The 5 Biohacks Anyone Can Implement To Live Longer w/ Dave Asprey | EP #109

how do you maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass on 20 minutes a week I don't get it it doesn't that doesn't sound plausible to me I tried being a vegan I tried being a semi-vegetarian I was lowfat I went to the gym 6 days a week 90 minutes a day when I had a 46 in waist and I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle but still had a 46 in waist and still weigh 300 lb we like to think that if something is good more is better it's just a typical cognitive

bias that saves electricity in our brains if you go to the gym if you lift twice as much or for twice as long or you run for more you'll get more benefits right you know more training is better it turns out that that isn't really how things work what the body is looking for is I am as are you in the longevity business I want to see as much of life I think this most amazing time ever I want to see where Starship takes me into the cosmos I want to meet my great grandkids I

want to upload myself all of those things man this works and it works so effortlessly that like I've never looked better in my life all right so listen I need the secrets right now because I I have a lot to do in life Welcome to moonshots I'm on today with Dave asprey the original biohacker he is the CEO of danger coffee upgrade Labs 40 Years of Zen author of nine books one of the most extraordinary thinkers in the field of biohacking that I know we're going to talk about how do you add muscle with just

20 minutes of exercise a week I'm going to challenge him on that but we'll dive into the details there we'll talk about psychedelics we'll talk about Consciousness neotropics how do you increase your cognitive capacity we talk about what to eat what not to eat uh this is a deep dive with a dear and Brilliant friend one of the smartest people I know in this field I'll challenge him I'll learn from him and so will you all right if you love this content please subscribe so I can bring you more let's jump into the episode with

Dave aspey Dave asprey good to see you buddy Peter my friend it's always just great to get a chance to talk I I love it and you are looking as velt as ever you know I just heard something that you said recently that blew me away which I want to dive into right away CU you know I've made a huge deal about the importance of adding muscle mass and last year for me adding 10 lbs of muscle was like a number one objective and I hit it but it was a lot of hard work you

know you've just written this book harder not smarter or smarter not harder and either I I heard you're doing how much weight a week how much weight workout I'm doing 20 minutes of total exercise a week Peter okay so and you feel like that is delivering you uh it's pretty amazing this is my week one that's caffeine tattoo I I feel like it's working like yeah 137 137 trimethyl I can read the that's exactly what's on the arm but like I feel like in kind of a douchebag flexing as a nerd on um on Instagram

but I've I was just in a couple magazines and actually on Nightline with my shirt off I was a fat computer hacker I still have stretch marks like this is this is so unlikely all right so listen I need the secrets right now because I I have a lot to do in life and uh you know keeping muscle is a top objective I do like working I like the habits of it but I don't want to have to so how do you get how do you maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass on 20 minutes

a week I don't get it it doesn't that doesn't sound plausible to me uh it's okay it doesn't sound plausible to a lot of people in fact it makes some people mad when they say that um di makes me hopeful buddy makes me hopeful good it makes me hopeful too um diary viio actually cancelled my interview uh which is a big podcast because they thought I was lying I'm like you want to ask my girlfriend or my assistant I I how do I prove what I'm not doing and number one you have to have working

mitochondria for this to work right so mitochondrial function is terribly terribly important and thyroid hormone is is important no matter how much you exercise if your thyroid is off even a little bit your TSH levels should be out or below one for longevity and there are other measures of thyroid function that matter besides just TSH that's the the easy one so I've been on thyroid since I was about 26 because I had Hashimoto because I had toxic mold in fact I had very low thyroid back then so building muscle requires energy having energy requires thyroid

number two much how much how much uh do you take each day I take about two grains of Armor Thyroid or equivalent which is appropriate for my body weight and my markers it's totally different for different people I do think anyone over age 40 will have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction we just call it aging and we call it normal for your age so I take take first thing first thing in the morning I have literally an armor thyroid pill on the good for you in fact if you want to have less Alzheimer's and less diabetes

taking even a quarter grain um which is a a relatively small dose starting in your 40s or 50s is going to help to Stave off cognitive dysfunction as long as your Labs support doing it your TSH is probably at two or three and you want to bring it down to one and just keep it there and that's a part of building muscle it's also a part of being lean I'm 6% body fat right now and this isn't by trying Peter I'm never hungry this is ridiculous uh and the second thing is exercise without adequate animal

protein doesn't work well and I say animal protein specifically because U I've been a vegan I've been a raw vegan and I've experimented with like highly processed plant proteins the evidence is in that even the very best plant proteins have anti- nutrients and you need their amino acid availability is so low you need probably twice as much so I do one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight and so I do the same I've done that I've actually started going between animal and plant protein back and forth you know I recently had a

long conversation with Dan Butner who you know zones and Dan's amazing and what he says is that you know if you look at all the Blue Zone diets it's like a minimal amount of animal protein I um I think it's wishful thinking um you look at Hong Kong which has the highest intake and has similar Blue Zone numbers it's just not in the book because it didn't fit the model and so I I think Dan's a beautiful human being and a True Believer in longevity but when I sat down with them on my show like

can you tell me why beans goes look epidemiology says beans work therefore for they work but I am not an average of 100,000 okon aans I am exactly this human being and when I eat beans they wreck my metabolism for very specific reasons so doing what everyone does would be the limbing approach I'm all about personalization yes I've tested a vegan diet I've tested beans I've tested animal protein and plant protein and I've also looked at the mechanistic studies I think you can start with epidemiology to find Clues but you have to look at mechanistics

and look at personal outcomes and I'll say straight up the blue zones diet's a recipe for disaster for most of the people I work with so you know you are the uh the king biohacker in fact in Webster's Dictionary you defined biohacking so um you live that life and the question is you're not saying these are the right things for everybody you're saying you need to test and this is what you do and works for you biohacking is kind of the enemy of epidemiology and it's that and end of one baby end of one yeah

it's it's a commitment to only do what works for you and to measure it because I tried I tried being a vegan I tried being a semi-vegetarian I was lowfat I went to the gym six days a we 90 minutes a day when I had a 46 in waist and I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle but still had a 46 inch waist and still weigh 300 lb so I don't care if it's supposed to work if it doesn't work then quit doing it and do something better with your life and I

just wish I'd have had the courage to do that earlier because so I want to go back to this 20 minutes on on maintaining and building muscle with 20 minutes okay so protein protein loading how often you 150 gram or is it a gram gram per pound yes it's a gram per pound so for me it's closer to 200 yeah and when do you take it through the day throughout the day but here's what we used to believe and I've even put this in one my early books that 30 to 50 grams of protein is

all you can absorb at one setting and about 3 years ago when I started getting leaner and putting on some muscle I I thought to myself I only eat two meals a day I can't do 200 Gr of protein so I'm just going to do 100 gram per meal and I'll take digestive enzymes and if it's not absorbing it'll make ammonia and I'll smell it when I fart so there was no weightlifter farts involved so I was absorbing the protein and just about 3 four months ago a study came out that completely decimated this idea

of 30 to 50 grams it turns out that's a myth you can absorb more than a 100 grams of protein in a meal as long as you have enzymes present and it'll absorb throughout the day and effect protein synthesis so the reason this is working is that when I eat protein I took 100 gram of animal protein powder this morning and I'm going to eat a steak tonight with some enzymes and I'm good to go any particular enzymes you use um I like broadspectrum enzymes that contain Bane HCL and ox and that seems to work

better than just taking something like a just a A protease or a pan or something like that so you want something that'll break down as many different proteins as you can um so they typically have a lot of ingredients creatin yeah yes much I am a fan of creatine but with the amount of animal protein I need I get about five grams a day but I take an additional probably three or four grams every day there's a form called GAA creatine that seems to have better evidence behind it so that's what I use but honestly

creatin monohydrate works just fine the hack for creatine if you really want to absorb it is to don't put it in in cold water put it in warm water so that it actually dissolves suspending particles of creatine doesn't work very well getting it to dissolve like salt to make salt water that makes creatine much more bioavailable there's a new creatine product called create which is a creatine gummy that I just uh got sent to me by some friends and uh tastes yummy and easy uh you know one of the things you have to worry about

