Bulletproof Radio Q&A – Nicotine Benefits, Bulletproof Labs & Top Hacks - #236

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A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

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Let's just get going. Today is one of my favorite types of topics. This is a straight up Q and A and today's I guess I'm today's guest. Today's interviewer is my buddy Zach, who's on the Bulletproof team. Zach's going to ask questions. You can get these questions submitted just by going to our Facebook page, hitting us up on Twitter and going to the comments section on Bulletproof Radio. And you can ask these things on our blog. So what I do is I read through all the questions. I look for the ones that lots of people are asking about and then I try to answer those here for you. If I don't get them here, I'll do my best to get them online. There are tons of questions, but I'm here for you and this is one of the most leveraged way I can answer these questions because everyone who hears this likely hundred Thousand people could be listening to this. Well, that means one answer answered it for a lot of people. Because if you had the question, that means that there's thousands of other people who had the question too, but just didn't have the time to ask. So thank you for asking. Keep doing that. Let's see, what else should we talk about? So let's talk about for the final the first question here. This is hopefully one of the last podcasts you're going to see in this location, which has some cool old school biohacking equipment behind me and like a kitchen. What's coming up here is we're going to start filming more and more of these at the new Bulletproof Labs location in my backyard where I've set up a full studio with better sound. And all right now there's a tractor moving dead trees. It's really loud over there. So. So finishing up some work on that. And you're going to get to see some biohacking actual hands on stuff happen that is pretty unusual. And I'm going to start cooking for you online as well. So it's not going to be one of those, like, chef hat kind of things. I'm just going to show you. Look, you have so much time, you don't like a lot of dishes, and you want food that tastes amazing and makes you kick ass all day. This is how to do it. So this is going to be a different kind of show and I'm really excited to bring it to you. And it's all set up with cameras and all. So this has been a big project and it's going to add some value. You don't have to be kind of a highfalutin chef for this to work. And these are a lot of the techniques that we're putting into the bulletproof coffee shop, which is right on the cusp of opening in Los Angeles. Pretty stoked on that one as well. All right, Zach, let's do it, man. Ask me some questions. I'll tell you no lies.

Well, perfect segue there because the first question comes from Matt. It's from our online forum. And Matt asks what's going on with the Santa Monica shop? How will it be different than a normal coffee shop?

The bulletproof coffee shop in Santa Monica is not going to be like any coffee shop you've ever seen. There's basically an idea behind coffee shops, which is let's kind of exalt the coffee. And I'm a huge coffee fan. I've coffee has changed my life in many ways. However, the reason we drink coffee is not just that it tastes good or not just that it's cheap or not just that we get a short kind of kick in the pants shot of adrenaline from it. Coffee at the bulletproof coffee shop is about increasing your performance so you feel different when you leave the bulletproof coffee shop. And everything in the coffee shop is there to make, make you better. And this is the lighting in the store, the air quality, the furniture itself is electrically grounded. We're using pulsed electromagnetic frequencies. And what we've done is design a space that's there for optimal performance. So you should feel good when you go in there. In fact, you're going to experience the bulletproof vibe. You can actually stand there and do the same frequency that NASA uses on astronauts and stand there and it vibrates. It's really invigorating. You feel a huge difference. And it's there so people can experience that. So when you go into Starbucks, you're like, look, I need a cup of coffee. That's consistently just kind of what it is. And when you go to the bulletproof coffee shop, I wanted to change the quality of my day and I wanted to not pay attention to food for a long period of time. The other thing that you're going to see there is it's not just like a selection of baked goods, it's a full on place where you can get meals. We have something called salad undressing, which is one of my favorite inventions. We'll be featuring grass fed beef from multiple ranches. Just like wine has different characteristics, meats the same way. So we're going to be supporting small local ranchers by highlighting and showcasing their beef. And we'll always have grass fed meats on the menu. We'll have bulletproof soups, recipes right out of the bulletproof diet, as well as some new stuff that we've developed. And the goal here, you're going to go in, you're going to get your coffee and you'll probably pick up something for lunch or maybe you'll just come in for lunch and any time of the day you're going to feel it. And we also have some stuff we can put in your coffee. They're called stack upgrades. And these are, they're designed to change how you feel. So we have ones to help you with antioxidant levels, ones to help you with stress adaptation, ones for your brain, and ones for helping you burn fat. So the idea is coffee is a delivery vehicle for changing the quality of your day, the quality of your brain the quality of your life. And this is all about you. It's not all about the coffee. I'll tell you though, we put a lot of energy into that coffee.

Yeah.

What's up next, Zach?

Well, let's keep it on the coffee topic. Another question comes from Facebook. Somebody named June, and she says, I'm a Mormon. For religious reasons, I do not drink coffee. Are there any other options to use a high quality drink with grass fed butter and brain octane oil, et cetera, to get similar effects of bulletproof coffee?

