DAILY HACKS To Reduce Fatigue & INSTANTLY BOOST ENERGY Today! | Dave Asprey

When you dig in the research, there's actually a debate. Do the muscles exist for the brain or does the brain exist for the muscles? And probably the brain exists for the muscles, which is a surprising thing for a lot of people. If your physical health isn't working, your brain won't work. It gets really strange, though, because the fundamental unit that controls most of the health in the brain is the same as the rest of the body, but it's just a question of density. We have these things called mitochondria, and these are things that were bacteria a couple billion years ago, and we somehow incorporated them into our cells. And there's all sorts of like tens of thousands of pages of academic debate about how this happened, because this is the genesis of all life on Earth. Somehow we became able to carry batteries around with us so that we don't have to have roots in the ground like plants do. Well, those little batteries were red rod shaped bacteria. We incorporated them into our cells, or they invaded ourselves, which is probably more like what happened. They took us over. And these little bacteria, there's about 15,000 of them per cell in the brain and only 1,000 of them per cell in the rest of your body, except the heart. So the eyes, the brain and the heart have this incredible density of these little things that control everything about you.

They give us energy, they give you.

Energy, but they also decide if cells live or die. They make hormones. Not the only part of you that makes hormones, but they're actually in control of the hormone factories. They decide whether or not you'll get cancer. They control cellular aging. And literally those little guys call the shots. And they don't really care much about what you want. They care about what they want. You're a walking petri dish for them. And they're going to make sure that the petri dish stays alive.

Wow. What are these called?

They're called mitochondria.

And they're in your brain, they're in your whole body. Yeah, they're cells.

Well, they're inside your cells, inside of cells. So each one of your cells has all these different components in it. You know, kind of like they're like a carburetor or a battery inside each cell. So about 10% of your body weight is your battery. And these things are the battery in the body.

They charge the body. They give you energy.

They give you energy.

They keep you awake.

Yeah. They take the food and they take the air, and they take light even, and they turn it into electrons, the same electrons that power your iPhone, power Your body. Wow. And it turns out these little guys are semiconductors. We didn't know this until about five years ago. And that's why they're affected by electromagnetic fields, by light, by electricity, and by temperature and all these other things that you can manipulate. And since they don't listen to you very well, but they listen to the world around you, you just change the world around you. And all of a sudden your brain has more energy. And when you get these guys hacked, you feel it first in your brain, and you feel it second in your. Right, in the chest, like in your emotional center. You feel it in your heart. You put your heart into something. So by doing this, of course your muscles are going to benefit because they all have battery needs. It's just they don't need very much to move. Thinking is actually harder work than moving. So what if you were to give yourself a battery upgrade? You'd be a better athlete, you'd be a better lover, you'd be a better spouse, and frankly, a better human being. Because you have more energy to say no when you have one of those urges to go out and do something you shouldn't do. Right, Right.

And so this helps you. But it all starts from the brain first. If the brain muscle and mass is not optimized, then you're saying that the rest of our body will not have the energy. Is that what I'm hearing?

You say, well, if your brain isn't working, the rest of your body won't be working and vice versa.

So it's a feedback loop.

Yeah, you can't.

It starts with the brain.

It starts with the brain.

If you have no sleep and you're eating horrible foods and you're not getting any sunlight and you're stressed out all the time, but you're working really, really hard. You're working out really hard, and you're trying to build your body. The brain is not gonna have the energy to recover, or you're not gonna be fully optimized or somethingthere's gonna be breakdowns.

What'll happen is these little bacteria throughout the body, these mitochondria, they're gonna sense that you're stressed. They're gonna sense they don't have enough recovery, they don't have enough energy. Like they are not getting enough food or enough light or enough of the other things that they rely on to be a healthy colony. When they don't get that, they're gonna communicate with each other. Life sucks. Get ready for a famine. There's a threat, there's Some ominous threat. And they're bacteria, they're stupid. They don. Threat is. So they're going to change your physiology to have higher cortisol, lower testosterone, less focus, less energy. You're more optimized to fight and to run away. And you're going to be cranky, more reactive, resentful. Yeah, your blood sugar is going to swing because like, what do I need to fight? What do I need to run? And here's the thing that comes out of this research that just fascinates me. There's only three things you need to do to stay alive. If you're a cat, if you're a bacteria, or if you're opossum or a tree, it doesn't matter. It's always only three things. Run away from or kill. Scary things. And plants do that by making poisons or spines and things like that. And they can't run away because they're plants.

Sorry.