with your if your protein loading is making sure your kidney function um you know so I actually recently backed off on the amount of protein I was taking in because my it it was my body was trying to eliminate it um and my my kidney function began decreasing it it's a conundrum because kidney function is sort of the fifth of the horsemen in in my book on uh longevity I'm like okay diabetes leads to cancer cardiovascular disease um and Alzheimer's but right behind that the high blood pressure that's a part of diabetes leads to kidney

dysfunction so if you can fix kidneys you've got uh you've got a a blockbuster drug so I I also only have one kidney born that way I didn't know it till I was 30 cuz I have a super mega kidney and it you know doesn't cause any uh any health problems but I monitor my function really well at GFR turns out the hack for that is don't eat the plants that contain oxalates because calcium oxalate radically shreds your kidneys I'm talking kale spinach raspberries almonds a lot of the so-called superfoods these are measurably and very

quantifiably high in a compound that is so bad for your kidneys I also take two tablespoons of lemon juice for the citric acid that helps to dissolve extra calcium throughout my tissues so I have really young tissues when people do work on me like what is going on you feel like you're 20 not like you're 50 and I think that's really important to just talk about oxalate and kidney function so nuts seeds and some but not all vegetables 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants by oxalate not by phosphate which is the ones we'd

be concerned about the other one Peter is a quarter to a half a teaspoon of baking soda away from a meal every day is going to also change pH in a way that protects your kidneys I could imagine that going back to 20 minutes of workout building muscle I I'm still I'm trying to learn this and believe and believe this here's the principle and this is in smarter not harder it's that we like to think that if something is good more is better it's just a typical cognitive bias that saves electricity in our brains so

if you go to the gym if you lift twice as much or for twice as long or you run for more you'll get more benefits right you know more training is better it turns out that that isn't really how things work what the body is looking for is the slope of the curve how quickly did you bring on the stress and most importantly how quickly could you return to Baseline which sends a signal of safety and if you have safety and adequate minerals and adequate protein the body can put muscle on very effectively oh inadequate

testosterone which we can talk about in a minute so this is people say Oh you mean high intensity interval training no it's even less than that for cardio you get a 12% VO2 max Improvement in 15 minutes of exercise without sweating every week this is part of the stack at upgrade labs this is a franchise now we've got 30 locations across the us that are opening and probably another dozen or two that'll happen after my last conference so you come in oh in the amount of time I brush my teeth I did cardio but I

got six times better results than I did from going to a spin class 5 days a week and this is university studies on just that AI Tech and then for muscle there's about five or six things that will get a signal into your muscle more quickly as long as you know how to calm down and you're properly nourished you will put muscle on in stupidly small amounts of time and it turns out picking up rocks which is what weightlifting is we just concentrate the Rocks into plates which is our biggest innovation in 5,000 years I'm

I don't pick up rocks I fight against a computer that doesn't believe in gravity so the the feedback system against my muscles also part of upgrade Labs it's called the AI cheat machine and what it's doing is it's causing either perturbations or a movement of the weight that confuses my muscles so my Pro preceptors don't try to protect my joints they don't need to when it's a controlled environment um that means I can load faster and that means when I'm done if I had the protein and I had the minerals and I had the testosterone

the body says oh that was hard but I'm safe let me put on muscle quickly so it's about setting up the environment and then getting the right signal in and man this works and it works so effortlessly that you just like I've never looked better in my life and I've never had an easier time doing it because I'm using precise signaling instead of Brute Force talk to me about testosterone what what levels do you like maintaining how much do you supplement how do you supplement everyone should have the levels of a healthy 25-year-old from 1970

if you really want before they before they changed the uh the recommendations the recommendation and before we flooded the world with estrogen Plastics and all these other chemicals because kids today have half the levels that they did 30 years ago and adults do as well and if you're sitting here going I can't put on muscle and I'm tired and unmotivated testosterone drives dopamine in the brain so if you have enough testosterone but not too much suddenly you're excited and motivated to change the world and if you wake up and just like H maybe it's your

testosterone affecting your dopamine and it's not the amount of effort you did and what I found is that when I was overtraining overtraining reliably suppresses testosterone so I been supplementing testosterone since I was 26 when my anti-aging doctor showed me that my lab results on testosterone were lower than my mother this actually happened name of Dr Phil Miller right and I had some metabolic problems you could say so uh I've kept my levels between 750 and probably they Peak around 1100 sometimes but around 900 is where I want them different men with different backgrounds feel

best at somewhere between at the low end about 750 and around 1100 but you got to find the number for you and it's the one where you you're not like trying to hump a door knob um because you're you're you're not too full of libido but you just you feel feel like you can handle things and you feel like you want to take care of your family and for women it's the same thing it's also a motivational hormone women have more testosterone than estrogen but much much less than men so getting that level dialed in

it's about happiness and joy and motivation it's not about sex SE is side benefit how agreed how do you take your testosterone injection you know today I'm taking an oral testosterone for the past three months which is a new form it's called testosterone undecanoate and before that I've been injecting testosterone um ennate which is common in the entire world except in the US in the US we use testosterone cypionate yeah problem is cypionate causes water retentions I was always puffy on that stuff so when I bought my testosterone in Mexico because I was tired of

getting it refilled here suddenly I leaned out because I had the right form levels are the same and before that years ago I would use a cream um the cream though you have to put in your armpit or in your groin and cream are dangerous to have young kids because even the amount of testosterone on a sheet if you rub it on a baby it's going to affect them so um you got to be really careful with that interesting TV episodes around that I won't go there uh so let me ask you a question when

you take when you supplement with testosterone and I do supplement I do it with injection I'll try the oral um I don't feel different W uh with without it what are your levels when you're injecting uh it's typically they obviously they range depending on when I'm injecting but they're in range of 800 thereabouts some people need 15 or 1,800 I would double dose and see if you like your life I mean you really I love my life right now okay so you you might not feel different because it's keeping you where you are um I

have gone up to 1700 for brief periods just to see what happens and I find it's a little easier to put on muscle but I I don't think that's necessarily worth it and if I start getting pimples or something that's that's an issue that yeah cuz my my you know I've had this conversation with my my medical team and you know it's like well you know you know typically if you're low on testosterone you're a sort of grouchy old man you don't have the energy you don't have the ambition all of that I'm saying like

I'm like the most optimistic person I know you are and and I don't feel any different with so I've stopped for like three or four weeks um and then gone back on and I haven't felt a difference so maybe I you didn't see a difference in like how you looked in the morning energy when you first wake up nothing oh you look at yourself in the morning just kidding um so uh that's I'm just super curious um how do you feel different how often do you did you inject how often do you take a pill

there's a lot of studies that show injecting twice a week would be preferable but I'm kind of lazy so I would usually do it once a week MH um the reason I switched to the oral form just as an experiment here is allegedly it doesn't turn to estrogen as much as the other stuff does I've had to carefully manage my conversion to estrogen like most people do I don't use it pharmaceutically I just do it with herbs but uh the the thing is you get testox or you get testicular shrinkage when you inject unless you're

using HCG or chopine or a remedex and all of those have a downside so well let's just say that um testicular volume is not on my high on my list of of personal characteristics that I care about but given that this stuff doesn't suppress FSH FSH is by itself a longevity compound so there's emerging evidence that having um FSH levels of a young person probably also keeps you older so maybe the oral form works better I'll tell you in six months okay anything else on muscle first of all upgrade Labs delivers those AI cheat machines

as you as you mentioned and we're opening them across the country so guys upgrad labs.com and if you want to start you're moving the one that was near me in Santa Monica and Venice where you need to figure out where for a franchisee in La who wants to do a franchise we've got a bunch of members uh who are ready to go uh unfortunately the landlord wanted to increase the rent dramatically with a 10year lease and a part of Santa Monica that's getting a little sketchy so we just couldn't make that work so if you

are listening to this and you're in Los Angeles and you'd like an upgrade labs near you contact Dave because I will be one of your members okay there you go own and upgrade labs.com thanks Peter it's fun stuff there's there's so many things that are just higher return on on time that you can do for longevity and we track everything with a clinical grade electrodermal screening so we can tell you do you have visceral fat like I have the visceral fat levels of a of an 18-year-old at the low end of the range even though