You know, one of my really, really good friends from business school is connected with one of the largest auto dealers in Utah. So I actually asked him about this quite a while back. There's a, when you're Mormon, you're not allowed to have coffee. But there are other beverages that don't qualify as hot beverages. So for instance, hot chocolate is allowable. And cacao tea is something that works really, really well. And according to at least my sources, and I might be wrong about this because I'm not Mormon, but according to my sources, you can drink tea that's made out of cacao. So this is on the Bulletproof website. You can get the tea, it's not creamy at all. It's like a clear tea that tastes like chocolate. And what you can do is you can take that, you can brew it, and you can add the butter and the brain octane and you can get the benefits. And it makes a big difference. That's the most likely way to do it. If you get a copy of the Bulletproof Diet, the book that's out right now, there's a recipe for a no coffee vanilla latte, and this will rock your world. I actually use this when I'm doing 40 years of Zen brain training because that's a time when I don't want caffeine in my system because caffeine has a very specific effect on certain brainwaves that we're training. So what I do then is I take vanilla Max, which is our lab tested whole vanilla bean just ground up into a powder. There's nothing else in there. And it's a huge amount of vanilla that comes in those little packets. Take a teaspoon of vanilla, which provides those polyphenols that you're looking for. You blend it with the butter, the brain octane hot water, and the sweetener of your choice, either xylitol or stevia, and you get this creamy, delicious, amazing thing that turns off hunger the way you'd expect. So you can totally be Mormon and Be bulletproof. It absolutely works.

Yeah, it does. And I love it with a little bit of full fat coconut milk as well.

Oh, yeah. Get a little bit of coconutty flavor with vanilla. It's pretty good. I don't like the taste of coconut milk in coffee nearly as much as I do in the cacao tea because, like, chocolate, coconut seem like they go together better than coffee.

Okay, cool. Another question about caffeine from McMillan on Facebook. Question is, I'm always looking for more fat and more caffeine in my diet. I like this guy. What I don't understand is why caffeine from different sources tends to feel slightly different. For example, mate versus coffee versus an energy drink. Is it just the amount of caffeine or does the source and other factors make a difference?

It's interesting. When people are smoking potential, they'll tell you flat out, like, this strain totally makes me hyper. This strain makes me hungry. This strain makes me mellow. This strain is good for writing. Why would it be any different? Even with different coffees from different regions, not to mention how they're processed? So it turns out that a lot of times what you think you feel from coffee is not actually from coffee, it's from coffee. Plus stuff that comes from processing. A lot of the jitter, anxiety, kind of the. The kind of over the top almost aggressiveness that can come from coffee, like, I'm going to charge through it, versus this other feeling of like, all right, I can bring it, but I don't have to bring it. There's less of the kind of buzzing energy. It's a smooth thing from the coffee. So that's a question of what else is in the coffee, what could be causing that. And when you use yerba mate, which I've definitely tried, Tim Ferriss and I have talked about that on a couple bulletproof radio episodes. And. And that's his caffeine source of choice. I have a couple different sources of yerba mate. I get too stimulated by this stuff. I drink it and I'm like, it's too much for me. I've heard some other people say that as well. But there's another group that says, hey, I love yerba mate. I put brain octane in it. I put butter in it. And Tim's talking about the Tim's tea concoction, which is the equivalent of bulletproof tea. I'm intrigued at just the notion of fat in the morning instead of food, just fat. And Tim's talked about that not as drinking bulletproof coffee, but just the idea of Using this concept of bulletproof intermittent fasting as something you can do. So you could apply it to yerba mate. You could apply it here. You could also, if you want to know what caffeine itself feels like without all these other polyphenols, with all these other psychoactive substances that are present in yerba mate or are present in coffee or chocolate bromines and things like that, you could actually go out and get straight up anhydrous caffeine. Be careful. You can die. You can die from too much of almost any plant compound. And this is one that's pretty concentrated. So if you take an appropriate dose, say 100 milligrams of 100% caffeine, and you do it in an equivalent amount of liquid, so the absorption rate will be about the same. That's pure caffeine. That's what that feels like. And that's going to feel different than caffeine mixed with all these other things. So that's why they sort of seem to feel different. We've been taught to equate coffee with caffeine, but what you feel from coffee is actually from coffee, which is like a thousand different chemicals in it. Or what you feel from tea with the same amount of caffeine would be all of the polyphenols. All the effects on the gut biome from coffee or tea or chocolate or whatever else, they're different, and you should expect them to feel different. And. And the difference between this cup of coffee made from this random mix of beans and this blended coffee that's been roasted to a dark color, it may feel different than your next cup. And one of the reasons I developed bulletproof coffee specifically was that when I drink coffee that has a lot of that stuff that causes jitter and mold, not only it makes me act like a jerk, then I get really tired, and I probably will get a headache from it. So I was really feeling the difference between cups of coffee. I'm like, all right, this coffee's not going to work for me. But I could never tell from cup to cup what was going to happen until I put in the lab testing, and then the process changes. On making the beans themselves.

It's kind of like the standard biohacking idea of n equals 1, and it can affect different people in different ways.

Yeah, that's a good point. And I totally recognize some people just love yerba mate and that's their focused drug of choice. And I'm down with that test.

What works? Okay, well, I'll shift gears a little bit because there's another question related to smart drugs, and it's actually about nicotine. So this comes from Paul from our online forum, says, hey, Dave, you mentioned the benefits of nicotine for cognitive enhancement, focus, et cetera, before. What delivery method do you recommend for a non smoker wanting to use nicotine to help with study, memorization, mental clarity, has bulletproof, or you considered developing some type of upgraded nicotine mind supplement?

