How to Use Nootropics to Feel More Like Yourself | Dave Asprey on Health Theory

In today's episode of Health Theory with Dave Asprey, we discuss how to enhance your cognition and daily performance, why your ego is holding you back from the life you want, how to use the Bulletproof Diet for longevity, and how to overcome hungry ghost syndrome with gratitude. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dave Asprey, the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author of several books, including Headstrong and most recently Gamechangers, What Leaders, Innovators, and Mavericks Do to Win at Life. He's also one of the world's most famous biohackers, the founder and CEO of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of the Webby Award-Winning podcast Bulletproof Radio. Now, Dave, the fascinating thing about you is how eclectic you are, which I was really impressed by. The new book is cool, all over the map. But, as somebody who's crazy good at optimizing, where I want to start is nootropics. So, my personal obsession is the brain, and you go into, in the book, nootropics. You talk about, um, going to Burning Man as one of your action items, which I thought was cool. Walk me through nootropics, how we can use things to enhance our cognition, and not just nootropics, but the sort of host of things that we can do. Uh, this is one of my favorite 20-year passions. Starting in, uh, my mid-20s, I said, "My brain isn't working the way it's supposed to." I started forgetting things. I was having problems that I didn't like, and my career was just taking off. So, I said, "What can I do to hack this?" I ordered my first big package of smart drugs, and these are mostly pharmaceuticals. Uh, they came in, I was all excited, and and I I took the first of the bunch I was testing out on myself. It was called piracetam, and I use an analog of that even today, and I wrote about that in Gamechangers. But, the experience was really weird. I took it for a week, and I'm like, damn, I'm so I'm so excited. I'm so disappointed this stuff doesn't work. So, I stopped taking it and the next day I said, "You know, I'm grasping for words." And I realized the previous week, every time I wanted to think of a word, it would just come to me. And then I had found that I'd say, "What's the word for that? What was I going to say?" And I realized I wasn't having that. What good nootropics do, the ones that aren't energizing, which is a different effect that's also helpful, they make you feel more like yourself. They reduce the struggle and the work it takes to do something. So, it would have been within your skill set, but a struggle or a stretch, like, "Oh, I got that." Sort of like if you could, you know, lift a 35-lb dumbbell, but it's work and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, yeah, I got that. Maybe I could do 45." So, it's this performance enhancer, but it feels so natural. It feels like yourself, that after a very short period of time, you get used to having that superpower and it just becomes your new normal. And it turns out there's a whole bunch of different racetam family drugs. Piracetam's been around for almost 60 years. It's made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a big pharmaceutical company in Europe. Well, it's protective of your neurons. It increases oxygen, but not blood flow in the brain. And we're not sure all the ways that it works, but it's got a long safety history. The downsides are it may use more acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter. You can eat raw egg yolks or take soy lecithin or some of the supplements that I make have things that increase acetylcholine in it. And it's widely available at Whole Foods or anywhere. Would you have to eat raw egg yolks to get it? If they're lightly cooked, it's okay, but if you burn your egg yolks, you're not really going to get functional choline. It'll be burned. It's damaged by heat. So, you you go through that and say, "That that might be one side effect." The other side effect is amplifies caffeine. So, you take one of these things, hold on, your brain works better. It protects your neurons in low oxygen environments, increases oxygen in the brain, and things work better. Like, I think I like this. And what I switched to, in my Game Changers I kind of give the the dosage and all this, is one called aniracetam. And aniracetam is lower stress. It also is the only one that increases memory IO, or input output. And I'm a computer science guy. I was a computer hacker by training when I weighed 300 lb. And if you can increase the speed that you put something into a computer's memory or you get it out, it radically changes the performance of the whole computer. So, faster memory means something. Well, as a human being, if you can find a substance that increases your ability to get things in and out of your memory, when you meditate, you're going to remember how to meditate better. When you study, you're going to remember what you do better. When you want to recall what you did, you're going to do it better. I've been on that stuff for 20 years, and it's really impactful. Wow. There's also um these things that if you increase energy in the brain, you increase performance everywhere. And that's been a big a big focus. My book before Game Changers was called Headstrong. All about if you increase function of energy producing cells called mitochondria in the brain, what's it going to do? And it turns out your emotions get better, your ability to regulate your emotions, your ability to recall things, your ability to just have raw power to be you, it goes up. Some nootropics, uh and a lot of the ones that I focused my my formulations on, are around increasing energy throughout the body, but most especially in the brain. And then others are around manipulating or modifying things. Another nootropic that's really uh really powerful is uh something that comes from green coffee fruit. Not the coffee beans themselves, but actually the