0:00
Anytime you do something that makes your brain or your body evolve, it will involve discomfort.
Search this video
0:03
But suffering comes when you resist the discomfort.
0:05
When I test my brain on the neuroscience stuff from my neuroscience company, I have the response time in my brain of a 20-year-old.
0:13
And it linearly goes up with age and part of superhuman, the anti-aging thing. No, I've got the data.
0:19
It shows I have a 20-year-old's brain.
0:21
And it's awesome because I can keep up. Otherwise, I wouldn't. That's incredible.
0:25
I can't wait to test that out.
0:26
I'd love to see how old my brain is.
0:28
I'd be pretty Who's brain has fascinated you the most that you've tested?
0:31
Whose brain is Well, I mean, a lot of times I there's confidentiality. This is 40 Years of Zen.
0:36
He doesn't have to tell me who it is. Got it.
0:38
Yeah, don't tell me who it is. Okay.
0:39
So So, this is a uh neuroscience institute 5-day intensive program in Seattle, custom hardware software, all all this clinical grade stuff to see what's going on in there and then to performance tune it like a race car for your brain.
0:51
And I mean, we've had some of the spiritual leaders from South America come through.
0:57
Uh one of the guys is really fascinating.
0:58
Actually, he's public about this. Uh Dr. Barry Morgalon.
1:00
He's one of 12 living grandmasters of Lao Tzu's oral heritage. Wow.
1:07
And uh he's spoken at the Bulletproof conference and uh just a good friend, been on the show a couple times. So, this guy is Dr. Strange.
1:16
Literally, he went to the the monastery.
1:18
They interviewed him before they wrote Dr. Strange.
1:20
And he he just has these abilities.
1:24
He works with Tony Robbins and works with me before I I go on stage and things like that.
1:28
And some You know, presidents of countries kind of guy.
1:30
Uh so, you look at his brain waves and you're like, "This is not a normal human being."
1:35
And some guys like him, if he turns it up all the way, he'll fuzz out the gear.
1:42
Literally, you're looking at brain waves and all that stuff and all of a sudden you can't get a clean signal. Yeah.
1:47
And this is something intrinsic in our biology.
1:49
You talk about real superhumans.
1:52
You look at the people who are way outliers, those are where the most interesting thing happens.
1:56
Because do we take you and me and how do we turn up our abilities to do that?
2:00
Because we all have that in us.
2:02
And that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.
2:04
It might take a few decades.
2:07
So, you're going to need more decades or you might cheat.
2:09
That's what I'm doing on the neuroscience front. I love that. Yeah, no.
2:13
I I'm excited to share because when my book come out, I've got a ton of research on the minds of monks.
2:18
So, I know we have a lot of similarities there and I'm fascinated by how monks meditations can switch like you were saying on and off like a switch, you know, just from compassion to empathy to to focus to discipline without even a second of warm up.
2:32
We've been studying this for 30 40 years, but traditional neuroscience is all about seizures and surgery and and things like that.
2:38
But now in the neurofeedback category, we know what's a carrier wave, we know what's happening down at delta, we know what's happening at alpha in a meditator versus a monk.
2:52
And the reason that my program is 40 years is then is it's meant to replace 40 years of daily practice of meditation cuz hurry meditate faster, there's nothing wrong with that. That's incredible.
3:03
And and have you seen how how have you seen the results compare? Uh it it's ridiculous.
3:06
What you end up with it if you were to spend all that time studying and I've been to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters.
3:14
In fact, I I first had yak butter tea, which was the inspiration for Bulletproof Coffee in Tibet when I was there to learn meditation.
3:20
And it was like, wait, what?
3:22
This stuff is more powerful than after some something just happened with this weird mixing tea or mixing butter and things.
3:29
But you look at what happens there is while you learn, you know, there's seven layers of hell and all this wisdom and depending on whether you're looking at a Hindu perspective or a Buddhist perspective or, you know, there's other traditional Chinese things or there's European.
3:41
So, there's all these lineages and heritages and shamanic training and all these things and and I've I've had a chance to to learn some of those.
3:47
But there's wisdom and then there's the felt state. Mhm.
3:54
And what you can do is you can achieve the felt state using the tools of breathing, tools of meditation, tools of neurofeedback, and you can be there.
4:03
But, without at least some guidance, you might not know where you are.
4:06
You just know it feels really different, and you can kind of blow your mind open. Yeah, absolutely.
4:11
Yeah, and and I've I've noticed that I think for a lot of people who come from non-spiritual traditions or backgrounds, a lot of this is great.
4:18
It also just giving them a window into the fact that this exists. Yeah. And it's possible.
4:23
And I think the felt state is a much more tangible experience for them to believe that it's not just some elusive thing, but it's it's real. Yeah.
4:31
I didn't believe any of this.
4:31
I'm a computer science, computer hacker, weighed 300 lb, come up from a family of engineers, and anyone who'd believe this is clearly stupid. That's how I was raised. Yeah.
4:40
And when you feel something, you go, "Whoa, what's There's a signal in here that might be useful."
4:45
And then you realize it's actually not just useful, it's hackable, and you can choose the felt state, and you can use that to sense the world around you and to connect with people and things.
4:56
It was a pretty big awakening for me, but it it's part of the path.
4:57
And what I discovered, and the reason I went down the Bulletproof path at the same time doing the 40 Years of Zen, if you want to do personal development, you want to meditate, you want to improve your brain, doing it on french fries doesn't It doesn't work.
5:12
You have to get your biology in order, because if your cells don't make energy, it's subcellular components that drive most of your felt state.
5:21
And if they're running at half power, how are you going to have enough energy to, you know, wake up, you know, have whatever you have in the morning, uh take care of of yourself, take care of your family, your community?
5:31
Oh, and have time and energy left over to do the deep personal work to, you know, let go of a childhood thing or, uh you know, reach a new state of performance?
5:39
No, you were too tired cuz your cells didn't work.
5:41
So, eat right, and then do the meditative practice, and you'll get more results in less time.
5:48
And you went through that experience, too, right?
5:49
Cuz you were 22, 300 lbs. I was 300 lbs, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
5:52
Tell me Tell us about that journey just before we dive into all of this incredible insight.
5:55
Tell us about that journey and transition of when you came to the point where you were like there is more out there, but even before that, this what I'm doing to my biology isn't good for me. Well, it's really weird.
6:07
Anyone who's fat will will tell you at some level they know they're fat cuz we have a mirror. You know what I mean? You have a scale.
6:13
My pants keep getting tight. What what do I do here?
6:16
And then you say, "Well, I'm going to try to do something."
6:19
And trying to do something is already presupposing failure.
6:21
It's I call it a weasel word in in my books.
6:25
And what you end up with is you say, "All right, I'm going to do what's supposed to work."
6:29
And anyone who's ever read anything says, "Oh, we must be meat robots.
6:34
Therefore, it's calories in, calories out." So, I did that.
6:37
I worked out for an hour and a half a day, 6 days a week for 18 months.
6:44
Was that hard at that time? hard.
6:45
And although exercise is addictive when you do it like that, you get the endorphins, you get a rush from it.
6:49
So, it's hard to stop exercising.
6:51
And you There I know people are addicted like they I can't do anything that got to go exercise.
6:56
That's not a healthy state. All right?
6:59
That means you're you're stuck with the endorphins, the runner's high, whatever.
7:01
And for me, I went on a low-fat, low-calorie diet.
7:04
And at the end of this, I still weighed 300 lbs.
7:07
I I could max out the machines.
7:09
It wasn't 300 lbs of muscle. I was covered in flab.
7:11
I still was a 46-in waist.
7:13
I'm a 33-in waist right now.
7:17
And I I just I looked around and I said, "Maybe it's cuz I'm eating too much lettuce." That That was my math. Right?
7:23
It's cuz I'm not trying hard enough. Yeah.
7:25
And and and seriously, all my friends are eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers, and I'm eating the salad with no chicken and no dressing, and I'm hungry, just so hungry.
7:33
And I'm just putting all my willpower into this, and I don't care if I'm sick, I don't care if I have final exams, I'm going to go to the gym.
7:39
And just that of failure, but it became a a self-worth problem.
7:46
And then I said, one day, I'm actually doing all this, and I'm not getting the results.
7:51
It must be what I'm doing doesn't work.
7:54
And then you start digging in the research, and I started trying all the different variations on diets, and went really deep in the corners of the internet.
8:01
And this is back in the late '90s.
8:03
So, you people didn't even use the internet for this kind of stuff, but I'd find weird researchers, and I would just test it all.
8:09
Because I was computer science, I'm building the internet as we know it.
8:12
I'm pretty sure that I should I'd be able to just hack this dumb meat body.
8:17
Um and the idea of hacking is that you can take control of a system, you can manipulate it without understanding what's inside.
8:24
You test inputs and outputs. So, all right.
8:25
That actually works really well in biology, but it's not what medicine does. It's a different thing.
8:32
It's what bodybuilders do.
8:32
It's what the anti-aging community does. It's what Navy SEALs do.
8:35
And heck, it's what people own resources do to their resources.
8:38
So, how do we apply that to ourselves?
8:41
And I said, all right, I'm going to get over this childhood.
8:44
I've had arthritis in my knee since I was 14.
8:46
And it I found out later when I reverse engineered it all, I lived in a house that had toxic mold, and I poisoned the mitochondria in my body.
