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

How do you maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass? I'm 20 minutes a week. I don't get it. That doesn't sound plausible to me.

I tried being a vegan, I tried being a semi vegetarian.

I was low fat.

I went to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day, when I had a 46 inch waist. And I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle, but still had a 46 inch waist and still weighed 300 pounds. 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's looking for is.

I am, as are you, in the longevity business. I want to see as much of life. I think this is 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.

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 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. Forty years of Zen, author of nine books, one of the most extraordinary thinkers in the field of biohacking that I know. We're gonna talk about. How do you add muscle with just 20 minutes of exercise a week? I'm gonna challenge him on that, but we'll dive into the details there. We'll talk about psychedelics, we'll talk about consciousness, nootropics. How do you increase your cognitive capacity? We're talking about what to eat, what not to eat. 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 Asprey. Dave Asprey, good to see you, buddy.

Peter, my friend. It's always just great to get a chance to talk.

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 because, you know, I've made a huge deal about the importance of adding muscle mass. And last year, for me, adding 10 pounds of muscle was like, a number one objective, and I hit it, but it was a lot of hard work. You've just written this book Harder, not smarter or Smarter not harder either. 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. And you feel like that is delivering you? I mean, it's pretty amazing.

This is my week on the caffeine tattoo. I feel like it's working.

Yeah. 137 trimethylxanthine. 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 Instagram, But 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 so unlikely.

All right, so listen, I need the secrets right now, because I have a lot to do in life, and, you know, keeping muscle is a top objective. I do like working out. 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? I'm 20 minutes a week. I don't get it. It doesn't. That doesn't sound plausible to me.

It doesn't sound plausible to a lot of people. In fact, it makes some people mad when I say that.

Diary of the SEO makes me hopeful, buddy. Makes me hopeful.

Good. It makes me hopeful, too. Diary of a Co actually canceled my interview, which is a big podcast, because they thought I was lying. I'm like, do you want to ask my girlfriend or my assistant? And how do I prove what I'm not doing? And number one, you have to have working mitochondria for this to work. So mitochondrial function is terribly, terribly important. And thyroid hormone is important no matter how much you exercise. If your thyroid is off even a little bit, your TSH levels should be at or below 1 for longevity. And there are other measures of thyroid function that matter besides just tsh. That's the easy one. So I've been on thyroid since I was about 26 because I had Hashimoto's 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.

How much. How much 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 it first thing, and 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, which is 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 2 or 3 and you want to bring it down to 1 and just keep it there. And that's a part of building muscle. It's also 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. And the second thing is exercise without adequate animal protein doesn't work well. And I say animal protein specifically because 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.

So I do the same. I've done that. I've actually started going between animal and plant protein back and forth. I recently had a long conversation with Dan Buettner, who, you know, Dan's amazing, and what he says is that if you look at all the blue zone diets, it's like a minimal amount of animal protein.

I think it's wishful thinking. 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. I think Dan's a beautiful human being and a true believer in longevity. But when I sat down with him on my show, can you tell me why? Beans. He goes, look, epidemiology says beans work, therefore they work. But I am not an average of 100,000 Okinawans. 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 are the king biohacker. In fact, in Webster's Dictionary you define biohacking. So 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.

N of one, baby. N of one.

Yeah. It's a commitment to only do what works for you and to measure it. Because I tried being a vegan, I tried being a semi vegetarian, I was low fat, I went to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day when I had a 46 inch waist. And I ended 18 months of just struggle with more muscle but still had a 46 inch waist and still weighed 300 pounds. 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 I.

So I want to go back to this. 20 minutes on maintaining and building muscle with 20 minutes. Okay, so protein, protein loading how often? 150 grams. Or is it a gram per pound?

Yes, it's 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 of my early books, that 30 to 50 grams of protein is all you can absorb in one sitting. And about three 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 grams of protein. So I'm just going to do a hundred grams 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 three, 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 100 grams of protein in a Meal as long as you have enzymes present, and it'll absorb throughout the day and affect protein synthesis. So the reason this is working is that when I eat protein, I took 100 grams 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?