fruit itself. And we produce it's called Neuro Master. There's a compound in the brain called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And this is neurotrophic factor. We're talking about nootropics. This is stuff that lets the brain be more plastic, more like a young brain. And it's tied to something called nerve growth factor. And if you can find a way to raise those things, your brain will act like a young person's brain. It'll learn faster. So, the number one thing that we know that's free that raises both of those is exercise. High-intensity interval training, lifting heavy things, stuff that you've talked about before in the show, right? But this compound in Neuro Master raises your BDNF levels four times more than exercise. So, I'm like, I think I'll exercise and I'll take that stuff. So, I want that young plastic brain. And after 20 years of trying pretty much every nootropic out there, I've settled in on what works for my brain. But my advice for you as you go down that path and for everyone watching or listening is your brain is not the same as your spouse, your friend, even your parents, although it's more likely to be like your parents. So, the stack that works for me may not be the stack for you. And this is why when you see companies have like 15 different racetams and all the stuff in there, don't start there. Because one of those may have a negative effect on you, and one may have a very positive effect. So, try those individually. Most of the time with supplements, I'm like, try all the ones that might work and see if you get the results you want, then pull them out. I've found that with nootropics it doesn't work that way for the pharmaceuticals. With the plant-based ones, it usually does. And I make something called Smart Mode, which is a a set of very well-studied plant-based compounds for cognitive enhancement. Different kind of a different universe than the pharmaceutical side. And it's funny because another nootropic that's controversial and it's in Gamechangers is microdosing of LSD. Yeah. I interviewed 500-plus people, Nobel Prize winners, all these people. And I said, not What does one person do? I asked them all the same structured question. But what do they all have in common? Like, what are the rules they follow to become game changers so that I could boil that down and frankly use it for myself, right? Like, instead of doing what that one guy did, I'll do what all of them agreed on. And not all of them microdose LSD. In fact, very few of them do. But, the three big buckets that came out of all this research over several years was they do things to be smarter, faster, and happier. So, happiness doesn't come from wealth, but wealth can come from happiness. But, being angry and tired and unhappy all the time is not a good way to become successful or to change the game in your field or frankly to become wealthy or powerful or whatever else is important. I also got from the data not one person who's been a game changer named when I asked three most important things in the world for people want to perform better. Not one said wealth, power, or fame. They're not seeking that. That is not the target. It is a side effect of them doing what they're here to do. And I had this dinner in New York. It was profound. A friend Andrew hosted this. And he has this long table, 25 people, and there's hedge fund managers, like like big people in New York. And it was a Jeffersonian dialogue. And what that means is that instead of just having a random dinner conversation, one person asked a question of the table, then we discuss it, only one person at a time. So, we're all listening and focused. It was really cool. I've never done that before. And when it got to be my turn to ask a question, I said, "All right, how many people here have used hallucinogens or psychedelics for personal development?" Every single hand at the table went up. And I'm talking 20-year-old artists to 70-year-old senior executive people. They'd all done it at least once, right? And the rule that came out of that in Game Changers was get outside your head. There's 46 laws in this book that that people follow in in the lines of 48 Laws of Power. And Robert Greene's actually in the book, the guy who wrote 48 Laws of Power. And get outside your head doesn't mean you go do drugs. In fact, if you're under 25, I would say don't go do drugs cuz your brain's not done cooking. Don't go, you know, some to some random party, even Burning Man. Do it with a trained professional in a place where it's legal. And I talk about you can actually go to a place in Costa Rica that has a medically licensed ayahuasca setting. I did ayahuasca in Peru 20 years ago with a shaman in the jungle, which was a transformative experience for me. But just to go out there and say, "Hey, you know, I got some. I'm going to go to Disneyland." That is not good for your soul, is not good for your performance, it's not cognitive enhancing. But having the ability to look in and see what your mistakes are, you can do this with holotropic breathing, which is a type of breathing that was developed to replace LSD for psychotherapy in the early '70s. the book. Go into detail about that. Oh, I I love this. So, Tom, in addition to this, losing 100 lb, getting control of my biology, and having a successful career, making my brain work better, when all this stuff that was supposed to work didn't work, I said, "All right, I'm going to go outside the box. I'm an engineer. So, I'm going to try meditation. It's not supposed to work." And 20 years ago, no one meditated. Or if you did, you wouldn't tell your friends cuz they'd think you were goofy. And I put it on my LinkedIn profile. And I said, "I'm going to go uh do a personal development thing." And I was at a point in my life I was ending a relationship. And a friend said, "Dave, you have to go do this." And I said, "What is it?" She said, "I'm not going to tell you." All right. So, what did she say? She said, "You won't do it if I tell