Dave Asprey’s FULL Masterclass on Cognitive Enhancement : 1217

I went down to Peru and I found a shaman and said, I want to do ayahuasca. He looked at me and he said, dave, inside your brain is total chaos.

I don't know how you're standing here.

In front of me.

90% of people who've come through 40 years of Zen, these are high performing executives. They probably bumped their head when they were a kid or an adult. You're not stuck with the brain you have.

Long term meditation changes brain structure.

You want to get the same brain as someone who's done up to 40 years of daily meditation practice you want to do in days. And I'm going to walk you through what I actually do on myself and with clients, because there's things you can.

Pick up from this.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

You've been asking me actually for years to put together a show where I basically interview myself to talk about the things I do for cognitive enhancement. So I'm going to share that with you. A pretty comprehensive list. It's not going to go into every little detail, but I'll tell you the stuff that I've done to reverse Asperger's to improve my IQ by at least 12 points. And I say at least because your IQ varies on a day to day basis and it's hard to measure that and just walk through my journey of cognitive enhancement because this is something that everyone could use today when your brain works better, well, you're hard to program and things just are easier. This is also, in part, but not completely, a summary of my major New York Times science bestseller book called Headstrong, which is to this day still many people's bible of cognitive enhancement. And I'm going to start with where it came from. So you understand how powerful this is. And if I can do this, given where I come from, it's going to be way easier for you. You might have heard me say I used to weigh 300 pounds and I did. Well, technically I weighed 298 pounds naked, so that's close enough to 300 because you normally at least wear pants when you're being weighed. So there you go. That happened when I was about 23.

Years old and I struggled with my.

Weight even in, you know, eighth grade.

And I gained weight and lose weight over and over.

My metabolism was already breaking. I went to the doctor, I was 14. And he said, you have arthritis in your knees. I'm like, isn't that what old people get? And I was kind of just like, what is going on with me. And I'd been on antibiotics for years because of chronic sinus infections. I had chronic fatigue syndrome and didn't know it. We didn't even talk about it back then. But all the symptoms of it and symptoms of toxic mold poisoning, even though we didn't know. That's why I had nosebleeds all the time. So let's just say I wasn't very healthy metabolically, even as a teenager. And if you're into functional psychiatry or functional medicine, I had adhd, ocd, odd, ptsd, Asperger's syndrome, anxiety that I didn't even know was anxiety because it was always there, but I just pushed through it and did my best. Socially awkward, all that kind of stuff. And you've probably heard me say that by the time I was 26, I made $6 million. And these were pre Biden dollars. So that. That was real money back then. That's probably the equivalent of about $20 million today. I lost it when I was 28. So I tried having a relationship, getting married in my 20s briefly.

I tried being in magazines.

I was an entrepreneur magazine when I was actually 23 for being the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. That's my. Yes, I was really fat, picture in a double extra large T shirt. And I tried being rich, and I was still miserable. So that set me on a lot of the path of biohacking. So this episode is how I resolve that. The goal in this episode is to just offer you the most effective tools of everything I found to give you control of your brain. One of the biggest things that set me on this path was Dr. Daniel Amen's work today. Daniel and I are good friends, and I'm on Dr. Amen's board of directors for Amen Clinics. I read an article about this new type of brain imaging about 20 years ago, and I went in to see one of his psychiatrists. The guy looked at me, was in Palo Alto, and you could sort of see, tech bro wants Adderall to get through business school. But that wasn't my thing. I didn't want Adderall. I was failing out of Wharton. And I was thinking, maybe I'm just not trying, or maybe I'm dumber than all my classmates because my brain would just shut down when I would try to take a test. I get 100% on the first thing, 80 on the second, 50 on the third. And after that, it was like there was nothing going on and I would just fail. So that wasn't. Wasn't an ideal situation. And when he, the psychiatrist, saw my brain scan, when I came back, he looked at me and he said, dave, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. And I just kind of took a deep breath.

Finally, someone believes me.

It's not that I'm not trying to. It's that I'm trying as hard as I can, and it's not working.

And I have the pedal all the way to the floor, and the car.

Won'T go any faster. It's slowing down, and you can push harder, but there's nothing left to push. And I was desperate, to be perfectly honest. So the reason I felt so validated by this is like, oh, it's real. And better yet, I have a hardware.

Problem in my brain. It's not a moral failing. It's not a lack of intelligence.

It's just something's not working right. And I can hack that. But, you know, being dumb is harder to hack.

And I was starting to wonder if I was dumb.

What you'll find today, if you look around in your family, in your workplace, there are a huge number of people who are wearing the same camouflage I was as a regenerative farmer.

There's sort of two kinds of animals.

Animals like sheep, they will not show you when they're sick because they'll get kicked out of the flock and then they'll get eaten. So they pretend. So as a farmer, you have to be really aware of the sneaky sheep. And that one's a little off. You better isolate it and fix it. Well, humans are the same way. So we're wired to not show our weaknesses like that. And it's surprising because even people who are very successful are oftentimes struggling with this. The number of big CEOs who have had toxic mold or struggling with hormones, with brain energy, can't remember anything. They're burning out, and they don't even know why.

They don't know what's up.

So this is happening.

So I went on a path that.

Started with taking cognitive enhancement drugs. I found a. An old, old newsletter called Smart Drug News. And one of my mentors is Steve folks who I met through running a longevity nonprofit group in the late 90s and early aughts. And Steve for years had been documenting all these pharmaceuticals and natural substances that we would now call nootropics that made your brain work better. And I spent 1200 bucks, which was a huge amount of money for me back then. Keep in mind, I'd already lost that $6 million. And I got this white package wrapped in string from Europe and I'm like, I finally got all my smart drugs and I took them and I thought, this sucks, they don't work. So I took them for a week and I was all disappointed and I quit taking them. And the next day I noticed I was forgetting words that.

Wait a minute.

When I'm on them, my brain works like it's supposed to, so it just feels natural. So it took me a while to learn the difference between being in an enhanced cognitive state and not being in one. And it turns out the lack of a nootropic is easier to notice because it feels very natural to feel like yourself, which is kind of obvious when you say it. For me, the biggest signal, whether I was on or off, is I would play a little game that required working memory at the time. I used something called FreeCell. It's a free app on mobile devices. It's a kind of solitaire that means you can always win if you can just remember things enough and you could.

Tell when you go into flow.

And you can do it, it takes you three minutes. Or if your brain's not working, it takes you 10 minutes. Today there's all kinds of free and widely accessible things that'll let you track your cognitive function if you just want to see if it's better if you don't have a good sense for that. But that wasn't enough, cuz I was still miserable. My brain still didn't work very well, but at least I had a signal for it. And when I exhausted all the western stuff, I said, I'm going to have to try the things that aren't really supposed to work. In fact, things that I think are total bs. I went down to Peru and I found a shaman and I said, I want to do ayahuasca. And the people I was staying said, you're white. I said, yeah, yeah, I know I'm white, but I've done my research and I want to do it. And they connected me with the right.

Guy and I did it.