8:54
So, I repaired that damage, and I said, wait, there's there's always new levels, things I can do where I didn't think I'd I'd look the way I look, I'd feel the way I feel, I'd be able to do what I do.
9:07
And I can, and I'm continuously getting powerful and younger and faster. My brain works better.
9:13
Uh I just mentioned about ping pong.
9:15
To see the actual data, and to see the scan, oh, I have 87th percentile hippocampal volume, the hippocampus in the brain.
9:25
Look, I started out fat and sick.
9:25
If I can do this, I'm pretty sure that someone who started out reasonably healthy with a normal body weight and normal biology has huge advantages.
9:32
But, everyone listening to this right now, you're thinking, "Okay, how I how I feel now, how I've always felt, that's pretty much normal, but you're totally wrong.
9:43
That's just what you've experienced."
9:45
But, if you could feel five times better and 10 times more energy, you would never know because you never felt it. 100%.
9:52
So, our job is to just teach people, "Here's the tools to tap into it in the least possible amount of time and money because it's there."
10:00
And it feels like that's the energy, that experimentation at that stage has led to now this decision or aspiration to live to 180 years old.
10:09
Like, why why why 180 specifically?
10:12
Because I'm sure there's some math behind that, I'm assuming.
10:14
And and why why want to live longer anyway? For you. No, it's at least 180.
10:21
I don't want to put a cap on it. Okay.
10:24
Important difference there. Great. Okay.
10:27
Now, the math is really straightforward.
10:29
We know we can do 120 cuz we've seen it.
10:34
And those people they drank, they smoked, they went through Let's see, what was happening 120 years ago? It was 1900. There's no cars.
10:45
They haven't been invented yet. There's no microwaves.
10:47
World War I, World War II haven't happened.
10:51
Antibiotics haven't been discovered.
10:53
DNA, they couldn't even spell it back then. Yeah. True. True.
10:57
The Krebs cycle, for matter of We didn't know much at all about how our bodies work, and they still lived 120. Yeah. Okay.
11:05
But, they weren't exposed to as much trauma as we are.
11:06
Oh, no, they had more trauma than we did. Exposure.
11:09
They had more trauma literally in the world. Yeah.
11:14
But, not necessarily exposure on a daily basis.
11:17
Do you know the odds of having one of your siblings die 120 years ago?
11:22
The reason you had five or six kids is cuz a couple of them weren't going to make it. Mhm. Okay.
11:25
Like, a redundant array of inexpensive kids, they invented it back then.
11:29
In fact, we invented that in society back then.
11:30
So, people grew up with their family members dying.
11:33
You didn't know if anyone would come home.
11:37
You couldn't call them on their cell phone.
11:38
Someone gets on a boat, they don't come back.
11:39
You don't Maybe you'll get a letter 3 months later.
11:41
People disappeared all the time.
11:42
It was a pretty shitty time.
11:44
Oh, we didn't even talk about polio.
11:45
We didn't talk about all the diseases that just wiped people out that generally don't get us anymore.
11:52
You go to the doctor, they're going to cut your arm off with a rusty saw.
11:55
Like this is the state of people who lived to 120 now.
11:59
Now, I'm just going to have to say it. How old are you? I'm 32. 32, all right.
12:02
So, let's think what it's going to be like 120 years from now, given that we can rely on the internet, we can look at PubMed.
12:10
I couldn't write these books.
12:13
Each of the books, the Superhuman book would have been a lifetime of research in a library using microfiche and card catalogs and all this crap.
12:18
But, the fact that I can pull together this information and I have the weird brain that synthesizes it and I can talk to these experts, all of this is enabled by technology in the last 20 years. Mhm.
12:29
Do you think that we can't add 50% to the maximum human lifespan over the next 100 and 50 for you, 148 years?
12:38
Like, put on your future hat and realize exponential rates of growth.
12:40
You have a very good chance of living way, way, way beyond 180 if there's still soil on the planet.
12:48
Uh if a comet doesn't hit us, right?
12:51
And if essentially we take care of the world enough. Mhm.
12:54
So, that that that's the big one. That's the big one. of the world enough.
12:57
But, here's the other reason that we need more highly energetic old people. Mhm.
13:03
In all societies that I studied, and it's in like the first chapter of Superhuman, I I talk about the quest for immortality is a something that's happened as long as we've had recorded history.
13:13
Going back to the Egyptians, going back to the alchemists, going back to the Hindu traditions, the Chinese traditions, the South American traditions, they've all been searching for this. Mhm.
13:21
And things like Taoism are tied directly towards that quest for how do I live forever as a highly functioning, highly energetic, evolved person.
13:31
Well, we've always had village elders.
13:34
So, what would happen is the young monks would go into the monastery and the 80-year-old llama would look at them and say, "All right, here's what we've learned and I learned this from my elders and I learned it from my elders."
13:45
In fact, in Laozi's tradition, 5,000 years of unbroken oral history passed down from the elders.
13:50
Well, elders today, unfortunately, a lot of them Alzheimer's disease, heart attacks, retirement homes, and we started seeing our elders rather than as sources of knowledge and wisdom, the people who can guide us the best, we started seeing them as tubes, monitors, diapers, wheelchairs, and expenses.
14:08
And that's actually never happened all of history it hasn't happened.
14:15
So, I go out of my way to interview people who are over 90 cuz, man, they've got, you know, 50 years on me.
14:21
And what did they learn that I'm probably going to learn and what can they what pain can I avoid from listening to them?
14:27
Would I like them to be 120 and still have fully functioning vibrant lives so I could learn even more and they could share it? Heck, yeah.
14:34
Would the world needs that?
14:35
Plus, Jay, if you're going to live for hundreds of years more, you aren't going to throw the plastic bottle in the ocean.
14:44
You realize, oh my god, I'd better not in my own sandbox because I'm going to be in the sandbox for a very long time.
14:50
I'm not going to hand it off to the next generation the way currently the boomers are getting blamed.
14:56
And it's funny cuz the boomers are saying, "Well, wait, we inherited World War I and World War II from you old people, but they're all dead so we can't blame you anymore."
15:04
We just keep going back and back and back.
15:05
Yeah, and they're saying, "We inherited this from, you know, the Civil War."
15:08
And it just it goes it goes back forever.
15:10
We always inherit this, but the scope of inheritance is going to change.
15:14
And anyone who has kids is unlikely to say, "You know, I'd like to have kids three times throughout my 200 years."
15:18
They're you're going to have kids, you're going to put so much energy and life into them the way all parents do, right?
15:24
You're going to enjoy seeing them flourish, but we're we're not going to worry about an overpopulation problem, and the data supports what I'm saying very, very clearly.
15:33
Japan, US, most Western countries, the birth rate's gone down, populations are declining, and so is the fertility rate.
15:40
So, we don't have to worry about global population just wait 50 years, it won't be a problem. I'm intrigued. I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated.
15:46
The reason is because it's We're talking about also and I I want to get your thoughts on this because we were we were talking about different things there.
15:52
You're talking about obviously the the physical abilities have increased, but with the rise of mental health Yeah.
15:58
even even if it is with less trauma, the way we're able to process traumatic events or tragedy tragedies or challenges seems to be struggling.
16:10
It's funny I'm just intrigued.
16:10
I'm just I'm just throwing it out there.
16:12
I want to get your perspective.
16:13
I'm I'm not negative at all.
16:14
I'm just trying to It doesn't sound negative.
16:19
You ever There's a documentary uh that come out that came out recently that's called They Shall Not Grow Old. I've never seen it. It's about World War I.
16:28
Oh my god, the toughness, the resilience of of these guys. It's unimaginable.
16:33
And they interview people who are still alive from World War I, but they show footage and they they tell these stories and and you're saying, "No human walk in the face of the earth today could do what these guys did." Exactly.
16:45
So, isn't that a challenge in lasting longer?
16:47
Because if the resilience and grit was so much more higher then that people could lose their family member, the family member never came back from the boat, but they never Did they have the mental health challenge?
16:56
They never talked about it.
16:57
They never They couldn't share on social media like or did they just not Did they just not feel it?
17:01
Whereas today we're overly sensitive and they felt it, but how you felt just didn't matter as much.
17:06
It was how you showed up in the world.
17:07
So, they they'd cram it down.
17:09
I don't know how happy they were. There's war veterans.
17:10
People knew that people came back from war changed.
17:14
But, there's also there was a community, and there's something else that happens.
17:18
Most of the time, if you took a big hit to the head, you just died.
17:20
So, now we have a lot more traumatic brain injury and people who survive horrific injuries who come back with more trauma.
17:26
But our technologies for dealing with trauma, even some of the neuroscience stuff, the the things that are a big focus for me at 40 Years of Zen, and you you deal with it nutritionally, you put them in a hyperbaric chamber, you can heal almost any emotional trauma and so many physical traumas.
17:42
The problem is when a physical trauma ties to an emotional trauma, it doesn't work.
17:46
You can also precondition people.
17:48
A lot of a lot of times people just don't know about the research.
17:54
Something called heart rate variability.
17:55
It's a a core part of what what I teach people.
17:58
This is how to change the spacing between your heartbeats.
18:02
When you're relaxed in a meditative state, you have a higher change in the spacing between your heartbeats.
18:06
Same number of beats per minute, but the pattern of the beats changes.