you." So, just trust me. All right, fine. I didn't know what else to do. I was feeling kind of desperate. So, I went to this personal development retreat. And a part of this was you'd lay down on a mat with a facilitator sort of watching over you. And there's a bunch of other people in there doing the same thing. And they play like movie soundtrack music. And you do this really deep rapid breathing. And the technical term for what you do is called tripping balls. That's the technical term. Yeah. You're like, what is going on here? And literally, is it because you're essentially hyperventilating? Yeah. Okay. You're hypoxic. But, it has with the music and the set and setting, it has really deep like really deep things that happen. And I have seen more things in there than I have from ayahuasca or from doing, you know, ceremonial use of psychedelics. Oh, how often do you do this? I do it like maybe once every year or two. Huh. And twice I've done this with Stanislav Grof, the guy who invented it. He's the guy who created the field of transpersonal psychology. In the '60s in Czechoslovakia, when it was still one country, he had from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, the same company that makes piracetam. He had a shipment of LSD when it was first invented. Wow. And he as a licensed psychiatrist treated 3,000 patients with LSD. And he noticed that they were all getting better and he was frustrated that the Freud and stuff wasn't working. So, they all get better, but there's patterns about how you come into the world. There's patterns where people get stuck. And he could help them work through it using this. And when when you say patterns of how you come into the world, you talking like literal birth? about birth. Okay. Yeah. And there's according to Stan's work, there's five stages of birth. And one is you're floating, you're happy in your mom and you know, there's plenty of space. Then you're like, ah, there's not enough space in here. Like it's getting tight. And then there's, oh my god, someone's trying to smash the crap out of me. That would be the actual getting born. And then there's the I just came into the world. And then there's the, you know, your first breath kind of thing. And then there's the is it a safe world or is it an unsafe world? And he he found that repeatedly the people had this kind of problem had stuff stuck here. And they would actually go back and revisit the emotional symptoms of birth. And based on that, a lot of the pre and perinatal psychology that is groundbreaking work for the over the last 30 years came from Stan's work with his wife. And when LSD was made illegal, he said, "Screw that noise." And so he studied uh yoga and Ayurveda to find a kind of breathing that would produce the same effects. And I can tell you, when you do that breathing with a licensed, you know, practice professional knows what they're doing, you can do personal development that is very hard to do. And it's one of the ways without drugs to get outside of yourself. In my case, what I figured out was I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. And I didn't have oxygen cut off to my brain. So, I was like, "That's no big deal. Uh who cares, right?" You know, it was like some random thing that happened, like a a trivia point. Mhm. And when I met the woman running this retreat where they did breathing, uh it was called the Star Foundation. It's still around. And she had these like really vibrant blue eyes, and she looks at me, she goes, "Tell me about your birth." And and I was like, kind of weirded out. Like, I'm I'm an engineer. So, I I look at her and I go, uh "Hospitals? Vaginas? Uh you know." And I was kind of like like, "What's up with this?" And she she said, "Well, do you really really do you know anything?" And I said, "Yeah, I had the cord around that." She goes, "I thought so." And she puts up a PowerPoint slide. And it's me, like a a SWOT analysis. They teach you that in business school, like strength, weakness, opportunity. It was like if I was a butterfly pinned down, like she nailed all the things I was afraid of that I wouldn't tell anyone. Wow. And I was like, "How did this How did you know that?" And it was like an act of wizardry. And she said, "Well, it's science. We've been studying this for 30 years, and we know that people who have an umbilical cord or you know, really traumatic coming into the world, they come in." And what had happened is I'd come into the world like, "Something's trying to kill me." And so you come into the world ready to kill, and you never stop. And I did that for 30 years. Talk about raising your IQ, stop doing that. And you'll be a lot smarter, right? Explain that to people. You talk about that quite profoundly in the book. What do you mean by if you stop coming at the world like that that you're actually smarter? Well, you your body makes electrons. The primary thing that your cells do inside each cell there's there's hundreds to thousands or even tens of thousands of these ancient bacteria called mitochondria and they run a lot of our our operating system. And their job is to take food and air and make energy. And then energy goes somewhere. Energy goes to breathing, to walking, to willpower. It also goes to thinking. It goes to anxiety. It goes to stress. It goes to hate. It goes to any of the bad things, right? So, if you're putting without your permission or knowledge, you're putting your energy into that, you're not putting into thinking, you're not putting into serving your community, you're not putting into your relationships, you're not putting in into into love, into kindness, into self-kindness, into recuperation, into recovery, into becoming a better human being. And it is you have one electron, the same electron that powers your iPhone, and are you going to put it into being a better human being or you going to put it into being afraid of something that isn't a threat? And we're wired to over respond to threats because all animals, including