And it was mostly interesting. And I'm lucky that I found a real shaman with proper training. I think ayahuasca can be dangerous, even though it does turn on neuroplasticity for you. And I have friends who've done it with great results. And there are some people in the biohacking field who are, you know, proudly bragging that they've done this 87 times. I'm like, when is this? When are you gonna find out it's not working? So I wouldn't put that on my top list. Especially when there are much safer ways, which I'll talk about later here, to get that kind of neuroplasticity that are related to psychedelics but aren't technically psychedelics. But that's not the main focus of this. This is, what are all the things you can do for your brain. I also went to Nepal and Tibet and I learned meditation from the masters. I went to remote, remote places in the world. Five days of four wheel driving to get to Mount Kailash. And I've studied with gurus in lots of different disciplines. Lots of advanced yoga, breathwork. Actually hosted a workshop with Stan Grof, who created holotropic breathing to replace LSD when LSD became illegal. He's a licensed psychotherapist and widely considered the father of transpersonal psychology.

I've done emdr.

I fasted in a cave. I learned about pre and perinatal trauma, in other words, birth trauma, and what that does to your nervous system before you even have a really functioning brain. I was born with a cord wrapped around my neck. That was some of my anxiety response. All of this can be reprogrammed and I'm sharing it with you because I've done everything and I want you to know which things are going to be.

Most useful for you so that you.

Can pick and choose.

You're unlikely to need to do everything.

I talk about here, but if you choose to do some of them, I want you to choose the ones most likely to work for you. And that's why I'm structuring this episode this way for you. I also decided that I wanted to try neurofeedback because I am a network engineer and a computer science guy. And in the late 90s, there was nobody doing this. And I found one chiropractor in the Bay Area.

I went into his office and he.

Before he even hooked me up, he had me sit next to the fish tank with the beaded curtain. And a little kid just comes up to me and starts screaming. Like, ah. Just runs in a circle around me over and over and over. And I'm kind of like, what is going on here? But I went and I did the thing and I came back five or ten times and sometime in there, same little kids in the waiting room, and I'm thinking, oh, God. But he just walks up and shakes my hand and says, hi, my name is Bobby. Or something like that and I'm like, what just happened? His mom says, you know, he has autism and this stuff has really changed his brain. And even though I felt some small shifts and just awareness of what my nervous system did, I realized there's more to this. So I bought my first neurofeedback machine. And if you're new to the idea of neurofeedback, it's just the idea that your brain makes electricity and you can measure the electricity and see what's going on in there. So I started doing my own neurofeedback at home and I bought a clinical grade machine and I've been working in the neurofeedback field for 25 years, we'll call it recreationally, and for the last 11 or 12 years professionally at 40 years of Zen, which is my Seattle based neuroscience brain upgrade program. And we actually build our own hardware and software for enhancing cognition. And I didn't necessarily want to get into that because it's going to be a big business. I got into that because I wanted the equivalent of a Formula one mechanic for my brain because I know that's what I needed. And it's been transformative for me and for almost 2,000 people who've been through the program over the years. But it's not, it's not for everyone. And it's a heavy lift, but it replaces decades of meditation in a small amount of time. But along the way I worked with different people in the field of neurofeedback and sometimes one of them a well known provider. I couldn't sleep well for six months after I did it and I heard a couple other people later the same experience. And it just realized doing neurofeedback on yourself with clinical grade stuff, it's like doing brain surgery on yourself. You don't want to do that. You need to work with world class people if you're going to do this. Because not all neurofeedback is the same. And some of what I'm going to share in this episode comes from looking at thousands of brains and consulting with people about how to improve their cognition. And a lot of this has nothing to do with neurofeedback. It just has to do with neuroscience and mitochondrial biology and how things work. So here's the basic way to think about improving your brain and headstrong. My book has a lot of this really laid out for you along with specific supplements and things like that. There's two aspects that are most important for your brain. Number one is turning up the power Supply in my case, because I had Asperger's, which is a form of autism, and I say had, which triggers some people. And it is something you can heal from. It's just an enormous amount of work that most people really probably don't want to. Don't want to do. But when this happens, something causes neuroinflammation. And that means that it's like there's static on all the lines. So hearing, seeing, feeling, you don't get a clean signal. So it's hard to make sense of the world. So your brain, it's trying to do this, but at the same time, you have static, you have mitochondrial dysfunction. So you have less energy in the brain and you have a noisier signal. So of course, the brain is going to throw out a lot of information that a normal neurotypical person would just automatically pick up and build into your reality. Things like facial recognition, things like social skills. Because you just don't have enough power.

And you don't have a clean enough.

Signal to be able to sort through all that and see the patterns. The gift of this, though, is that your brain, because it's constrained by limited power, it becomes enormously efficient. And then if you can restore the power, then you now have a very efficient brain that's at its normal power level. Sadly, you probably still have static on the lines. You clean up toxins, rewire the nervous system. Now you have a clean signal, you have a high powered brain, but you have to retrain all those senses. So I've gone through and I've retrained my vision, I've retrained my hearing, I retrained the way my tongue moves. And I've been working on functional movement for a very long time, in addition to rewiring my brain with neurofeedback. But to do any of that, you start with power. Power comes from mitochondria. And once you get that done, then you focus on making the brain able to change. It doesn't matter how old you are. But that's called neuroplasticity. I was really honored to have Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner for discovering improving neuroplasticity on the show. He won the Nobel Prize for that, if memory serves, in 1994. And before that, neuroscientists believed that you had all the cells in your brain you were going to have when you were born and that you couldn't change it at all, that the brain was locked in. That's total nonsense. But that's what we believed. And Eric's work really helped me see, okay, I have the capacity to change. And the easiest way to change a system is show it what it's doing. So you get real time feedback. And the brain's really interesting because it's the only part of the body that doesn't have monitoring of itself. The only nerves that are really monitoring the brain is called the fifth cranial nerve. It goes to your rear molars, otherwise the brain can't feel itself. But you can feel your gut, you can feel if your knee hurts or something. And this is why, if you've ever seen a video of a neurosurgery on someone's brain, they can open up your brain and poke around in there while you're awake and you don't feel anything. It's because there's no nerves in the brain that are sensory nerves. There's neurons, they're doing thinking, but it's pretty fascinating. So when you use neurofeedback as a mirror for the brain, the brain is the most self optimizing organ in the body. But it has nothing, no signal to optimize on. It's very hard to get something in there. So neurofeedback just provides a really direct way to hold up a mirror for your brain. So it could go, oh, I guess I could do that better. Or of course there's more to it than that, but that's a big part of it. So creating neuroplasticity means that the brain is more able to change. You can learn languages easily when you're 12 because you have high levels of a compound called BDNF, brain derived nootropic factor. Or if you get later in life, you just have less of this. So could you raise BDNF in order to make yourself more neuroplastic? Hell yes, you can. Can you raise mitochondrial function? Yes. And it's a primary way to focus on enhancing your brain function. You can also manipulate neurotransmitters, specific neurotransmitters, which is what a lot of nootropics do. And there's some formulas out there that work really well if you're middle aged, if you take it when you're young, you're just going to get jaw tension, for instance. So some, some of this is dependent on your age. But we'll go through all that. So let's get back to increasing mitochondrial function in the brain and increasing neuroplasticity. So people will say over and over.

Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell.