18:11
Well, if you teach soldiers to do this before they go into combat or kids before they get bullied, it doesn't really matter.
18:17
It your body thinks it's the same thing.
18:20
You actually don't walk away from that with PTSD. Yeah.
18:22
You can precondition for it.
18:25
So, what we could do is we can teach resilience. 100%.
18:27
And I wasn't necessarily highly resilient, but I am now.
18:29
And this is just missing from our curriculum. Correct.
18:35
It is a neuroscience state.
18:35
It's it's you can define it, you can measure it, you can quantify it, and then you can put a moral judgment on it. Yes.
18:44
There There shouldn't be a moral judgment. Yeah. I Yeah. I know.
18:45
You used to be able to You go to church and you know, you've been bad, right?
18:50
Or what whatever the the pattern of your church was, but people now are abandoning religion.
18:58
Religion provided some of that.
19:01
The the prayer before your meal.
19:03
You don't have to pray to a specific deity that someone told you had to, but you can provide a sense of gratitude, which is the real nugget there. Mhm.
19:12
Without gratitude, you can't do forgiveness. Mhm.
19:14
Without gratitude, you stay in fight or flight.
19:16
So, you can program these things in, but what does gratitude actually look like in the brain and in the heart?
19:22
You can measure those and you can look I can sit here across from you with your wired up and I can say you're actually not feeling grateful.
19:30
You said you were grateful and you lied to yourself.
19:34
And hold you accountable to that. That is amazing, right? too.
19:37
Yeah, yeah, I love that too.
19:37
And I and I hope that one day we can all have that next so we know we're not lying to ourselves.
19:42
Because it's fun being a lie detector for other people, but it's better being a lie detector for ourselves and That's why we have coaches.
19:48
That's why we have gurus.
19:49
That's why we have friends. Yes.
19:49
The problem is that you're very likely to get angry at a friend or a coach when they really call you out on your BS.
19:56
I'm going to get angry at your phone.
19:58
How how angry are you going to get at but the data is the data. And that's what I do.
20:01
It's one of the most important impactful things in my life has been the 40 years of Zen training.
20:06
Where when I do that if there's something that I'm hiding from myself, I'm not going to know it.
20:12
I'm going to look you in the eye and I'm going to deny it and you're going to do the same thing to me because our ability to look inside ourselves is very low, but when you have a a mirror right here, oh, I have spinach in my teeth. Yeah.
20:22
But you're not going to know you have spinach in your teeth until somebody tells you unless they're really close to you. Yeah. Exactly.
20:25
What what I love about you though when I'm hearing you speak and and I've never I guess I guess you don't when you meet someone you you you unearth things differently and it's like you really have this great juxtaposition between wisdom and science which I think so powerful and beautiful and you started off there.
20:38
And I think when it's either or it can get slightly lost sometimes. They have to align.
20:43
And one of the reasons I I created this field of biohacking and it's now a word in the dictionary in I think 2018 they added it to Merriam-Webster's and my name's in there.
20:56
And I created this big conference around it as I wanted to take the data that we can now get for the first time ever things about that heart rate variability neuroscience and something called the exposome, which is the measure of all the things you're exposed to in your environment over the course of your life that changes your genetics. Mhm.
21:14
It This is a data set we'll never actually collect all of it.
21:16
It's like a real a full-size map of California isn't very useful cuz it's as big as the state, right? Yeah, absolutely.
21:23
But we're able to gather so much data that we can now validate things.
21:25
Like in the book before Superhuman, I wanted to test a Taoist equation.
21:34
The These guys are looking to live forever and they say flat out, "If you're a guy and you want to live forever, you should use this equation to control how frequently you ejaculate cuz it'll make you old if you ejaculate too much."
21:48
And I looked at that and I said, "That's complete BS.
21:49
I have to test it and disprove this BS."
21:51
And I ended up publishing a year's worth of data and I interviewed other experts in the field and it turns out for guys, there really is an orgasm hangover. Mhm. Right?
21:59
And what I'm not saying have less sex, I'm just saying decide how often you're going to ejaculate.
22:07
I would have said the data would not support that and what I'm finding is the more I dig deep in in shamanic knowledge and you say, "How could that possibly work?"
22:15
And then I go and I I look at the neuroscience of it like, "Oh my god, these people couldn't using our language and our tech, they couldn't explain it." Correct, for our time.
22:25
But they learned by watching for generations and their elders handed it off and handed it off.
22:28
And one of the coolest things I can think of in the space, the lady who discovered the opiate receptor in the brain, massive transformative thing, her name was Candace Pert and I'm I'm sad she passed away right before I could interview her.
22:44
And in her book, she writes about how after maybe 20 years of her career of just being hardcore Western scientist atheist just you rejecting anything that might be energetic, she started realizing maybe I have to pay attention to this cuz there's something else going on.
22:59
And she met this group of shamans.
23:01
And she tried to explain to them what the opiate receptors were, and then the guy says something and they all laugh, and then she asked the translator, and the the translator said, "Oh, they're laughing because they said, 'Haha, she thinks these molecules actually exist.'"
23:17
I think they're both right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. It's crazy.
23:21
Tell me about Talking about that, tell me about the So, you did a $120,000 stem cell makeover.
23:25
Oh, the stem cell makeover. That was with uh Dr.
23:28
Harry Adelson in Park City.
23:32
Tell Break down what that is and why you did it. Okay.
23:34
So, that people can understand a bit more about it.
23:35
And I write about the details of stem cells and what's happening now and what you can get for $5,000 versus in this case $120,000 is at the very high end of what's possible.
23:48
It's the most intensive stem cell procedure that you can do right now.
23:52
What I did is I laid down.
23:52
They put you under a sedation, but not full anesthesia.
23:58
And they pull bone marrow, and and people go, "Oh, it's so painful."
24:02
I had it done when I was unsedated.
24:04
It's not that big of a deal.
24:07
It just feels really odd. I even Facebooked it.
24:08
Uh I have a Facebook Live video. Live this? Oh, that's crazy.
24:13
I didn't I couldn't do the uh this procedure cuz I was unconscious, but the one before that that I did just to see what the components would be.
24:18
Uh and I've done stem cells, you know, what a variety of times, different technologies that are that are out here.
24:23
And they pull the bone marrow, they pull your own fat, um they can get the stem cells out of it, and then they go through and depending on which part of the body, starting at the toes, every joint, they inject stem cells into the joint so the joints will stay young.
24:39
I'm going to be around for hundreds of years, so I would like to be walking around under my own power.
24:44
I've had three knee surgeries before I was 23, and so I want my knee to be highly functional forever.
24:50
I don't want to be in a cane when I'm old.
24:51
And then uh Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who's been on my show, Marcela, she uh she flies out for it and she threads a cannula inside the spine so they drip my own stem cells inside my spine and they are attracted to areas that are inflamed and they turn off inflammation and turn on growth. Wow.
25:08
So, they inject every vertebra.
25:11
They do the face, hair, male reproductive organs and I have I Facebook live that when they did another time too.
25:19
That was funny without showing anything you can't unsee.
25:21
And you wake up 4 hours later and you're sort of going what just happened but the regrowth and the the rejuvenation happens 6, 9 months later as the tissues themselves turn over and you get younger.
25:35
That's at the very cutting edge but if you just have a lot of knee pain or an injury that won't heal, I did all that stuff 3 years ago with stem cells.
25:44
I had this thing in my right shoulder, it's gone.
25:46
All these things throughout my body that you accumulate over time.
25:48
You know, when we're young we go I'll go mountain biking.
25:51
Sure, you know, I'll play soccer and even though there's a piece of bone fragment sticking out of my thigh.
25:54
I have just one more right here. Absolutely, yeah.
25:57
And you pay for it later and then you can reverse it and that's what I did. That's incredible.
26:02
And what what level of when you when I'm hearing that someone who's not had any of those processes and speaking on behalf of most of the audience I guess who've not done that, what level of risk are you comfortable with or have you researched this to so much of a depth that actually when you do this you're like I'm not experimenting at all because there's very little risk.
26:16
Like what level of risk do you feel comfortable with?
26:19
I I talk about return on investment as the primary lens I'm looking I I look for for anything I do.
26:26
There's how much energy do I put into doing something and then there's how much time and then there's how much money do I put into it and then what's the return I'm looking for.
26:34
And dying is the return I'm not looking for. Mhm.
26:36
The problem is that if you just do what you're doing now, your risk is probably 80% that one of the four killers from Super Human are going to get you.
26:48
It's cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease or type 2 diabetes.
26:56
So, you pretty much have an 80% chance of doing those. Yeah.
27:00
And that come those all come with 20 plus years of suffering before you die.
27:05
Uh and you're not in charge of yourself when you die.
27:08
So, those are crappy odds. Absolutely. The worst odds ever. Mhm.
27:12
So, how willing are you to take a few risks to avoid that?
27:16
I'm willing to take a few risks.
27:18
But, they're not stupid risks. Okay? I'm in a room.
27:21
I've got one of the top trained neurosurgeons out there doing a procedure.
27:25
The risks are exceptionally low when you have that.
27:29
I'm not doing anesthesia.
27:29
I'm doing sedation, so the risks are low.
27:30
And the returns are more energy now, more energy for the decades, more time I'm going to live, and as I age, I will age differently than baseline human models. Mhm.