I was obese when I was that age so you can reverse aging in fact my extrinsic age score on my most recent panel from true age was 19 and a half years younger than my current life that that's what happens from lifestyle components for aging yeah I'm I'm at I'm 63 now and mine was 45 so whatever that is 18 years or thereabouts you're killing it Peter well not clearly as good as as you are uh but hey let's go back to this so um anything else on on muscle uh we've got it's lift heavy

oh I guess the other one that just has to be talked about everyone is mineral deficient if you eat the blue zones diet and apologies Dan I love you like I I love your vibe plants contain phytic acid and oxalate both of which are well documented to decrease your minerals even if there's minerals in the plants they suck it out of your bones you cannot make testosterone without adequate zinc and copper and even some of the trace minerals like Boron is terribly important so if you're deficient in those you won't get the results from your

exercise and it's funny danger coffee which is my new post Bulletproof Coffee Brand it has a therapeutic dose of ionic minerals that can enter cells and it's in there for a reason and electrolytes so that you get the minerals into the cells when you need them and I think that's made a difference just having adequate minerals for the past five years as a big Focus has has changed my responsiveness to exercise yeah I I supplement with IVs with a mineral additive good yeah very good all right let's talk about food I mean you know food

is medicine etc etc uh protein I heard you say something recently and I'm curious I am a you know of Greek descent I love olive oil and I'll do a daily olive oil shot but you said too much is not good what are your thoughts there well there's tons of evidence say olive oil is good for you historically no one has lived on just olive oil even if you're from Greece you can't afford it it's actually much more expensive than butter and cream which are also part of the traditional diet there right yeah okay and

the the super power that's in olive oil is called hydroxy tyrosol which is a very potent antioxidant I take 100 milligrams of hydroxy tyrosol most days of the week that's about 100 bottles of olive oil uh so I feel like I've got that one covered and I do an ounce or two of olive oil and I think it's very beneficial in studies but excessive oleic acid will raise Delta 5 desaturase and Delta 6 desaturase and these cause linolic acid that negative omega-6 acid that's so omnipresent in our diet it causes it to oxidase very to

oxidize very aggressively so too much olive oil in the face of eating any other oils at a restaurant or any prepared foods it makes the other oils more harmful so I typically focus on getting couple ounces of olive oil and I'm eating A2 grass-fed butter and I'm using grass-fed Tallow and some avocados not avocado oil because it's generally oxidized and half of it fake so super premium olive oil but I look at what I see people eat when I go to Greece I don't think there are swimming in olive oil if they have some cheese

on their plate and I I think cheese is on the plate whenever I go there right so it's actually a mix of saturated and oleic that seems to be actually present in the diet I I don't believe the the story that it's not there and when I talk to people from Greece I I mean to ziki like there's so much Dairy I will be there I will be there next week I will be going to uh spending two weeks I haven't taken a a vacation a while so I'll call it research instead well when you

pour your olive oil on the feta cheese on the platter just remember there's fat in that feta too I know I know you know um I want I want to go cognitive um yeah uh because at the end of the day you know you can feel great look good but thinking clearly I mean if that's the single most important asset right just when your brain isn't fire and just there's got you've got Clarity and um you're enjoying life you're you're experiencing full spectrum of everything uh let's go there how do you how how do you

wrate your cognitive ability right now on a 0 to 10 scale my brain has never worked better in my entire life Peter I love this and people look at me and say how how do you remember all this stuff and the answer is complex but I have this whole picture for longevity and aging and I remember Delta 5 toat I don't the reason is because it's all in a picture in my head that I could not do when I was 25 or 30 and I use a variety of compounds some pharmaceutical a lot of them

natural I've been formulating and taking neut Tropics for 25 plus years and I taught by the guy who wrote the first newsletter called smart drug news which was a print newsletter in the 80s was my mentor his name is Steve folks just a a total Genius of a biochemist and so this has helped I've also spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head developing uh and perfecting the 40 Years of Zen program where 1500 Elite Executives have come through and reprogrammed their brains to be coming I'm coming through soon I promised

myself that as a gift oh Any Time Peter have you talked to naen he just went through been real public about it okay yeah you know I I have and uh let's dive into neut Tropics so Define neut tropics and what are you doing I want me some all right neut Tropics are compounds that enhance cognitive function and people say well hold on is that a drug or is that a a nutrient it doesn't really matter if it makes your brain work better it's a neut Tropic so there are neut Tropic drugs and there are

plant compounds the two drugs that are probably most impactful one of them is modafanil yeah this is a they had to create a new category of drug it's called arousal promoting because it's not a stimulant and it affects dopamine and something called orexin in the brain it has a very good safety profile SA than Advil but about five out of a million people can have a genetic reaction to it same exact reaction that Advil can cause it's a uh actually life-threatening skin reaction but it's exceptionally rare what it and full disclosure and full disclosure I

I use mhil and have been for some time and I have spoken to every neurologist um that I ever speak to I ask the question how do you feel about Mel what's the downside is there any addictive elements is there any you know elements that are suppressive other part of mental cognitive function and so far uh I've not received any warnings that concern me at all the the only one that might matter is it does increase histamine in the brain histamine is a neurotransmitter it's not all bad and there are some people will get hives

from it so if you have weird allergic responses when you take it maybe no but in terms of long-term harm I've been on this since about 2001 and I went to Daniel Aman's clinic and today I'm so grateful to be on the Aman Clinic's board of directors that that scan changed my brain because it documented a hardware problem one thing that modaal does it increases blood flow in the brain and this is one of the neut Tropic effects that you want to look for is how do I get blood up there and I had brain

damage from toxic mold exposure and that meant low blood flow so when I when I'm aail that's why I graduated from business school because I was on mail and my brain wasn't working very well at the time it's I had to fix it um the other pharmaceutical that is worth noticing there's a class of compounds called the racetam r a CE t- M and PHA in Europe and there's an analog that's fat soluable called anaram a n i r a c e t a m i have been on Anar acetan most days for 25 years

there's two reasons one is it's neuroprotective of the brain two it increases memory IO Peter you and I are both you know Engineers you're a doctor I'm not but input output bandwidth is one of the primary performance enhancers of computing systems in fact I'm a network engineer by training in Silicon Valley so more IO you mean maybe I remember stuff because I'm doping for my brain yes so can you and your brain will probably last longer if you do this so aniracetam and baphy are the two big ones and then from a from like a

other cognitive enhancing function my big book on brain function I hit the New York Times list sandwich between hodu and sapiens which is like the hugest honor ever that's fantastic and it's called headr strong and the two big theories in that are number one increase mitochondrial function in the brain via any means necessary and I go through those and the second one is increase bdnf and ngf and bdnf is brain derived neutop Factor this is a compound that causes nerves to grow and nerve growth factor does the same thing it turns out there are some

supplements and some practices that will cause this to happen so if you have the neuroplasticity of a young person because your brain can change itself uh and you have enough energy to do it you'll have a neut Tropic effect so I even interviewed Eric Kendell who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for proving neuroplasticity was real and in fact talk about an unusual guy 94 years old still has a lab off Central Park and just you know cranking away on new ideas to this day because he he gets it so how do you raise bdnf

well exercise intermittent fasting some of the core biohacks I've been writing about for a long time and so of you uh but there are also some plant compounds that raise this and some interesting Pharmaceuticals uh the number one plant compound is well Lion's Man Mushroom problem is it doesn't work I got so excited when I read the studies I took Lion's man every kind for three years and gave up on it back when I started bulletproof before I left the company and I found out the reason is that for this to work you have to

have fruiting bodies and it has to be extracted with alcohol and hot water so a high quality one will work but the stuff they put in coffee doesn't do anything and you'll know it's working because if you take Lion's man or anything that raises bdnf you have vivid dreams it's a very good sign that it's working I can imagine that sure you know neuronal growth is going to excite functionality while you're sleeping I I actually just had a couple uh phds in the studio about 15 minutes ago here working with a supplement called brolite and

we they went through a bunch of research on how it increases bdnf so this is sorane from precious vegetables and the hack for listeners is if you're not going to use a supplement if you're eating say cooked broccoli you need a bite of radish or a bite of raw broccoli to activate the enzyme that lets lets the sorane out of cooked broccoli so cooked broccoli won't affect brain function cooked broccoli with a little bit of raw will how is that um I mean I don't need to go into detail here but I love broccoli and