I like broad spectrum enzymes that contain betaine, hcl and ox bile. And that seems to work better than just taking something like just a protease or a papain or something like that. So you want something that will break down as many different proteins as you can. So they typically have a lot of ingredients.

Creatine?

Yes.

How much?

I am a fan of creatine, but with the amount of animal protein I need, I get about 5 grams a day. But I take an additional probably 3 or 4 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, creatine monohydrate works just fine. The hack for creatine, if you really want to absorb it, is to don't put it 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 got sent to me by some friends and tastes yummy and easy. One of the things you have to worry about with your protein loading is making sure your kidney function. So I actually recently backed off on the amount of protein I was taking in because my body was trying to eliminate it and my kidney functions began decreasing.

It's a conundrum because kidney function is sort of the fifth of the horsemen. In my book on longevity, I'm like, okay, diabetes leads to cancer, cardiovascular disease, 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 a blockbuster drug. So I also only have one kidney. I was born that way. I didn't know it until I was 30, because I have a super mega kidney and it doesn't cause any health problems. But I monitor my function really well, like gfr. It 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 2 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 can imagine that going back to 20 minutes of workout, building muscle. I'm trying to learn this 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's 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 could come in. Oh, in the amount of time I brushed my teeth, I did cardio. But I got six times better results than I did from going to a spin class five 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'll 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 don't pick up rocks. I fight against a computer that doesn't believe in gravity, the feedback system against my muscles. Also part of Upgrade labs, it's called the AI cheat machine. What it's doing is it's causing either perturbations or a movement of the weight that confuses my muscles. My proprioceptors 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 wanted to, before they changed the, 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 you're just like, ugh, 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 have 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, named Dr. Phil Miller. I had some metabolic problems, you could say. So I've kept my levels between 750 and probably 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're not like trying to hump a doorknob because you're not too full of libido, but you just, you 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. So getting that level dialed in, it's about happiness and joy and motivation. It's not about sex. That's a side benefit.

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 enthonate, which is common in the entire world, except in the U.S. in the U.S. we use testosterone cypionate.

Yeah.

Problem is, cypionate causes water retention. 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. The cream though, you have to put in your armpit or in your groin. And creams are dangerous. You 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 you gotta be really careful with that.

Some interesting TV episodes around that don't go there. So let me ask you a question. When you supplement testosterone, and I do supplement, I do it with injection. I'll try the oral. I don't feel different with or without it.

What are your levels when you're injecting?

It's typically. Obviously they range depending on what I'm injecting, but they're in that range of 800, thereabouts.

Some people need 15 or 1800. I would double dose and see if you like your life.

I love my life right now.

Okay, well, so you might not feel different because it's keeping you where you are. 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 don't think that's necessarily worth it. And if I start getting pimples or something, that's an issue.

Yeah, because my, I've had this conversation with my, my medical team and it's like, well, typically if you're low on testosterone, you're sort of grouchy old man. You don't have the energy, you don't have the ambition, all of that. And I'm saying I'm like the most optimistic person I know you are. And I don't feel any different with. So I've stopped for like three or four weeks and then gone back on and I haven't felt a difference.

So maybe I 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. So I'm just super curious. 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. 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 the thing is, you get testicular shrinkage when you inject, unless you're using HCG or clomiphene or Arimidex, and all of those have a downside, so. Well, let's just say that testicular volume is not on my high, on my list 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 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 mentioned.

Yeah, we're opening them across the country. So, guys, upgrade labs.com and if you.

Want to start, you're moving the one that was near me in Santa Monica, in Venice, where you need to figure.

Out what we're looking for a franchisee in LA who wants to do a franchise. They've got a bunch of members who are ready to go. Unfortunately, the landlord wanted to increase the rent dramatically with a 10 year lease in 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.

There you go. Ownandupgradelabs.com thanks, Peter. It's fun stuff. There's so many things that are just higher return 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? I have the visceral fat levels 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 you are, but hey, let's go back to this. So anything else on muscle?

It's lift heavy. 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. 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 changed my responsiveness to exercise.

Yeah, I supplement with IVs with a mineral additive. Good.