And that Is, I think that's actually some sort of conspiracy from your mitochondria to make you underestimate how in charge of your life they are. Because if you think about it, your mitochondria, they were once ancestrally floating around as independent bacteria. Bacteria can move around. They can make decisions based on environmental factors. And based on those decisions, they do different things. So they have awareness and intelligence. Not very big, but they do have it. And we tell ourselves we harness them as our mobile power plants. The mitochondria are distributed consciousness in your body. They talk to each other, they vote. We know how they do it. And they see reality before you do. And based on that, you realize mitochondria are calling the shots for how you feel a lot of the time. And by increasing function of your mitochondria, you have more energy in the brain, which can take up to 20% of your calories every day. You also make them relax, which makes you relax. So there's this really rapid mitochondrial consciousness that sees reality and then does a bunch of stuff and shows it to you about a third of a second later. And we can measure that at 40 years of Zen, or at least using the kind of tech at 40 years in that's called P300D. So more mitochondrial function equals more information processing, recovering from stress better and being able to focus for longer periods of time. How do I know that? Well, there's studies I reference in the book. But more to the point, and 40 years is, then we're doing advanced meditation with electrodes on our head, measuring brain waves, showing you how to meditate better and faster and go into a very specific states. I have found that if I enhance mitochondrial function, people who come through 40 years of Zen can do two and a half times more neurofeedback before their brain is just too tired to do it. If I don't feed them right, I don't get their mitochondria fully charged. They just don't have endurance. Now, does this apply to you? Well, according to the research in the book, 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. Everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. It's called aging. At least unless you do something about aging, you can have younger mitochondrial function. It's just work to do that. So we won't. We want to upregulate your mitochondrial function and we want to upgrade your neuroplasticity. And if we can do those two.

Things, you're going to be able to learn faster, you'll be more agile and.

More flexible, less resistant to change, and you'll have enough energy to change. And that's foundational for cognitive enhancement. Before you get into fancy smart drugs or into manipulating neurotransmitter levels, which you can also do. So let's talk about some specific techniques that you can use and I'll talk about some of the science behind them. There's a study in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and showing that just meditating influences your brain's neuroplasticity because it increases bdnf. And when BDNF goes up, you grow new neural connections. And this research specifically shows that long term meditation changes brain structure and boost BDNF.

And I've seen this when people come.

In to 40 years of Zen who are advanced meditators, we can see in.

A, it's called a QEEG, this is a 20 channel cap we put on.

And we measure how does your brain compare to a bunch of other people's.

Brains on a very detailed level.

And you can see long term meditators brains are very, very different.

And this is likely according to the.

Study, because meditation itself raises bdnf. But you can do it a lot faster with some other things. One of them is neurofeedback, which is different than meditation, but can go with it the way I pair them at 40 years of Zen, neurofeedback shows a significant increase in BDNF levels. And this is in a journal called Neuroregulation. And they found that when you do neurofeedback you improve synaptic conductivity. And that means your brain can adapt and learn and recover from stress faster. And that's certainly what I've seen in my own life and what we see in people who come through 40 years of Zen. So what are the supplements that you'd want to take that help out with all of this you'd want to use. I'm going to sound like a broken record here.

MCT oil.

And not just any MCT oil, C8 MCT oil. And if you know my background from when I used to, when I started and used to run Bulletproof, I have nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore. Danger Coffee is my new company for coffee. Because who knows what you might do. And Danger Coffee is a very different take on coffee with electrolytes and trace minerals that affect how you feel after you drink it. But I'll still put C8MCT oil in.

C8MCT oil is different than the MCT oil.

You'll see a Lot of companies sell this rare form. It's about 5% of what's in coconuts. In phase two, clinical trials can prevent or even reverse Alzheimer's disease. It's because the neurons in your brain prefer ketones to glucose for energy.

And when you think about it like.

Okay, if I could have extra energy for my neurons, would I be able to meditate better? Well, yeah, you can think better too. And it takes a couple teaspoons a tablespoon, and that'll gently raise your ketone.

Levels, even if you're having carbohydrates.

I don't put people on a zero.

Carb diet at 40 years of Zen.

Their brains need glucose, but I make sure ketones are present. You can also look at something like a ketone dial. There's a company called HBMN that makes ketone iq, which is slightly stronger than MCT oil, but it's not too strong. And there are some ketone supplements that are probably not a good idea. But ketone IQ works really well. And you can save some money with ketone IQ using this affiliate code. But getting back to MCT oil or it's a Big Brother ketone dial or ketone iq, there's a study from the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease where researchers looked at MCT and they tested cognitive performance in adults that had mild cognitive impairment. And when they had C8, MCT, the one that I turned into a billion dollar industry. But they have a significant increase in blood ketone levels that were directly associated with improved memory recall and cognitive performance. And these are quantitative tests. And they said, oh, ketones are an efficient fuel for the brain, which is really important because Alzheimer's is oftentimes just impaired glucose metabolism in the brain. Oftentimes. If you look at the episode with Dale Brezin, who wrote the End of Alzheimer's Disease, he talks about toxic metals and toxic mold as being potential causes of Alzheimer's effect. He doesn't say potential. And he's right. Those are not the only causes. But ketones help with everyone.

I actually helped to fund some research at UC San Diego by Dr. Cun, who further elucidated how important C8 ketones are versus just regular MCT oil. So I recommend you do C8.

It doesn't take a lot.

You put in a smoothie, you can pour it on your salad, and yes, you can put in your danger coffee. It does work for cognitive enhancement and there are studies for this.

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Then there are good old fashioned omega 3s or fish oil. I have been recommending for years, since my very first book that instead of fish oil you take krill oil because krill oil is phosphorylated which means it can enter cells much more easily, especially in the brain. But a good quality Omega 3 that comes from fish that doesn't smell and taste fishy. That means it's oxidized and bad for you. Can be good for you. It's a major part of brain cell membranes. And I wrote about how quickly the brain changes when you take some omega 3s. It's very fast. There's DHA and there's EPA. These are the two things. Sorry, my vegan friends. Vegetarian omega 3 is not EPA or DHA. What it is is a type of fat that converts at a ratio of 45 to 1. So you need 45 grams of vegetarian omega 3 from plant oils for your body to possibly make 1 gram of EPA or DHA. And it's unlikely your body can do that because you need a lot of enzymes, co factors and minerals that you probably don't have dialed in. So what I recommend you do is you take some DHA and some epa. DHA works better for pregnancy and for younger brands and EPA works better for older brands. So as you age, you want to take more EPA and a little bit less DHA as you're younger. More dha, less epa. And if you don't want to think about it very much, just take half and half, you'll be fine. I'm not saying that you don't need DHA as you age. In fact, there's a study about that. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition did a study or they published a study. They found that older adults who took DHA had substantial improvements in memory and learning tasks compared to those who didn't supplement. And they proposed. The reason, like I say in multiple books, is that DHA allows you to have fluidity of brain cell membranes. Now, problem is, if you're like most human beings, including me, you're going to use the lowest energy decision making available, which is if something is good, take more. If something is bad, have none. Do not overdose on fish oil. It's an unstable fat, so a gram is probably a good idea. But I used to do, you know, three glugs out of the bottle and overdosing on fish oil going to create inflammation at the body. But there are cases like right after a traumatic brain injury where higher dose might be appropriate for shorter periods of time. So I'm concerned about people overtaking their EPA and dha, but I think it's useful and you can get around that by taking krill oil, which is more expensive but works better. It's also worth looking at L Theanine. L theanine works by crossing the blood brain barrier and it modulates some neurotransmitters, especially gaba, dopamine and serotonin, which means that you are relaxed but still alert. And if you feel anxiety and tension, this might be something you want to do. Some people try to put it in coffee. It doesn't taste amazing in coffee. You could just take a capsule. It's easier that way. But whatever turns you on. L. Theanine does pair very well with caffeine. So you get the upping part from the caffeine, but you don't get jitter, anxiety, or energy crashes. My experience is that most people don't get jitteriness or anxiety or energy crashes if their coffee doesn't have mold in it. And if you try danger coffee, I know this isn't an ad for it. It's just like, this is how stuff works. I make stuff I can't buy. Having the high therapeutic dose of trace minerals and then you can't taste them. It just tastes like a coffee that's paired with electrolytes. So it goes in and people generally don't have the energy crash from that. But if you have a problem with all forms of caffeine, L. Theanine might be something you need to do. Or if you're just relatively anxious all the time, it can help you chill out. Some people take it for sleep, some people take it with their caffeine.