I love sophan I mean I my number number one food you know is if I to if you said okay what's the food you would not want to eliminate from your diet right now it's broccoli I love broccoli with olive oil and lemon that's what I will obsess on um but why the why the raw broccoli requirement when you cook broccoli you inactivate the enzyme that releases the sophan and it's present in and just to if you get it a little bit of it it Cascades and provides release it turns out it's a very active

enzyme so all it takes is one radish or even a slice of radish so when you were going to the upgrade Cafe um in Santa Monica whenever you had cruciferous veggies there was always a piece of watermelon radish on top to activat enzyme that was there for a reason and it's it's funny it's so active if you wanted to be really fancy you would take like one little stock and just smash it because the more smashed it is more exposed to air the more of the enzyme is released and then you just have one bite

of that and then your broccoli does something extra for you and I would I would put that in the realm of neut tropics and interestingly almost every psychedelic and I'm working on these for my book that'll come out later um sometime in 2025 don't know the title yet um almost every psychedelic increases bdnf meaningfully and the one that I'm most intrigued with is ketamine because it's legal and well studied so I just hired Dr Mark bronstein to be the medical director for me at 40 years of Zen so we're using ketamine as an optional add-on

on top of intense personal development neuro feedback because every dose of ketamine even a low dose not the kind where you're going to go you know see aliens this is a low it's called a psycholytic dose it causes 72 hours of profound brain plasticity so that if you're going to be doing some resetting of old patterns you might as well have a brain that's ready to receive a reset with less work and so ketamine um DMT LSD and psilocybin work I'm even an investor in Paul stam's company where he said well what happens if you

stack Lion's man and psilocybin and a B vitamin called niin that causes vasil dilation yes well he's showing whole brain nerve regeneration right now Lions man and all the other ones they only do hippocampal regeneration so he's fixing things that are are you know brain injuries and things like that and if you stack that with Hyperbaric and I've got a hard-sided oxy Health chamber you know the medical grade one downstairs that also will regrow things in the brand so if you stack your hacks in the right way for your goals there's an argument but there's

two other neut Tropics that we just have to talk about because they the most common ones out there and some people are already triggered going you can't you can't talk about neut Tropics that's cheating okay 90% of the population has this one this is caffeine yes okay caffeine is a well studied I love that you tattooed caffeine on your arm it's funny right because I talk about you know the reason I memorize caffeine structure and name is you know it's important to know what drug you're addicted to when you end up on an alien planet

so you can recreate it there okay that is awesome Peter I loved you before but I love you even more now because you're such a nerd I I love this like this one I need this one um the reason I tattooed it there is way back in 1991 or '92 I sold a t-shirt with that molecule printed on it it turns out it was the first product ever sold over the Internet before the web browser was invented so the first e-commerce on the planet was caffeine t-shirt and I sold it to 16 countries out of

my dorm room so this is like plus bulletproof is a big company now danger coffee is getting big so it's like caffeine has served me well and so how could I not have fun with it if I had a tattoo on the other arm though it would be nicotine and this is the controversial one you want to talk about a well studied smart drug you'll type 15% faster on maphl or nicotine almost every great work of literature was written on caffeine and nicotine and not very often alcohol or THC they're not good for cognitive enhancement

I I get that um are you doing nicotine and mhil at the same time yeah you want to have a great day so here's the thing about nicotine smoking and vaping will shorten your life they are bad for you right so when I say nicotine everyone hears tobacco no this is pharmaceutical nicotine extracted from tobacco one cigarette has 20 milligrams I'm talking 1 to 5 milligrams of nicotine delivered either orally or through the skin how do you do that how how do you deliver your your your nicotine I usually use a nicotine spray and you

can buy it in Mexico Canada all of Europe all of the Middle East and Australia but it's not approved in the US it's from niced uh God Knows Why um so in the US you can get little sachet Lucy gum is good but watch out for artificial sweeters you don't want that you what what's it called Lucy gum yeah Lucy chuy.com or. Co or something like that and full disclosure I'm a small investor visor but I just wanted a nicotine without neutr in it because neutr is not good for brain function so why would I

want to take a cognitive enhancer that also punched my synapses in the face that seems rude I I love I love this story I love this study done years ago in University students they studied a whole slew of drugs to determine what increased their their test scores and there were two particular molecules that increased their test scores the most and it was glucose and caffeine um yeah Coca-Cola I I actually write about this for college students I'm like guys if you really want to Ace the test you need to test yourself ahead of time so

you know dosing but it's probably double espresso with sugar and 1 to two milligrams of nicotine and you go into this hyperfocus mode and just you can do anything and everything is easy and it's all right there and the problem is nicotine is addictive and when you're young I don't think you want to use it regularly um at about age 40 I recommend 1 to 3 milligrams a day the reason for this is re Arch out of Vanderbuilt uh Dr Andrew Nukem I believe is his name I call him Dr nicotine he's been publishing study

after study showing that nicotine stops Alzheimer's disease in Parkinson's you don't want neurod degeneration so is it possible that we threw the baby out with a bath water and that smoking is bad for you chewing is bad for you tobacco is bad for you but a tiny dose of pure nicotine is cognitively enhancing so you feel good now and you don't have an aging brain I think so it's part of my recommended stack for people but it's controversial yeah uh I remember reading about mhil um provigil is the other name it goes by yeah and

reading that it was developed for fighter pilots to be sharp during long missions and uh if you decide to try it it's it is a prescription drug um typically dosed in 200 milligram I usually do 100 milligrams yeah it's h you don't want to be drinking alcohol along with that it I know a lot of people who drink alcohol with it if you did that you might want to take some glutathione because of liver Pathways it's not particularly hard on the liver but it could have a longer action in the body so I I don't

drink alcohol it gives you weird dreams um if you're if you're doing that and you don't want to take any of these things later in the day sleep is important yeah yeah it's they used to use amphetamine for the military and it turns out amphetamine makes you want to kill people which is bad if you're flying a $100 million jet so they they replaced it with mapl and I tried amphetamine when I was in Wharton um just prescription uh and I did focus better but it it hurt my but it hurt my brain I I

felt horrible afterwards even on low Doses and when I switched to modaal I was like wow the lights came on but all neut Tropics have this this problem everyone around you feels slow and if you have personal development work to do and you're angry all the time you're going to be a bigger jerk if you're already a jerk so the worst thing do is take someone with lots of trauma lots of triggers lots of hyperreactivity give them 100 milligrams of modafanil and coffee then they run around just acting like a jerk it'll make you more

of what you are so your job if you do use if you do use neotropics is to be more self-aware because self-awareness plus a faster brain equals kindness and a faster brain without self-awareness equals big [ __ ] and we don't want that yeah the other benefit of adinal for me is the dopamine element it makes me feel happy and joyful and filled with energy so uh anyway it's something which Peter thank you for for openly talking about modaal and testosterone there should be no controversy about these at all these are life-enhancing anti-aging just powerful

drugs that let you show up better in the world and I I've been so open about it and some people get really mad and like you're cheating you're thin because you're on thyroid I'm like you're fat because you're not on thyroid like it's okay everybody I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group

of very talented Physicians you know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body we're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning it probably was a problem that's been going on for some time but because we never look we don't find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world's

most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we're building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive 150 GB of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable you're going to find out eventually might as well find out when you can take action

