Hacking Oxytocin, How to Use Rapamycin, Level Up Your At-Home Cold Plunge, Curing Asperger’s | AMA 1

There are groups of people working with autistic kids right now on advanced spiritual stuff. Sometimes their brains can do things that you just wouldn't think any human's capable of. When they study Einstein's brain, it wasn't bigger, it was more efficient. So the more efficient brains are the higher performing brains. A brain that has mitochondrial dysfunction which is part of Asperger's or autism, it's going to be a low power brain. Your job is to have better mitochondria because that makes you younger, it makes you smarter, it makes you happier, it makes you perform better, and it makes you kind and more loving and improves relationship. Everything is better when your mitochondria are better. But how are you going to have control over anything if you don't even have awareness over it? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Welcome to the Human Upgrade ama. These are questions submitted by our premium group, the Upgrade Collective. If you're watching this show right now and have a question for me that you'd like me to answer in a future video, please click the link to the Upgrade Collective page in the description and take a look at our membership. In the near future, we'll be adding even more to this membership, including an approachable monthly plan. So keep an eye out and enjoy the show. How do cold plunges and alpha lupoic acid impact health?

With alpha lipoic acid, there's about a four hour window when it's really active. I think the half life is four hours. So then if you really wanted to elevate your levels, you would take it every four hours. And some people use it for chelating mercury and they suggest taking alpha lipoic acid every four hours, even waking up to do that. That seems a bit obsessive to me. But if you're trying to heal your liver with alpha acid, you'd want to be able to do probably multiple times a day. My guess is three, maybe four times a day would be would be plenty to do it. And silamarin, very well established. I would probably add glutathione and calcium D glucarate to that stack to make it really effective to get phase one and phase two and probably sulforaphane as well. And that's gonna be a really comprehensive stack. And if you wanted to double down on liver health, you could add some ionic trace minerals and some caffeic acid. Oh, danger. Coffee, probably a good idea. And there's pretty good evidence for caffeine having beneficial liver effects, so at least that's What I like to do. The other big thing for livers that isn't on everyone's radar is something called tudka. And back in the day they used to really value bare gallbladders. Like they would kill bears just for their gallbladder, which is horrible. Well, it's because of tadka. So you could just take synthesized tudka and I've been taking is it 350-750mg a day for a long time. I pulse it. But it's a really good way of creating healing in the liver. I also did some research and I'm interested in the slope of the curve biology. This is the idea that how quickly a stressor turns on and how quickly it turns off drives massive change in the body. But slowly increasing something doesn't cause change at the same rate. So if you want to save time, you want to get your stimulation in quickly. And one of the ways that you can do that is say hot cold therapy. Problem is if you want to go into a really hot sauna, like 170, 180 or my sunlight, and we'll get up to this morning it was 162. It still takes like 20 minutes to get your body temperature up. And there's kind of a magic number of about 104 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a high fever and you don't want to hang out there. But this causes all kinds of heat, heat shock, protein benefits for you. So you could slowly ramp up. But the faster you can do it, the more benefits you're gonna get. So I thought, well, what transfers heat most effectively? Air, radiant heat or contact? It turns out contact. So you could say I wanna use a hot tub. Problem is the federal government limits the upper temperature of hot tubs to 104 degrees. And this is something I think they did about 2008. So it's not legal to buy a hot tub that can go above 104. And this is dumb because if you get your hot tub to 106 or 107, it'll take 10 minutes to raise your body temperature all the way up to 104 degrees. Now if you hang out in there, you're going to get heat stroke and heat exhaustion, which would be dumb. So, so don't hang out in there. But it takes about 80 minutes of sitting in 104 degree hot tub to get your body temperature up, which no one has time for that and it sucks. Also the slow ramp doesn't create massive waves of heat Shock protein. So during summer here in Texas, my hot tub naturally goes 107 and when I get in it for 10 minutes, you feel so different. And then you do a cold plunge right afterwards. Or if I had it available, I'd have to drive to upgrade labs here. I would rather do cryotherapy. But regardless, you go up and then back down. And I did a bunch of research on PubMed and things like that. It turns out rapidly increasing your temperature increases your heat shock protein and growth hormone release a lot more. So