Very good.

All right, let's talk about food. I mean, food is medicine, et cetera, et cetera. Protein. I heard you say something recently and I'm curious. I am of Greek descent. I love olive oil. And I'll do a daily olive oil shot and. But you said too much is not good. What are your thoughts there?

Well, there's tons of evidence as 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 superpower that's in olive oil is called hydroxy tyrosol, which is a very potent antioxidant. I take 100 milligrams of hydroxytyrosol most days of the week. That's about 100 bottles of olive oil. 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 desatures. And these cause linoleic acid, that negative omega 6 acid that's so omnipresent in our diet and it causes it to oxidize 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 a couple ounces of olive oil and I'm eating a two 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's fake. So super premium olive oil. But I look at what I see people eat when I go to Greece, I don't think they're swimming in olive oil if they have some cheese on their plate. And I think cheese is on the plate whenever I go there. So it's actually a mix of saturated and oleic that seems to be actually present in the diet. I don't believe the story that is not there. And when I talk to people from Greece, I mean, tzatziki, like there's so much dairy. I will be there.

I will be there next week. I will be going to spending two weeks. I haven't taken 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, I want, I want to go cognitive.

Yeah.

Because at the end of the day, you know, you can feel great, look good. But thinking clearly, I mean, that's the single most important asset. Right. Just when your Brain is on fire and you've got clarity and you're enjoying life. You're experiencing full spectrum of everything. Let's go there. How do you rate your cognitive ability right now on a zero to ten scale?

My brain has never worked better in my entire life. Peter, I love this. And people look at me and say 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 to saturate. I don't know. 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 nootropics for 25 plus years. And I've 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 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 and perfecting the 40 years of Zen program where 1500 elite executives have come through and reprogrammed their brains to be.

Let's be. I'm coming through soon. I promised myself that as a gift.

Anytime. Peter, have you talked to Naveen? He just went through. He's been really public about it.

Yeah, I have. And let's dive into nootropics. So define nootropics and what are you doing? I want me some.

All right. Nootropics are compounds that enhance cognitive function. And people say, well hold on. Is that a drug or is that a nutrient? It doesn't really matter if it makes your brain work better. It's a nootropic. So there are nootropic drugs and there are plant compounds. The two drugs that are probably most impactful, one of them is Modafinil. This is a 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, safer 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 actually a life threatening skin reaction, but it's exceptionally rare. What it.

And full disclosure. And full disclosure. I use Modafinil and have been for some time. And I have spoken to every neurologist that I Ever speak to? I ask the question, how do you feel about Modafinil? What's the downside? Is there any addictive elements? Is there any elements that are suppressive other part of mental cognitive function? So far, I've not received any warnings that concern me at all.

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 who 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 Amen's clinic. And today I'm so grateful to be on the Amen Clinic's board of directors. That scan changed my brain because it documented a hardware problem. One thing that Modafinil does, it increases blood flow in the brain. And this is one of the nootropic 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'm Modafinil, that's why I graduated from Wharton Business School, because I was on Modafinil and my brain wasn't working very well at the time, and so I had to fix it. The other pharmaceutical that is worth noticing, there's a class of compounds called the Racetam, R A C E T A M. And piracetam is the most famous. This was made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. It still is. And it wasn't Even in the PDR, the physician's desk reference in the U.S. for many, many years probably still isn't. It's almost like it doesn't exist here, even though it's sold by Big Pharma in Europe. And there's an analog that's fat soluble called aniracetam. A N I R a C E T a M. I have been on aniracetam 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 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 Modafinil are the two big ones. And then from, from like a other cognitive enhancing function. My big book on brain function hit the New York Times list sandwiched between Homo deuce and sapiens, which is like the hugest honor ever.

That's fantastic.

And it's called Head 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 nootropic factor. The 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 and you have enough energy to do it, you'll have a nootropic effect. So I even interviewed Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for proving neuroplasticity was real. And if I talk about an unusual guy, 94 years old, still has a lab off Central park and just cranking away on new ideas to this day because 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 have you. But there are also some plant compounds that raise this and some interesting pharmaceuticals. The number one plant compound is, well, Lion's mane mushroom. Problem is it doesn't work. I got so excited when I read the studies. I took Lion's Mane 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 Mane or anything that raises bdnf, you have vivid dreams. It's a very good sign that it's working.