Fountain life also has an entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life.com Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter will put you to the top of the list really it's

something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to Fountain life.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let's go back to our episode uh you know one of the things which I'm excited about in the future uh and I'm working on it right now with uh with Fountain life is it should be absolutely possible um you

do this because you're so extraordinarily brilliant uh and uh and constantly consuming data and constantly experimenting and I just I know nobody who does it to the level of success and abilities that you do Dave you're amazing and I I say that with with full with love I feel the same um where I want to go uh and working on it is can we build an AI system that is able to have your gen ICS which play some part have uh your desires like is it longevity is it muscle is it cognitive Clarity is it

weight loss what is it you desire to achieve um and then how many different meds or supplements you're willing to take per day like I'm probably taking 80 uh how how many are you taking about 150 pills probably 100 substances about the same uh so you know lot people can't do that some people are like you know I can't deal with more than you know a small handful I've gotten really good at being able to consume lots lots of pills in a handful uh but there should be so today if you go to your physician

and you say these are my goals you know here's the last Labs I did maybe they have your genome screen your your whole genome scan um and you ask them recommendations every physician you go to will give you a different set of recommendations different yeah and and based upon what they happen to have read what they happen to have heard you know a whole set of cognitive biases recency bias and so forth um but there is actually a optimal set of meds and supplements and so the my moonshot within Fountain life is I want the

AI system that has my all my metabolomics and all of my you know biomarkers and all my genomics I'm able to pick from a list of you know maybe their their 20 Mac you objective functions I want and then the number of pills drugs whatever I want to take per day and it will spit out for me every single time the exacts set that are right for me independent of who my physician is or where I did this in the world there is an optimization function that's possible so we're not there yet the data is

going to get us there um and you know I think that's that level of of of of large data AI migration is in the next you know 2 to 5 years but yeah that will be that will be great it it will be and when people come into upgrade Labs which is a non-medical uh franchise you know we're using medical grade gear but it's not um we take in their wearable data and we take in all the stuff we can get there and we make similar recommendations like well what was your goal because maybe you

should focus on recovery or you should focus on cardio just depending on what you want and we look at the supplements they take and we'll incorporate U basic lab value from Lab data right in order to make recommendations of the right bioh hacks for it yeah but end of the day uh we should be putting like you you and me and all of us working on this we should be putting 90% of doctors out of the business they're in today and into a much better business I agree the three minute visit is so horrifying for

doctors and for patients so all that should be handled so you go to the doctor when you're actually sick and then they time to treat you with the real expertise instead of just like going in and and arguing about whether you really need a vitamin D or a thyroid test you shouldn't have to ask permission for that it should be just built into your system and it says hey you need some thyroid you know go talk to your doctor because clearly your labs are off but you shouldn't have to go ask let's talk a little

bit more about the psychedelics um we just recently had a little bit of a setback uh where the FDA did not approve I um I don't remember the Constitution given the FDA a right to tell me what I can do with my own body did you see that in there did I miss that amendment I I hate this I I I hate this part of it I mean I have I have a um I get angry uh that that the well there's an extreme case I'm most angry about which is if God forbid you or

a loved one is suffering from a fatal disease and there is some chance that this drug under development that hasn't been approved by by the FDA could help you being told no I can't try that just obliterates me it it means rich people can leave the country and do whatever the hell we want yeah and the rest of Americans are completely screwed and it's it's unconscionable so Peter before we met in 2008 I co-founded a medical lab testing company I think we're the second people to do directed consumer marketing for lab testing but all we

did was a white blood cell radioactive cell counting to figure out what toxin toxic Metals you were allergic to it was called the maliza test and we could tell people were allergic to their hypoallergenic implants that contain 2% nickel that wasn't labeled MH and there was a a boy somewhere around eight or 10 who had the condition where your your ribs grow Inward and it kills you so they put a chest splint in it's a genetic thing well as soon as the chest splint which was titanium went in he started dying and his his phys

just went crazy and found us late at night on the internet we ran a lab test and the poor kids white blood cells proliferated like crazy in the presence of titanium even without antibodies so we had to apply to the FDA it took a couple weeks to get a compassionate exemption to allow a zirconium bracin and the day they implanted it the kid's health conditions all turned around and he lived and and became healthy why did I need a compassionate exemption from the government I pay to keep me basically away from violent criminals why did

it that is unconscionable and that two weeks of suffering that kid went went through like some bureaucrat right now you're going to hell for that yeah uh the old adage is they're not happy till you're not happy but let's not go there so um there is a model here Dave and I don't know if we've discussed this before um if I know we haven't discussed in the podcast uh which is the idea of a uh you know if you if you want to make an investment today um if if you're if you're investing in a

uh in a public company where enough law and enough uh Financial experts have analyzed it so that if you're a widow or kid you can invest in it but if you want to invest in a company that's risky you have to be an accredited investor right defined as having $250,000 or more income of a million dollars or more and it's basically saying the SEC the security Exchange Commission is basically saying if you have enough money you're intelligent enough to lose it but if you're orphan or a widow we don't want you having the ability to

invest in these risky companies and so they're trying to protect you from yourself and I get that I mean there are scams out there um the Like Bernie maid off because all those accredited investors who invested in that were smart right oh wait oh yes oh wait uh so my my objective would be we should have an accredited patient program that basic that basically says um if if you get your your spouse and your physician or whomever uh if you're of right mind and you get one or two people close to you to say yes

we've looked at it and you should you know we want to take this risk with you that you should be accredited to go and try the trial not in Mexico or Costa Rica but you know uh at your home um and I just think this protecting us against ourselves um has got more downside than upside and by a huge Marin one of the reasons so my my new coffee is called danger coffee but it's because who knows what you might do and and this idea that being afraid of risk yeah as an excuse to take

away your freedom is a bad thing I'm doing this for your own safety no one who's ever said that had your best interest at heart it's by Design it's they're saying I rule you my will is better than your will and honestly I mean that's why we have free speech and we have all these other amendments to protect ourselves from people trying to keep us safe by starving you or you know burning you at the steak or whatever other story they're telling you to keep you safe like not okay I own my biology and no

regulatory Authority on Earth has the the right to do that this is a built-in right as much as freedom of speech or anything else and so recently not political but I believe in that yeah I believe in Freedom I I believe data I believe in science I believe in the ability of intelligent people to read the data and especially now with AI in the loop right you can you can give a large language Model A very complicated medical and say okay this is me this is who I am this is what I have uh is

this risky to me what are the risks and explain to me like I'm five right right um and and get that so anyway recently uh uh MDMA um which was under trial was was expect to be approved for uh for PTSD uh was turned down uh and that was a sad day the data looks to have been extraordinary thoughts well you have to look at who's funding the people who are doing things for our own safety and seems to me like MDMA would cause a drop in the sales of a lot of the anti-depressants and

other addictive chemicals that are sold regularly by the people funding the NIH and Nia and FDA you got follow the numbers there Peter you and I both know them there is corruption in the system in the US which is why our Healthcare is the most expensive in the world and ranks somewhere around 50th in terms of outcomes because there's people skimming off the top okay uh psychedelics um I have had extraordinary experiences uh on DMT and ketamine um I went you know those are two of my my favorites I'm I'm so happy that you're willing

to talk about that I'm not running for president or any political office ever even if you did it might not hurt you I've had dinner with uh with Bobby and he uh he's not afraid to talk about that stuff because he's a former addict and and but I did I did it under care I did camine with a physician I did um I did the DMT with a with a therapist and it was uh some of the most uh joyful love uh exploding um transformative I've seen the shift in you since you did that Peter