what that means is if you have a hot tub, there's two ways that you can upgrade it. One is you put a resistor in line in your, in your thermostat so that it misreads things. Or you could do what I just did. I ordered for about $35 a heater for hot tubs that you just plug in and you just let it sit in the water. So I'm just going to leave that running and I'm going to set it to 107 and it'll just keep the hot tub at 107, even though I have a hot tub that does all the other stuff. So will I be comfortable when I get in 107 degree water? No, it's just as uncomfortable as getting in ice water. You just deal with it. You get in and at 107 I'm going to be in it for maybe seven minutes. And I don't do this alone in case I was to in 7 minutes get heat shock or something like that. And if you have cardiac issues, you don't want to do that. If you don't have cardiac issues, it's way more like doing aerobic exercise. So there's a protocol that says rapidly raise your body temperature and then do a cold plunge. And it's supported by anecdotal evidence and it's supported by research on the speed at which you raise the body's temperature. And it's very different than slowly raising your temperature. This might be why a super hot sauna could be better than a not hot sauna. But what we don't have research on is with a far infrared sauna, which we know detoxes way better, how rapidly that heats the tissues inside the body versus a hot sauna outside the body. I think the research is out on that, but we know that it heats you internally more, which probably activates more heat shock proteins. How haven't seen a strong setting on it. So there you go. If you can get hot fast, you're better off. What else could you do? You might, before you hop in your sauna, have a piping hot cup of danger coffee, because electrolytes are good for you in the sauna anyway, and heating your temperature with hot liquids can help. And if you want to be really crazy about it, you can make sure that you take your T3 hormone 15 to 20 minutes before you drink your coffee and get in the sauna so that your thyroid is upregulated. This goes way back in the early, early days before biohacking was a thing, when I ran the nonprofit for Longevity in the Bay Area near Stanford University. One of our members, who was an electrical control system engineer for factories, he was in his 80s when he taught me this. He said, there's something called set point theory, and this is that systems have these equilibrium points and you can change your body's set point. So his protocol was to take doses of T3 thyroid hormone, wear a parka, have your heaters up all the way, be in a sleeping bag for a week, keep your body temperature above 102 degrees. And he said, if you do this, it's going to have all sorts of physiological benefits. And you do this if your normal body Temperature is below 98.6 at the time, because I'd had chronic fatigue at Hashimoto's, toxic mold poisoning and a bunch of other stuff going on, my normal body temperature was 96.8. And the enzymes in your body operate in a very narrow range of temperature. So he proposed doing this. And I did do it. It was horribly uncomfortable. And you don't want a mega overdose on thyroid hormone because it'll give you rapid heart rate. You feel like you're going to die. It's a terrible feeling, but you can take a little bit of extra. I did this for a week, and after that my body temperature reset and. And it was closer to 98 instead of 96.8. So that meant that all the enzymes started to work in my body because a lot of enzymes won't work if they're too cold or too hot. So if you're always cold, you probably should get your thyroid checked. How would you check your thyroid? Well, you could go to Axo Health and do the advanced Longevity panel, which includes an advanced thyroid panel. So then you can just know, is it low or is it high? So there's a little mini course on the body set point via a very old protocol. Let's talk about selenium for a minute. Selenium is the most annoying of the metals to supplement other than maybe copper and it's because low selenium is associated with all kinds of problems. But high selenium is associated with cancer risk. So you have to know where in the world do you live and are you in a high selenium or a low selenium part of the world? Where I grew up in New Mexico, it's high selenium and the risk is getting too much in your water. And if you're in other parts of the world, like where I am now in Texas, I believe I'm lower in selenium. Or on Vancouver island, the selenium levels are so low that a moose can't live there. They would drop moose off on the island and they would swim back to the mainland because there's no selenium and they would die without it. So apparently if you're a moose, you really like selenium. But the point there is you have to supplement if you live in that kind of environment, because no local food is is going to have it. This is why selenium is in minerals 101, the stuff that I make for subgrade labs, because it's important but you don't want to over supplement it. So we put a low but meaningful dose in. Just don't mega dose selenium. And you could even take it every other day if you wanted to.

What is the optimal range for free T3 levels?