And there are studies to support this.

The Journal of Nutritional Neuroscience published a study showing that L. Theanine promotes alpha brainwave activity. Now, in this study, people who consumed L Theanine had increased feelings of relaxation and focus without drowsiness. Some people fetishize alpha brain waves, and they're not that special. In fact, if you'd like to triple your alpha, ooh, wouldn't that be great? Here's how you do it. Close your eyes and look up to your forehead right here. There. You tripled your alpha. So it turns out when you're looking at electrical activity in the brain, it's a matter of alpha being about 4 hertz. And so there's many different levels in that 4. And you want to be able to have the right level within that spectrum at the right place at the right time, in concert with other parts of the brain. So just having alpha isn't that special. Just close your eyes, you'll get alpha. Be in darkness, you'll get alpha. So what I would say there is, though, when a supplement can raise that, irrespective of your eyes being open or closed, it's probably going to be helpful for you. Just don't over emphasize alpha, because every person has their own unique alpha signature that works best for their brain. And just broadly saying, I'm going to raise alpha and it's going to give me some superpowers, it's not going to do that. Another way to meaningfully improve cognitive function via mitochondrial enhancement is taking NAD plus precursors. NAD plus is a coenzyme, and I've done, I think, five or six episodes on it. And it's part of how your body makes electricity, how it makes ATP, and really how it moves the electricity that your mitochondria make in the Krebs cycle. So the electrons can move and be used in other parts of the cell. And NAD plus goes down as you age, so your cellular processes go down, which means you have less energy. And less energy in the brain equals a brain that has to push harder to get stuff done, which means it's harder and slower. And there are lots of studies. David Sinclair, who's well known for talking about nad, has been on the show a couple times. He's a friend. And there's a study in the journal Cell Metabolism where they found that NAD plus levels do decline with age and that it does impact mitochondrial function. And they showed that taking NAD plus precursors like NMN or NR can increase NAD levels, can improve mitochondrial efficiency and give you more energy.

It's kind of a good thing.

My favorite way to raise NAD is from my friends at qualia. It's qualia life.com Dave mind qualia life.com Davemind and Nad is messy. I have tried every precursor since the very first studies came out. And most people feel great when they start taking just a precursor. But after about two months, you have some inflammatory cells that like NAD more than your own cells. And it can increase these inflammatory cells called CD38, using a formula like the Qualia NAD Plus. It has things in it that help your body not go down an inflammatory pathway. But everyone will feel good for the first month on any NAD formula, I just want you to feel good for multiple months. There are two other things that are foundational for cognitive function, and they're almost boring. But these are two things that I manufacture, and I make these for you because they're cost effective. They're actually very cost effective, and they're critically important. I made the mistake when I was young of starting with fancy pharmaceuticals in order to enhance my brain. But your brain can do a lot of stuff on its own if it has the right precursors. The worst thing you could do is give your brain a signal to grow or improve. But not have the raw ingredients to do that because that's just going to create stress in the body. There was a demand I couldn't improve to meet the demand. So I just got stressed. The first of these supplements is called vitamin D. And you can go to vitamindake.com that's D, A, K, E. And vitamin D is something that's been core for biohacking forever. You need this for neurotransmitter function and you need vitamin A from animals, not plants. The beta carotene doesn't work. Vitamin A supports neuroplasticity, vitamin K protects neurons, and vitamin E protects brain cells from free radicals. But you want to take them together because vitamin D enhances your body's ability to absorb calcium, which is a good thing. But if you don't have vitamin K at the same time, calcium won't go to the bones, it might go to other tissues. And calcification of your brain or other tissues is not a good performance enhancement or longevity strategy. I put them all together in vitamin D and it costs about 22 bucks a month because one bottle is a two month supply. It's meant to give you broad spectrum, fast soluble vitamins. And without these, you put effort into improving your brain and your brain won't do it. The next most important thing is a supplement from the same website, Vitamindake.com and it's called Minerals101. Most of your neurotransmitter production and a lot of your cellular energy production relies on minerals. If, like me, you've been a vegan or raw vegan, or you at a ton of superfoods, even things like chocolate, sadly, raspberries, beets and kale and spinach and almonds and whole grains and whole nuts, they suck minerals out of your body. This is how the plants keep you from wanting to eat. Too many plants and you are deficient in minerals almost certainly because you're alive and you eat food that's grown in the soil we have on the planet today. It's just how it is. I've seen profound changes in my own ability to be lean, to be focused, to sleep, just by getting my mineral levels up. So vitamin D and minerals101. One of the most important minerals that's present in minerals101, that's something you probably want to take even more than the amount that's in that broad spectrum formula is magnesium. Magnesium and zinc are particularly important for cognitive function and they're included in Minerals 101. But I would love to see you take even 800 milligrams of additional magnesium, as long as it doesn't cause disaster pants. Too much magnesium is known for creating, well, underwear.

Surprise.

So are there studies to support this? Yeah, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, they looked at taking a mix of vitamin D and essential minerals, including magnesium and zinc, and what did it do for cognitive performance and health? And they found, surprisingly or not surprisingly, if you've been listening to the show for a while, is that adequate levels of those fat soluble vitamins and minerals were associated with improved brain function, including memory, cognitive flexibility and mental clarity. And the participants who use the supplements showed measurable improvements in cognitive test scores over a 12 week period compared to people who didn't supplement.

Hmm.

See why I would tell you to take vitamin D and Minerals 101? Because they're affordable and they don't just support your brain. There are thousands of enzymatic processes involved in aging, immune function, muscle building, and fat burning that rely on minerals your body doesn't have. So take them for your brain.

But you're going to get a lot of other benefits.

Members of Upgrade Labs, my biohacking franchise that has 32 locations in the process of opening across North America. These are the two most commonly recommended supplements. Just because they work and they're very cost effective, these are not gonna give you a boost on day one. But in that study, having adequate magnesium, zinc and vitamin D equaled improvements. And what else could you do that didn't cost anything? Because anytime I write a book or I do biohacking, like, what's the principle then? How do I do the free version? How do I do the medium cost, you know, 50 bucks or something? And then what do crazy billionaires do? And I do all of it, and.

Then I share it with you here.