you're you're happier at a very base level there used to be like a little a little line of like a little bit of stress that was in there and and and you're still positive but there was a little line of stress and you just seem softer in a good way and I think that's what they do I think one of the things for me you know it's very interesting because I am as are you in the longevity business I want to see as much of life I think this the most amazing time ever I want

to see where Starship takes me into the cosmos I want to meet my great grandkids I want to upload myself all of those things and the experience I had from a dimethyl tryptophan and DMT Journey was complete loss of fear of death MH um a connection uh with with the universe that made me feel extraordinary and it's not for everybody you have it's a it is literally a shedding and letting go of the ego uh and it's a very powerful experience um and and I don't think I would have been ready for it younger in

life but I was definitely ready to shed a lot of the [ __ ] to call it that had accumulated over decades I I believe that the ego is an emergent phenomena from our mitochondria they are distributed intelligence running a distributed network of compute nodes and environment sensing nodes and I can prove all of that okay we know how they make decisions they do what the same way Advanced crypto does via Quorum sensing and the ego is just the mitochondria trying to keep the petri dish alive as if you're not in there and you are

the petri dish your body is so what that means is that if you can lose the fear of death you're reprogramming your operating system the these very fast parts of your body to be less reactive to it and when you're less reactive to fear your body naturally allocates energy into things that matter more like folding proteins right or mitophagy or autophagy or happiness but if you're stuck with old pattern matching recognition keep in mind this is a very fast system designed to keep Life Alive with no brain in there so it's reactive so if you

know your mother-in-law criticism is pushing an old Network designed to keep you alive until you undo that you will be sitting in your ego because it thinks you're threatened so losing fear of death is just critically important you don't want to die but it just means that when you do I look at death and birth same thing yeah we all do it like you can't avoid it the end of the universe is going to happen I just asked Brian Johnson that on stage in my conference he goes we haven't proven the end of the universal

happen but like okay fine I don't univ yes yeah so do you have you experienced and made use of micro doing of any of these I have and I in 1999 I went down to Peru and I sought out a shaman to do iasa mhm and um they said you're white I said yeah I know you won't like it this wasn't it wasn't a tourist it was unknown and I actually think iasa is one of the more dangerous of the ones out there low in my list yeah yeah it should be low on on most

people's list you want to do it with uh with a shaman who's very very well trained I I think there are some spiritual risks there that are hard to go into but I've just seen too many people with a negative reaction uh and and there's a lineage and a respectfulness that maybe is missing in some places but the active ingredient DMT you don't micro do that stuff maybe if you're doing do dispensa breath work you're getting a little bit of it but um DMT can be incredibly potent and a similar experience is just shorter a

micro doing ketamine would be a bad idea so when micro doing came out James fatan is well known for creating a protocol on micro doing for LSD or mushrooms and it's about 5% of an active do do so I I decided to micro do LSD every day for 30 days and I put it you know Tab in a drop of water so you get a drop of water is a fifth of a dose all that kind of stuff or a couple drops and when I was traveling though I didn't want to bring liquid because of

TSA so I chopped up a tab into 20 things and I was given a speech in LA on in front of a room full of entrepreneurs and I was just making all these jokes and no one was laughing I was like oh my God that piece of the paper was a little bit more than a micro do and and I'm telling that story because most people who think they're micro doing at least here in Austin oh it's a micro do chocolate bar I'm like dude that's a 25% dose party dose that is not a micro

do so micro doing causes neuroplasticity and a little bit of creativity and performance enhancement but it's below the perceptual threshold and it's just a very different dose so I think most people micro do wrong but I've done mushrooms and I've micro doed LSD the other that I would really really not micro do would be ioan and I spoke with Tim Ferris on my podcast about that I think right before he launched his podcast and I ioan resets neurotransmitters and doing that every day is probably not a good idea so iban is another very risky drug

you need to be under a doctor's care because you can have a heart attack from it I haven't tried it it's on my list of of things I probably will do but I think there's Great Value to it but honestly try even if you're doing camine once every week or two with a lozen you're going going to get more neuroplasticity from that than you do from micro doing did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biod

defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should eat

what foods you shouldn't eat as well as your supplements and probiotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommendations members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 48% reduction in IBS listen I've been using viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best of all

viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vom.com Peter I've asked naine Jane a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you'll find it at vom.com Peter you've started diving into uh to p300 Let's CH let's chat about that what is what is p300 neuroscience um why are you focusing there what are you learning and what should people care about well p300 is something called evoked potential and what this means is

if I do this and I clap my ears you and I are both Engineers you know that there was a signal transmission delay when I'm converting the signal there was a latency on the internet it came out through your speakers and there was a latency before it hit your brain but you heard it as soon as the sound was delivered but what the science and Neuroscience shows is that you didn't hear it a third of a second after the sound was delivered to your tissues your auditory cortex got activated so who's in charge for the

third of a second it's actually like when they do a broadcasting on TV there's an 8-second delay in case someone says poop or whatever they're supposed to not say well your brain and your body has this built in so your body gets to decide what parts of reality are worth showing to you and it will filter them out reliably based on fear and based on programming and this is not your subconscious this is in your body it's before it gets to your subconscious and when the signal gets to your brain it takes you additional time

to figure out was that a voice or a clap or what was that and to become aware of it and do the processing so what happens during that delay well number one young people teenagers about 18 have about 240 milliseconds of delay and as you age it goes up to about 350 milliseconds it levels off and if it goes much above that you're starting to get an early sign of Alzheimer's or cognitive dementia so we can do this for um for visual inputs and we do this for auditory inputs so this is actually a marker

of aging and I still have the response time of a 18-year-old the 240 milliseconds is it the maphil is it the way I've trained my brain for six months with neuro feedback or the fact that meditators have a lower p300d I couldn't tell you because I do all of that stuff and then some but what I can tell you is that the the existence of this system that's where the ego takes action it will give you an environmental signal and an emotion at the the same time and the emotion will feel real even worse there

are studies showing that inside your brain all of your memories are cued to emotions so you remember something by imagining how it felt and then you come up with the word and you do enough meditation or other neurop feack or probably work with psychedelics and you start developing the awareness of how the system is affecting you and how it's entirely possible for someone who's intelligent and smart when their body doesn't want them to hear something they won't hear it I've seen it straight up when I'm doing facilitation with people at 40 years of Zen you

know phds and very very smart people there's something they don't want to hear their body will not let them hear you ask them a question it'll answer a different question it gets edited in real time this is what the ego really does and so in the the Buddhist kind of or any meditation uh framework they say well emotions will happen allow it to come through you feel your heart rate feel it and just let it pass like a like okay that took a lot of electrons guys I could have been folding proteins I could have

been making body heat I could have been getting [ __ ] done right and see yes but it's just going to happen until eventually you calm the storm well yes I love all that I've been inal and Tibet and ancient China like there's so much value and knowledge I've done breath work with Shri for years like all of this but what if you just reprogrammed the mitochondrial Network so that in that p300 window it wasn't triggered so you didn't have to have it come through and what I've done in my life Peter is I've gone

through everything that's ever triggered me and I've run a structured reset process with basically a li detector test at 40 years as in on my brain where I re experience whatever discomfort I had and then I create a very specific state that you can teach someone afterwards and that state cancels out the signal and it cancels it out permanently so you're just no longer triggered cuz it's less work and if it's it's less work then you can have more expansive views of the future and you stack that with some adapin some nicotine some caffeine and

good God like the amount of wasted effort we have on fear and hunger I don't have hunger signals either like like I know the difference between craving and hunger so all of a sudden I'm not afraid of death my body doesn't react to the things that should make me reactive that would have made me reactive 10 years ago and the amount of energy left over for living longer I think this is one of the most important parts of longevity and it turns out when you look at the data people who are more stressed do die

sooner from all cause mortality maybe being triggered all the time because you never dealt with that time your teacher was mean to you in first grade is actually important I think it is for longevity it's underrated as a longevity thing and that's why for 11 years I've run 40 Years of Zen it changed my life I I think being able to let go and not have hold on to uh triggers is is one of the blessings I have I just like zero time for that let's move forward what's next where are we going um you

