that’s the level that I operate at and I went from that to like people you know calling me like an asshole scumbag snake oil salesman and all that so what I did is I went to the 40 years of Zen facilities plugged myself into a neurofeedback machine and I did a very structured practice of forgiveness and I actually forgave the person for doing this I understand you know when people come with the world

from a threatened perspective where everything is a takedown that’s that’s how they see things and so this guys are coming to you know have a competing thing with a friend and so I’m going to attempt to smear Dave’s reputation okay a guy who makes loaded dick jokes just called me a scumbag liar we tried to drag my name through the mud the amount of stress that I felt over that was all wasted stress and I don’t feel any stress over

it anymore like you don’t have to like me I’m gonna do the work that I’m gonna do here I honestly I don’t care about that stuff anymore at a very deep level because I already let things go so I actually feel a sense of compassion for the people who want to you know come in and try and deface what they do in fact yesterday someone just posted on my on my Facebook page they called me a quack and I responded to it I’m like I’m like

let me be really clear I’m an unlicensed biohacker I mean you have lots of doctors as friends I married to one whatever but I’m not a doctor I’m like so from your perspective of it you just upgraded me like you just told me you think I’m a physician even though I know like so here’s the deal like like if you’re gonna troll me I would expect you to at least like like do it right so the right term would be like snake oil salesman right and then I linked to my

last April Fool’s Day post which was actually about grass-fed snake oil where we spin the snakes at high speed and then let them go on to a snake sanctuary dude this stuff it’s laughable and the other thing you get successful a guy named Peter sage who is one of the most popular gaston bulletproof radio really help help me to see this is what happens you know the better the better you do the more successful you are the more people’s egos get involved the more

jealous they get of your success yeah I that every day and there’s there’s people out there who I have supported dramatically in getting the message out there they get jealous like why am I not getting whatever this is and then all the sudden it’s like Dave Asprey is a thing and people make up the weirdest stuff and there’s people who say I have cancer there’s people say I have type 2 diabetes there’s people who say there’s stuff in my products that isn’t there I

mean like just crazy stuff out there so the number one thing I say is I’m like look where that’s coming from and then I keep a little equation my back pocket Savior and it’s one I would encourage everyone who is in this role where you’re succeeding and there are people trying to it to drag you down is that it takes a minute or two for a troll to write something on your page or whatever else it takes you about a half a sec to click ban delete okay I went every

knit Sony man it’s like you know it’s it’s great and i love the just the rawness and i can and i can feel you know that you actually you do care and and I mean I’m kind of the same way and I you know this morning I was up that’s just checking the page for the show and there’s just guy just losing it losing his mind I’d even understand I wasn’t really even saying anything i post an article and and he just and and that’s exactly what I did you know i just i

just banned him from the page and but at the same time you know I and it maybe it’ll take me a couple more years or just you know maybe it’ll just click one day and but you know it it doesn’t affect me a little bit and it affects most people it it’s supposed to because you’re human and you’re part of a tribe right and this is our wiring we are we’re meant to fit in and at a very core level we’re kind of pack animals so if you’re not a part of the pack you could

die and the automated defense systems that you have will get triggered by this because you’re human what you can do with deep meditation practice and scripting practices and all all sorts of different ways for me it’s it’s almost all about heart rate variability and like that that deep forgiveness with the electrode stucked on my head so I have a lie detector telling you whether I’ve really forgiven or not but when you do that you actually can change your

biological response to that where I would say ninety percent of the time it just doesn’t get to me at all the area where I still have a little bit of a hot button is when I’ve really provided like like a huge amount of service where I’ve helped someone and then they do like the betrayal thing I’ve had times or I’ll take someone I’ll put them on the show or I’ll do something really nice to support them and then two weeks later they’re like hey have you heard my new

coffee its mold three it’s not actually tested mold free but I just said it and they’re like it’s like dude what the hell right like this isn’t how we help each other like do something new and interesting talk about it but if you’re going to knock off my stuff without even knocking off right there’s another company that used to used to be a supporter they’re selling some mix of water and mct oil which they know very well it doesn’t