So one of the things you can do that doesn't cost a lot is meditation and breath work. I particularly like box breathing, where you just breathe in, hold, breathe out, and hold empty for the same number of seconds. Most people start with four seconds on each side of the box. Do five of those breaths and just feel your whole nervous system calm down. You can also, for relatively low cost, eat less toxins. Lead, mold and heavy metals, especially mercury and lead, have terrible effects on brain function and mitochondrial health. They build up over time. And if you've tried everything and doesn't work, testing for mold toxins and metal toxins as inhibitors of cognitive function is something you really, really want to do. Now, anytime you talk about cognitive enhancement, you kind of also have to Talk about removing the things that are stopping you from being enhanced, if that makes any sense. So maybe you're feeling slow because you are slow, but we're not even about enhancing. I just want to get you back up to baseline. And there's a case study from the New England Journal of Medicine looking at lead and cognitive decline in children. They looked at children exposed to lead in early childhood and they measured blood lead levels, which is a really good marker. And they measured cognitive abilities using IQ tests. Even low lead exposure, decreased iq, attention span, academic achievement. And they said even the current safety levels are probably wrong. In fact, I'll tell you, there is no safe dose of lead. And the EPA used to believe it was 20 parts per million. They cut it to 10, they cut it to 5. Let'll make you slower. Let'll especially make your kids slower. It also increases cardiac risk. So having a toxic metal avoidance and elimination protocol where you occasionally take things that chelate out lead and mercury will improve cognitive function if they're inhibiting your function. Other things you might consider for cognitive enhancement, grains, especially gluten. And gluten containing grains. They're not good for your brain. They're better than starving. And there's always people get mad and say, I don't have Crohn's disease. Look, you do what you want to do. The evidence is pretty strong. You can look at grain brain from My dear friend Dr. David Perlmutter. You could look at many, many different studies. Gluten is not good for your brain function. So avoiding grains, avoiding processed sugars, and especially avoiding vegetable oils, especially the fried stuff that you see at restaurants where the oil's been used over and over. These mess up the cellular membranes, the fat and cellular membranes in your brain. I published the results of studies in my cognitive enhancement book, Headstrong, looking at where does fat go when you eat it. The brain and the white fat in your body absorb fats from your diet the fastest. So avoid that stuff. And if you're going to do it, make sure you're getting your vitamin D because you need some of that vitamin E to help protect you from those oils that you really don't want to be eating. You can also look at EMF mitigation. And some people still think electromagnetic frequencies don't do anything to the brain. I like to take them to upgrade labs and I like to put are high powered pulsed electromagnetic frequency devices that can actually make your bones more dense and exercise your cells. If you put that over someone's head, their brain gets scrambled I don't really put it over their head. But you really, really feel it. And if not, I'll just put it over their bicep and turn it up until their body's twitching. And it's hard to say these don't affect you. I've also worked with other companies that have very subtle magnetic fields. They play over the brain that change brain function. And this is a real thing. So should you walk around in terror? No.

Should you turn off your WI fi.

At night and put your cell phone in airplane mode and keep it away from your bed? Yes. So do your best to minimize exposure to EMFs, knowing it probably isn't helping your brain. Is there a mechanism of action in studies? Yes. It's called the voltage gated calcium channel. And small amounts of EMF create voltage on cell membranes. That's how PEMF therapy works at upgrade labs. When it creates voltage like that, there is a calcium channel and the calcium channel that's gated by voltage opens and you get a calcium influx into cells which causes mitochondrial swelling. Which causes your brain doesn't work as well cuz your mitochondria aren't happy. It's just science. There are studies that support all of this. You don't have to be terrified of things. You're not going to see me holding my phone up against my head. I have wired headphones for that. And this is a little bonus thing. You want to spot a biohacker, they have a wire coming out of their phone instead of using Bluetooth in their ears. Because Bluetooth in the ear creates a lot of EMFs in a part of the brain that's exposed via the ear canal. I wouldn't recommend those for long term cognitive function, but you might say it's worth it. And I totally respect that too.

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You can look at red light therapy for boosting energy in your cells. I started one of the first red light therapy companies called True Light and there are many, many other brands on the market. And when you get into the high end therapeutic side of things, there's a company called Five2Eight Innovations that makes a brain laser you're likely to find at a clinic that can have profound effects on brain function. And they're often at the biohacking conference as a major sponsor. So you can ask your basically your physical therapist or your brain doctor. Do you have a 528i laser? They tend to be pretty expensive for most consumers to buy. You can also look at something called a Mendi device M E N D I and I'm an advisor to Mendy. Mendy is profoundly effective. It shows your brain when more blood is flowing into the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that lets you pay attention and you play a little video game on your phone. Every time you play it, it increases your ability to pay attention and it changes your TOVA score. We use Tova to see if someone has ADHD or Not so you mean a 4 or 500 consumer device can do this? Yeah, it can. In fact, I use the same tech that's N. Mendy 10 years ago to really affect my brain so that I could just pay attention effortlessly, which did not come easily for me. What Midnight can do is it'll allow you to show your brain, hey, here's how to put more blood, therefore more.

Metabolic activity in the front of my brain.

But your brain can do so much more than it does today because of neurofeedback. And neurofeedback came about really in the 50s, early work on lie detectors and things like that. But the vast majority of work ever done in the field of neurofeedback was around how do I fix broken brains? And maybe you have a broken brain. In fact, 90% of people who've come through 40 years of Zen, these are high performing executives. They have electoral evidence that they probably bumped their head when they were a kid or an adult, even if they don't remember it. So it's very common. In fact, my kids, when they were about two, I could cover everything in the room with foam except for one little edge and they would walk into the room and immediately run over there and bang their heads on it. I don't know why kids do that. But you probably did and I probably did too. So you see evidence of that years later, and if you played soccer or you took a few hits to the head, those do change your brain. Good news is with the right neurofeedback and the right practitioner, you can show the brain how to get back. I took a titanium knee to the head at high speed about, oh, seven years ago and I had a bleeding in the brain. I have my scans from 40 years, has done before. I have an advanced meditator's brain with very high coherence. It's, you know, you consider it a beautiful brain. I put a lot of work into this. It looked like spaghetti afterwards, which means I had all kinds of places that were overactive or underactive, like someone had scrambled. Took five days of working with my neuroscience team and doing the hard work of neurofeedback. It's not always easy, it's taxing on the brain.

But at the end of that, I.

Got my brain back. And if I hadn't done that, I would have kept acting like a jerk. Now when I say acting like a jerk, I couldn't play go fish with my kids because I couldn't remember anything. I swore all the time and I sent Tim Ferriss A super angry email about something he didn't do. And when I got my brain back, I emailed him and apologized. I was like, dude, I had a brain injury. I have no idea what's going on there. And he was gracious and, and said, that's no problem, I get it.

So it can change your personality when you hit your brain, but neurofeedback is.

The fastest thing I know of to get your brain back if you have taken a hit. But you might need some lasers, you might need some hyperbaric and things like that. So that's the real powerful end of neurofeedback. But what I want you to think about is that your brain, it plays like a symphony. And that's why it's sort of annoying when people say, oh, well, I have high alpha brainwaves or high beta brainwaves or whatever. I went into this state, or I'm gonna do that. That's like saying I played music with a C note or a D note. It doesn't mean it was good music. It just means that you were playing in a certain frequency of sound.

But was it a good song?

Was it Mozart?