I've considered this and I'll probably outrage some people who are like, nicotine equals smoking equals death. And I'll just be the first to say, look, coffee does not equal caffeine and nicotine does not equal smoking. One is an active ingredient and it's not the only active ingredient in those substances. And I'll be the second person to say smoking stuff, putting burning things, whether it's burning forest fires like the ones happening right outside my house because the sky is covered in dark smoke, or burning tobacco, or burning marijuana, or burning anything else, is not good for your lungs. Like, we're not designed to handle that. Increasing carbon monoxide is not a great thing for you either. So that's not to say you can't withstand smoking, but it's not a good idea. So let's take smoking off the table. I just said it. I don't think you should smoke. It's not the most intelligent way to get stuff in. However, what if you take nicotine apart from smoking? Well, there's pretty good evidence that nicotine increases oxygen levels in the brain. Bet you didn't know that. That's one of the reasons I use nicotine. Before I go into my hyperbaric oxygen chamber, I just take 1 milligram of it. There's two ways that are safest for taking nicotine. I do not recommend you do this every day. You don't want to be addicted to nicotine, but you do want the nicotinic acid receptors in your brain to be happy. And it turns out caffeine, not caffeine. Well, caffeine and nicotine, but nicotine specifically, can help you increase your rate of beta oxidation. In other words, it makes you burn fat faster. That's kind of cool. So all of a sudden, just a tiny dose of nicotine at the right time can give you this great focus. There's a reason that, oh, just about every great work in the last 200 years of literature has been composed or written or created on this amazing mix of cigarettes or cigars and coffee. And quite often there's some alcohol involved too, but not always. It's that combination. In fact, I'll tell you a good portion of the bulletproof diet book, which, if you read that thing, it's pretty darn well written. I've looked at a bunch of diet books. Some are thrown together, cobbled blog posts. There's a whole bunch of new research in there. It was a work that I was pleased to present to you to take up your time. Like 100,000 copies of this, just about, give or take, have been sold. And the idea that you might spend, I don't know, 14 hours reading it, that's like 100,000 times 14. That's the number of hours that I waste if I write crappy stuff. And I'm not going to do that. So what did I do? Well, I did all sorts of stuff, but I did use bulletproof coffee and I used nicotine while I was writing it to help me be more in the zone to bring it to you. The two forms are, number one, nicotine. Sorry, not nicotine, Nicorette. Mini lozenges. You have to watch out. Nicorette puts crap in their lozenges. They put bad sweeteners in just about all of the full size and all the gum. And gum is bad for your trigeminal nerve anyway and it makes you look like a cow. So don't chew the gum. But if you wanted to, you get these little blue things. I recommend the two milligram capsules. These are very small. Sorry, not capsules, tablets. I break them in half. I do half of one and I just tuck it in right where you put cha or chewing tobacco. And it's minty fresh. It lasts for a long time. If you want a faster kick, you can put it under your tongue. The other thing that works is you can get the smallest dose. Stick on patch, you can cut that in half. And they say not to cut the patch, but no one ever tells you why. I'm assuming that's because they like to save. They like you to buy more patches. And I'll take half of the smallest size patch, stick it on my arm and leave it there for like three hours. Do not do what one member of the bulletproof team, who shall remain nameless. Jackie. Anyhow, she was excited by this idea and went out and bought a 25 milligram, the max dose patch, and stuck it on her arm. Was like, oh, my God, I feel so good. And it got worse and worse and worse. And pretty soon she's just like green, literally green in the face and. And like just about throwing up with massive headaches. Nicotine is a potent poison. If you or an animal or a child were to eat one of those patches, they could die. Like, it is that potent. So you need to take really good care with this stuff. And if you use the patch, use it just for a little while and you can take it off, you can reuse a patch. Maybe they say not to do that too, but I do know people do that, and it seems to work fine. The other method, which I guess would make three methods, but one that I don't use that often, they make a nicotine inhaler, they call it, and I'm tempted to go grab one for you. Let's see. Oh, I'm using my wireless mic. I'm actually just going to go grab one. Give me five seconds and I'll be right back. I'll show it to you on air. All right, I'm back and I can only show you the box. I don't have the little plasticky guy. I don't know where I put it, but what it is is getting my headphones back on. Nicorette inhaler. And it's these little capsules that look like little filters. And what you do is you put those inside a little inhaler, which I may have in here, and you puff on it. It's a little plastic thing. It looks like a filter cigarette thing, and no smoke comes out. There's not an E cig, and I don't recommend E cigs right now for basically because it looks like there may be some problems with toxic metals coming out of them. And most of them come out of places in China and can have additives. And there's some studies showing that they may do things to your lungs you don't like. So I'd say the jury's out on those. But this stuff is just pure nicotine in a tiny little. See if I can open this up for you. Basically, it's a clear thing, and inside it is a sponge that's saturated with nicotine. So all you do is you puncture the end of the sponge and when you breathe through it, you get a dose of nicotine. This is a very small way to kind of microdose your nicotine. And these are, let's see, seven trays with six cartridges each, and there's four milligrams of nicotine. So this is two of those little tiny undertong things. I might use nicotine two, maybe three times a week. And it always. It's like different than coffee. But it's amazing as a cognitive Enhancing substance for increasing oxygen in the brain and for helping you lose weight. Do not overdose on it, do not take it every day unless you want to be addicted. And I don't even think it's a great way to use to lose weight. It can make you feel kind of ampy and weird, but in very low doses I find it. It's a performance enhancing drug and it deserves a place in your stack if it works for you. There is no moral judgment about nicotine. It is not tobacco, it is not burning, it is not a lung cancer issue. This is actually about cognitive function and making your brain work better and happy and causing no harm. And I believe nicotine can be used effectively that way. It can also kill you, so pay attention.