are one of the happier people just in general I I just finished my my big 3200 person event and it was amazing success but your brain is fried and I've seen you at abundance 360 for almost 10 years when I come there and you're the man of the hour everyone wants a piece of you everyone's talking to you you're running around you're managing the stage you're doing all this stuff I mean it is so much work but even though you're tired you're still happy and you're in a place of service Peter and that's the hard

thing thing to not just be like so pegged out that I remember I remember our moment I was like it was it was late I was I'm trying to get to sleep by 9:30 my my bedtime and I'm walking by and I see there's Dave and I like stop go over run give you a hug it's like I know you were here um you remember what I said I said go take care of your conference we'll talk later because like we both go through that and it's crazy uh it's that being of service all day

long even though it's it's powerfully good for you in fact it also raises bdnf and puts you in a flow State end of the day if you don't get that sleep and you're going to be up the next morning um at my event this year I was picking my kids up at 9:45 at night from the airport in Dallas and I hit something on the road two flat tires along with 25 other cars we all got two Flats wow and I don't know what happened Peter but I I meditate and all that stuff I was

the first car to get a tow truck I had new tires on the car and was back at the hotel in an hour and 20 minutes at 10:00 at night how's that even possible I to this day I have no idea but even then the next day I showed up and it was the best conference I've ever had because of the resilience everything we've talked about here is about resilience and did I wake up and take my model and my anos him yeah I did did I have some coffee with some minerals and maybe some

MCT oil in it yes I did because that's what works for me but for someone else man if green juice is your thing you should do it just watch for the kidney stones right like you got to find your stack all right buddy 40 Years of Zen I have been hearing about this I've been reading about this I've had incredible friends going through it it sounds like the most transformational experience you can have in a condensed period of time uh tell us about it I I've always been a little bit uncomfortable talking about 40 years

as Zen because I I feel like when people are called to it they just come okay I'm called to it tell me what I'm going to there I called to it 100% I started this about 11 years ago because I knew that I had a weird brain I had Asperger syndrome as a kid I had brain damage from toxic mold I've worked with Daniel aan and I've I fixed it and part of this was I would go do neuro feedback but with people who are trying to make my brain average because that's what we train

to normally I I don't want an average brain I want my weird brain just better yes so I finally ended up hiring neuroscientists and facilitators and putting together this mix of personal development that comes from a whole bunch of different bodies of work on forgiveness and forgiveness is actually the thing you do to drop the triggers it's not about saying something something is okay it's just about how do I drop my own triggers and there's a very specific recipe for that that's called the reset process and I'm disclosing the whole thing in in the new

book uh that'll be out next year but it turns out your body will not let go of an old trigger unless you experience a state of awe and gratitude first so what I do is I I do a qeg brain scan so we know how your brain does compared to our sample set and compared to the the standard sample set called the Thatcher database so now we've got your strengths and weaknesses opportunities and threats but we spend three days cleaning out your triggers because if you're if you can be triggered you're carrying a loaded gun

and that process it's it's intense and you go in there and you run the structured reset process and you re-experience something that was scary and you experience this exalted state that is probably closest described as the loving kindness but it's got more to it and it has to be in the right order and when you do this suddenly whatever that trigger was everything that's ever been involved with that trigger goes away so you fix a trigger it just stops being a part of your life and I've had some pretty heavy stuff happen in the last

few years and this has been just so helpful I I consciously uncoupled with my wife our total legal bill combined is less than $50,000 which is which is extraordin unheard of extraordinary yeah and and we genuinely want each other to win right and and I couldn't have done that and I don't think she could have either if we didn't have access to just turn off our triggers so that you know you you can step back and see things as they are instead of through the emotional lens that your body installs when you're not looking and

then I also had you know bulletproof I was sold to an investment bank for 10% of what it was worth when they let me go a few years ago that was not a good outcome for me or for any of the people who believe in me again I went through this reset process and so anything that's been a really big bump for me and I've already gone through for six months I've gone through everything in childhood everything I can think of even birth related trauma the number of people have PTSD from being born like I

was with a cord rptor on my neck I had to let go with that and what it means is I can be non-reactive much of the time I'm not perfect but I'm 1% as reactive as I was and I find most execs come through there and they come out and go wow I'm I'm a much better leader because it's easier things have less friction in the world because your body was creating the friction before you ever even got to think about it and there are so many of us who are intelligent so we always try

to bring it into our brain but it's the pre-processing that needs to reprogramming not the brain and then we do specific things to help you remember and we do specific things to increase neuroplasticity when you're there and the latest iteration is we're adding psycholytic doses of ketamine under a doctor's care so you're not tripping do you remember do you remember when I've done ketamine as a as a psychotherapeutic um and it's it's a you know an experience that will last about 45 minutes and then is a recovery period but you know you're there's very little

post um downside you know 90 minutes to 2 hours total but for me it was I think it was a 60 milligram injection and another fall on 40 milligram injection about half an hour later it's IM ketamine or is it Los Ang Los we went back and forth and because we're personalizing the doses every day loes have the same effect but it takes about times as much so we have a a medical care provider there but in order to be able to customize it each day based on your response uh we are going with after

testing IM and lozen we realized lozes work better for this thing the psycholytic dose isn't the journey that you go on this it almost acts like a truth serum it just makes it so you're less resistant to seeing your own [ __ ] got it and then on two days we do a heavier dose for increased neuroplasticity and a soft journey we'll call it but as you're coming out your brain is hooked up two electrodes and we're guiding your brain to experience more awe and more gratitude and more forgiveness and then you you store that

sensation of just profound profound just amazingness in the world and when you use that state to unlock the door of resetting a trauma it just it's so fluid and smooth um that if anything pisses me off these days I I go and I I run a reset and fortunately for me since I'm CEO and we have four patents in Neuroscience but I have the gear downstairs I can just hook myself up and maybe breathe some hydrogen or something first just to be fancy about it and then I go do the reset and my relationship uh

today with my girlfriend it's so cool because like I I don't generally get triggered and if I do I'm willing to apologize because I don't feel any Shame about it because I work through my shame issues right uh and that's beautiful how I'm not perfect but that's what it does listen being able to identify your own [ __ ] and let go of it is such a gift such a such a gift right and and the smarter you are the better you're going to be at bullshitting yourself this is something they don't teach you but

they should so the the most genius people oftentimes suffer greatly because my belief until I was about 30 when I started on this personal development path I was feeling something in my body and I didn't know what it was uh and I was just really uncomfortable and a therapist asked well do you have any feelings in your body I said yeah I'm angry because this is dumb and um she said well there must be another feeling yeah my stomach feels weird and she said there's a name for that and I go what is it she

goes it's fear and I said there's nothing here to be afraid of therefore it isn't fear and she just laughed she was in her 80s a beautiful woman Barbara Von was her name and and she goes fear is an emotion it doesn't have to be logical and I was like mind blown you mean my body's going to do stuff that doesn't make any sense and I'm simultaneously irrational and rational at the same time and that's unlocked a huge part of the biohacking movements I want to know what's actually happening I want to follow the data

right and the data shows me that my body does weird stuff before I can think about it and that window of 350 milliseconds at p300 that is real and that is where the meat on the bone for personal development is how long is the uh the 40 year of Zen program and where does it take place Zen is five days it runs Monday through Friday every week in Seattle and it's going to take about 8 to 10 hours a day and think of it like running a marathon with your brain every day I have to

have an executive chef and a handful of supplements or you can't even do that much meditation in a day we're we're trying to cram 20 to 40 Years of daily meditation into five days when you're done your brain waves will look like that of an advanced in meditator and we've shown that we can upregulate parts of brain function that generally are believed to be untrainable and when we get exactly the right brain waves for your brain and we train to that even Alpha there's a lot missing from the research on the Alpha Brain Wave in