Right. And then, let's see, you have to eat everything to make sure you don't starve to death. Right. So I've certainly done both of those behaviors. You know, you eat all the donuts and oops. And then the third thing is have sex with everything that's left to make sure the species doesn't die out.

Right. So reproduce. Yeah.

Right. So can you think of anything you've ever done you're ashamed of that didn't come from one of those three behaviors?

I mean, I've been rethink. I've done that a lot. I'm ashamed of all the. I mean, I was a sugar fiend my whole life totally. And you know, I cut out sugar for 45 days, last 45 days. And what a transformation in my mind and my body and my health just by not having sugar and then wanting to reproduce? Yes. I've been there too.

Yeah. Did I really go on that day?

Exactly.

The thing is, we take responsibility for those things and those are things we're responsible for. But they're not you. They're emergent behaviors that come from what bacteria want because the bacteria are the puppet masters in our bodies. And when you realize that, you better take care of those little bastards because they have control over you in some way. But when they give you enough energy in return for this symbiosis they have, you can then have enough energy for the human adult parts of your brain that to easily take over and to easily control things, we call that willpower. So when you feel the urge to flip the guy off in traffic or to yell at your spouse or to eat all the donuts. If your battery is charged all the way, you're like, oh, I got this. It's not even that big of a deal. I'm just going to say no. And it's those times when you're browning out a little bit, like, wow, it's the end of the day, I'm a little tired. Fine, I'll just have half the donut. And you dive in and you have no willpower. Yeah. There's frosted stuff all over your face and colored sprinkles on your shirt.

Or you say the thing you wish you didn't say or whatever happens. Yeah. Fascinating. So how did you. How have you applied this into your life? What are the main things that you've done on a daily basis that you've seen a transformation in your life? Because you've done a lot of biohacking and mind hacking for years.

For years.

So what is this new stuff that you've been doing? Just to be honest, I've. We've probably seen each other maybe 10 times, like in person. I've known you for a while, but we've probably been interacting in 10 times in person. This time you look younger than I've ever seen you. And we mentioned when you came in, you look stronger, you look like you have more energy, you look clearer. You never looked as clear as you do now. For some reason. You look very clear, high energy and youthful. Not that you did them before, but you just look even more youthful. What are the things that you're doing that is allowing you to have this energy of abundance that you've never had before?

I'm doing a lot of stuff. One of the things that, that a fair criticism of biohacking is how do you know if it works? Well, like you just said, there's evidence that something is working. Can I tell you that One of the 45 things I'm doing is the one? Well, no, because it wasn't the one. There's something called synergy and there's amplification. And if you do A, it doesn't work very well. You do B, it doesn't work very well. And shockingly, if you do A and B, it works. But the double blind reductionist, like western medicine thing, I swear, there's like some guy in a white lab coat, he's like, there was no such thing as bread. Here's why. I baked the water and nothing happened. I baked the flour, nothing happened. I baked the yeast and nothing happened. Therefore there is no bread. And you're like, maybe if you mixed them and then baked them, there would be bread. But no, that's more than one variable. I can't do it. I have to test single variables. Our bodies are incredibly complex systems. So what I do and what this program and Head Strong, the two week program is, is let's do many of the things that make your mitochondria stronger all at the same time. Instead of messing around with just one thing, give me a few examples of.

Some of the things. And I know you do things at every different point of the day. You do things in the morning, you do things in the afternoon. At night, you're like constantly testing and tweaking.

One of the things that doesn't cost anything that's really effective is changing temperature. So mitochondria, their job is to stay alive, and then their job is also to kill off the weak. So you got to stress them enough to kill off the weak. That process is called apoptosis. If you don't do that, you get cancer. So you want to.

You want to stress.

You want to stress them, but not too much. So it's brief periods of stress.

Like ice.

Ice is great.

Ice tubs or ice showers.

Yeah, just a cold shower in the morning, not a whole cold shower, because cold showers suck for a minute. Just take a hot shower at the end, turn on cold, do it all at once and just feel the pain for a minute. Those little guys, they're going to freak out.

That makes them stronger.

They get stronger and the weak ones die. And then you burn more calories throughout the day, your brain is clearer and inflammation goes down. Here's the interesting thing. Every time you have inflammation, it's because your mitochondria aren't working very well. So if something makes you inflamed, it's because you damaged your battery system in the body. When things are working well, they actually change the structure of the water in your body. It's called exclusion zone water. And no one knew mitochondria could do this until a couple years ago. Gerald Pollock figured this out and he talked about it at the bulletproof conference. So all of a sudden you're just telling these little guys, hey, the world isn't always warm and soft and fuzzy. Maybe you should just toughen up a little bit. And then that toughness gets built into your system and you carry it with you for the rest of the day. And so you're a little leaner, you're a little. Just more on point, and it cost you nothing. In fact, you saved a quarter cent on Heating hot water for that last one minute, it's. It was just a change in habit. Another thing is exercise. So I looked at all the research on mitochondria and exercise, like, what's going to make them stronger? What's not going to make them stronger? There's a set of studies that show if you go for a walk for 20 minutes a day, that that increases mitochondrial function. That's it.