Was it Eminem?

Or was it, you know, something that.

Maybe sounds a little bit like a fifth grade orchestra?

You can play whatever note you want. So what? The kind of clinical grade neurofeedback that we do at 40 years of Zen is we do some that's around teaching you to radically improve the amount of power and orderliness of very specific windows of those frequencies that cause you to go into altered states where you can go in and reprogram triggers. And then we do whole brain analysis where we figure out, you know, what this part of the brain and this part of the brain, they're not connecting, right? So think of it like, you know, the oboes and the flutes are playing off and we need to get them lined up. And when you do that kind of thing, the amount of power it takes for your brain to work goes way down because we've increased the efficiency of networks in the brain. And the cool thing is when people do five days at 40 years of Zen and this is eight to 10 hours a day, it's. It's meaningful work. There's an executive chef and custom built pods and custom hardware and software. It's a big deal. But two to four weeks out, about half of people, a little bit less than half, say, you know, I've noticed improvements in my relationship, but it takes the brain a while to myelinate after you have a big Experience and myelination is the process of putting insulation on nerves so that they carry electricity much more efficiently. When we asked participants six months out, after the brains had time to adjust to the new information, it took in, 91.7% of people report improved relationships in their life. Like, whoa, that's a big deal from neurofeedback. What this means is that once your brain can see what it's doing electrically, it can change it really rapidly and you can double down if your BDNF levels were higher. And earlier I mentioned some supplements, but the Rockstar supplement here is lion's mane. And lion's mane doesn't work most of the time when you buy it. The studies are so good, so excited and sadly no results. And like, what is going on? It's because for lion's mane to work, it needs to be extracted with heat and with alcohol. It's a dual extraction process. And when you get a lion's mane that really works, it's great. Lion's mane that's put as a powder in coffee is not extracted that way. And I've never felt any effect from it. You'll mostly notice increases in BDNF because you have increases in lucid dreaming and just very intense dreams. That's a good sign that your strategy is working for raising bdnf. Some of the common brainwave problems that you may have, it's an overactive brain, and this is too much beta. And beta is not a bad state in the brain. That's a state of stimulation where you'd want to be in beta if you were going to go into competition, if you're going to do a sport. But a lot of people get stressed and anxious in part because of deficiencies or toxins or just stress or lack of sleep and all the lack of recovery that we have out there. Then the brain gets overstimulated and you feel anxiety, stress, and you just can't concentrate and you get a high stress environment. You get bad lighting in your office and people yelling at you and lots of background noises like boing, boing, boing. And your brain just doesn't work so well and it gets stuck in overactivity. And then we also see underactive brains. And you can be stuck in a theta state, which is a kind of daydreaming mode where you never really wake up and you kind of come out sometimes, but you kind of float through life and you can even be stuck in alpha. And that means you can't really bring alertness when you need It. So the idea is, how do we teach your brain to be able to have higher levels of power at every state, to have it orderly and to be able to move between the states effectively and efficiently and to make this really more complex and confusing. Most people's brains are simultaneously underactive and overactive. They're doing this at the same time. And that means some part of your brain might have excess beta and be overstimulated and another part might be stuck in a low level brain state because it's not regulated well, it's not simulated. So you get what I had this cognitive dysfunction, poor emotional regulation, and you just can't go into a flow state even when you really want to. So the goal of neurofeedback is to balance out those states. And when you get this right, you can have cognitive function. Because now we can teach your brain to focus more easily and we can increase your information processing abilities.

Now people like Dave, how do you.

Know all this stuff? And people ask me things on stage.

I'll go into detail. I don't know.

I know all that stuff. It's because I did six months of neurofeedback and I took all the cognitive enhancers for 20 years and I just remember the stuff I care about. And it doesn't take any work or trying or studying. It's just there because this is what your brain's supposed to do. I've also had the opportunity to do biofeedback, neurofeedback and biohacking with well known artists. And creativity is something that it's hard to put words to it, but we can put brain states to it very well. Forbes named back when I was running Bulletproof, they named Bulletproof one Of the top 25 most innovative brands in the country. Going up against really big, really big brands. It's because innovation comes easily. When creativity comes easier, is turned on and creativity gets turned on by optimizing and controlling alpha and theta states. But not just any alpha, the right alpha, the very narrow band at the right part of the brain at the right time, and emotional regulation. I talked about how I swore all the time and got pissed off at Tim Ferriss for nothing. He did. Because my brain wasn't firing the right brain waves at the right time because of physical trauma. So you can reduce anxiety and stress by regulating your brain's ability to control beta. And you can increase resilience massively because the brain will recover better from stress when it's more balanced and it uses energy more effectively. Now you've just Heard about BDNF and I'm about to get to something that is very, very big for bdnf. We've already shown that meditation works, which is free, and we've shown that neurofeedback rates as bdnf. But there's a way to massively amplify it. And I'm going to walk you through what I actually do on myself and with clients in 40 years of Zen.

Because there's things you can pick up.

From this even if you decide not to come to 40 years of Zen. And I understand it's an expensive program. I'm working on making it more available. And this is highest and greatest, you know, F1 mechanic for the brain place that I know how to do. So if it, if you're called to it, great. And if you're still working on getting there, thank you. It's a five day neurofeedback training that accelerates your high performance states. And we don't do standard neurofeedback. We build our own gear and we use custom settings and not all the gear is made by us, but some of it is. And we're doing this in combination with training. And it's one thing for a practitioner. And I hope if you decide to do neurofeedback, you find someone who's a good practitioner because some are better trained than others. But you sit there for an hour in a normal neurofeedback session and you look at something or hear something and your brain does something and it can be helpful.

What we're doing at 40 years Zen.

Is I'm teaching you specific meditation steps to do with a computer helping you so that you go into these really deep, profound states. Like one person reported, it's like the best plant medicine ceremony I ever did, but there was no plant medicine involved. And this is just the power of your own brain looking at itself. The idea is that you want to get the same brain as someone who's done up to 40 years of daily meditation practice, the same brain states, but you want to do it in five days. I don't have a daily meditation practice because after having done 40 years of Zen way more than a few times, I can turn on the meditation states at a moment's notice, could just shift the state. That's hard to do. But you can have a brain that's profoundly different than it was before in just a few days. We look at cognitive imbalances on the last two days of the program. I look at it like tuning a car if you took, you know, a Honda into a racing mechanic, they're going to say, well, do you want it to be faster? You want it to break more easily? Do you want it to turn better? You know what's important? Well, when you come in, we do a custom scan of your brain called a qeeg, figure out the areas for improvement or areas we're already really strong, you may want to amplify. And then you spend three days going through and removing wasted effort in the brain. And then we go into performance tuning. And the difference there is, is really profound when you get out of it. I mentioned that 91.7% of people report improvements in relationships and on a dozen other factors, there's huge improvements. So we're looking at simultaneously helping any kind of cognitive imbalance, but enhancing creativity, intuition, emotional intelligence, and your ability to focus and the biggest win. If I could just put a word to it, when I do another week of it, it's like everything that felt hard feels easier. And that's because the brain required less electricity, became more efficient and more orderly, more organized to do it. The other thing that's critically important in any kind of consciousness practice, whether you're doing advanced breath work or you're doing psychedelics or you're doing the kind of work we do at 40 years, is then it's facilitation. When you enter an altered state, your body will forget it very soon afterwards. It'll do that because it's like a dream. You wake up, you tell someone it sticks. You don't tell someone, it just goes away. So you can make a big breakthrough and then forget it. So we have expert facilitators working in.