I can imagine that, sure. Yeah. Neuronal growth is going to excite functionality while you're sleeping.

I actually just had a couple PhDs in the studio about 15 minutes ago here working with a supplement called Broccolite. And they went through a bunch of research on how it increases bdnf. So this is sulforaphane from cruciferous 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 the sulforaphane out of cooked broccoli. So cooked broccoli won't affect brain function. Cooked broccoli with a little bit of raw will.

How is that? I mean, I don't need to go into detail here, but I love broccoli and I love sulforaphane. I mean, my number one food is 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. But why the raw broccoli requirement?

When you cook broccoli, you inactivate the enzyme that releases the sulforaphane.

And it's present in. And just to. If you get it, a little bit of it, it's cascades and provides.

Yeah, 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 in Santa Monica.

Yes.

Whenever you had cruciferous veggies, there was always a piece of watermelon radish on top of the enzyme that was there for a reason. And it's funny, it's so active, if you wanted to be really fancy, you would take, like one little stalk 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 put that in the realm of nootropics. And interestingly, almost every psychedelic. I'm working on these for my book that'll come out later, sometime in 2025. Don't even know the title yet. Almost every psychedelic increases BDNF meaningfully. And the one that I'm most intrigued with is. 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 neurofeedback. Because every dose of ketamine, even a low dose, not the kind where you're gonna go see aliens. This is a low. It's called a psycholytic dose it causes 72 hours of profound, 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, dmt, LSD and psilocybin work. I'm even an investor in Paul Stamets company where he said, well, what happens if you stack lion's mane and psilocybin and a B vitamin called niacin that causes vasodilation.

Yes.

Well, he's showing whole brain nerve regeneration right now. Lion's mane and all the other ones, they only do hippocampal regeneration. So he's fixing things that are brain injuries and things like that. And if you stack that with hyperbaric and I've got a hard sided oxy health chamber, the medical grade one downstairs, that also will regrow things in the brain. So if you stack your hacks in the right way for your goals, there's an argument. But there's two other nootropics that we just have to talk about because they're the most common ones out there and some people are already triggered going, you can't talk about nootropics, 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 the reason I memorize caffeine structure and name is 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 love this. Like this one. I need this one. 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 was the first product ever sold over the Internet before the web browser was invented. So the first E commerce on the planet was a caffeine T shirt. Love it. And I sold it to 16 countries out of my dorm room. So this is like plus bulletproof as a big company now danger coffee's 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 modafinil 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 get that. Are you doing nicotine and modafinil at the same time? Yeah.

You wanna 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 one to five milligrams of nicotine delivered either orally or through the skin.

How do you do that? How do you deliver 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 U.S. it's from Nicorette. God knows why. So in the U.S. you can get little sachets. Lucy gum is good, but watch out for artificial sweetness. You don't want that. You want.

What's it called? Lucy gum.

Yeah, Lucy chewlusy.com or.co or something like that. And full disclosure, I'm a small investor advisor, but I just wanted a nicotine without NutraSweet in it because NutraSweet is not good for brain function. So why would I want to take a cognitive enhancer that also punched me my synapses in the face? That seems rude.

I love this study, done years ago in university students. They studied a whole slew of drugs to determine what increased their test scores. And there were two particular molecules that increased their test scores the most, and it was glucose and caffeine. Yeah, Coca Cola.

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 2 milligrams of nicotine. And you go into this hyper focus 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. At about age 40, I recommend one to three milligrams a day. The reason for this is research out of Vanderbilt. Dr. Andrew Newcomb, I believe is his name. I call him Dr. Nicotine. He's been publishing study after Study showing that nicotine stops Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's. You don't want neurodegeneration. So is it possible that we threw the baby out with a bathwater 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, I remember reading about Modafinil. Provigil is the other name it goes by and reading that it was developed for fighter pilots to be sharp during long missions. If you decide to try it, it is a prescription drug typically dosed in 200 milligram. I usually do 100 milligrams. 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 don't drink alcohol.