Fair enough. All right, here's another question related to coffee. This is from Sandra from Facebook. I know that in your book you advise not to drink coffee after 2pm so it doesn't disturb your sleep, but I can have coffee at like 9:30 like I did last night and be asleep by 11 and have my normal night's sleep wake up around 5:30, no problems. Is there a reason why some substances that have a reputation to have some effects don't seem to have the same, if not the opposite? For me.

The difference is probably in your genes and maybe in your gut biome. So what's going on there is you probably have a very fast phase, phase two liver metabolism. And this is called the P450 pathway. And what that means basically is that you're breaking the caffeine down faster or you may have some, we'll call it an abnormality. It's a difference. It's not a bad abnormality in the way your body uses neurotransmitters. And I actually read your question online or on Facebook, I should say. And you're saying that you tried a sleeping pill that kept you awake, et cetera. So there are some number of people who are weird responders to things and other people where it just doesn't work right. For instance, I don't think most people know this, but if you're a redhead, you probably need way more anesthetic than a non redhead and your likelihood of having other drug interactions is different than other people. So there's a big genetic component, I would say. I used to think I could drink coffee before bed and I'd go to sleep and get a good night's sleep and wake up feeling like I always felt I was totally wrong because I didn't have a good grasp of the quality of My sleep. So if you really can do this, and I believe what you're saying, at least get Sleep Cycle on your iPhone. And while you're at it, while you're programming it, use a Zentech shield. That's going to keep the melatonin from getting messed with you. So you're only testing one variable. Yeah, I do make the Zentech shield and it's awesome. It's on my phone right now. It cuts out a little bit of blue spectrum that affects your melatonin. But what you do is do that and then track your sleep with and without it. And what I think you'll find is that your sleep quality really is lower. But maybe not. If you read the blog post about a caffeine power nap, maybe it's helping you and you're just one of those people, you can just do it. But you're not doing a caffeine power nap. If you're drinking at 9:30, going to bed at 11, you could chug the espresso right before bed and you might get good results from that too.

Interesting. Okay, let's stay on the sleep topic. The next question is from Matt Facebook and he says during your podcast with Emily Fletcher, you mentioned how you sleep for six hours and meditate for one hour. Do you feel this is equivalent to eight hours of sleep? And how would or do you measure your sleep wakeful states to compare?

Well, I'm a fan of the Beddit sleep monitor, but I don't always have my same bed. I travel a lot, so I use this app on my phone. Let's see, this is the, this is called sleep cycle and this is my stuff from last night. So let's see if this actually shows on the screen. So last night I got four hours and 20 minutes of sleep. And I'm not saying that's the right amount. My average time in bed is five hours and 59 minutes over the last 845 nights. So I don't actually meditate an hour a day though. I use neurofeedback, which lets me get a lot of meditation done in a very, very compressed period of time. I did for quite a while. And this is what I talked about with Emily. I did. I basically wake up at 5am I taught myself to be a morning riser, which didn't add any real value to my life, but I did it for almost two years. So I'd wake up at 5am and I found that I could replace two hours of sleep with one hour of meditation. And this is something that's been reported by other people. So I'd wake up around 4:30 or 5 and I'd drink a little bit of green tea and I would sit cross legged and do a set of like a 15 minute set of breathing exercises called a kriya. I was doing art of Living, which you can take classes in, this is out of India. I learned it with a bunch of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. It was really effective practice for me. It turns out those breaths reset your sympathetic nervous system function. And I had an overactive sympathetic nervous system. So I would do that and then I would sit and do like an energetic style meditation for about the remaining 45 minutes. Sometimes I would do like little chants, basically a mantra. And I experiment with a bunch of different things like that. And it works like I did this for a couple years and finally realized that for me the golden hour, the creative hour, is between 11am and 2am it always has been since I was 12 years old. And that's how my circadian rhythm runs. I have a long window compared to a short window so I can be a morning person. I just don't get any great value out of it. I like the way my day is arranged now and I do meditate, sometimes in very brief periods. And next week I'm going back to 40 years Zen. So if I can spend three weeks of the year with a lie detector stuck to my head telling me exactly when I'm meditating, even a little bit wrong, I'll make more progress as a human being in that period of time than I will from spending two hours a day meditating. Because one week of that meditation gives you the same Brain State as 40 years of Daily practice. So I'm cramming this meditation in as much as I can and I'm practicing mindfulness and awareness the rest of the time. And yes, sleep matters. Getting more sleep makes me score higher on the neurofeedback stuff on the 40 years of Zen training. So I specifically will give myself seven hours of sleep instead of six on the days I do that training. If I do the arx, that very, very heavy duty resistance training, I get more sleep. Last night I ate a bunch of essentially what I would consider suspect foods. No actual junk food, but a bunch of foods that I know I'm reactive to because I'm doing a hack right now to reduce my allergic sensitivity. Assuming this works, I'm going to share with you guys exactly how you can get rid of food allergies, like all the way. Get rid of them, like eat the stuff that is the suspect food. You took it off the suspect list, you rehabilitated it, and now it's cool for you. So that was why I slept four hours, because my nervous system was a little bit amped last night after I ate a bunch of foods that I know trigger my allergic sensitivities. I actually ate every food last night. That does it. And I'm standing here today to talk with you, which tells me that it's working at least a little bit. And I don't look too crappy either. Probably a little crappy.

Nice. All right, the next question is about the biohacking lab. You mentioned that. This is from Mike from the online forum, and he asks, hey, Dave, huge fan. Have gotten lots of benefit from your podcast and products. You said you had some sort of biohacking laboratory on Vancouver Island. Is there any way you'd be able to provide some info about it? And if you let us normal people come through.