Small groups with you in order to.

Help everything you did get locked in. And we do several other things to make sure that all the benefits happen. There's a study from Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback that shows neurofeedback can indeed significantly improve IQ scores and EQ scores. In this study, the people who trained with neurofeedback had notable increases in cognitive processing speed and their emotional intelligence went up compared to the control group. So this training concentrated on focus and emotional stability. And turns out you can change these things. And these are the types of things that we're doing very consciously at 40 years of Zen. And you can look at creativity. Is there really evidence? Well, Creativity Research Journal published a study where people use neurofeedback and did have quantitatively measurable deeper levels of creativity and insight. They had better creative problem solving And a greater flow of new, innovative ideas. So if you thought what I did with bulletproof and with creating the biohacking movement looked easy, it wasn't easy. But I think I could do it because I have trained the living crap out of my brain, and I want this for everyone. One of the things that plagued me the most when I was young was just brain fog or mental fog. It's, it's. You just feel like you're walking through mud with your brain and reducing mental fog and making more strategic decisions more quickly. It's also possible with neurofeedback. And there's a study in clinical EEG and neuroscience that shows that doing neurofeedback can reduce brain fog and improve cognitive function, and that it gives you accurate decision making, at least more accurate. And people reported greater mental clarity, ability to think strategically under pressure after just a few sessions.

This is one of those things.

You might want to check it out. And in terms of productivity, the Journal of Biofeedback and Self Regulation published a study where neurofeedback produced improvement in focus, attention and time management skills. And people said, I am more productive and I can finish tasks more efficiently. So at this point, I think you've heard there's lots of evidence that you can radically reprogram your brain.

And the question is, should you just use nootropics?

Should you enhance mitochondrial function? Should you increase bdnf, or should you do those and then meditate? Or should you do those and then do 40 years of Zen or some sort of neurofeedback program or maybe the Mendi? I think, in fact, I have great evidence from 11 years of doing this with thousands of clients that you want to always take vitamin D and Minerals101, increase mitochondrial energy in the brain, increase BDNF, and then train your brain with whatever the heck it is you're going to train it with. And if you do in that order, you're gonna get so much, so much better results. There's one more study worth calling out. And then I'm gonna tell you about the big thing that has been transformative for me that really increases neuroplasticity beyond belief. The final study is from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. It's a journal, and they were studying resilience. Now, resilience for me is the most valuable state. In fact, it's why Danger Coffee is called Danger Coffee. It's because who knows what you. I want you to have so much energy that you know you can handle whatever life brings your way. That's that's the most important thing. Like, I've got this. It might be hard, it might be scary, but I've got this. And I just know it because I know I can summon more if I need it. I did not have resilience, I did not have energy at all in my 20s and I was barely hanging on. And life is so different. And it comes from this combination of things that we're talking about in this episode. In this study on resilience, they found that increasing specific brain waves with neurofeedback, this was narrow windows of simultaneous within the basically 6-12 Hz if you're a nerd here. But when they increase those specific brain waves, participants could recover faster from stressful events and adapt more effectively to change. If you're worried about politics, well, don't be.

It's mostly just a show.

Or you're worried about AI creating massive change in society, which is doing right now. Well, you might want to learn how to have a brain that handles change better. It also helps you recover from setbacks. When I consciously uncoupled from the mother of my children, who's still a dear friend, you can bet that I went to 40 years of Zen and I did my work on that because I wanted to recover from that, which wasn't even necessarily a setback, but it was a massive change. And being able to adapt to that in a way that was peaceful and harmonious, it's one of the things I'm.

Most grateful for that I was able to do that.

And I don't think I would have.

Without this unfair advantage of neurofeedback.

Now here's the thing that is just rocket fuel for meditation or NeuroFeedback. It's a 70 year old pharmaceutical and it is called ketamine. And ketamine has a reputation as a party drug. I'm not talking about using it that way. I'm talking about using it under a doctor's control and doing it therapeutically. Ketamine for 72 hours after you take it causes a massive increase in BDNF and incredible improvements in the effectiveness of neurofeedback. 40 years of Zen just launched the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback training where when you go on a ketamine journey, you're using a customized dose and you're doing it with some days a light dose and one day a heavier dose. And you're doing this because it makes your brain so able to transform. And ketamine works by targeting something called NMDA receptors in your brain. Those are what cause synaptic plasticity and cognitive function. It'll block those receptors. So you see a huge surge in glutamate, which is what your brain needs for learning and memory. It also shuts down something called the default mode network, which is necessary to do some of this deep work. Ketamine therapy by itself, without the addition of neurofeedback and facilitation, it has great clinical results for treatment resistant depression, anxiety, ptsd, chronic pain, sometimes in one dose. And it lets the brain reset itself and rewire itself. So I believe it's fundamentally because of the BDNF and the fact that the brain just becomes so able to just reform itself in the way that you choose. There are so many case studies. What ketamine does and 40 years of Zen is a cognitive enhancement facility. We do not do anything that treats or diagnoses anything. But during the ketamine portion, we bring in a physician who works with you directly so you're underneath a physician's care for the ketamine portion as we're doing the neurofeedback and some of the case studies from ketamine. A 45 year old woman who had treatment resistant depression, this is stuff that's really, really serious. Did six treatments with ketamine and MRI scans before and after she had increased synaptic density in her mood regulation areas of the brain in six treatments. When you come to 40 years was then we do five, but we don't handle treatment resistant depression or anything else. We just help your brain do more what it wants to do. There's another ketamine case study, case of a traumatic brain injury where a person with a serious TBI had cognitive rehab and ketamine simultaneously. And that combination meant huge improvements in memory retention and processing speed. This is an example of what happens when you do training with ketamine as a synaptic agent. It's just remarkable. Ketamine, you could say it catalyzes breakthroughs because it opens your mind to new insights. And you, you just have these things, you realize things you never saw before. But then the neurofeedback that's a part of the program, is a stabilizing force so that you can integrate those insights back into your life. One of the most profound stories, and there are many from 40 years of Zen, is from Miriam. Miriam's 80 when she came through the program and I'm sharing this with her permission. She was born to parents right after they got out of a concentration camp. And she said, with tears in her eyes, she said, I've been searching for peace my entire life, and I never found it until now. And it took her five days. She did neurofeedback and 40 years of Zen with ketamine. And she said, now I know this data I've been seeking. I don't think it's okay that it takes 80 years to find that, because we have the technologies to make this happen, and just a lot of the world doesn't know about them. Another person who came through the program said 40 years was in was a truly transformational experience. It felt like rediscovering the world through new eyes. I gained access to insights and layers of awareness I didn't know existed. Adding ketamine is a game changer. It amplifies the journey and accelerates breakthroughs in ways I couldn't have imagined. And the data speaks for itself. We're coming up on the end of the episode, and I feel like there's more to be shared about some of the cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals that I couldn't fit into this episode. This is a big part of. Of what I do in my own practice. And what's helped me just become who I am today, it's because I, instead of meditating in caves, actually I did meditate in caves and in monasteries. But after that, I started using technology to help me do it faster and to get into these deep states. And it creates a sense of peace, the ability to feel peaceful even when there's a lot of stuff going on around you. And I wish you that same state and all of the biohacking techniques in this episode or the other 1200, however many there are, they're about turning on more power, because more power in you equals more peace in you. Because when you have power, you can change. And if you have no power, you can't change, and you're stuck. And I've been there, and I don't.