ones without brains like ours, that's the that's the operating system for survival and it starts inside each cell. Literally quadrillions of times or quadrillions of locations in the body, millions of times a second, your body's saying, "What's going to kill me now? What's going to kill me now?" And it's our job as we become smarter, more intelligent, more effective to actually turn down that voice. And some of the laws in Game Changers are about Okay, how do you become aware of that? Because awareness is hard. It the story that you tell yourself about whether something's a threat, you believe it. When someone cuts you off in traffic, the story that goes in your head is, "That son of a thinks he's more important than me and you know, I I should kill him." Now, I used to have like an overdeveloped middle finger muscle from that. But see, that story's all BS, right? That probably came from being bullied in first grade, who knows? But the real story is someone cut in front of you and they could be on their way to the hospital to go see their dying wife, or they could just be an But, you don't know. So, I stopped the stress that that would that would think for that. I'm like, I want to choose the story. But, we're doing this thousands or even tens of thousands of times a day, and if you just shift the needle a little bit by gaining awareness, the end result is not only do you have more time and more electrons to think more effectively, but we're wired to be nice to each other. And when I say wired, I mentioned overreacting to fear, Tom. If you are a single-celled organism, there's a very specific set of rules that everything has to follow. And the first rule is if something if you think something's about to kill you, it's a threat. Immediately, you have to run, you have to kill, or you have to hide. And that's the first F-word, it's fear. Because it's game over. Like, if you're a bacteria, something eats you, well, that was okay, lost. So, life won't go on without that. The second thing you do is eat everything. Because you don't know if there's going to be a famine. If you starve, it's game over. And the third thing you So, that that was feed. So, we have fear, feed. The third one is also an F-word, and it's reproduce the species. And that explains like why you date all the people you shouldn't date, right? Because if you don't reproduce the species, it's game over. So, our wiring is all about game over. And you can say, "Well, that sucks because that's the human condition." It's actually the condition of life, and without it, none of us would be here because we would do things that would self-destruct. Or I'd say we do them more often. A lot of us self-destruct anyway. But, there's another F-word that comes at the end of that, and it's friend. Even single-celled organisms will work together, they'll cooperate, and they'll form a community that provides uh greater benefits than you being the the lone wolf kind of thing. And humans are the same way. So, this is our order of operations. So, our job as as human beings, your job with the work you're doing on on spreading information like this, is like, "Look, maybe we can have less fear. We can have less hunger. We can have better sex. And maybe more beneficial, soulful, uh you know, healthy sex." By the way, there's four laws in Gamechangers about sex, including orgasm hangovers and what those do to men. And when you you get past that we're actually supposed to be nice to each other. It actually feels good to be supportive and to be nice. And this is built into our it's built into every cell in our body. And that's why this getting outside your head is so important. And whether you choose to go down that psychedelic route, whether you want to do a shamanic drumming ceremony, you want to fast in a cave, uh you want to go to Tibet, and you know, go to go to Mount Kailash and do meditation for 10 days. These are all paths that lead to more self-awareness. And along the way, wouldn't it be nice if you weren't hungry the whole time? So, maybe you could eat properly, right? And if you just do some of these right, you don't have to do them all right. There's huge amounts of untapped energy inside the human body, in inside us energetically, biochemically, uh emotionally, spiritually. It's all It's all in there. And I was only tapping I don't I don't know what percent, 5%? 10%? when I was in my 20s. And I'm 46. And I have more energy now than I did when I was 25. And I have more energy than a lot of the people who work for me 20 years younger than me. And it it's all there because I just stopped doing the stuff that wasn't serving me. Mhm. So, to that point, going back to these 3,000 people treated with LSD, the fact that everyone around the table had experimented with hallucinogens, is it the dissolution of the ego? Is it like, what is it about it that's going to allow you to redistribute that energy, to stop wasting it on stupid Like, what what happens actually? Ooh, that is a profound question. So, part of my path has been doing neurofeedback, and I've spent 4 months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing intense meditation looking at brain waves, and I do this with clients. And you can learn some things about the ego. I mentioned that operating system in the body. There are studies This is creepy, but it this these are real studies that are validated and reproducible. Where they'll take a computer screen and they'll have a random number generator inside the computer, so no one knows what's going to come out. And if it's an even number they show a picture of flowers and puppies, and if it's an odd number, they show a picture of grizzly violence. Okay. They're hooking the subject of the study up to monitors that look at their It's called galvanic stress response or skin response. It's a measure of stress in the body. And the weird thing is, before the image comes up, before any human being knows what the image is going to be, if it's the grizzly image the body responds