work it’s about 12.5 percent the strength of what I do and it’s more expensive on a per unit basis but it’s watered down and they’re running around you know talking about things like that that that one instance I got over it but still it does kind of it does throw me for a loop when someone you’re like okay like I’ve invited you to come on my show or I put you at the bulletproof conference you know thousands of people and like shined a spotlight on your work

because I think it’s worthy and then you’re going to turn around and like tell me I’m an asshole like that I still that still pushes my buttons for about usually about an hour or two and then there’s there’s some specific things I can do heart rate variability there’s a that forgiveness thing I can I have electrodes and EEG machines here or i can I can go to my facility in Seattle where I train my executives and I do the 40 years of Zen program that stuff I can

really dig deep on and if that doesn’t work I have in-house legal counsel and I’m not afraid to use it I don’t have to pay per hour for attorneys all right so you want throw down let’s throw down it’s gonna cost you more that’s going to cost me wow that’s that’s funny and kind of you know real at the same time just because you know I its loyalty is so important I mean you have to you have to be loyal man especially to you know

someone who is offering something to you that you would otherwise they’re just take you a long time to see and and I agree a hundred percent I mean um that that betrayal hurts a lot okay there’s there’s integrity and then there’s loyalty and loyalty is sometimes blind right so so if you’re loyal to someone who is you know starts killing babies you are not acting in integrity so I’m fine if someone I used to work with sides all right I’m going to sever ties

and I’m going to go compete at i would say oftentimes that’s without integrity like if you know i’m backing their company or something and they decide to do it weird stuff like that can happen but the the bigger thing about integrity there is that if you feel like to go compete the first thing you have to do is you have to actually take down the person who helped you before that’s like a really deep level of integrity that’s lacking and that’s an area where i think

a lot of people carry a lot of shame in fear and and like all their bad like early childhood experiences are all mushed up in their head i know because i had all that too i just unraveled it all so I I kind of feel the most compassion for the people back that way cuz like they’re kind of living in hell and they don’t they don’t really know it it’s still irritating though because it’s like guys like come on don’t far in the elevator like this isn’t how we help

each other like I have dozens of new york times bestselling authors who I consider like good friends who’ve helped me bring the message out and like I do anything for them and they would do anything for me and we would never do that to each other and then every now and then someone shows up and is just like you know kind of tries to try to insert themselves in the community and then just shows up without integrity and they get booted by the immune system of

cool PF yeah yeah I’ve noticed that too and that’s that’s the amazing thing about I think this community and I mean there are good aspects and there’s there’s always going to be those people who kind of are jealous they’re envious they want what you have and and they’re just going to come at you that way so I mean I’m glad we we covered that right on a curious note though Dave I mean if I can ask how many how many bridges like

through you know you’ve been doing this for a while how many bridges do you think have been burned through you know launching your companies and kind of being at the point you’re at you know no real bridges have been burned right there were some times where I’d like oh I thought that person was was cool or I thought our stuff was aligned there was nothing there right this comes down to to me that the rise is straight up from meditation and awareness and

it’s called discernment right it’s my job as the CEO bulletproof and as the vanguard of a movement now around biohacking it’s actually a huge responsibility to that and it means I have an even higher bar for when I decide who’s going to be a guest on my show like a million people might hear what that person has to say like I don’t want to put someone up there who’s is going to steer people to do things that are harmful or to spread misinformation

I put people I’ve had a guy who’s a radical low fat like no added fat to your food any kind of thing and like we just agree to disagree on that and we talk about some other stuff and it’s all cool like I’m happy to challenge my ideas but i don’t want to harm people right and i don’t want to put people who are are those takedown people who believe that the way to the way to win instead of to create something amazing and to share it is to take down someone

else to make themselves look better it’s like dude you were bullied in high school I get it but now you’re like you know a 50 year old adult so you can let that go now and like let’s do something real right my job is to filter those out when I’m hiring people when I’m partnering with people when I’m inviting people to to spend some time in the the media sphere that that I’ve created on the media side of bulletproof it’s a pretty big thing and I’m spending more

and more of my time on on discernment and just just kind of feeling into it and and using those softer skills which did not come naturally to me but that’s what you’ve got to do in a position like this in order to have the maximum positive benefit I mean an end David thank you for answering that question and you know a large part of what you talked about as well as it’s just gratitude and and for me that’s a big thing as well and just being in the