27:43
And that is very precious.
27:43
And if there's a risk of one in 50,000 of something really bad happening, one in 50,000 Maybe it's one in 10,000. I don't know.
27:55
But, I will tell you that if you're popping Advil right now, you're facing those same kind of risks.
28:00
Like, we're all facing risks all the time we don't know about cuz we never hear it. Totally.
28:03
In fact, I got to go back to those that bowl of french fries.
28:05
It causes more inflammation in your body than smoking a cigarette for a longer period of time.
28:12
But, you probably ought to not do either one of those.
28:13
But, most people listening to this, yeah, I'm talking to you, the french fries taste good. I'll eat them. Right?
28:18
Have you done the risk analysis on that behavior? No, because it's normal.
28:22
And can we talk about cancer and alcohol? Let's do it. Yeah.
28:26
Just go to PubMed, which is the database of all these studies, and look at the relationship between drinking alcohol and cancer. It is not good for you.
28:32
And you're saying, "Oh, I'm so worried that I do the stem cell procedure that could make me feel really good and fix that that that joint or that hip or that back pain that they might want to fuse my spine for."
28:42
I'm going to go spend $5,000 doing that.
28:45
"Oh, I could never do that. It's risky. It's too expensive.
28:46
You spent five grand on wine this year. Coffee. Yeah.
28:50
Well, I mean that's coffee. Coffee's worth it. I mean, come on, man. I know.
28:53
I was I was I said that as a joke.
28:55
I totally but uh the that whole thing, okay?
28:58
You spent that same amount of money on something that we know contributes to cancer, right?
29:03
I'm not picking on wine specifically.
29:04
It's alcohol as a metabolizer that increases your risk.
29:05
By the way, I actually had sake last night.
29:10
It's not like I never drink.
29:10
I can tell you I took supplements that turn off the negative effects of it when I did that.
29:15
But you you can still enjoy life, but people are not very good at doing risk math. Yeah.
29:19
And when you look at those two things, you spent the same amount of money on things that are vaguely pleasurable and vaguely bad for you.
29:27
Or you could have done something that was a step up in your performance.
29:31
I know what I'm going to choose.
29:31
I'm going to skip the french fries.
29:33
I'm going to occasionally have really good wine that's expensive instead of a lot of cheap wine.
29:37
And I'm going to do the stem cells. Yeah. Yeah, no.
29:40
And it And it comes back down to what what we both know Thich Nhat Hanh said about wanting familiar pain versus unfamiliar pain. Yeah.
29:48
And we'd rather have familiar pain of everything that our ancestors have had or family members who have had so we have some familiarity with it whether that's cancer or Alzheimer's so we feel, "Oh, yeah.
29:58
It's kind of something we've all had."
29:59
We feel whereas the unfamiliar pain of I don't know what that looks like is so much more scary. Mhm.
30:03
Uh even though like you said very clearly and statistically that actually our odds are not good anyway.
30:10
And And that's that's the That's the argument that that hits me the most is that in so many areas of my life I'm convinced that the way we've always done it is is really the right way.
30:21
Well, it One of the things you learn if you if you go to any ancient practice lineage, look, we're all going to die.
30:29
And even when I talk to my immortalist friends, you know, those super longevity I'm going to upload myself to the internet.
30:36
Newsflash, the universe will collapse in on itself sometime. We're all going to die.
30:39
You You have to get used to that. Yeah.
30:41
you know, lot of people "Oh, I don't want to Sorry, that's just a fact of life."
30:44
The question is how much suffering do you want to do before you die? Mhm.
30:48
That's really what we're doing.
30:48
And for me, I actually don't like suffering. It's amazing.
30:52
But discomfort is different than suffering.
30:55
So, if anytime you do something that makes your brain or your body evolve, it will involve discomfort.
31:00
But suffering comes when you resist the discomfort.
31:03
And understanding, all right, I'm feeling a lot of emotional discomfort right now, but it doesn't mean I'm suffering.
31:09
It doesn't mean I'm struggling.
31:10
It It means I'm accepting and all right, it's a signal.
31:14
So, I'm lifting this heavy thing.
31:16
I'm really sore the next day.
31:17
That was the cost of growth.
31:17
Or I'm facing my fears and I'm doing it anyway and I feel like I'm going to my pants and I'm going to do it anyway and I'm going to see what happens.
31:25
That's how our brain evolves.
31:27
We're wired to do to to focus on things that don't push us. Yes. Because that's biology. Yes.
31:32
Well, if once you decide you're going to take charge and you're going to push yourself, you say, all right, maybe I will live to 180. Yeah.
31:39
Maybe I'll live beyond 180.
31:40
Or maybe I'll just, you know, ask someone out who I'm really afraid to ask out.
31:44
Why the hell are you afraid to ask someone out?
31:45
The worst they'll do is say no.
31:46
It's the same as saying, look, do you like pizza or Chinese? Okay?
31:50
If they say, I like pizza, you're like, darn, I'd like Chinese. We're not compatible.
31:53
It's not a judgment on you.
31:55
But if you don't ask, you don't know. Yeah.
31:57
But people they they have all this crazy programming in their heads.
32:00
I got rid of most of my crazy programming just through these these processes.
32:05
And I don't think I could have the the power to do that if I hadn't have just got my base biology working with food.
32:11
And so, we get wrapped up in all these fears and resistance things.
32:16
But really, the simplest lowest hanging fruit here is just eat the stuff that makes your brain work.
32:22
And then you'll start being comfortable pushing yourself.
32:23
Otherwise, you're just too tired to push yourself. Absolutely.
32:26
Let's talk about I I want to talk about the seven pillars that make us whole.
32:29
But before we do that, let's talk about, because you mentioned it now, some of the foods that are good for our brain that are basic that anyone can start doing today.
32:36
And which ones to remove, too, because we've already got the the fries out.
32:40
Fries and alcohol are out.
32:42
Anything deep fried, and it doesn't matter if it's Brussels sprouts.
32:45
Sorry, especially at a restaurant.
32:47
And I I've got the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in LA, it's a restaurant.
32:50
I know what happens back of the house, and I we don't have bad oils there, but the typical restaurant uses the same oil for a long period of time.
32:57
Oxidized just plant oils are not good for us. Mhm.
33:01
Our cell membranes, and I go through really cool new new science in Superhuman, 45% of the cell membranes in your body are saturated fats.
33:09
And the brain militantly holds that constant, but the amount of unsaturated fats can change dramatically between omega-3, which is more of a fish oil, and omega-6, which is the plant-based ones.
33:24
So, if you only eat plants, you don't get omega-3s, the kind that come from not plant-based omega-3s, those don't work, unfortunately.
33:30
You end up changing about 15 percent of your of your brain cells into these highly inflammatory things.
33:38
So, you tune the very composition of your being by choosing the kind of fat you eat.
33:42
You eat French fries, your body will take damaged, unnatural fats that have never been a part of your system, and it'll try to build batteries out of those.
33:49
And you'll get batteries that make half charge.
33:52
And then you walk around going, "Hmm, I you know, I I wonder what's going on.
33:56
Is just kind of how I feel.
33:57
Yeah, I got a little bit of a muffin top here."
33:59
But what you really have is you have a muffin top in your brain.
34:03
So, the inflammation happens there.
34:03
So, a big part of what I do is I'm eating at least half my calories from fat, and usually 70%, but I'm very careful.
34:10
The fats I eat are undamaged.
34:13
I eat a moderate amount of plant-based fats.
34:14
I don't eat omega-6 fats much at all.
34:18
You're still going to get a lot of them cuz they're out there.
34:20
But I'm careful to get fish oil, which is really, really good for you.
34:22
You can do it by eating fish.
34:23
If you're going to eat fish, you want to take something that binds mercury in the fish.
34:28
Um and I make supplements that that have specific kinds of oils that go into the brain.
34:34
But the real really good fats that come from plants, macadamia nuts, avocados, and coconut oil is one of those things where you say, "All right, it's good for you."
34:42
It is to a certain extent.
34:47
Every kind of fat, including coconut oil, it's a whole bunch of different types of fats mixed together, different lengths of chains of fats.
34:55
And people have heard MCT oils cuz I'm the guy who put MCT oils on the map, right?
34:59
It turns out that 52% of coconut oil is MCT oils.
35:02
So then uh an unscrupulous marketer will say, "Yeah, I'm selling MCT oils."
35:10
Bad news, about 40% of the fat and that's 90% of the MCT oil in coconut oil, it's legal to call it an MCT oil, but it doesn't have the special powers for turning on your brain and mitochondria. Mhm.
35:21
So now you say, "Wait, this is labeled MCT oil and this is labeled MCT oil, but they do very different things."
35:28
So yeah, you can use some coconut oil as a fat source, as a fuel source, but you can't eat enough of it.
35:33
In fact, it would take 20 lb of coconut oil to equal 1 lb of the stuff that I make. Wow.
35:38
And so it's Everclear versus weak beer.
35:41
It's It's an analogy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:43
So it's it's important to say eat some coconut oil, but a huge amount of saturated fat like from coconut oil, if your gut bacteria is broken, will bring toxins from your gut into your brain into your body.
35:57
So then, okay, what else do I eat?
35:57
It turns out the template for this is called the Bulletproof Diet.
36:02
It is a plate covered in vegetables.
36:04
And it's really important.