fact the peak Alpha that everyone trains to is not the right number and I've got great evidence to support that so we train to the right number so there's a lot of proprietary tweaks anyone can do neuro feedback anywhere but most neuro feedback is designed to make your brain look like an average healthy brain so f- students become C students which is great but a students become C students which is bad I never want to do that we want to enhance the things in the last two days of of the program after you get your

triggers handled that's the performance enhancement part of this where we're doing a 24 channel uh AI powered training of specific networks that are under overactive and there you get to pick do I want more focus more executive function more social connectivity less of something that isn't serving you but you get to choose it it's it's like you take your BMW into the dinin performance mechanic and like did you want acceleration or braking or steering like let let's tune this and which mechanism you can do that for your brain it's just not about fixing a broken

brain it's about enhancing ing brain that already got you there website for this 40 Years of zen.com 4 years of zen.com and like I said I kind have a hard time talking about it because like it's it's like a spiritual thing but the people who come through there these are people who are affecting thousands or even sometimes millions of lives with the decisions they make and if you can be 1% more conscious you need to do that and the this is not a 1% shift it's much more than that and I've had many many friends

many of them are CEOs they're successful individuals who gone through this and uh this is not typically what any entrepreneur any executive anybody encounters during the course of their lives um and I think being able to step back and have this pattern interrupt in your life so you can actually look and see what's going on and how to optimize it so important I can't wait trying myself it it reduces suffering so much and you and I are both CEOs and we we we hang out with them a lot there's a lot of suffering in cosos

because it's lonely if you have your team but you can fire any of them so they're your friends but they're also your friends who always know you could fire them and there's some you just can't share also I mean there are people like Elon who is just so extraordinarily driven and I've had late night conversations where he's just in pain and not happy and he's cannot let go of what he has to do and and he feels like and many times unfortunately it's true he's the only person who can actually make it happen happen um

unfortunately it is true sometimes his biography was so profound and I I I I would love to get a look at his brain waves someday and I I could probably predict what's going on there he probably has of the very unusual get [ __ ] done brain waves but the the the trigger ones that cause the suffering there I mean what a what an amazing human being and what if you get it done with more joy and less suffering right I hope that I truly I truly hope that for him I truly do yeah I

do too I I have so much respect there and his his business mind aside from his engineering mind it it it's unusual my job is to look at unusual minds and people who have just unusual abilities to do things and like what's the secret sauce in there so we can make it more teachable at 40 years of Zen um it's collecting the database let's close out with uh with a simple subject Consciousness I I I believe referring to what we talked about a little bit earlier that your body sees the the world as it is

but your brain cannot possibly handle that level of complexity in fact we know it can so it filters and it filters and it filters and what your brain's really doing spased on Jeff Hawkins work the guy who invented the Palm P yes I know I know him I know his work yes it's amazing uh it it's amazing but he says your brain predicts the future a microsc in advance Che yes yeah it just says you only notice things that that don't match what you predicted so if you've been trained to predict suffering fear plague disaster

shame grief guilt that's what you're going to see because your body is programmed to do that not necessarily the brain and then when you reset those systems in the body and sometimes in the brain suddenly things that were in front of you all the time you become aware of them and when you go into these Altered States whether it's from breath work uh neuro feedback U extended fasting extended dark Ness and psychedelics and some of the other things that I I I share suddenly now you're seeing the world without filters and it looks pretty freaking

weird but it also looks awesome and amazing and sometimes scary usually when you're seeing scary stuff you're replaying an old trauma but a lot of Consciousness is just learning how to see the world with the filters you choose instead of the filters that your body chose for you when you were a little kid or in the womb or some other time you know I I think people don't really GAC appreciate the cognitive biases that we have all right and and what you said is absolutely correct we have so much information coming into all of our

senses all the time uh that you cannot process it all right so you know everybody hopefully has had that experience where when you're asked did you hear the person uh you know uh speaking down the hall or did you hear that background music and when you're into conversation you're not and your brain filters and there's if you go and just Google cognitive biases you find hundreds of them I you know I wrote about them in my first book abundance with Stephen Cotler we talk about you know there's negativity bias which is unfortunate right you give

10 times more attention to negative news and information than positive there's recency bias what you just heard recently you give more weight to familiarity bias you know if you if you look and sound and feel like some somebody you're going to um give their words more Credence than someone who looks different from you and we don't realize that we're we're processing all of this biased information all the time you know one of my one of my hopes and expectations from AI from some version of Jarvis an AI wraparound shell is that I'm going to turn

on bias alert and have it you know just make me aware when I am giving uh improper weight to data based upon my biases yeah it it turns out our brains are lazy and your brain doesn't want to use more electricity than is necessary to get a good enough answer so any answer it gives you is going to feel 100% true including all the biases including the the most toxic one is if something is good more is better and this is why marathoners die of drinking too much water right more wasn't better you might have

want elro in there okay they do it because they get hyponatremia which is is lack they're diluting their electrolytes too much which is why you should put some salt in your water but it it's profound that we do this for exercise at the beginning of our conversation the and in fact in lots of studies not just in my own experience but there's also no exercise is bad so it turns out there's an ideal amount but for you and me to sit down and think about something and look at all the day it's a lot of

work so our brain says that's too much work don't do it just make a good enough assessment and then argue to the ends of the Earth that you are right that's the toxic part like I'm wrong and I know my brain does it right yeah that is so true uh yeah and and and once your ego gets in the loop and you're you know you're defending you're going to die in that Hill whether or not you have the actual evidence to support it or not because it it it does really really truly feel true and

just understanding that this is a part of human nature and the advanced Zen Masters and all they talk about three states that are important for consciousness the first one is is empathy can you feel other people's pain but empathy is not a very high Vibe thing because now you're picking up everyone else's negativity and you're suffering along with them so the next step of development of your your spiritual practice your Consciousness is compassion and this means you automatically wish other people well before you have a chance to think about it yeah right so you look

at someone I don't like them because they're fat I don't like them because they're successful whatever your biases are you replace that with I hope that person's successful even if you know they're actually not a good person or whatever loving loving kindness meditation loving kindness but the the highest level that they teach about um in the west we would call it resilience in the East they would call it Equanimity and it's part of the path to Enlightenment U and this is you choose your state and no force on Earth can take you out of your

state this is the monk meditating in a hurricane and that's what I'm working on it's what it feels like you're working on is how do I choose to be happy joyful of service even if things didn't go my way even if I lost some money even if I got injured even if someone I care about isn't doing well my heart goes out to them I do what I can but I don't feel like I'm going to die and I don't lose my state and half of that challenges biological Peter if your mitochondria are screwed up

from toxins they will feel anxiety and it's really hard to be in a state of equinity when you're making half the electricity you're supposed to so you practice your longevity practice mitochondrial enhancement take cognitive enhancers and then be as resilient as is humanly possible and I think you're going to be more conscious as a side effect and that's been my experience what do you think I think you are brilliant and I could spend uh countless hours in this conversation and I hope uh I hope we will I hope we'll have more time together and I'm

looking forward to booking my time with you up in Seattle at 40 years when you get booked I will come up there I uh I don't do a lot of the the facilitating personally just because of the travel and the time but when you're up there I want to spend five days hanging out with you anyway I that do it it'll be fun ladies and gentlemen uh the one the only the the biohacker original uh Dave asprey Dave um tell us where we can find you tell me the last three books that you uh that

you recommend from your series smarter not harder uh is uh your last book out just before then smarter not harder the one before that was fast this way to to correct some misconceptions about fasting mostly people over fasting uh and then the one before that was I think that was super human yep that was my big longevity book amazing and I'm at Dave asp.com upgrad laabs is own and upgrad labs.com and the human upgrade my podcast has only 1,200 episodes with world leaders and Longevity so there's something to be gained from that I love it

I love it and I've been honored to be a guest on your on your podcast multiple times yeah buddy Peter thanks your work in the world too man I I appreciate you so much abundance has really helped me just have a positive outlook thank you thank you see you soon see you soon [Music]