That's it.

20 minutes. Now that's one set of studies. You can go for longer, but if you go for too long, you actually can stress them out, which isn't a good thing. So if you're going to every day go for a two hour run without recovery, it's the lack of recovery that really messes up your energy system. So you see a lot of people who are type A entrepreneurs like you or me, where we like to go, yeah. And they're like, and on top of that, I'm going to run the Kona Ironman and I'm going to do it without sleep just because I could. Right. So you push like that. And I've certainly done that in my early career in tech. The company that held Google's first servers and things like that, I burned, I'm like, why would you burn the candle at both ends when you could also light the middle? It's so bad for you. And it's bad for you because it breaks your mitochondria. They get stressed like that and they communicate with each other. They do it with chemicals. And we believe that they probably do it with light as well, which is really interesting. If those theories are proven, and I would bet right now that they will be, we know that these little parts of your cells make lights the same way an LED light does. They literally make little photons and they receive photons. So a set of scientists are proposing that that's how mitochondria talk, which is why if you're beating up your muscles all the time, you're going to be tired in your head because the whole system of these bacteria that are interacting and they're not bacteria anymore, they're part of our cells, they're called organelles. But they still have that little bit of bacterial behavior that's built in that allows us to be who we are and what we are. So it's fascinating.

Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

The other exercise, just so I. People listening. I don't leave them going. I just have to go for a walk once or maybe twice a week, but certainly once a week you need to kick your ass and there's two ways to do it. And these are actually both in the bulletproof D, too, because we knew they worked, but we didn't understand the mitochondrial part of that back then. One is intermittent sprinting. Basically sprint for 60 seconds. And there's a neat trick in Headstrong that's not in the first book. And I got this from John Gray.

The men are from Mars.

Yeah.

Okay.

That guy, he is a crazy biohacker. You would not know this from reading his books about relationships. No, he goes deep. So we got to be friends. And he's like, dave, after you sprint, instead of walking, lay on your back. Just lay down. Like the way you'll see CrossFit gym, people just kill themselves and lay down. There's a reason they're doing that. They're not doing it because they know the reason. They're doing it because they felt the urge. And that was.

Whenever I would do CrossFit to lay down, it's because I couldn't breathe. And I was just like, well, that's.

The body's natural response. So if you want to increase the height and the trough, which is what you're doing, you're telling these guys, you better be ready to just, like, bring it all at once. You're training the battery in your body to totally have a high voltage and then stop.

So you should stop and go on your back.

You shouldn't keep walking. Yeah. At least sit down. Better yet, lay down, really for a minute and then get up and sprint again and then lay down. And this is what animals will do, right?

That's true.

And it's amazing what a difference that is. So that's one way you kick your ass. The other way is lift heavy things for 15 minutes or less and don't stop. Keep the muscles engaged the entire time. Don't stop at the top, don't stop at the bottom. As heavy as you can, and you'll.

While stretching and warming up properly.

Why would you do that? Exactly. I do my warmups on the bulletproof vibe. I'm vibrating when I do that. And I do that vibration stuff every day or I go for a walk, but quite often I'm on the phone and I'm in Canada. It's dark and raining in Vancouver, right? Yeah, I'm Vancouver Island. I'm on an organic farm.

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So, I mean, it's funny because I've always. In track and field, when I ran track, they would always tell you to keep walking after you're done with the sprints. So it's interesting. And why is it, what's the science behind laying on your back or stopping?

It has to do with heart rate variability and cardiac recovery and getting the system to go from sprint to calm as fast as possible. That's what you're trying to get it to do. It's just to increase the recovery after the sprint so that you can do another sprint, another set. Yeah. And it's, you know, we're talking to this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It looks a little funny if you just collapse. People, people call ambulances off it and.

You, you only work out once or twice a week. Right. Like a heavy thing. Otherwise you're walking and that's it. Right?

That's, that's about it. Yeah. I'll go to yoga class when I get a chance. So like I appreciate yoga more for the, the stretching and all, but I'm, I'm doing all right from a 44 year old. You know, I'm 44.

You're a head strong?

Yeah, I'm head strong there.

You're muscle strong.