36:06
It's not covered in grains, it's not covered in legumes, it's not covered in potatoes, it's covered in vegetables. Okay? Green stuff.
36:14
And it's probably not covered in kale, either. Mhm. All right?
36:16
Kale has a whole bunch of antinutrients in it and I write about thallium, a toxic metal that accumulates better in kale than any other plant we've ever found.
36:26
So we're talking broccoli, cauliflower, uh celery, fennel, carrots, stuff like that.
36:32
And then you cover it in fat.
36:35
Guacamole, grass-fed butter, things like that. Nuts, olives, olive oil.
36:41
And I want to say cover it, you don't have to go liberally.
36:42
It's not a little bit of sauce.
36:44
No, you you want to soak it in that fat.
36:45
And then a moderate amount of grass-fed or wild-caught protein.
36:52
Most people eat way too much protein from animals.
36:54
And I'm talking two maybe 4 oz.
36:57
And the anti-aging numbers, it turns out you want to eat less meat than you think you want to eat.
37:04
But if you go to zero meat, I know you're you're plant-based.
37:09
But um what you end up finding is that people today and most people listening to your show, they don't really They say they care, but they don't really care about where the animal they eat came from.
37:19
So, we are supporting the death of the planet by eating industry-raised feedlot animals. I do not eat those. I never eat those.
37:28
They will make you old, they'll make you fat, and they'll make you sick.
37:31
They'll destroy your gut bacteria.
37:31
And along the way, they're destroying the very soil of our planet.
37:35
So, feedlot meat is off the map.
37:38
And then people say, "But I can't afford it." Like that's BS.
37:43
If grass-fed meat is twice as expensive, eat half as much, which is going to make you live longer anyway.
37:46
So, your budget will not change if you do this.
37:48
But what will happen is you go to restaurant and say is it grass-fed?
37:52
They say no, you say I'm I'll order the vegetarian. Right?
37:56
And then you can say, "Is it grass-finished?"
37:58
And if it's grass-fed and grass-finished, you've done the planet a favor.
38:02
The animal actually led a life that it was supposed to live. Right?
38:06
And you've contributed to soil, and you eat a moderate amount of that, and you feel really good.
38:11
And one of the nutrients that's been missing that was a huge game-changer for me was collagen.
38:17
And the reason collagen is cool right now, Bulletproof put that on the map.
38:20
And we're now the second largest collagen in the market out there.
38:22
The reason collagen is so important is that for me I had this arthritis in my knees and I always had soreness.
38:29
It went away when I started eating collagen.
38:32
And on that same trip to Tibet where I discovered yak butter tea, I I discovered it the Tibetans have had it for thousands of years but I tried it and discovered how I felt on it.
38:42
Um I had wrecked my knees.
38:42
I had descended 7,500 ft from the Annapurna base camp area in one day and I my knees were bruised, the cartilage was bruised.
38:51
I already had pre-existing injuries and screws in my knees and stuff. I couldn't walk.
38:55
I like to go across the street to get a cup of coffee it was like you know two two canes and I felt like I was 100 years old.
39:05
I had 7 days until I was going to be able to recover enough to walk 26 miles around Mount Kailash.
39:12
And I just asked a guy on the bus with me.
39:14
I said, "All right, can you read this Chinese menu to me at this little Tibetan roadhouse, the only restaurant in town?"
39:21
And I'm looking for collagen cuz I knew from the anti-aging work I'd been doing I needed some building blocks just to fix my knees and you couldn't buy collagen powder back then.
39:29
And plus in Tibet they wouldn't have it.
39:31
So I ordered the only thing on the menu that's going to work.
39:35
It's a bowl of pig's ears.
39:37
Now I've never eaten that before and I know what it looks like and it arrives and it's chilled and it's literally a big bowl of maybe 15 cold pig's ears and I'm just going this is really unpleasant but I'm in pain so I can I do here?
39:54
I said cuz I got the soup and I dipped them in the soup to heat them up and it was like argh argh Man. or No, they were soft.
40:00
They were like steamed and just sitting there. But you know what?
40:05
The next day I could walk.
40:05
It was that big of a deal.
40:07
I just my body was trying to heal and I did not have the nutrients I needed to heal.
40:10
And now when I hear people who add collagen to their diet whether it's in their coffee or whether it's on their things on their food it's a kind of a flavorless powder when it's done right, or it tastes like socks if it's done wrong.
40:20
Um what ends up happening is the pain I've had for 10 years in my ankle, my knee, my back, it just went away.
40:27
And my my hair is growing stupidly fast.
40:29
I have to dye it more often and and things like that.
40:31
I hear that from women all the time.
40:32
They like it though cuz they want to thicker hair.
40:35
They got it, but now that they're going to the the you know, the salon more than they did.
40:38
So, those are important nutrients.
40:41
And then you say, all right, there are people who are saying I I want to be plant-based.
40:43
And you know, you're one of those.
40:45
Now, why why are you plant-based?
40:46
Is this an ethics thing or health thing? Both. All right, got it.
40:50
So, ethically, as a guy who runs a 32-acre organic farm with turkeys and pigs and sheep, where is the fert- where's the fertility in the soil that makes your vegetables supposed to come from if we don't have animals?
41:03
I mean, factory farms for grains and corn and things like that, what they're doing is they're taking these minerals from a mine.
41:09
Uh it's this actually isn't really even a mineral, nitrogen.
41:13
It's it's a nutrient they're putting in the soil.
41:17
Well, if they had animals that would come in during winter and just crap on the soil the way they do on my farm, the soil would replenish itself and it would actually get thicker.
41:25
Soil's the biggest carbon sink we have right now.
41:29
It's getting thinner and thinner and thinner because we're basically overdriving the soil, but we're running out of the things we used to overdrive it.
41:36
So, when you go to a permaculture model, you don't eat very much meat, but you might say take advantage of ghee or butter.
41:42
But we're talking about one or two cows on many acres that walk around and do their job.
41:47
Mother nature designed sheep and cows and ruminants to just walk around, munch on stuff, and then poop.
41:53
And it's and they poop everywhere.
41:56
It's kind of horrifying as a farmer.
41:58
But I I have pictures showing this part of the the the the I'll call it a lawn, but it's the pasture, where they live, it's vibrant and green without any water being added.
42:10
And right next to it, the part where that was fenced off, it's gray. It's It's light brown.
42:13
The only difference is the poop. Mhm. Right.
42:16
So, you think about that, go, "Wow, what does this mean on a global scale?"
42:22
It means that if we go all plant-based, the very ecosystem that has supported farms forever has always been based on animals pooping on the farm, Mhm. it it ends. Mhm.
42:31
And then we won't have nutrient-based vegetables.
42:35
And you can actually pull off a vegetarian diet and be pretty darn healthy.
42:38
But the people are saying, you know, "I'm never eating anything that came near an animal."
42:41
They haven't thought through the system of it.
42:45
And uh you having gotten actually quite sick on a raw vegan diet, even though I'm pretty well educated on how to do that, there are some vegetables that don't work for people. Right?
42:53
Like that don't work raw, too. Oh, yeah, exactly.
42:57
And cooking is an okay technology.
42:59
Uh so, you know, the nightshade family, things like bell peppers, for some people they work just fine.
43:05
And for other people, they will wreck you. Absolutely. Right? And I'm one of those.
43:08
I don't I don't eat nightshades cuz I tested it.
43:11
When I eat I feel like crap.
43:11
Yeah, feel like crap, too. Yeah.
43:14
And so, I would say eat mostly like a vegan, and the fat you put on there doesn't have to be vegan fat.
43:18
But if it's industrially raised fat, shame on you.
43:24
Just Just put it out there. Uh that's great.
43:25
Let's Let's talk about I I think that's brilliant.
43:27
That's a It's What I love about that is that I think, and this is this is partly education, too.
43:35
It's the way we make decisions are often not stretched out enough.
43:37
We're not looking at the societal, community, family.
43:41
We We look at things so small in one sense of just like how it affects us and the four people around us, as opposed to how things are affecting.
43:49
And I feel like you're stretching our mind, which is wonderful.
43:51
The idea is we should eat to feel really good all the time, and we should eat to be here for hundreds of years. Mhm.
43:56
I mean, how do we do that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
43:58
And the planet lasting, which was your point earlier of like everything else that we're doing with factory farms is killing the planet, so there won't be any soil to live, hence we won't last to years.
44:07
Tell us about the seven uh pillars that make us old, some of which you've kind of told us. This is interesting.
44:11
You go back 20 years, I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group.
44:15
We we were doing research, we had people coming in giving lectures in Palo Alto, but we didn't really know why we were aging.
44:22
We had different ideas, and they've now been so baked in based on really good research using unimaginable DNA visualization techniques, the ability to to do things that are out of Star Trek in terms of of seeing inside our body.
44:40
And we now know there's seven things that are making us old.
44:43
And this is really important because a lot of times they say, "What's the one thing I could do to live a long time?"
44:47
It's the same thing as "What's the one thing I could do to make my car last a long time?" Totally.
44:51
I'm pretty sure you got to rotate the tires and change the oil. Just just saying.
44:56
Might be a few other things, fuel filters and all that.
44:57
So, the seven pillars of aging are the things that we now know are the causes of aging.
45:01
And then the question is, okay, how do you avoid this?
45:06
If aging is death by a thousand cuts, how do I take less cuts?