Well, I think I take offense. Are you saying I'm not normal? Oh, wait. I guess I'm not normal either. It's basically an experimental center that's in my backyard. It's part of the bulletproof labs area where I'm going to be filming the podcast. So generally, my coaching clients who come up to Vancouver island or people who come up to be guests on the show get access to it. It's not set up for sort of general admission sort of things. It's not staffed or insured properly for that, although I'm working on potentially changing that. It's just not there yet. So I do have amazing plans on bringing this stuff out so that you can get better access to it, but it probably won't be in my backyard. Also, not that many people come to Vancouver island, but if you do come, send me a tweet. And who knows? It's entirely possible I'm getting restless about the lack of quality restaurants around here. I may have to do something about that. We'll see.

We're also going to be having some special contests that we're working on to get. You could win a chance to come biohack with Dave.

Yeah. Thanks, Zach. There will be ways. What I want to do is plan, like, power weekends where you do something special, do a video. We'll do these contests. And when you win a contest. Yeah. Come on up and hang with me. But rather than sort of just having people come through, I'd rather come through. And I actually want to talk with you. I want to hear what matters to you. I want to answer questions and actually get some real time. And one of the things that motivates me is helping other people. And one of the things that really motivates me is seeing other people. So when I'm not on the road, which happens 100 or thereabout days of the year, it's really good for me to get a chance to do that. So if you're a longtime listener, die hard bulletproof fan, and you win one of the contests, then that's kind of a way of selecting and saying, all right, yeah, do come out, but let's not just come in for an hour, let's sit down for half a day. Let's have lunch together. Maybe I'll even cook it. And let's make it real. That's what I'm looking to do with my life.

Well, let's talk a little bit about what you have there, because I was just there last month and we spent a week just doing all kinds of biohacking stuff. You had the hyperbaric oxygen chamber there. You got the float tank, the ARX fit, all these cool balance things. And you've added a couple of other cool toys since. So what else do you have?

Yeah, the ARX is pretty amazing. That's this weightlifting machine. We've actually had an episode, I think. Who was on? Was it Mike was on? Mike Palano. I did an episode on their podcast, and a bulletproof one. And this is a machine that lets you fully max out your muscles in just a couple repetitions. It's absolutely ridiculous. People make them the craziest faces on it, but it lets you do something in one repetition that you could never do with weights, because weights, if you push that much pressure on your muscles with gravity involved, you would damage yourself. And what you're doing is you're fully loading the muscle at every part of the muscle curve. So that's there very, very highly efficient exercise. There's the bulletproof vibe, so you get the lymphatic circulation. There's the. Let's see, there's a cryotherapy with liquid nitrogen, which lets you get just your peripheral temperature receptors. You stand there for three minutes in negative 260 degree Fahrenheit air that's chilled by these giant liquid nitrogen cylinders. And what a difference in terms of tightening of skin, weight loss, energy endorphins, sleep quality. That thing is really legit. There's a digitally controlled thing from my friends at iCool Sport. It's a water recirculating tub that keeps the water at 60 degrees for mild cold Thermogenesis, which is way safer than the stuff that Jack Cruz was recommending in the early days of excessive ice baths. The stuff that gave me the 15% ice burns over my body. It turns out that Ray Krones is talking about activating those same temperature receptors with mild to cold stress. I'm getting the peripheral ones with liquid nitrogen and then I'm doing a 60 degree water bath rather than the 40 degree water bath and chunks of ice and all that. It turns out that either end of the extreme is pretty good, but a lot of that stuff in the middle is proven to be less effective.

You got the sauna too.

There's the sauna. It's the lowest EMF model you can get. A lot of infrared saunas will make a lot of electromagnetic frequencies which are just not good for you. And there's various people with various theories about that. But there's a signaling thing in the body that is not good. They lower your heart rate variability. So what I did is I went with one from Sunlighten, which is an amazing brand of sauna and one that I highly recommend. And that means I can go in there. It also has like a built in little iPad thing, so I think it's an Android, so you can watch videos while you're in there, which is an improvement on some saunas. And it's got chromotherapy as well, so you can be in red light, which enhances mitochondrial function. There's the slack bow, which is an indoor slack line. And my buddy Jim hooked me up with that. Jim Klotman. And what you do is you stand on one leg on this thing and you wobble and then you cross over your centerline with all these different exercises. And what this does is this increases communication across the corpus callosum. So this is like visual and vestibular training that forces your body to do weird things that it normally would never do in gravity. There's also pulse electromagnetic frequency devices, there's neurofeedback, various forms of biofeedback and pull ups and some other weird stuff like that. And a few other things that are sort of just sitting around. Grip strength question quantified things like Zona. If you haven't heard the podcast with Steve Wood from Zona, you need to check that out. This thing is amazing. We've got that there. So there's all sorts of little things kind of sprinkled throughout. And the idea is everywhere you go, there's something you can do. And these are all just adult toys. There's Throwing axes. You got to have some of those for biohacking, right? And it goes on from there. Zipline, stuff like that.

Awesome. And we'll put some links in the show notes if you go to the page on the blog for this podcast with some more information. If you are interested in finding out more about all those fun toys, let's move on. This is a question from Stacy through our online forum asking about cooking procedures. She says, hi Dave. You often talk about the importance of not charring the grass fed beef that you eat that is not grilling. Now what is your advice for cooking a steak that tastes good but is not too compromised by the cooking process?