before the image. It's crazy. It's creepy. Right? It it if that is real, and it is, then there are some things that we don't understand. There's all sorts of theories, and some of them are being born out, and it probably has something to do with quantum, which is the most misused new age buzzword of all hell, but it's also quantum physics, quantum biology. These are real scientific things studied at university. So, we we essentially there's something going on here where we have a the ability to detect the environment around us before we have conscious awareness of this. So, the body responds and then we think about it, and then we tell ourselves a story about why we did it, but the order of operations is different. And if if that sounds weird, here's something that happens to most of us at sometime in our life. You lean on a hot stove and you pull your hand away before you get burned, and you say, "Thank goodness I pulled my hand away." But that is not a true statement, because you did not decide to pull your hand away. Something pulled your hand away without your knowledge or permission, and you were glad it happened, so you decided that it was you did it, right? Well, what is that? That's the ego. The ego is the operating system that keeps you alive if there's no human in there. So, it has its own goals, it has its own agenda, and it is there to keep you alive. Unfortunately, it thinks many things will kill you that won't kill you. And most of its programming happens in age zero through seven. That's interesting. So, if you were bullied, and even if you had great parents, I promise you that there was one time when your mom stopped nursing you, and you got really pissed off. And whatever was happening in the situation, it it leaves a pattern, and your body is just a pattern matching system. And the ego's there like, "Hey, I'm just trying to live." And your ego's also just it's absolutely convinced that if you're in charge instead of it, you'll die. Cuz its job is to keep you alive, and if it's not doing its job, you'll die, right? And because it's an emergent system inside the body, what's happening when you take any of these hallucinogens, when you do any of these practices that get you sort of outside yourself, you gain better self-awareness cuz you start looking at yourself as this system, and you start seeing what your ego's doing. You see how absurd that story is about the guy cutting you off in traffic, or So, what are some patterns and routines that people can do on a daily basis? Um you've talked about how only miracles happen in the morning, talked about the power of belief. Um what can anybody watching right now take away and do on a daily basis to make sure that they're optimized for this? Okay, the single biggest way to turn off the ego The ego is about want, it's about emptiness, it's about what the Tibetans call hungry ghost. So, hungry ghost? Hungry ghost. It's one of the seven realms of hell in Tibetan Buddhism, and it's one where everyone walks around with these distended bellies, and they're always hungry no matter what they eat. They can never be satisfied no matter what they have. And this happens with a lot of people, entrepreneurs. This happened when I was 26. Tom, I made $6 million when I was 26 years old at the company that held Google's first servers. I lost it when I was 28. When I When I had that money, I looked at a friend at the same company where we all made more money than we should have, and I said, "I'll be happy when I have $10 million." I I freaking said that, okay? What kind of a jerk move was that? But, that was my story, right? That's that hungry ghost syndrome. Right? And so, what you can do, that's the antidote for that. That's the antidote for all the stress, anxiety, anger, fear, is something I do with my kids every night. And you don't have to have kids to do it, but I sit down and I say, "Tell me three things you're grateful for today." And gratitude is the final law in Game Changers. And what it we see in in 40 Years of Zen in the neuroscience facility, when people are grateful, even for just the shittiest day ever, they're grateful for one little thing, that transforms the biological response in the body from want, from that hungry ghost, from I'm never going to have I'm never going to be happy, it transforms it into "Whoa, there's something good here, there's some abundance." And what happens right after gratitude, and with in the neuroscience stuff, we dig deep, we say, "Okay, that was the gateway. Now you've got to actually do something called forgiveness." Which is when you permanently change your pattern. Where instead of holding that grudge, whether it's a grudge you chose consciously cuz something happened to you when you were 20, or something you chose unconsciously because it happened to you when you were two, it doesn't really matter. You You forgive that all the way. And what's left is compassion. So, now you can walk into a situation that would have just absolutely just, you know, tighten your jaw, and you're like, "You know what? I'm grateful for this." And you're unflappable. The amount of energy you waste, the amount of struggle you have, it all goes down. And it's simple. Write down three things you're grateful for. And I asked my kids to do this every single night. They don't have to write down, they just tell me. And sometimes it's like, "I'm grateful we had steak, You know, I'm grateful I played with Johnny, whatever. But, when my son was 5, he goes, "I'm grateful for the Big Bang, because without it, there wouldn't be anything." And you're like, "Whoa! Like Like I never would have thought of that one." But, these little things it's free. You just have to find a way to consciously intentionally be grateful instead of be hungry, empty, pissed off, angry, stressed, feeling not good enough, and all the other stuff. And this is what the people who are game changers, the people who've done really big things, including you. Like you figured out a lot of the stuff in this book. When people get to a certain level, they by definition had to figure out some of these laws, because you cannot get there if you're running just the normal mogul programming that we all come into the world with. I was going to say, you put in the book that um oh god, normal is your nemesis. Yeah, normal is the enemy, one of the two. Average is the enemy. There you go. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. So, speaking of average being the enemy and things that we can do, one of the concepts that I found really interesting in the book is rewilding. Um and and your choice to move to an island in Vancouver on an organic farm, cuz you said the greatest gift you could give your kids was growing up in nature. Talk about that. Why is it important? What does it do for us? What's forest bathing? Like all that stuff. Oh, this is so cool. I'm I'm so happy that you went there. The idea of of rewilding is that we've been kind of domesticated. When animals are in a zoo, the old zoos were you know, a bar like bars and a cement cage, and animals would die all the time. So, they finally realized, maybe we could make an environment that's at least mostly like nature. So, you go to you know, the San Diego Zoo, and there's trees all around, and there's the little miniature savanna, and all that. Well, we're the same way. So, you have plants in your house. You do some Sometimes you're cold, sometimes you're warm, sometimes you you you're hungry. Things that would have happened to us as as human beings. It It's really transformative to have some of that. When you combine that with access to nature, you get this idea of forest bathing, which came from Japan. And just walking around in a forest, exposing yourself to trees and clean air, does a couple things. One is it's shown to reduce anxiety levels. Just seeing plants does that. But the other thing it does is it changes the microbiome in your gut and your your lungs and your nose, because you're walking through forest bacteria. And our bodies collect these bacteria from the environment around us, and they they become a part of us. And the idea that we're not bacteria is completely false. There's bacteria inside every cell in your body that power who you are. And there's they become a part of us. So we like to think they're different than those other bacteria, but they're not. So, this forest bathing, you get the cognitive effects of seeing the green. A lot of people don't know this, but we can see more shades of green than any other color, because we evolved in the forest. And the reason you need that fine ability to see that those shades of green is because that's where the leopards hide. Predators are there, but we're we're wired to be in that environment. When you do it, your body relaxes. And so, just introducing plants, walks in nature, sunshine, and occasional biological stresses. It's cold, it's hot, I'm hungry, I worked really hard, the way animals would have, transforms your biology. Do you take cold showers? I do. In fact, if you take a cold shower for 3 days in a row, you only need about 30 seconds, maybe a minute at the end of your shower. And so, if you do this, you have to do it on the forehead and the chest. And it's important cuz the most cold receptors are there. And you're going to last 10 seconds the first time you do it, and you it's really unpleasant, and you'll be like shivering. Second day, 20 seconds. Third day, like, you know what? I felt a little actually felt kind of good today. And the fourth day, you're like, yes! And there's a something in your mitochondrial membrane. Membranes are little layers of fat that surround every cells. And it's called cardiolipin. And a new study just came out that shows 3 days of cold exposure, even for a few minutes, raises cardiolipin levels, which makes your cells make energy more effectively all day long. The side benefit of a cold shower is that these ancient bacteria, some of them are in good shape and some of them are not in good shape. When they can't turn on heat quickly, it means they're weak. If you show the body you will be in an environment where sometimes you need to make heat heat quickly, the weak ones will die and they'll be replaced by young ones. So, you want to stay young, you take a cold shower. You don't have to do it every day, but do it every couple days after you get used to it. All right, so let's talk about staying young. Let's talk about So, my personal fantasy is actually to live forever. What are things that people can do on a daily basis to prime themselves to live as long as humanly possible? I love it. Um this month um Men's Health ran an article about I've been really public. I'm going to live to at least 180. And at least is an important word there because like you said, I'm happy with forever. And what you want to do is look at at aging as death by a thousand cuts. There's no one cause of aging. It's we we think that there's basically seven different things that happen inside your cells and outside your cells that evolve over time. And here's the deal. If it's death by a thousand cuts, maybe you could have only 500 cuts and make them less deep. So, when it is not expensive, it's not inconvenient or painful, take the path of less cuts. Don't eat fried food. Don't eat charred food. Like these are very basic things, but the science is pretty solid on that. Don't eat seed oils, things like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, vegetable oil, cottonseed oil. That stuff will make you age, and we understand that. It is abundantly clear. Don't eat too much animal protein, and don't eat no animal protein. Like these are things Eat a lot of vegetables. Don't eat stuff that's been sprayed with glyphosate because it messes with the way your body makes collagen protein and it messes with your gut bacteria. And things things like that, those are going to go a huge way. Sleep adequately. Right? I sleep about 6 hours and 5 minutes a night. Do you set an alarm? Uh I do. Uh