I still have like stretch marks. I mean I wait for people who don't know. I used to weigh 300 pounds. Like I was obese for until geez, my mid-30s.

Wow. You could carry it okay as a 64 guy. Yeah, a little bit better.

I couldn't quite see my feet. But you know, I remember the first time I saw my ribs. I'm like oh my God, like for years walking down the hallway, I would like turn sideways to make space for people because I was just used to having this bulk that I don't have anymore.

How's it feel?

It feels now natural but for a while it was pretty strange. And I put on about £19 in a month last month.

It's crazy.

I was actually doing something that's not in the book. But if you order, do the orderheadstrong.com I'll tell you how I did it.

Right.

But I wanted to increase my mitochondria by 50%. This is a major battery systems upgrade. And I used a research chemical called a SARM in order to do that. And I wasn't trying to put on muscles.

I'm happy not training heavy weights all the time. No.

And I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. I, I very much appreciate bodybuilders. I'm also looking to lift 180 and carrying too much muscle mass is hard. Isn't. Well, it's not necessarily. Yeah, it's not where I want to go. But so I had to buy new, a new suit, and, like, half my shirts don't fit. Oh, my God. You know, I was okay the way I was before, but it kind of feels good to have a little bit of extra muscle.

You're strong, man.

I'm feeling good. That's Great, man. And 20% increase in strength across the board on the ARX. I have this. When I do lifting, I'm fighting a winch with a computer, so I have, like, a strain gauge. I don't usually use heavy things that have gravity associated with them. So I'm basically pushing it. Something where it's always quantified and just across the board. 20%. 20%. 20% in a month. With three workouts on that and one electrical stimulation workout.

Amazing, man.

Super crazy.

And you look younger, too.

There's some stem cells involved, but a lot of this. As soon as you get the mitochondria working better, they're responsible for powering recovery and repair. So what happens? You do this to make your brain work better. You feel it in your brain first, but then it goes throughout the body. And I'm, you know, because you've known me for a while, I am getting younger.

You are, man. I'm not. I'm not. It's crazy. You almost looked like, a little weathered at times. Like, the first few times I met you. Maybe it was because you were, like, launching a business. You're like, everything was involved in distress.

When you first met me, I was a VP at a publicly traded company, head of global evangelism and starting. And in three years, I was one of the top 20 most influential voices in health on the Internet, like I was when I was a new dad or second you. Danny, there's a lot.

You got a lot going on.

Yeah, you do.

But you seemed like more. You just seemed, like, overwhelmed whenever. When I first met you a few times. Because you had a lot going on. I can only imagine. And now you just seem like this lightness about you.

There's something else I've done, too, and there's something I write about in here. I've talked about neurofeedback as, like, a general term, But I opened 40 years of Zen, which is now something that I'm running as a. I'm operationally running it, but something that I created that has been like my baby. I wanted the world's best brain mechanic in order to do performance tuning for my brain. I've had my own EEG machines at home for 20 years.

What's that?

EEG is the idea you can measure electricity coming out of the brain. Guess where that electricity comes from? It's all about mitochondria.

Right.

So you can measure it and then you can teach the brain, which means teaching the mitochondria how to work better.

Wow.

So I've been doing this, but I kind of topped out on all the things out there. So we created new hardware and software. And in order to teach you to be in this zen State, like 20 to 40 years of daily Zen practice, you can achieve that in five days. And that sounds like a big claim. It's quantitative analysis of your brain. I can show you your brain before and after. And like, there you go. You just, you made these shifts happen. So I've been doing that. It's a facility in Seattle. It's a five day executive thing very few people can go through. And like we vet out some people just where like, this isn't the right training for you. But I did that because I really wanted this for myself. So I've been able to go and do that. And here's what's interesting. You get a new battery upgrade, you do this headstrong stuff. What do you spend most of your energy on? You spend it controlling your desire to kill people, your desire to eat everything. You can turn off everything. That's the bulletproof diet. How do you lose the cravings? That's what the whole diet thing was about. That's one of the three things. I still haven't hacked that. How do you not want to have sex? Because actually it's good to want to have sex. If you don't have sex, your mitochondria won't be happy either. Because that's one of the reasons they exist, is to reproduce. Right. So sex is good for you and all that. But the thing is, how do you control that overwhelming anxiety, the fear, the sense of overwhelm the stress?

Yeah, yeah.