Sous vide is awesome if you can do it. Sous vide is when you take the steak and you put it in a BPA free bag, you vacuum seal it and you cook it in a controlled temperature water bath. You can buy those things at Costco. Sometimes they'll let you do that. I started doing that with laboratory equipment a long time ago, back before sous vide kind of caught on to be cool. But even then it benefits from a little bit of caramelization on the outside. And that's kind of a fancy schmancy. Takes all day. Like I'm a chef thing and I have great respect for people who do that because I'm one of them. Right. But the other thing that's probably just more approachable is a steam oven. These used to cost five grand. They're also straight out of molecular gastronomy, the idea of applying laboratory techniques to your cooking so that you have more control of your food. The problem is molecular gastronomy is all about flavor instead of all about how it makes you feel, how it makes you get inflamed or not inflamed, stuff like that. But Cuisinart just came out with a steam oven that fits on your countertop. It looks like a toaster oven, but it has a steamer. So now you can cook a steak in that and it comes out tender and juicy and good without being browned on the outside. The other thing you can do is you cook the steak at a relatively low temperature until you get the inner temperature you want. And then you turn the oven up to about 375, really the max I would recommend. And just give it just a very light browning at the end. And that's going to make a difference versus browning it quickly up front, searing it up front, and then just letting all those heterocyclic amines and PAHs sit there and kind of percolate the idea is you don't want to over denature the meat, but more importantly, you don't want those damaged fats. The idea is to damage the fat as little as you can. And if you're going to be doing that extra browning, and I'll do that especially on pork skin, like, oh, my God, you have to get that stuff a little crispy or it's just not quite as religious of an experience as it could be. And what you do there is you use things like turmeric and rosemary and even a little bit of vitamin E. And these are techniques straight out of the bulletproof store when we do that kind of thing. And what you're getting there, or the bulletproof coffee shop, I should say, and what you're getting there is the protection of the lipids, which is one of the big things you're trying to do. You don't want to over damage the proteins, but you are going to cook them and digest them, which is an act of denaturing. It's just a question of how denatured they are. And then you want to protect the fats, because eating oxidized fats is really, really not a good idea for you. By the way, this is one of those Nicorette things, and I've lost a little holder, but I'm gonna have to just have some because it's on my desk.

Nice.

Yep, it works.

There's also a ton of information in the Bulletproof Diet Book about, like, going deeper into the cooking procedures that are recommended. Okay, let's talk.

Hey, Zach, can I pre announce the. The date for the Bulletproof Cookbook?

Go for it.

So in December, Bulletproof Cookbook is coming out. I've been working on this with a team of recipe people, and it's a good book. We didn't go out there and copy a bunch of Paleo recipes and then modify them a bit. We actually created these things from scratch with professional food photographers. If you read the first book, you know what I'm talking about. This is bulletproof level of quality, and I'm. I'm pretty excited about it. Do we have a URL? Zach, I haven't even checked in with you.

If you go to bulletproofdietbook.com you can get information in the free roadmap for the diet. And then we're going to give out updates via email to that list. If you're interested in the Bulletproof Cookbook, which is going to publish on December 1, so be on the lookout, stay on Facebook and on the Blog for more information as it comes out and we'll definitely get you the information about it and you can pre order it and all that good stuff and get the bonuses.

All right. And some of the bonuses are going to be more of these live streams. If you're on the mailing list for Bulletproof, I've been doing these things where I just kind of pop up. We tell you ahead of time, and I spend an hour and 90 minutes just doing a live chat where you can type questions and then I just answer them one after the other. So those have been really popular and I love doing that stuff, like hearing the things that matter most to you really matters to me because I've accumulated a lot of knowledge and some of it's really specialized and I'm never going to blog about it because most people don't care. But then someone comes on and they ask that question, then I tend to answer that. So I've been getting just a lot of satisfaction from doing that and I believe it's helping a lot of people. So by all means, sign up and.

Follow Dave on Periscope and Twitter because he's doing live Q&As randomly. And if you are on Twitter or Facebook, you might catch one of those kind of Impromptu, maybe a 10 minute Q& A while you're waiting for like an appointment or something. Dave, is that when you do it?

Actually today I did one from my backyard because we're moving these trees that we had to take down away from the Bulletproof labs so that there isn't more of a fire risk. There's this giant claw arm thing that's like in my backyard. I hired a giant claw that picks up a tree like a matchstick and flings it around. And it's just like every adult male's fantasy. I guess so Anyhow, I did a Periscope earlier today, about 10 minutes where I did Q and A and I showed people the berries growing in the backyard and answered all these questions with giant machinery behind me. I felt very manly, actually, to just from the whole experience.

Okay, staying on the food topic, we've got time for a few more. And this one is from Tom from Facebook, and it's about garlic. Do your concerns about garlic's effect on brain function apply to black or fermented garlic? I ask because of the oft hammered point about the dangers of soy. Except when fermented, in which case benefits are said to be abound.