if I if I have a a busy day, which I quite often do. However, I often wake up before the alarm and the alarm is set to wake me up at the top of a sleep cycle. So, I never wake up when I'm groggy. So, you can do that or you can just make sure you get enough sleep. We have enough deep sleep, which is anti-aging and enough REM sleep, which consolidates your memories. And if you do that, you're going to live a lot longer. Oh, and don't eat too much. If you eat a lot of calories, more more than your body needs, that's aging. Intermittent fasting, which I I helped to popularize in 2014 with the Bulletproof Diet, that is a big thing. It works. Occasional longer fasting. None of these is expensive and I take 150 supplements a day. Woah! I mean, we can't list all 150, but give me some of the all-stars. So, I focus on mitochondrial enhancement. So, I take a kind of uh fish oil that comes from not just krill, but it comes from fish eggs. And fish eggs are an even richer source of phospholipids. And uh so, that's something that Bulletproof manufactures. It's our omega-3 krill. And I think that's really important because getting omega-3s into the brain is the most important thing you can do. I take supplements that control inflammation because my body still tends to because I had autoimmunity for a long time, it tends to have more um it does have more inflammation. So, we make a turmeric that has some Chinese herbs in it that really work uh for the kind of inflammation that I have. Like, oh, I feel much better. Uh I take uh a bunch of other unusual mitochondrial enhancers that we make. One's called Unfair Advantage. Another one's called Keto Prime. And that actually primes the mitochondrial pump to be able to use sugar or fat to make more energy. So, I used to open 10 bottles, take 10 pills, now I open one bottle and it's just less work. So, a lot of this has just been consolidation over time in order to do it. So, when I travel, I have three bags, like little crack bags full of pills, and I take one when I wake up, I take one with food or coffee in the morning, one at lunch, and one before I go to bed. And you know what? My life is way better when I do it. It's annoying and it's not cheap, but I'm going to extend my life and even if I completely die trying, I've extended the quality of my life energy all along the way. You cannot lose with that strategy. Mhm. Talk to me about vitamin D. You've said that sun exposure is not optional and I'm I'm trying to imagine you in Vancouver in, say, February getting sun every day. Um do you really go outside in the sun? It every day in Vancouver? It sucked to move up to the Pacific Northwest. I've been up there for 8 years. I grew up in a desert in New Mexico. So, I'm a desert person. What I do in the winter, and I it took me about three winters to figure this out, is I take vitamin D. And taking vitamin D is important. As a supplement. As a supplement and we make one, in fact, this is important. This is the one I take. It's it's called ADK because you need vitamin A and vitamin D together and if you take vitamin D without vitamin K, and I mean K2, not K1, when you take those together, vitamin K basically keeps the calcium in the cells and vitamin D encourages calcium to go into the cells. If you take the vitamin D without vitamin K, it can encourage calcification throughout the body, which is not what you want. That's a bad thing. So, um that uh that works really well, but for vitamin D to work, it has to be activated through a process called sulfation and that's what happens with ultraviolet light exposure. So, in Vancouver, what I do, in the morning, I stand on my vibrating platform. Yes, Bulletproof makes that. It's called the Bulletproof Vibe. I stand on that and I have a sun tanning lamp that's optimized for high UVB. It helps with vitamin D and it even helps with collagen formation. Where do you get the machines? I know Mercola was making one for a while that was UVB optimized. Yeah. I have Mercola's old machine. Okay. And what happened there is um it was very unpopular to to say that um that UVB light had any health impacts. And it's bad for you in high doses. Let's be really clear. Like you can get cancer from too much UVB. Right. But if you do a search for high UVB tanning lamps, they sell them on Amazon. They're little boxes that do it. And just don't overuse it. This is not about getting dark. This is about getting an effective dose of something that's going to biotransform the vitamin D hormone. It's a hormone, not really a vitamin, in the body, so that it becomes active. And that can reduce your risk, just having active vitamin D, of all sorts of things. So I That's what I do. Right? And I I feel good about that, and I think the science is solid on that. What are a few key things that people can do for their diet if they want to live forever? All right. I wrote two books that are sort of diet-focused. One of them is Head Strong. But the big diet book is the Bulletproof Diet. And here's the gist of it. It is cyclical ketosis. If you do the the the keto bro diet, as I'm going to call it, right? Which is you never eat a carb again, I don't think that's going to work for you. If you eat lots of carbs, that's not going to work for you. So you should absolutely do keto. And then you should stop. Then you should do keto. And then you should stop. And this is for your gut bacteria, and this is for the glial cells in your brain that prefer glucose to ketones, right? And so I feel like like if you go to the Oh, I'm going to be like I used to be a a raw vegan, you know, that's not going to end well for you. We'll just tell you. Really? You didn't enjoy the experience? Well, I mean, I felt great for the first two, three months, like most people do, because you're eating a lot less of the other crap. But it's what happens over time, even if you're pretty knowledgeable. Very few people, in fact, none of the anti-aging people I know support that kind of thing because they see it in patients. The