Want anyone to be there.

That's what motivates me to be the biohacker and just to keep sharing this because it's that precious. And so if you feel called to 40 years of Zen, I'd love to see you there. And you can go to 40 years of zen.com upgrade and just schedule a call and see if it's the right fit for you. And if it's an expensive program. And if you're saying this isn't right for me, get one of the other devices, try some of the breathwork from this Try some of the supplements. Get your vitamin D. It's Vitamindake.com get your minerals 101 and start meditating if you've never done it. So there are very cost effective ways to do this and there are some that are expensive and very, very impactful. And if you like this episode, let me know in the comments. If I get a lot of reviews or comments on this, I'll do another one that's just a solo episode. I haven't ever done one before, which is kind of funny. And if so, then I'll go deeper on cognitive enhancements, especially the pharmaceuticals. So let me know. Thank you so much for your time and attention.

Wish you well.

Hey guys, thank you so much for.

Giving this podcast a chance. I wanted to share some testimonials for.

Those curious to take the plunge with us.

Enjoy.

40 years of Zen. My life was perfectly seeking perfect perfection. I definitely saw tremendous opportunities in the world and I found myself always focused on the things that were most beneficial to my growth. How I would learn something new every day and that would change my tomorrow. And so I had a lot of things that I had worked out in my life in, in terms of wrestling with the challenges I had faced in the past past. But I didn't understand the depth of how the things that hadn't worked out in my life really made me into the person I am today and in many ways were sucking energy out of my ability to move forward. And so after 40 years of Zen, at least at this point, and I see this only growing because I am so excited about my intention to living with more integrity and gratitude and thus enhancing and expanding my consciousness. The main thing is, is that I absolutely went through the wonderful gifts that my life has given me and that as I now look back, there is nothing in my life that gives me any friction, any irritation, but nothing but joy. And so I came here without knowing what this was all about. I intentionally didn't read reviews, I intentionally didn't read anything about the program because I really trusted Dave Asprey and the team that he's built here to make this just an extraordinary week. And it went way, way beyond my expectation.

Hi, my name is Lisa. I'm doing this video because I've been on a growth and healing personal training transformation journey for the last decade. And it's been a lot of ebb and flow and up and down. And the year, the previous year has been one of a lot of kind of gathering of information and data and experimenting. And in that a lot of Confusion, I think, you know, just trying to see what's going on in my life. Coming to this week, in conjunction with other things that I'm doing feels like it's brought a lot of clarity Going away from this experience. I have some clear objectives going forward, which feels amazing. After a year of a lot of confusion, I highly recommend 40 years of Zen's program for the organization that it will do in your mind. Before attending 40 years of Zen, my life was good. I have a beautiful family and a beautiful home and beautiful friendships. And I was feeling very stuck in my own forward progress and movement. There's been a lot of that over the years. But before 40 years of Zen, I feel like there's been about a year of kind of stuckness and wondering and confusion for my personal path. What made me appreciate the program the most? I think the care of the facilitator through the process because the data was cool, environment's really cool. It's very nice and relaxing. I think that specifically the one on one help with the facilitator honing in on, okay, that thing, work on that thing. Go into the pod next time, do that one. Those kind of really catered to exactly where I was.

I recommend 40 years of Zen to everyone, whether you're an entrepreneur or just normal human being, to upgrade yourself to help you realize your full and complete potential. Before I came here, it was very difficult to even imagine what you're going to be going through here. And to me, the idea of first understanding the black box, what is happening in your brain and really experiencing that. And I think the biggest transformation I can recall would be understanding what is stopping you from. From being even better than you are. You know, every one of us tend to believe we are at our best and this is the most optimal me that can have that is possible. And here, coming here and upgrading yourself, getting rid of some of the blocks and some of the resentments that may be just pushing you down a bit without you even knowing about it. And as soon as you release, you feel this giant coming out out of you. And that giant, when you go back out in the world, you don't know the problems that you thought you could not solve now suddenly start to look so trivial for you to solve them. Because now you have the confidence, you have this idea of what is possible. And the things that used to trigger you when someone said something, no longer triggering. So you're able to react in a situation that you were in the past, found yourself helpless and hopeless in the past. Now you're able to deal with those situations. Most importantly, you're able to take on the world that you just did not think was your duty and you could do it because you just didn't think that was possible. And many of the experiences that you may have had, you just believe that's how life is, that's how it is going to be. That's who I am, that is the card I'm dealt with. And coming out of the five days of experiencing and letting go of all that, suddenly you realize all those limitations that you put on yourself were all self inflicted wounds. And now you have healed those wounds and suddenly you're able to do things that actually you thought you couldn't do, but someone else could. So I really think it's an amazing, amazing program.

So I would recommend for these years of success Zen. If you need a brain upgrade in your life, you want to become more focused, you want your mind frankly to work faster on the right things in life and not be slowed down by the negative by those things that trigger you. My life before 40 years of Zen was frankly not centered. I was constantly in a state of anxiety and reactive. In short, I was full of self doubt and feeling overwhelmed and I just forgotten what my true north was and what my value set was. I had lost some boundaries and I definitely had lost some of my purpose. So so much of trying anything, taking that leap of faith comes down down to trust and confidence in the person who is inviting you. We build trust in others and that can take years. And I've known Dave for quite some time and I respect and trust his work. He had seen in me a struggle. I was struggling with some similar autoimmunes and issues that he had faced in the past. He was quick to recognize him and reach into his St. Bernard bag with a few supplements and remedies to at least help stabilize me. But he could see the brain fog, he could see the anxiety and the fact that I was overwhelmed with a lot of things and then shared further because he said when did all this start? And I definitely told him that there was a few traumatic events and that triggered a number of health ailments and autoimmunes and imbalance, gut biome. So my favorite part of the week, without question, was the opportunity to share a space of vulnerability with people that I quickly grew to know and trust and respect who held space for me in the same way that I could for them. So for me, any experience is truly about the people that I share it with and what obviously enhanced that experiences. We're all going through this together, not truly knowing how the journey was going to begin or end. The magic is you're going through it together with a certain level of ambiguity. There's a reason they don't tell you everything that you're going to do. And I understand completely that you're truly here to be present. You lose all sense of time. You remove your watches, you remove all of your connectivity to the world. No cell phones, no electronics. You're in the moment and as such, finally get to reconnect with yourself.

My name is Dr. Mark Bronstein and I'm shooting this video because for the past five years I've been struggling with irritability, anger, resentment and depression. I've tried many modalities and haven't figured out how to get past them. I came here as a consultant and I'm leaving as a very satisfied client. And now I'm excited because I get to live life with a new possibility, a new excitement and joie de vie about the future that the way it's been isn't the way it has to be to wake up without anger, irritability and resentment. And I'm also excited that if I do wake up with them, I've got some skills to turn it around really quickly and abort that feeling. State I highly recommend 40 years of Zen because it can change your life.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

The 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 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 herein. 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.