I sit in these big pods that we've made that literally have 24 electrodes glued to my head with a computer showing me how to be chill. So literally on the way over here, I was negotiating a hundred million dollar deal, no joke. And it's a very substantial thing. I'm looking at venture capital dollars and all these things. And right before that I was on stage with Jim Kwik at Kwik Learning. But I'm not stressed. Like you can see me. Like, I'm happy and I'm full of this. Before, even five years ago, without this level of training, I think it would have been harder for me to Task switch and just to be grounded and present. So some of this is just deep internal awareness. And because I don't have the food craving thing, the one third of my cognitive burden that would have gone towards saying no to food or thinking about food, that's gone.

You just give it to me. I need something. Yeah. I need some energy.

Yeah. And the part of me that's like I have to run away from or kill things that's turned off. I mean, if you were to attack me right now, I would respond appropriately and with my instincts. But I'm not like over sensitive to those things. So I'm in that sense of groundedness and awareness, but not in a state of fear. And that also frees up a huge amount of energy that was subconscious, but it was like constant worry in the background. What if, what if, like, what if there's not enough? What am I going to say next? All those voices, those are just gone. The voice in my head is just blissfully silent now. And then you know, there's, there's that third behavior there like that I'm married. So like, you know, I get something. That's great, man.

Amazing. What is this process called?

That's called five day process, called 40 years of Zen.

You created it or is it part of a program that I created it?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's my baby. I've been like, I gotta tell this story.

I'll check it out.

It's cool. Yeah, you should come up and do it. I would love to. Jim did it. Jim Cook did. When you. Let's see. In Vishen. Like honey did as well.

I don't know if you know Vishen. Yeah, of course.

If you. JJ, she was on your show. Yeah. JJ's been real. Yeah. In fact it's in her book. Yeah. So when you, when I started doing this in 1996, this is like going back, jeez. Like 20 years ago, I decided my brain was, I was really struggling and I didn't understand mitochondria. I didn't understand like how to turn energy on. I was really successful in my career, but I was, I was like, I wouldn't hire myself. I don't remember what's going on half the time. I'm all over the place. So I started doing neurofeedback in Silicon Valley and this, I walk into the office for the first time and this 10 year old kid comes up and he looks at me and goes. And just starts running in a circle around me and it doesn't stop yelling or running. It just runs like 20 or 30 times. I'm like, this is weird. And I realize, okay, the kid's probably autistic or something, but it was kind of jarring. So I did my training for 10 sessions, got some nominal benefits. This is very primitive tech. And then I come back six weeks later and the same kid's in the waiting room. I'm like, oh, God. And he walks up to me and goes, hi, my name's Bobby and makes eye contact. And I was so blown away. It was like a miracle had happened. And I realized this is where neuroplasticity comes from. This is why a kid could change so much. And I had some change from that. And that actually encouraged me to start not just doing neurofeedback, but I bought the gear and I've been doing it myself for 20 years. And I've been working with neuroscientists and leaders in the field because there's a certain point where you could harm your brain with neurofeedback because it's like doing surgery on yourself. You should be careful about that. What came out about that is actually part of what's in the book. And it's something called brain derived nootropic factor bdnf. This is a compound that makes your brain able to change itself better. And many of the practices in the two week program are designed to increase levels of this. That makes your brain more plastic, more youthful. The cold shower thing we talked about exercise, higher quality sleep. Not necessarily more sleep, just better sleep. And it drives me nice. People say you need more sleep. Like, no, you need good sleep. It's just such a different animal when you're like, I slept with no wasted time. I woke up in six hours and I felt amazing, by the way, the last 14, 38 nights, 6 hours and 5 minutes of sleep. Like I track it every night. I have for more than three years. That's how many. Five hours you say? Six hours and five minutes. That's my average. Some nights it's night before. Last was three and a half hours because I was flying. I had to get up early. Like, you can bring it all day, it doesn't matter. Amazing, right? And if you do that every night, you're not going to like your life. But it is, it's entirely flexible.

Yeah. Wow.

So the whole BDNF conversation is, how do you make your brain younger so you can learn better? And one of the things that happens as we age. And how old are you now?

33.

33. So you're already on this.

34 in a month. Yeah.

And you're already on this path.

How do I stay younger?

All right, 48% of people under 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. That means they're not making enough energy and also their, their neuroplasticity will go down because they don't have enough energy to make new neurons. And so that's half of us under 40. Over 40, everyone has mitochondrial insufficiency and that's called aging. So our goal is no matter what age you are, to give you maximum performance in this battery. So you can turn the battery on, you can, you can pull a charge out of it at very high voltage if necessary. And this would be the ability to sprint. The ability to lift something heavy or during like 40 years is in. We actually train you to increase voltage that your brain can make. It's a trainable thing. So literally the speed of neuron firing and the.