CrossFit coaches like yeah, I can spot a vegan or a vegan. I ask them to hold on to a bar and they drop off after 5 seconds and people who eat french fries can hold on for 15 seconds and people who eat grass-fed steak and you know do keto and you know are doing things right, they hold on for 30 seconds. Like like it it's quantifiable, right? So this isn't a rip on vegans. I was a vegan for a long time. I would eat gravel if it's what was best for me or best for the planet. I'd say eating grass-fed meat that restores soils is best for you and best for the planet but not too much. And that plus a huge plate of vegetables with lots of undamaged quality fats following the ratio in your cells. Your cells are 45% saturated fat, your cell membranes, especially in the brain it's a little bit higher. They're in the brain about 30 35% monounsaturated fat. And then the rest of it is all about the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6. And there you want more omega-3 and less omega-6. So tons of veggies, moderate amount of high quality grass-fed protein, tons of fat. From protein perspective, you want to get high quality protein and plant compounds, polyphenols, terribly important. You're not going to get them from colored fruits and vegetables, they're just not rich enough. Herbs and spices are how you get it. And number one source of polyphenols in the world, you probably know what it is. Oh, coffee. Coffee. I do know that because you talked about it in the book. I was like so coffee, tea, chocolate. And I'm sad to say this even though we all like red wine, it doesn't have very many polyphenols and you got to detox the alcohol and the aldehyde. So you can have some wine but make sure it's good quality wine. I would say wine and and grass-fed meat it's like spend money on quality and consume less. And you don't have to consume that. And and that algorithm it's like it's quality over quantity. When you do that, it sends a signal to the whole food production system about what's acceptable. And you know this because you've run a very impactful, sizeable company, right? If the customers are saying they want something and they won't buy the wrong stuff, well, then the companies making the garbage food, they lose sales, and the companies making the really good things, right? They gain sales. So, all of us, when we say, "I want the animal that was fed grass instead of fed corn and soy and antibiotics, I'm willing to pay a little bit more even if I buy a little bit less, so it's the same dollars out of my pocket." You'll change our store oil, you'll change our agricultural systems. I I I firmly believe that, both for my own biology and for the world that we're going to live forever in. I don't want to mess it up, right? I don't what You know a lot about this stuff, Tom. What What do you think about nutrition? Dude, we will bring you back for part two because I haven't even gotten to a like 1/5 of the things that I wanted to talk to you about. But, no, this has been amazing. It's exactly what I wanted. Before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. Go to bulletproof.com and check out Bulletproof Radio on iTunes, wherever podcasts are distributed, and Game Changers is in stores now. If you read it and you like it, leave a review. I actually see those reviews, and you do too when when people tell you any of your work it matters. We care. Like the reviews you get on the show, they matter. You can thank both of us, and there you got your gratitude checkbox for the day. Nice, I like that. Um my final question, what's one change that people could make that would have the biggest impact on their health? Wow, just one change with the single biggest impact. All right. Can I answer with two things, sir? All right. Number one, learn how to sleep like a boss. Okay? There's a bunch of new sleep hacks in Game Changers. Do whatever it takes to sleep really well, and you're going to have to black out your room. You're going to have to like just learn how to do it. No one teaches us how to sleep. Okay? And most of that stuff is free or very inexpensive or one-time cost. Um the second thing is, you've got to stop eating the things that make you weak, and you know what those are. And there's one category of foods that are pretty much bad for everyone. Seed oils, deep fried stuff, charred things, and whole grains. Those are just not good for anyone. Right? And you may tolerate whole grains better than your friend, they're still not good for you. Sorry. Okay. So, get those out and in the Bulletproof Diet there's a layer of suspect foods. They're bad for some people and good for some people, and you need to know which of the suspect foods are guilty for you. And there's an infographic, just Google Bulletproof Roadmap, and you can download it, it's a free thing. It's basically the entire Bulletproof Diet book without all the explanations, just here's what to do now, here's what foods are really good, the Bulletproof foods, these are suspect, and these are kryptonite foods. Just so you can go, all right, if I'm going to do a protein or whatever, that that totally works. All right, I love it. Guys, man, when I say that we didn't even begin to get into some of the stuff that this guy can go wax eloquently about, you're going to want to dive into his world and check it out. He is one of the most recognizable names in the world of longevity hacking, uh biohacking in general, mitochondria, like all kinds of stuff that are going to help you live your best life. He's that guy for a reason. So, he has just a breadth of knowledge on a whole bunch of subjects. His new book, Game Changers, I found really interesting. We didn't even get to go into sex. He mentioned the orgasm hangovers, which is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. He actually graphed out his own orgasm to life satisfaction. It was amazing. It is one of a hundred reasons you're going to want to check out that book. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.