There's specific evidence about aged garlic and suppression of alpha brainwaves that have Come across somewhere in my head in my research. And I would say fermented garlic probably is better than regular garlic. Garlic itself is relatively high aflatoxin food. So good quality organic garlic that's been stored properly is pretty good. But a lot of times you see garlic that's been hung in someone's garage and they sell at the farmer's market and it's covered in black speckly stuff, that's actually not really a good idea. Garlic that's super clean is different. Then there's another thing that happens with garlic itself. The active ingredient in garlic, allicin. Not like your friend allicin, but a L, L, I C I N. Allicin itself is kind of related chemically to THC in that there's an unstable nitrogen bond. And the theory there is that that may be why it has this alpha brammable lowering effect. What I do know is that it really does lower alpha brainwaves because my alpha brain waves are like stupidly high and I've spent eight weeks of my life training them that way. And when I take garlic, I can't do what I normally do. My brain doesn't do what it can do, and it takes about four days to empty it out. And garlic, when it suppresses alpha, it increases that kind of angry, agitated, Italian, stereotypical housewife kind of energy. And if you're practicing meditation or practicing calmness, you're looking to lower sympathetic function. It's not what you want to do if you're trying to fight something like, oh, I don't know, cancer. There's studies on garlic and cancer you can look up on PubMed if you're using garlic as an antifungal. There are things you can do, especially as a woman with garlic, that I'm not going to go into great details here, but they work. Garlic can have great medical benefits, but don't take it every day. It's not a performance enhancing substance, It's a medical substance. And if you take it every day, you should expect to be a little bit more angry and jittery, am less able to reach the epic mind states you're capable of reaching. It's an inhibitor. That's why it's where it is on the bulletproof diet. I don't religiously avoid garlic. I just choose not to eat it very often because I like what my brain can do when it's got all of its cylinders firing.

Oh, but it tastes so good.

It does. And it gives you that body odor.

Oh, wait, okay. Kind of related to that. Talked about mold a little bit. There's a question from, from Murphy from the online form. And Murphy asks. I'm doing mold remediation in the near future at my office. I heard about the mold eating bacteria that you used in the old barn converted into the bulletproof facility. And I'm very interested in the product. When do you foresee it being available?

Well, this is a question about Homebiotic. This is a new company that I helped to get started that is growing a kind of bacteria that eats toxic mold. I'm going for broke here. The gloves are off and mold is affecting hundreds of billions of people globally in a way that's not okay and isn't commonly acknowledged. But the evidence is incontrovertible that especially in our global food supply, that we know it's a big problem. And then in our homes we're just becoming aware of how big a problem it is. This is a way fight fire with fire. So if the natural way that mold is kept in balance is with bacteria, that's what Homebiotic is all about. So specific strains that go after the toxins that mold forms as a fuel source. So Homebiotic, I'm hoping we're looking at 30 days, 45 days, fingers are crossed. It's very, very close. The reason it's taking more time than I would like is that I want to make sure that what I'm shipping is shelf stable. I don't want to send you dead bacteria, I want to send you live bacteria. So it's really important I get that right. Otherwise I'd be selling you something that it didn't work and that's not going to happen. I'm taking extra time for quality assurance, quality shelf stability testing. And when it's ready, I'll send an email out and I'll talk about it on the podcast. This is a really important product and I'll be inoculating my home with it every six months going forward for sure. And there's 30 bottles of it that went into the bulletproof labs.

All right, we've got time for one more question and this one comes from Kurt from the online forum. It's about WI fi and the question is I've stumbled across some products that claim to transform harmful WI FI signals to a corrective resonance. Wonder what your take was on the subject and if there's any other product recommendations you have to reduce EMFs and EMIs.

Well, there's a lot you can do to reduce them. The first book that made me pay attention to this, this is going back to the mid-90s was a Robert Beck or Becker book about electromagnetism. I think it was called Electromagnetism and Life. If I remember right, this goes way back. It has a black cover. I tend to remember book covers. And I read this and was like, wow, there's enough evidence here that we need to pay attention. And I've been just not avoiding EMF because it's gonna kill me right away, but I've just been minimizing exposure. And so I turn off my wifi. I have it on a little lamp controller so I can just flick the switch when I go to bed. And now magically when I'm sleeping, I don't have to have WI fi cooking my head. And I don't keep my cell phone in my pocket right next to the family jewels because that's just a bad idea. And I've looked over the years at things that transform WI fi. I use pulsed electromagnetic frequencies for healing and for human performance and for increasing stem cells and things like that. They actually work when the frequencies are right. It is my hope that if we could all get off of our brain damaged skeptic perspective on this and say, all right, there is ample evidence that there's a problem. Let's investigate the evidence. Instead of saying it doesn't exist and then just saying everyone who talks about it is full of woo. What we should do is be true scientists do the studies. There actually already are a bunch of studies. But when you look at all that stuff say, all right, what do we do to transform WI fi? So it benefits us instead of inhibits us. It wouldn't be that hard to do it and it would represent a little bit of growth for the wireless networking industry, which has been commoditized. So come on guys, get with it. You can hack people with WI fi. It just requires taking two disciplines and putting them on top of each other. Now that said, can taping a crystal pendant to the back of your phone change the WI fi coming off your phone? I'm highly skeptical. I have tried many of those devices because people keep sending them to me. I haven't felt a difference. The only one that had any, any meaningfulness. There's actually two things you can do. One of them is, is it spec or plug? What's their name? One of the companies, I'm pretty sure it's Spec makes, makes a case that doesn't transform the WI fi. It just angles the WI fi away from your head. And I actually have a. My wife has that case on her phone. I Think I had one, but I. It broke or something or actually, I just never got one for my iPhone 6. And so that's on my list of things.

Is that the one with silver in it?