It gives you weird dreams 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 hundred million dollar jet. So they, they replaced it with modafinil. And I tried amphetamine when I was in Wharton, just prescription. And I did focus better, but it hurt my butt, it hurt my brain. I felt horrible afterwards, even on low doses. And when I switched to modafinil I was like, wow. The lights came on. But all nootropics have 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 you can do is take someone with lots of trauma, lots of triggers, lots of hyper reactivity, give them 100 milligrams of modafinil 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 nootropics, is to be more self aware because self awareness plus a faster brain equals kindness and a faster brain without self awareness equals big asshole. And we don't want that yeah.

The other benefit of Modafinil for me is the dopamine element. It makes me feel happy and joyful and filled with energy. So anyway, it's something which.

Peter, thank you for, for openly talking about modafinil and testosterone.

Yeah.

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. The 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 in 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 corners 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 gigabytes 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 fountainlife.com Peter When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my. My friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.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. You know, one of the things which I'm excited about in the future and I'm working on it right now with Fountain Life, is it should be absolutely possible you do this because you're so extraordinarily brilliant and constantly consuming data and constantly experimenting. I know nobody who does it to the level of success and abilities that you do. Dave, you're amazing. I say that with love.

I feel the same.

Where I want to go and working on it is, can we build an AI system that is able to have your genetics which play some part, have your desires? Like, is it longevity? Is it muscle? Is it cognitive clarity, Is it weight loss? What is it you desire to achieve? And then how many different meds or supplements you're willing to take per day? Like, I'm probably taking 80. How many are you taking?

About 150 pills. Probably 100 substances, about the same.

And a lot of people can't do that. Some people are like, I can't deal with more than a small handful. I've gotten really good at being able to consume lots of pills and a handful. But there should be. So today, if you go to your physician and you say, these are my goals, here's the last labs I did. Maybe they have your genome screen, your whole genome scan, and you ask them recommendations. Every physician you go to will give you a different set of recommendations.

Different, yeah.

And based upon what they happen to have read, what they happen to have heard, a whole set of cognitive biases, recency bias, and so forth. But there is actually a optimal set of meds and supplements. And so my moonshot within Fountain Life is I want the AI system that has all my metabolomics and all of my biomarkers and all my genomics, I'm able to pick from a list of Maybe there are 20 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 exact 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. And you know, I think that's that level of large data AI integration is in the next two to five years. But yeah, that would be, that would be great.

It will be. And when people come into Upgrade Labs, which is a non medical franchise, we're using medical grade gear, but it's not. 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 basic lab value from lab data. Right. In order to make recommendations of the right biohacks for it. But end of the day we should be putting like 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 3 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 have time to treat you with the real expertise instead of just like going in 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, 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. We just recently had a little bit of a setback where the FDA did not approve.

I don't remember the Constitution giving 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 hate this, I hate this part of it. I mean, I get angry that the. 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 the FDA could help you. Being told, no, I can't try that just obliterates me.

It means rich people can leave the country and do whatever the hell we want and the rest of Americans are completely screwed and it's unconscionable. So Peter, before we met in 2008. I co founded a medical lab testing company. I think we were the second people to do direct to consumer marketing for lab testing. But all we did was a white blood cell, radioactive cell, counting to figure out what toxic metals you were allergic to. It was called the Melisa test. We could tell people were allergic to their hypoallergenic implants that contained 2% nickel that wasn't labeled. And there was a boy somewhere around 8 or 10 who had the condition where 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 physician just went crazy and found us late at night on the Internet. And we ran a lab test and the poor kid's 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 bracelet. And the day they implanted it, the kid's health conditions all turned around and he lived 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 that is unconscionable. And that two weeks of suffering that kid went through like some bureaucrat. Right now you're going to hell for that.

The old adage is they're not happy till you're not happy. But let's not go there. So there is a model here, Dave. And I don't know if we've discussed, discussed this before. I know we haven't discussed in the podcast, which is the idea of a, you know, if you want to make an investment today, if you're investing in a, in a public company where enough lawyers and enough financial experts have analyzed it so that if you're a widow or a kid, you could 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 or 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 an 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.