space being here right now being able to talk to you and I have a lot of gratitude for that I mean how how important is gratitude for you it’s the most important thing you can do to reset your nervous system to get out of the fight or flight mode and when I say this until I was 30 I was in the fight-or-flight mode of the time I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck I came into the world thinking that it was a hostile place was

something that was trying to kill me and I never dropped that until I did some really deep work right so I understand that that mindset said very very well and I don’t I I just don’t think that it’s it’s necessary for people to be there but I have been in that state for so much my life that now I I spent a lot of time not being there yeah Dave when when we you know when we talk about all these these biohacking tools and kind of

retooling the way that we we perceive threats and and other people how important is it to really be consistent with you know our practice and and what we’re doing to to kind of maintain those changes let’s go back to that gratitude hack for getting out of getting out of that fight-or-flight mode it doesn’t make sense that gratitude would be the antidote for like being fearful all the time but its programming in your biology that says hey the world is either a

fearful place full of threats and you should optimize your biology to survive or the world is full of hopefully don’t mind us but it’s full of awesome things and you should program yourself to thrive well gratitude is what does that so in terms of consistency every night before bed I sit down with my two young kids and we do a little gratitude ritual and I say tell me three things you’re grateful for that happened today and it could be anything right I’m

grateful that you know we had a pork belly for dinner fine right not so long ago a learn he was five he’s like daddy I’m grateful for the Big Bang because without it there wouldn’t be anything okay that’s gratitude for you right it turns out it’s really good for them because it resets their nervous system they sleep the night like so reliably like it’s amazing actually and I do the same thing with them I tell them through things I’m

grateful for and sometimes it’s it’s I’m grateful for things they don’t quite understand but that’s the one thing it doesn’t cost you anything to write down the three things you’re grateful for you do that it’s really cool there’s a five-minute journal is like a gratitude focused journal that that’s out there I really feel that that is is one of the best things you can do if you are an experienced meditator or you’ve done this neurofeedback stuff that I’m

talking about there’s actually a physical sensation of gratitude it’s like in your chest you can feel it and you can amplify that and when you you focus on the physical sensations of emotions they all have a seat somewhere in the body and they’re the seat is in a different place with different people depending on where they came from but you can use that to amplify the gratitude and pretty soon you’re like wow it this is a wonderful place and it

doesn’t matter if some terrorists did something so it’s something evil today it doesn’t matter if your revenues are up or your revenues are down or you know you got in a fight with your significant other like the world’s still an amazing place and if you just focus on that for a little while it changes your nervous system it changes your biology and that’s one of the hacks you can do Wow yeah it’s beautiful man i love it i really really really truly value you

know that what you’re saying and I I you know I do my best to exercise the same and you know those those emotional muscles where you know I’m putting down what I’m grateful for and reminding myself that you know I’ve been given this huge opportunity to reach people and affect people and you know I get emails all the time and thanking me for this and I I’m very very grateful for you know all of it if we can just if we can actually stick with what the emotional

part of it and address anger a little bit how how do you deal with it I mean is it something that is still part of who you are or have you kind of hacked your way out of that as well you know anger always always exists it’s a part of it’s a part of your ego and your ego is a part of the operating system for keeping your meat alive I call the Labrador brain in in the bulletproof diet and whether it pissed me off to call that book bulletproof diet but

that’s what makes people buy books like like like seriously this is about willpower this is about like everything you can do to kick more ass like like how dare you call it a diet honestly I don’t even care if I have abs I care about how I feel right so that’s sort of that sort of was a little anger right there but it passes and there’s there’s actually an emotional hierarchy that’s really important to understand and and it turns out the very worst place to be

as apathy like if you’re the place where you just don’t give a that is the darkest place you can be because you can’t even be bothered to care and that apathy always hides sadness right so you’re sad about something so when you get past apathy now you carry like how I got a face sighs now I have to like deal with the fact that I’m actually sad that that somebody’s going on and after that then you can feel anger so the good news