I don't know if it has silver. It actually has an antenna in it. And wired did a test of the first rev of this for the iPhone 4, and they're like, of all the things we tried, this is the only one that measurably reduced radiation inside our fake head. When you're holding the phone up to the head, so it doesn't make the wifi good for you, it just takes what's shooting into your skull and shoots it away from your skull. That makes good sense. But most of these things that are going to sort of block it, here's what they do. When you make it hard for your iPhone to transmit signal, it automatically turns up the strength of the signal they adapt. They'll go between a half a watt and four watts of memory serves. So if you're in a low WI fi or, sorry, in a low cell phone coverage zone, your battery drains a lot more because it's sending more power that actually cooks you more. So I don't know about a lot of these things. A lot of them don't have good tests. And so I believe that some of them probably do something, but we don't have great data, except for about this one that I'm pretty darn sure is from spec. And what you can also do, though, is you can physically block these signals. So, Zach, I don't know if I'm supposed to do this, but I have to talk about quarterly.

Go for it.

So in the next quarterly box, and if you guys don't know about quarterly code, I have a box I send out once a quarter for people who are subscribed, and it costs 100 bucks, but it always has a lot more than $100 worth of stuff in it. And in this one, that's about. That's coming up here that you can still sign up for. Now, there is a specific device that very effectively blocks emf, which is worth. Actually, it's worth about a hundred bucks all by itself on top of all the other stuff that's going to be in there. So this is like promising to be the coolest of all the boxes. And this is something that I'm definitely a fan of. So this isn't something that you're going to put on just your cell phone, but it's a physical barrier kind of device. And this is something you can use With a cell phone to keep the cell phone or any kind of WI fi from penetrating your body. So that said, there's other shielding devices you can put a Tesla, not a Tesla coil, a Faraday cage. I'm confusing my Tesla coils and Faraday cages. That's extremely rare for me. A Faraday cage is a grounded metal box basically that blocks EMFs. And even when I built bulletproof labs, I grounded the entire metal skin of the building. There are still open windows and doors. So it's not a perfect Faraday cage, but it does lower emf. And I'm in an almost zero EMF environment anyway. It's very, very low here. So what you can do is you can get these things and there's like a mesh you can put around your bed that will block a lot of EMFs and things like that. But you put your cell phone outside of it. But in terms of putting a little sticker on the back of your phone that's going to make it magically do that. I'd like to see more evidence before I'd be willing to back something like that. I do not believe it's impossible by a long shot. And if someone says it's impossible, it's probably because they forgot how to think.

And one of the lowest tech things you can do to protect yourself besides turning off your WI fi and everything at night, it doesn't cost you any money, is just put your phone on airplane mode at night, at least when you're sleeping, and turn off your WI fi and your computer and all that. So if you're sleeping in an area and you're not doing anything for eight hours or seven hours, makes sense not to have those things on near your face.

There's also a nervous system reason to do that. If you're afraid that something bad might happen and you won't know about it when you're asleep, you need to deal with that. That's just fear. There's very little going on on the average night where someone's going to have to wake you up. And if that's the case, like have a landline where no one knows the number or something like that. Get a pager, like a one way pager, if they even still make those things. But the bottom line is sleeping with your phone not in airplane mode is like so 1997. You need to deal with that and put it in airplane mode if you're going to sleep. It's better for your nervous system, even if you don't even take into account.

The EMFs that's so 1997. Okay, I actually am going to do one more because this is a great way to end the podcast. And this is a question from George from Facebook, and he asks, just wondering, if you could only do three practices or biohacks, what would your top three be?

40 years of Zen. That advanced neurofeedback stuff has absolutely changed everything for me. So that's very, very precious and very expensive. But I am who I am today because of that. The Bulletproof diet, which is just important, that basic algorithm, get enough of the right kinds of food for energy, avoid the things that make you weak, and get enough of the nutrients that you need in that order. That has also completely transformed my ability to execute on everything, including being a dad and everything else. I have the energy all the time. The third one is really tough, and that would probably be nootropics. The benefits I get from using nootropics, and I have for more than a decade, are ongoing and substantial. I use unfair advantage. I use, on occasion, choline force. If I take that stuff every day, it's actually too much for me. I get acetylcholine dominance. I get jaw tension from it, which happens to around 20, 30% of people who have enough acetylcholine. I use aniracetam, which is not prescription, but it's an actual pharmaceutical, and I use a bunch of other nootropic herbs. And in fact, there's the stack upgrade that goes in your bulletproof coffee at the bulletproof coffee shop, which is a bunch of nootropic herbs that has really been transformative for me. So it's training the brain using precise feedback that it can understand. There's that algorithm for eating that is the bulletproof diet. And then amplifying what your brain is capable of doing using nootropics would be the list. Awesome.

Great way to end the podcast. Just want to encourage everybody out there to get on the email list because a lot of these answers are being put out through email. We don't spam, we never sell your email. It's always secure and safe. And there's a bunch of updates around content when new blog posts go up, and really cool podcasts, you can get those updates as well as product updates. A lot of people were asking about different products that you've talked about, Dave. So go to bulletproofexec.com right on the homepage. Put your email address in, we'll send you some free stuff, and you'll get a bunch of really cool biohacks along.

The way over the next 60 days, you have no idea the new products that are coming out. There's some seriously big ones coming, things that have been in the laboratory for a while and they're finally coming to fruition. So stuff that makes it easier for you to stable approve, things that you just wouldn't even expect. Man, this is the time. Have an awesome day and thanks for listening. I have a great time doing this podcast and I'm grateful to be here and to be able to answer all your questions. Keep asking them. I mean it. Thank you.

A Human Upgrade Formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.