The, like Bernie Madoff because all those accredited investors who invested in that were smart right away.

Oh, yes. Oh, wait. So my, My objective would be we should have an accredited patient program that basically. That basically says if, if you get your spouse and your physician or whomever, 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. 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 at your home. And I just think this protecting us against ourselves has got more downside than upside and by a huge margin.

One of the reasons. So my new coffee is called Danger Coffee, but it's because who knows what you might do. And this idea that being afraid of risk 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 interests at heart. It's by design is 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 burning you at the stake or whatever other story they're telling you to keep you safe. Not. Okay, I own my biology and no regulatory authority on earth has 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.

I believe in freedom, I believe in 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 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. Is this risky to me? What are the risks? And explain to me like I'm five, right? And get that. So anyway, recently mdma, which was under trial, was expected to be approved for ptsd, was turned down. 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 antidepressants and other addictive chemicals that are sold regularly by the people funding the NIH and NIA and fda. You gotta 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, Psychedelics. I have had extraordinary experiences on DMT and ketamine.

You know, those are two of my favorites. 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 Bobby and, and he, he's not afraid to talk about that stuff because he's a former addict and.

But I did, I did it under care. I did ketamine with a physician. I did, I did the DMT with a, with a therapist. And it was some of the most joyful, love, exploding, transformative.

I've seen the shift in you since you did that, Peter. 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 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 is 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 dimethyltophan and DMT journey was complete loss of fear of death, a connection with the universe that made me feel extraordinary. And it's not for everybody. It is literally a shedding and letting go of the ego. And it's a very powerful experience. 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 bullshit to call it that had accumulated over decades.

I believe that the ego is an emergent phenomena from our mitochondria. They're a distributed intelligence running a distributed network of compute nodes and environmental sensing nodes. And I can prove all of that. Okay, we know how they make decisions. They do it the same, 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, 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 that 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 crazy 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 at my conference. He goes, we haven't proven the end of the universe will happen. But like, okay, fine, I don't know.

Yes.

Yeah.

So do you. Have you experienced and made use of micro dosing of any of these?

I have. And in 1999 I went down to Peru and I sought out a shaman to do ayahuasca.

And.

They said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know, and you won't like it. This wasn't a, it wasn't a tourist, it was unknown. And I actually think ayahuasca is one of the more dangerous of the ones out there.

Not my favorite. It's low on my list.

Yeah, yeah, it should be low on most people's list. You want to do it with a shaman who's very, very well trained. 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. And there's a lineage and a respectfulness that maybe is missing in some places. But the active ingredient, dmt, you don't microdose that stuff. Maybe if you're doing Doe dispenza breath work, you're getting a little bit of it. But DMT can be incredibly potent in a similar experience. It's just shorter microdosing. Ketamine would be a bad idea when microdosing came out. James Fadiman is well known for creating a protocol on microdosing for LSD or mushrooms. And it's about 5% of an active dose. I decided to microdose LSD every day for 30 days, I put a 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, 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 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 microdose. And I'm telling that story because most people who think they're microdosing, at least here in Austin, oh, it's a microdose chocolate bar. I'm like, dude, that's a 25 dose party dose. That is not a microdose. So microdosing 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. I think most people microdose wrong, but I've done mushrooms and I've microdosed lsd. The other one that I would really, really not microdose would be ibogaine. And I spoke with Tim Ferriss on my podcast about that, I think right before he launches podcast. And ibogaine resets neurotransmitters, and doing that every day is probably not a good idea. So ibogaine 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 things I probably will do, but I think there's great value to it. But honestly, try. Even if you're doing ketamine once every week or two with a lozenge, you're going to get more neuroplasticity from that than you do for microdosing.

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 biodefense 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 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 use 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 six months of following Viome's 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 three 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 viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter. You've started diving into P300. Let's chat about that. What is P300 Neuroscience? Why are you focusing there? What are you learning and what should people care about?