45:11
How do I make the cuts less deep?
45:11
And then how do I heal them like Wolverine instead of just slapping a band-aid on?
45:16
And if you do that, that's the road map to living to 180 and feeling good along the way.
45:21
So, let's look at what the seven pillars of aging are. Okay.
45:25
And one of the first ones is telomeres.
45:28
And people have a lot of times heard about this.
45:29
There's all kinds of tests you can order online that measure blood telomeres, which don't really reflect tissue levels that well.
45:34
But what we do know is every time a cell divides, it it takes one off a little string of counters, and eventually you reach what's called the Hayflick limit.
45:42
A cell can't divide any more times because it's little counter got cut down.
45:47
Well, all you got to do is find the enzyme telomerase that lets you lengthen that, and there you go.
45:52
One of the seven pillars is handled.
45:54
And in the book I write about a couple things.
45:58
There's a very expensive supplement, there's some lifestyle things, and there's a Russian peptide, a small string of amino acids you can just inject twice a year that will probably has a bigger effect than anything else. I like that one.
46:10
It's cheaper and it's faster.
46:10
Now, there's also something called zombie cells.
46:15
And this is just just becoming early trend in anti-aging, although the researchers are looking at these What?
46:20
The technical term is senescent cells.
46:22
And these are cells that don't die, but they stop working.
46:27
So, they sort of sit there and they make free radicals and they don't do anything.
46:30
And as you age, you get more and more of these over time.
46:32
So, if you can do something like oh, fasting or these drugs, one called rapamycin that's really coming out for from research.
46:42
And there's a few other compounds being tested.
46:43
There's another compound from seaweed or strawberries that I wrote about in the book that'll tell your body to kill the zombie cells. Get rid of them.
46:51
And guess what's going to grow to replace them? Young cells. Who would have thought?
46:55
There's extracellular stiffening, which is outside of the cells.
46:59
I call them cellular straightjackets in the book.
47:02
Okay, what's causing that?
47:02
Well, we've all heard of beta-amyloid plaque as the cause of Alzheimer's.
47:06
It's a symptom, not a cause.
47:08
But throughout your body, when there's inflammation, let's go back to eating industrial meat.
47:11
Let's go back to eating the wrong vegetables.
47:13
Let's go back to eating sugar and fried stuff.
47:16
These things that cause systemic inflammation cause almost cellular level calluses or scarring.
47:20
And as that builds up over the course of decades, you end up with cells that can't move the way they're supposed to.
47:26
So, you got to remove the stiffening and there's a set of techniques to do that in the book.
47:31
And then we look at what happens when stuff builds up inside the cells.
47:35
Imagine that inside every cell there's an incinerator.
47:39
And his job is to burn garbage.
47:40
Well, what happens if you have an incinerator and you aren't allowed to pull any ashes out?
47:44
So, you need to burn super clean.
47:46
And then one day you just decide to stick a bunch of glass and metal in there. It won't burn.
47:50
So, the incinerator shuts down.
47:53
Well, this happens inside the cells all all the time.
47:57
And so, what if you ate less of the things and did less of the things that clogged up your incinerators, and what if there was a way to get rid of the cells with broken incinerators?
48:06
There are ways to do that.
48:08
There's also extracellular garbage.
48:08
So, instead of inside the cell, there's junk outside the cell that builds up over time.
48:14
And one of the things I I just did is I just did a dialysis last week where they pull my blood out, run it through a special filter that gets rid of extracellular garbage, and then put my blood back in after it's clean.
48:28
This is different than kidney dialysis.
48:30
It's similar technology, but the filtration is entirely different.
48:34
It's an anti-aging technique that's just coming online. I did that up with Dr.
48:37
Matt Cook, who's been on my show a few times.
48:41
And so, I'm getting rid of this junk.
48:44
That's a pretty extreme procedure.
48:45
There's other things you can do, like change how what you eat is cooked.
48:47
If you're eating burned industrially raised meat, like you're so doing it wrong. Even burned veggies. Thank you.
48:54
Yeah, that these blackened brussels sprouts. Stop already.
48:58
You want to cook stuff with water. You want to steam it.
49:00
You grill it gently if you're going to grill it, and you'll find a difference in how you age, your cancer risk, how you feel, even how you look the next day.
49:08
And so, cooking matters, as well as the quality of what you throw on the grill, and the composition really matters.
49:13
And the science though is that it's causing this thing to happen.
49:18
There's nuclear DNA mutations. Okay.
49:21
And the big one, the one that's funny cuz I wrote a whole book my my New York Times best-seller sandwiched between Homo Deus and Sapiens, that book, is on mitochondria.
49:30
That was the one I was missing.
49:31
So, mitochondrial DNA mutation.
49:34
The power plants in your cells, these things that sense the environment around you, make energy, make hormones, change how your your very how your brain thinks. Mhm.
49:41
Uh these things mutate over time.
49:43
And after I wrote Superhuman, a new study came out that said, "Oh, when mitochondrial function declines, that they are the things that power the repair of your nuclear DNA.
49:54
So, you have cells that are the building the building map, the road map, the plans for all of the hardware in your body. That's your nuclear DNA.
50:03
And then you have the power plants and the wiring for it all.
50:05
That's your mitochondrial DNA.
50:07
And these things need to come together.
50:09
It turns out when your mitochondrial DNA gets mutated over time, it mutates easily, it's no longer able to read and build cells properly based on this blueprint.
50:18
And it's no longer able to repair the blueprint.
50:20
So, this is a major cause of aging.
50:23
And the book before Superhuman, called Headstrong, I wrote about how 48% of people under age 40 have early onset energy decline, this mitochondrial decline, quantifiably measured.
50:36
And everyone over age 40 doesn't make energy as well as a young person unless they hack it.
50:42
And so, one of the big things that you do in Superhuman when you're following the plan there, is you say, "How do I make energy like a young person?"
50:50
And when you do that, you get the response time in your brain of a young person, and you get better skin, and your cardiac function improves, and you don't get Alzheimer's disease, and you don't get diabetes, and you don't get cancer.
51:00
And all those risks are actually associated with mitochondria.
51:04
But, it's only one of the seven pillars.
51:06
So, you could say, "I have the best mitochondrial function ever, and my cells are in straightjackets, and I have lots of senescent cells."
51:10
You're still not going to like what happens.
51:12
That's why you manage your risk on all these.
51:16
And everything in this book, all seven of those things, there's Here's what you do that's free.
51:22
Here's what you do that's 50 bucks, the supplement level thing.
51:23
Here's what the crazy billionaires are doing.
51:25
And I went out of my way to do all the crazy stuff, even if I didn't really need it as much as I could, so that I could write about it and and talk to the experts while they were probably, you know, injecting me with whatever, and get the knowledge, but also share the experience of it.
51:39
And what makes me really happy is right now, people are fortunate enough to go see Dr.
51:44
Harry and do the the $120,000 whole body six hands stem cell makeover.
51:50
He's got one that doesn't do the brain stuff that's more affordable.
51:52
And you know, I can tell you if you wait five or 10 years, I'm pretty sure that the costs are going to come down.
51:57
But right now, before the cost to come down, it takes the very cutting edge people.
52:01
And people get really pissed like this is just for old rich people. Look, here's the deal.
52:07
Cell phones, when they first came out 30 years ago when you were 2 years old, okay, you probably don't remember this cuz you were two, but you'd see the Mercedes 300, the entire trunk was the cell phone transmitter.
52:18
And he's got this big old brick on his head and he's driving down the freeway in LA talking on the phone.
52:23
And all the other people in cars are like, "Who does that think he is?
52:25
Oh my god, these stupid rich people and their cell phones."
52:27
Okay, these are the same people, you know, playing Tetris on their phone or whatever.
52:30
But what happened is demand comes first.
52:34
Everything is stupidly expensive because it's the cutting edge of innovation, the fastest computers.
52:40
Like when I was 8 years old, I had a computer that cost $5,000.
52:41
It was a hand-me-down from my dad because he worked in the industry.
52:44
It was before Windows was invented, before DOS was invented.
52:48
And no one had that when they were eight, but I just was like I didn't even know what I had.
52:52
This weird little green blinky thing. Right?
52:53
But now, we all have that.
52:58
And these anti-aging technologies over the course of the next 10 years, 20 years, will come down in cost dramatically because they're being funded by people who are willing to basically spend everything they have to get another couple years of quality life.
53:11
And all of us at a certain point in our life, no matter how much or how little we have, if you're facing death, you're going to say, "You know what?
53:19
I'm willing to make that bargain."
53:21
And what I want is I want for everyone listening to the show to benefit from when a few wealthy people do that right now.
53:28
And and it is good for the world, it's good for everyone, and the costs will drop just like computer processors drop. Right?
53:34
Well, I am happy to and I appreciate the fact that you do go into lifestyle changes here too. It's free.
53:41
it's Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.
53:41
And I think that's really really important. Yeah.
53:43
Because I I think it is so important.
53:46
Like what you're saying, it's when it's wisdom and science, it's lifestyle and it's these stem cell changes, right?
53:52
It's both levels because it's all levels of change.
53:54
Because if we're not changing our mindset, we're not going to change our behavior.
53:57
And if we're not changing our biological behavior, we can't change our psychological effects.