is that if you are feeling angry about something you just bypass two of the steps that you might have had to go through you can be grateful for that by the way did you did you ever uh get a chance to read power vs force yeah yeah he taught he talks about that in that book where it kind of you go apathy being the base state and then you move through oh and and then anger is that pivotal state where you can kind of change the way you feel about a certain situation

you get bitten and a lot of people especially younger people and certainly went when i was 25 aight i believe this very fervently like anger is a great source of energy right and it’s actually not a good source of motivation energy if you’re acting out of anger you will always make sub optimal decisions and it’ll cost you emotionally and psychologically and biologically but yet anger is a pivotal point and what’s hiding behind anger every single time is

actually fear and that’s where for me neurofeedback and Harvey variability in just meditation in general have become really important because if you can see what it is that you’re actually afraid of it’s never a rational because fear is not rational fear is actually an emotion which means it isn’t the thought and what we do and this was transformative for me to understand and I write about this on some of my blog posts and all is

it’s that look your nervous system reacts and then you make up a logical story about why you did it and we can prove this with electrodes like we can see it happening you do it and then you tell yourself a story about it and the same as fear of anger you felt the anger and then you tell yourself a story i’m angry because you know my my whatever i mean it hurt my favorites I’m angry because someone cut me off in traffic well actually that’s not why you’re

angry right you’re angry for some other reason and if you actually sit down and journal about and feel into it all that stuff it comes down to the fact that always behind your anger there’s fear and God knows what your fear is and where that came from but it’s usually the first seven years of life you get really bad programming doesn’t matter how good your parents are you just get bad programming because that’s how the world works so behind anger sphere and

behind fear is actually joy and freedom and all those good things so if someone’s angry about something or if I’m angry about something I’m like well okay what am I actually afraid of here because that’s what it means and also I don’t describe the anger to me like I’m angry like my nervous system gets angry like I’m the good stuff so my view of the brain is a little bit radical there but we are the part of you that you identifies you right now the rational

parts that have some good feelings doll that stuff that’s basically a virtual machine running inside a piece of hardware it like there’s a different consciousness that runs your meat and it’s not a nice person and it wants to kill things that wants to eat everything and it’s got all that’s what that is yeah he’s got all the greed it’s got all the all the violence all the hate all that kind of stuff alright so when someone comes to the one of my pages are

wants to insult me or whatever else okay I know what part of them is in charge and what it is it’s their meat operating systems it’s their Labrador brain and they’re acting out of well apathy sadness anger or fear all right then operating out of joy and like that’s right hang out operating out of sense of mission I know I’m helping a lot of people I have a wonderful family and like I’m grateful right so it’s just a different place in the emotional

hierarchy and I I’m grateful that I’ve learned how to spend so much of my life in that state instead of those other horrible places so I feel anger but no you you take the anger and you’re like okay that’s coming from my ego and there’s a reason for it and I’m going to let it go do you ever feel like you are kind of five or ten years ahead of everything you’re doing and maybe humanity is a bit primitive and slow and kind of catching up that would be a form

of ill will or a version that be a really egotistical thought I don’t okay I can tell you that my entire life I am I’ve lived in the future the first ecommerce ever on the planet was a tshirt out of a dorm room I remember I was interviewed by like almost a hundred different magazines around like this 20 something-year-old like early 20s before like a lot of the cool changes that make that much easier now and someone asked me like like what how is this going to

change things I said look we won’t need mail-order catalogs in just five years and I described amazon to this reporter like the Amazon didn’t exist but I described it right I could see it and then I go to go to Silicon Valley and like the very first colocation company which is like that enabled the changes in the internet that we know today that allow us to have a conversation we’re having now in fact probably some fiber that my company

dealt with our buildings we built our between us right now which is awesome so that’s just part of it like like I think about how things are going to be maybe I read too much science fiction as a kid but I don’t think I’m an advanced creature I think that this is how it’s supposed to be for everyone and there’s just a lot of crap in the way and it’s my job to just illuminate the crap and how people get rid of it and the the cheapest fastest laziest way possible

life is supposed to be easy you’re not supposed to be struggling and striving all the time and when you can stop struggling and striving you can start gliding or coasting and it’s actually a lot more fun it’s just getting there for me took an enormous amount of heavy lifting and frankly like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars but I learned a few things along the way and that’s why I have a neuro feedback training institute that’s why I