Well, P300 is something called evoked potential. 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 screen 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 broadcast thing on tv. There's an eight 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 be completely 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 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 at 240 milliseconds. Is it the modafinil? Is it the way I've trained my brain for six months with neurofeedback 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 existence of this system, that's where the ego takes action. It will give you an environmental signal and an emotion at 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 neurofeedback 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 PhDs and very, very smart people, there's something they don't want to hear. Their body will not let them hear it. You ask them a question, they'll answer a different question. It gets edited in real time. This is what the ego really does. And so the Buddhist kind of, or any meditation 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, 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 shit done, right? And so, yes, but it's just going to happen until eventually you calm the storm. Well, yes, I love all that. I've been to Nepal and Tibetan, ancient China. Like there's so much value and knowledge. I've done breath work with Sri Sri 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 lie detector test at 40 years of Zen 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 because it's less work. And if it's less work, then you can have more expansive views of the future. And you stack that with some modafinil, some nicotine, some caffeine, and good God, the amount of wasted effort we have on fear and hunger. I don't have hunger signals either. I know the difference between a 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's changed my life.

I think being able to let go and not hold on to triggers is one of the blessings I have. I just. It's like zero time for that. Let's move forward. What's next? Where are we going?

You are one of the happier people, just in general. I just finished my big 3200 person event and it was amazing success. But your brain is fried. And I've seen you at abundance360 for almost 10 years. When I come there and you're the man of the hour, everyone wants a PC, 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, to not just be like so pegged out that you just.

I remember our moment. I was like, it Was late. I was. I'm trying to get to sleep by 9:30, my bedtime. And I'm walking by and I see there's Dave. And I'm like, stop. Go over, run. Give you a hug. It's like you were here.

You remember what I said? I said, go take care of your conference. We'll talk later. Cause we both go through that.

It's crazy.

It's that being of service all day long, even though 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. 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 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 o' clock at night? How's that even possible? 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. Did I wake up and take my Modafinil and my Aniracetam? 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? 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. Sounds like the most transformational experience you can have in a condensed period of time. Tell us about it.

I've always been a little bit uncomfortable talking about 40 years of Zen because I feel like when people are called to it, they just come, okay, I'm.

Called to tell me what I'm gonna catch there. I am called to it. 100.

I started this about 11 years ago because I knew that I had a weird brain. I had Asperger's syndrome as a kid. I had brain damage from toxic mold. I've worked with Daniel. Amen. And I've. I fixed it. And part of this was I would go do neurofeedback, but with people who are trying to make my brain average, because that's what we train to normally. I don't want an average brain. I want my weird brain, just better. 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 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 the new book 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 do a QEEG brain scan. So we know how your brain does compared to our sample set and compared to 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 can be triggered, you're carrying a loaded gun, and that process, it's intense. And you go in there and you run this structured reset process, and you re experience something that was scary, and you experience this exalted state that is probably closest described as 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 consciously uncoupled with my wife. Our total legal bill combined is less than $50,000, which is extraordinary. It's unheard of extraordinary. Yeah. And we genuinely want each other to win. Right? 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 can. 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 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 the cord wrapped around my neck. I had to let go of 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 a much better leader because it's easier if 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 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?

Or loosen.

Do you remember when I've done ketamine as a, as a psychotherapeutic and it's an experience that will last about 45 minutes and then is a recovery period. But there's very Little post downside. 90 minutes to 2 hours total. But for me I think it was a 60 milligram injection and follow on a 40 milligram injection. About half an hour later, it's IM ketamine or is it lozenges? Lozenge.

We went back and forth and because we're personalizing the doses every day, lozenges have the same effect, but it takes about four times as much. So we have a medical care provider there. But in order to be able to customize it each day based on your response, we are going with after testing IM and lozenge, we've realized lozenges 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 bullshit.

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 to 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 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 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? And that's beautiful how I'm not perfect, but that's what it does.

Listen, being able to identify your own bullshit 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, 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 she said, well, there must be another feeling. I say, and 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 Van Duysen was her name. 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 gonna 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, part of the biohacking movement. I want to know what's actually happening. I want to follow the data. 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 40 year of Zen program and where does it take?