54:01
So, I like to hope that someday we're going to have such good and affordable technology that all of us can be You know, I went on the cheesecake diet for a year and you know, I I went on and I went on on a huge series of inappropriate dates and I picked up all these weird diseases and I've got this huge tumor.
54:16
I'm just going to go on into the doctor and for five bucks I'm going to hit reset and I'm going to come out as a 17-year-old again.
54:21
Okay, maybe this will happen.
54:21
I kind of don't think so, but I would like to think that our technologies are good enough that you could be that stupid.
54:26
I also would like it makes us a bit too reckless?
54:31
There is data that shows that we adjust our risk.
54:33
So, when seat belts came out, people started driving faster. Yes, exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah. You know what?
54:38
It's okay that there's risk in life.
54:39
Who wants to live in a risk-free world? Risk not reckless. Yeah.
54:42
So, what I think will happen though is when you realize, you know what?
54:46
If I make a mistake like that, I can recover from it, I'm more likely to do something.
54:50
But, how good of a world is that?
54:52
You mean I could possibly do something that's more fun, more exciting, more risky, or more more worthy? Right?
54:59
And if I come near dying, I know I'm going to be okay.
55:03
That's profound versus right now, I'm too afraid cuz I might die.
55:05
I want to create that world without fear, but a world that still has risk. Yeah. And that's necessary.
55:12
Yeah, and I I vibe with that.
55:14
The the part where I always And and I guess this is always a small percentage of peop- percentage of people, but it's it's the part that it's like, yeah, how much can you risk without hurting anyone else? Yeah.
55:24
I think that's where pain to me is interesting because it's like I'm I'm like that.
55:28
I'm like, yeah, I want to you know, live to extremes and limits and test the barriers, but never at the cost of hurting other people.
55:33
And I wonder whether you could when you can reset there's there's that risk of like oh well they can reset too, you know?
55:39
And and we all know that people just as people age differently they also age emotionally differently, they also deal with trauma differently, they also deal with tragedy differently, so.
55:50
It's funny, people over 50 surprisingly show more happiness.
55:54
I've studied happiness and given big lectures on it and wrote about it in Game Changers.
56:00
They actually show they've actually had enough time to deal with their Yeah. Right?
56:03
And this is the horrible tragedy of of being human.
56:04
If you have children before you're 25, especially as a woman, your lifelong risk of every kind of cancer goes down, your health will improve, your odds of living longer go up.
56:17
It's actually really good for you.
56:19
The problem is that for 25-year-olds to have kids, you haven't had enough time to build up a financial base and you also haven't had enough time to deal with your emotional So now you're going to have kids and you probably won't be a great parent cuz you haven't had a chance to do your own work, right?
56:32
You're still like finishing separating from all the programming from your parents and all.
56:34
So you're saying right, I'm going to wait till I'm in my 30s and I'll have a financial base, but now having kids is harder on my body, right?
56:41
It's harder on the family.
56:41
So it's like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
56:44
And it's one of the reasons that the the birth rate is going down.
56:46
People are saying I'm going to choose just not to do it.
56:49
I'm going to choose to wait a long time.
56:51
And sometimes they wait too long, but part of it is what you just talked about there. Absolutely.
56:55
Is there anything I haven't asked you today that you're like David you're like Jay I really want your audience to know this so I really wanted to talk about this, whether it's you know, yeah it could be anything.
57:03
I mean there's so many other places we could go with this, but I just want to give you the Yeah, one one of the things we haven't talked about a lot is cognitive enhancement. Okay.
57:13
This is something I've done for 20 plus years, nootropics.
57:15
The reason modafinil is kind of cool, you look back 10 years, I went on Nightline.
57:19
I was the only guy who would do it without a bag on my head.
57:22
I was yeah, I went to Wharton and I was on modafinil the whole time.
57:25
It's the only way I could even get my MBA and still work full-time and all that.
57:29
And it's one of many things like that.
57:29
I just want to say it is well within our current technology to increase your IQ and increase your mental performance across all kinds of of measures.
57:41
There's natural plant-based compounds and animal-based compounds you can use that will help you.
57:46
And I write about the stuff on my blog on daveasprey. com.
57:49
There's pharmaceuticals that are proven to work and every month or so you'll see some big articles saying "Experts say these can't work."
57:57
Experts who didn't read the goddamn research cuz I put it in my book and there's five studies that show that you can type 15% faster on this stuff.
58:02
Like if it doesn't work, how can this be possible, right?
58:07
So we know that these things work and I don't know what's motivating the people who will look you in the face and lie to you and say that they don't work because they do in some circumstances and they might work for you, but they might not.
58:17
And you owe it to yourself to find out if you want to do that.
58:19
And then there's technologies.
58:22
Breathing and meditation being the two cheapest and most accessible.
58:24
And then there's the neurofeedback stuff that I'm doing at 40 Years of Zen.
58:27
And we didn't talk about my funky glasses. Yeah.
58:31
Company's called TrueDark.
58:31
It's a company I founded and I will tell you, I have doubled my deep sleep by using the glasses I made for sleep.
58:37
I couldn't buy them anywhere. that works.
58:41
You have 5% of the cells in your eyes receive a light signal that you never see.
58:46
It goes around your visual cortex into the timing system in your brain.
58:50
And you can look at your body like a computer.
58:51
There's quadrillion little tiny computer nodes, they're called mitochondria, and they need to work on the same clock because if the ones in your liver think it's daytime and the ones in your brain think it's nighttime, they don't match up.
59:02
So this light comes in and it tells your brain what to do and it spreads the signal throughout the body.
59:11
Well, the glasses that I make for sleep with TrueDark, it's a patented set of frequencies. These are all of them.
59:16
It's not just blue blocking, that's not enough.
59:19
It blue blocking is too much during the day and not enough at night.
59:22
These are the ones that keep you awake.
59:23
So you wear these glasses, I can fly to New York, I got no no jet lag at all.
59:25
It eliminated jet lag from my life.
59:26
And I get more sleep now in 6 hours, more quality sleep, than the average 20-year-old gets in 8 hours of sleep.
59:35
And I published the actual numbers in here in Superhuman how to do it.
59:37
So, who would have thought the color of light is a variable that matters?
59:40
Only by measuring, seeing what works, and understanding the fundamental wiring of our body can you create something like that.
59:49
Uh, so for me, I'm wearing these glasses now.
59:53
These are called the TrueDark Daywalker.
59:55
And what these are doing is they're blocking some blue light, which means my brain works better all day cuz a lot of the interior lighting we have today creates brain stress.
1:00:02
So, by the 5:00 you want sugar and you're tired. I don't like that. I don't do that anymore.
1:00:05
So, I'm willing to walk around looking like a rockstar.
1:00:08
And tell us I love And tell us what sugar does cuz Oh, man.
1:00:12
talked about fried and fried food, but sugar and Sugar's bad news.
1:00:14
You eat it and it creates something called advanced glycation end products.
1:00:18
Guess what clogs up those incinerators in the cells?
1:00:20
It's advanced glycation end products.
1:00:22
So, you're basically browning the tissues in your body.
1:00:25
You're increasing your risk of almost every disease, especially cancer and especially cardiovascular.
1:00:31
And half of what's in sugar is fructose and half is another kind of sugar, uh, sucrose. Um, actually glucose.
1:00:38
Uh, sucrose is glucose plus fructose.
1:00:40
But anyway, fructose is what causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
1:00:45
So, if we were to look at everyone's liver in the room right now, there's a pretty good chance that there's some fatty liver going on.
1:00:52
And if you're on an exclusively plant-based diet that doesn't have any saturated fat from animals, your risk actually goes up a little bit.
1:00:57
But we So, you look at non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, it's caused by sugar.
1:01:00
So, if you don't eat sugar, it doesn't work.
1:01:04
And what's interesting, you see this little uh little weird puck Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:01:09
I have a continuous glucose monitor on right now.
1:01:11
I don't sleep all that much. it.
1:01:13
And we'll see if my shirt's loose enough. Yeah, it is.
1:01:15
So, Now you're just showing off your muscles. Yeah, right. Yeah.
1:01:19
So, this thing on its side Oh, it's your face on it. Yeah, I did that. It was a joke.
1:01:22
Uh so, it doesn't have to have my face on it.
1:01:24
But, this this comes on every 14 days.
1:01:26
I I put it on the other arm.
1:01:29
And you can wave your phone or a little device over it and it'll actually tell you what your blood sugar is. Oh, I love that. And you created this? Uh no, no.
1:01:36
This is something type 1 diabetics have used these for a while.
1:01:40
But, now I want to know what sugar does to me.
1:01:42
So, I have this little device and I can wave it over this and see, it's at 5. 2.
1:01:45
That's uh Canadian or European units.
1:01:49
So, this is it's around 100. Okay.
1:01:51
And it's middle of the day and the line's perfectly flat.
1:01:55
So, I can tell you I didn't eat something that caused a blood sugar spike.
1:01:57
The odds are that if after your next meal, if you have one of these on, we we did it, you're going to see your blood sugar go up to 140, 150 if it's a typical vegan meal.
1:02:05
Now, if you were to say, "I'm not a typical vegan.
1:02:08
I'm eating a plate of green vegetables.
1:02:10
I'm not putting grains on it.
1:02:12
I'm not putting a lot of legumes, maybe a little bit.
1:02:15
And I'm putting a ton of olives and avocados and and seeds and all that."