have a Content things why I write these books because if I can spend 5000 hours to write a book that takes you four hours to read like that some of the most leverage time you’ll ever get mom yeah and that’s what I do yeah wow man I’d really really appreciate your time Dave in it and we’re we’re about out of it you know I really truly respect your work man and and I’m glad that you made the time to be here today and just uh just thank you well thanks Savior I

appreciate the work you’re doing getting getting the word out to just talking about the human experience it’s important stuff and it’s something that that I think is shifting you people are willing to talk about emotions and feelings and spiritual things you should go back 20 25 years if you talked about those things you were ostracized from and all that and now you go to a boardroom and like who’s meditating yeah and if you’re not meditating people sort

of make fun of you okay maybe it’s not quite that bad but it is it’s very widely accepted so things have changed the paradigm has changed and somehow it’s filtered in to this and and yeah and ten years ago I mean maybe even earlier than 20 and it was it was it wasn’t really heard of to go and you know meditate and people weren’t you know and so now it’s picking up and it’s a good thing it’s good i mean i’m glad that the global human consciousness is

kind of waking up to what the planet is and you know one of your one of your other missions is an ecological one where we’re actually helping the planet and you know giving it but getting it its life back and being conscious of what we take from it and and that’s what it’s another thing that i just really respect value men well say thanks so much i guess we didn’t have time to talk about that one but yeah you change you change demand for good stuff the

suppliers have to change and that is happening and shortages of grass-fed butter are leading to much more grassland being put in production to have healthier soil like this is a hackable system the whole planet and everything every decision you make it goes one direction or the other and you don’t have to be anywhere near perfect just when you have an opportunity to know which of two decisions is the one that’s better for you or better for the

planet or hopefully both just pick that one especially don’t care right like like oh I was okay either way let me pick the one that had more benefit justjust yeah where matters yeah man Wow beautifully stated so Dave where can I people pick up a copy of your book where can people find your work well head on over to bulletproof calm and try some of that brain octane oil i talked about try the bulletproof coffee beans that don’t

have a neurotoxin and then that’s common in coffee and you can buy the book there you can buy the book on amazon all over the place i’m not kidding about the effect of the supplements and of the foods and of these other things if you want to meditate better you need stable energy in your brain it’s it’s just required being being in a weakened state while you’re pushing really hard on personal growth doesn’t make any sense and it never did so fuel

yourself perfectly and then meditate and see how your experience changes that that’s really meaningful bulletproof calm and bulletproof radio is on itunes and bulletproof exact calm there’s north of a half a million words of content they’re all free for you yeah and I meant to ask you this and what what’s in your stack right now what do you what are you supplement right now well I’m about to go get some stem cells taken out of my adipose tissue and then

injected my cerebral spinal fluid so I actually grow more brain cells that’s happening next week fact for people interested i will have the physician who does that kind of work on stage of the bulletproof conference is sep tember 23rd through 25th bulletproof conference com boom got a plug-in but that is that means I’ve changed my stack I’ve gone off all the things that typically make your blood thinner so I’m taking less turmeric krill oil and several the

vitamins and a lot of the the plant based compounds that I use that increase cerebral blood flow I’m off of those I’m taking aniracetam i have had unfair advantage this morning i’ve had upgraded aging this morning i’ve had bulletproof coffee with lots of brain octane and be bulletproof upgraded collagen in it let’s see i’m drinking some interesting structured water I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at this thing that we ignore in our body which is that

we’re like ninety percent water and sort of like let’s take away water weight well Gerald Pollack who was on a bulletproof radio just blew my mind talking about how actually water does different things he’s a very prestigious scientist who’s also speaking at the conference so I’m really spending more time looking at the water and my cells and I could do there and that’s all i’ve had today is bulletproof coffee with a little bit of upgraded collagen i put

some of my vanilla in there vanilla has some plant based compound similar to capsaicin they’re called vanilloid activators so use some of that for its inflammatory properties and let’s let’s see Wow a few amazing some stem cells for lunch and and call a day exactly alright guys you guys heard here my guess is Dave Asprey and you can get to his site bulletproof calm this is the human experience and we will see you guys next week