40 years of Zen is five days. It runs Monday through Friday every week in Seattle and it's going to take about eight to ten 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 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 Zen 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 brainwaves for your brain and we train to that, even Alpha, There's a lot missing from the research on the alpha brainwave. 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 trained to the right number. So there's a lot of proprietary tweaks. Anyone can do neurofeedback anywhere. But most neurofeedback 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. And the last two days of the program, after you get your triggers handled, that's the performance enhancement part of this, where we're doing a 24 channel AI powered training of specific networks that are under or 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 like you take your BMW into the dine in performance mechanic and like did you want acceleration or braking or steering? Like, 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 a brain that already got you there. Website for this40yearsofzen.com 40yearsofzen.com and like I said, I have a hard time talking about it because it's like a spiritual thing. But the people who've 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 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've gone through this. And this is not typically what any entrepreneur, any executive, anybody encounters during the course of their lives. 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, try myself.

It reduces suffering so much. And you and I are both CEOs, and we hang out with them a lot. There's a lot of suffering in CEOs 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 things 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 cannot let go of what he has to do and he feels like. And many times, unfortunately, it's true. He's the only person who can actually make it happen.

Unfortunately, it is true. Sometimes his biography was so profound and I would love to get a look at his brainwaves someday. And I could probably predict what's going on in there. He probably has some of the very unusual get shit done brainwaves, but the trigger ones that cause the suffering there. I mean, what an amazing human being. And what if you get it done with more joy and less suffering?

I hope that.

What if.

I truly. I truly hope that for him. I truly do.

Yeah, I do too. I have so much respect there. And his, his business mind, aside from his engineering mind, 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. It's collecting the database.

Let's close out with, with a simple subject consciousness.

I believe, referring to what we talked about a little bit earlier, that your body sees 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, based on Jeff Hawkins work. The guy who invented the Palm Pilot.

Yes, I know him. I know his work. Yes, it's amazing.

It's amazing. But he says your brain predicts the future of microsecond and then checks whether it's valid.

Yes.

Yeah, it just says you only notice things 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, neurofeedback, extended fasting, extended darkness, and psychedelics and some of the other things that 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 think people don't really grok appreciate the cognitive biases that we have, all right? And what you said is absolutely correct. We have so much information coming into all of our senses all the time that you cannot process it all. So, you know, everybody hopefully has had that experience where when you're asked, did you hear the person you know speaking down the hall or did you hear that background music? And when you're in a 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 Steven Kotler. 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 somebody, you're going to give their words more credence than someone who looks different from you. And we don't realize that we're processing all of this biased information all the time. 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 just make me aware when I am giving improper weight to Data based upon my biases.

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 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 noticed electrolytes in there. They do it because they get hyponatremia, which is lack. They're diluting their electrolytes too much, which is why you should put some salt in your water. But it's profound that we do this for exercise at the beginning of our conversation 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 data, 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. I'm wrong and I know my brain does it right.

Yeah. That is so true. Yeah. And once your ego gets in the loop and you're defending, you're going to die on that hill, whether or not you have the actual evidence to support it or not.

Because 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 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 spiritual practice, your consciousness, is compassion. And this means you automatically wish other people well before you have a chance to think about it. 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 they're actually not a good person.

Or a loving kindness meditation.

Loving kindness, but the highest level that they teach about, 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. 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 challenge is 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 equanimity when you're making half the electricity you're supposed to. So you practice your longevity, practice mitochondrial enhancement, take your 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 countless hours in this conversation, and 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 in 40 years.

When you get booked, I will come up there. I don't do a lot of 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.

I would love that, pal.

I'll do it. It'll be fun.

Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only, the Biohacker original, Dave Asprey. Dave, tell us where we can find you. Tell me the last three books that you recommend from your series. Smarter, Not Harder. Is 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. And then the one before that was. I think that was superhuman. Yep, that was my big longevity book.

Amazing.

And I'm@daveasprey.com upgrade labs is own and upgrade labs.com and the human upgrade. My podcast has only 1200 episodes with world leaders in 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 for your work in the world tonight. 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.