1:02:20
So, we Yeah, my wife is the ex-vegan on me.
1:02:22
You'll see if it works because if your blood sugar spikes, bad news, man. It's not working.
1:02:27
So, I've been able to tune what is fasting doing and all that. That's so cool.
1:02:31
It's data-based and now I know what is low blood sugar feel like.
1:02:33
I don't get it very often, but when I get it, I know I know why.
1:02:35
And I can also show you if you get crappy sleep, you will have no ability to control your blood sugar.
1:02:43
If you have emotional stress in your life, you eat the same food and your blood sugar is all over. It's crazy.
1:02:46
Yeah, so that is the latest hack I'm working on. Absolutely.
1:02:51
And I and I love what you just said there because we know that when we're stressed, we turn to sugars, we turn to carbs, we turn to fats. Like, that's what we do.
1:02:59
What do you do when you're stressed?
1:03:00
When I'm stressed, uh mostly I meditate on the blood of my enemies. Sorry.
1:03:07
What do you What do you actually do?
1:03:07
Um I I'll usually It depends like the type of stress.
1:03:12
It's usually breathing or meditation. Okay, so So what you do. There's no idea.
1:03:16
There's some inner-energetic stuff that I I've picked it up done all sorts of interesting training in other countries.
1:03:25
There's usually some things I can do there and if there's this amazing thing you can do it's called call a friend if that's not call a therapist.
1:03:30
It's it's pretty remarkable cuz then you can talk to someone who really understands the etiology of stress and you can be that for your friends too.
1:03:37
It's just hard to see it.
1:03:38
I'm not going to see the big picture sometimes cuz I'm human.
1:03:42
Unfortunately, you know, I'm kidding.
1:03:44
But the the problem is is that if you don't have someone like that in your life or your friends are afraid to really tell you actually you really are an half the time but I'm still friends with you.
1:03:53
It's really hard to to have someone tell you that. is hard.
1:03:56
So a therapist's job is like actually you need to own this 100% you're blaming the other person you're just being a childish little jerk and you need to like put your pants on the right way this morning and then you're going to have to do the introspection.
1:04:06
So you got to have someone like that in your life and so if I'm feeling super stressed and I can't figure out why that that really doesn't happen to me anymore. Nice.
1:04:14
But if I'm feeling super stressed and I think I know why and I can't figure it out with friends I'll call a therapist or call a psychologist and I don't have necessarily regular sessions maybe once a month and I'll just check in and then I'll say you know I'm having this hard time with this thing and it's really like it's causing stress which is very unusual.
1:04:30
I don't experience normal stress like normal people because I hacked all my stress responses and then we figure out all right it's usually and this is a key thing it's a false belief.
1:04:39
So you were acting rationally and your feelings make sense if what you believe to be true is true.
1:04:45
It's just bad assumptions and those false assumptions lead us to terrorism.
1:04:52
I used to think terrorists were crazy.
1:04:53
No, if you believe what they believe their behavior is rational.
1:04:57
in line with their beliefs.
1:04:57
The beliefs are wrong and so that if your beliefs are wrong your emotions will be broken and that's what a psychologist a really good one or a therapist can help you see is that you assumed something wrong which is why you got in this in this jam.
1:05:09
So let's change your assumptions and then you oh And then the pain or the stress melts away because you changed the world you live in. Absolutely.
1:05:15
I feel like I've been talking to the real life Iron Man.
1:05:18
Have you ever been told that? Don't tell anyone.
1:05:22
Have you ever been told that?
1:05:23
Yeah, people have have said that.
1:05:23
I mean, I've got my little biohacks somewhere in the Aura ring. Yeah, it's awesome.
1:05:28
I just I want to I want to feel good all the time. I know. I love Yeah.
1:05:31
I was blessed with feeling like I was old and literally I had the diseases of aging before I was 30.
1:05:37
High risk of stroke and heart attack, prediabetes, arthritis, all that crap.
1:05:41
I don't want to go back to that.
1:05:43
Like, I know what it's like. Absolutely.
1:05:44
I'm not going to get old the way the way people expect cuz it's just sucks too much. Absolutely.
1:05:48
So, Dave, we end every interview with the final five, which is a rapid fire question round.
1:05:54
One word or one sentence answers max. You ready? Okay, awesome. So, question number one.
1:05:58
What's a lesson you find hard to teach others? How to stop being vegan. It's not hard. Sorry. I just had to say it. Yeah.
1:06:10
Tell tell us something that genuinely is hard.
1:06:12
Well, maybe this is hard for That actually is a really hard lesson.
1:06:17
A lesson that it's hard to teach others is that there are layers of abilities and powers and energies that they have that they've never seen.
1:06:25
It's just hard to believe. Absolutely. Okay, second question.
1:06:29
What's one thing you were once certain of that you recently changed your mind on?
1:06:33
I was once certain that the less you could sleep the better cuz sleep is such a big of time. Oh, yeah.
1:06:39
God, I used to have that one, too.
1:06:42
I I sleep my 8 and 1/2 hours a night.
1:06:44
Yeah, sleep quality, man.
1:06:46
I've become a sleep advocate over the past few years as I looked at the data.
1:06:50
I still sleep as little as I can, but my sleep is really good.
1:06:53
So, that that was a big change. That's a great point. Yeah.
1:06:55
Okay, question number three.
1:06:56
What's something about you that most people don't know that would surprise them?
1:07:01
I was was I was once bitten by a vampire bat. Where? In In Colorado.
1:07:10
Don't even live there, but I woke up when I was a kid with a vampire bat feeding on my neck. You being serious?
1:07:15
I'm very totally serious. serious.
1:07:16
I didn't believe you at first. Yeah.
1:07:17
No, there It's a real species.
1:07:20
They hypothesize they came in on bananas.
1:07:21
This was pre-internet, but we actually caught the bat and took him to the hospital.
1:07:25
It was just like that big. Not very big.
1:07:27
But, yeah, it was kind of scary.
1:07:29
Woke up in the middle of the night.
1:07:30
It was It was feeding and I didn't know what it was and Oh my god.
1:07:32
And I I grabbed it and I I thought it was a mouse and it wasn't and I'm like and it bit me and I threw it down and it never hits the floor. It It was really creepy.
1:07:39
But, yeah, that actually happens. Yeah, wow.
1:07:41
I I mine I had a bad experience, but it came and literally like it was I was in India in Pune and it came and literally landed on my face.
1:07:48
I was 9 years old and I literally just pushed it off.
1:07:50
Like it didn't bite me or anything, but it literally it flew and landed on my face.
1:07:53
It was It was my bad night moment.
1:07:56
They carry a lot of diseases, too. Not just rabies, yeah. Interesting. Okay.
1:08:00
All right, question number four.
1:08:00
What's something you once valued that you no longer pay attention to?
1:08:06
When I was young, I really valued actually two things.
1:08:09
Um one was uh being rich.
1:08:12
And I made $6 million when I was 26 and I lost it when I was 28.
1:08:15
And I can tell you when I was 26, I said, "I'll be happy when I have $10 million instead of $6 million, which is a super dick thing to say."
1:08:23
Uh so, that that fascination with when I have more money, I'll be happy, I I have lost that.
1:08:28
And you can say, "That's cuz you have enough." That's true.
1:08:32
You need about 74,000 a year.
1:08:34
But, say that that obsession with it, no, it above a certain level, it's just about what would you do with the money to make the world a better place cuz you can't spend it. It would be stupid. Um so, that's one.
1:08:45
Um the other one is It has to do with like wanting to be famous and recognized.
1:08:52
Uh when I was 23, I was in in in Entrepreneur magazine because I sold the first thing that was ever sold over the internet and it was a caffeine t-shirt.
1:09:01
It said, "Caffeine, my drug of choice.
1:09:02
The first e-commerce before the word e-commerce was out there.
1:09:04
No one knew what a big deal it was historically.
1:09:07
Um for me it was just being scrappy and trying to pay my college tuition.
1:09:09
But um I was like, "Look at me. I'm in a magazine.
1:09:14
There's a big picture of me in it my double XL t-shirt and you know, puffy red face."
1:09:20
And I just realized after 15 minutes of that it didn't do anything.
1:09:25
Like like like all of that yeah, I'm going to be recognized.
1:09:29
It There's no value in that.
1:09:29
And and that I'm going to be enormously wealthy.
1:09:36
There's some value in that, but not very much.
1:09:37
So for me it it's like the the rich and famous thing.
1:09:41
It It's about your mission and those things whatever.
1:09:44
Well, thank you for thinking it through. I love that answer.
1:09:45
Okay, question number Sorry, that wasn't one sentence. I suck. It was a great answer.
1:09:48
I was happy you went off on it.
1:09:49
This is the first time we're ever asking this question as a final five.
1:09:52
So you get to answer this.
1:09:52
I I'm excited to ask you this question.
1:09:54
If you could create any law for the world to follow, what would it be?
1:10:00
I like be kind would would be a really good one, but the really amazing law would be the law that limited the number of words in the entire set of laws in the country.
1:10:12
Thank you so much for watching that video.
1:10:14
If you enjoyed it, here's another one I think you'll love.
1:10:17
These foods are designed to be addictive.
1:10:19
You know, there was an old there's statement that's any white substance is addictive.
1:10:25
White flour is addictive, white sugar is addictive.