So for free it would be about 3.5 to as much as 4.2. That's picograms per mil, depending on what part of the world you're in. It's also the same as 5.5 to 6.5 picomoles per liter. So basically, if your TSH is above 1, then you're probably not performing at your best. And TSH, the way thyroid works is interesting if your body's cold all the time or it needs more energy. If things are working, TSH should go up, which is the body going, hey, could I have some more thyroid? Because I need more energy. And then if things work, then your body makes T4 on the thyroid and then liver converts the T4 to T3 and then you have enough, and then the body stops yelling, but the system oftentimes breaks. So maybe your body doesn't make T4 when TSH goes up, or maybe it makes T4 and it doesn't convert to T3 very well at all. Or maybe it converts to reverse T3. So when you go to Axo Health and you order your panel, you can just see, well, what is my TSH? What is my T4, what is my T3? What is my free T3? If you know those things and you have your thyroid antibodies to see if you have an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto's, which I was diagnosed with when I was 26, then you have the full thing. If you cannot lose weight, if you have brain fog, if you're anxious all the time, if you can't sleep, look at your thyroid hormone. And it's a very affordable test at axo. And what you end up doing is saying, oh, that's what's going on. If your levels are in the normal range, but you don't feel good and they're at the low end of the normal range, you treat it anyway. And the good news is you don't have to start by taking thyroid hormone, although frankly, I think Most people over 40 need a little bit of thyroid if they want to live a long time. You could start out by taking L tyrosine, which is an amino acid up to a gram in the morning. And that's going to help a lot of other things like your dopamine pathways as well. You could also add some iodine. I prefer Lugols. You can take Kelp. And there's great controversy in the world of Hashimoto's. There are people say don't supplement iodine because it could make Hashimoto's worse. There's also the biohacker view that says your body needs iodine for thousands of processes, not just thyroid. And being iodine deficient seems like it's a bad idea. So I think the jury might be out. You're gonna get widely varying opinions there. But I am on the you should supplement iodine side of things.

What are ways to treat low thyroid without needing a prescription?

Well, I just mentioned some of the things you can do with amino acids. You can also take thyroid glandulars from a few brands out there. You could try treating your adrenals with adrenal glandulars, or you could go online and you could just order thyroid hormone without a prescription, which is something that's easy to do in the U.S. now, I'm not going to tell you which websites because then they'll probably get shut down. The law is that in the US you can import a 90 day supply of any prescription drug as long as it's not a scheduled drug for personal use, as long as you have a prescription from any doctor anywhere on the planet, including the one who works for the pharmacy where you order them. So there you go. You could do this. And I want to double down here. If you decide to self medicate with diet, with sleep, with sunlight, with nutrition, with air filters, with even pharmaceutical drugs, it is your inalienable right to do that. And you should not need a permission slip. It's also your right to ski really fast into a tree or to jump off a tall building. Some things aren't very smart. So if you're going to self medicate, get good advice from your health coach, from your partner, your health partner, I mean, from your doctor even. And then you have a right to do this. People typically start with one 8-1-4 grain of thyroid. A grain is 60 milligrams. And I prefer to take the thyroid. Glandulars are a mix of T4 and T3. The most famous of those is called armor thyroid.

Which is better between stem cells and exosomes?

The answer is it depends. If you're in the continental United States and you're not doing your own stem cells, then, well, exosomes are your best bet. They're very cost effective. I just did a couple episodes on that and I used to recommend a clinic for $100,000 procedure in the U.S. but the limitations are so great here and the quality of stem cel are not yours in the US it's so low that I'm very, very suspicious of that. I've seen too many people have negative responses. So my recommendation is to do stem cells leave the US particularly. Go to RMI. Go to daveasprey.com RMI for info on the whole body thing, including stem cells in the brain that actually work for the first time. That's been profound for me. But if you're in the US you can do exosomes or you can do V cells, V, S, E, L s, those work, they're safe and they're much more cost effective. Here in town, Dr. Anne Shippy in Austin does V cells, I believe, and there are a few other people like Dr. Todd, who really invented V cell therapy in the U.S. so this is a kind of hybrid that's somewhere between doing stem cells. The problem in the US Is that stem cells come from umbilical cords of all different qualities. And the people who make the stem cells in the US Are not allowed to expand the stem cells. When I go to rmi, they take one umbilical cord and they expand it and so they can test the hell out of it and you can use it over and over and over. And your risk is limited to one person who's extensively tested, very high quality Stem cells as well, because they choose a healthy umbilical cord. When you go to the US they literally have to buy all the umbilical cords, blend them all together, and you get what you get. And I don't think I know what I get.

What are your thoughts on rapamycin for longevity?

Rapamycin is a longevity drug. One of the things we do in advanced longevity is we'll take pharmaceuticals and we'll use lower doses of them to get effects you cannot get from lifestyle or from any other way. Say a supplement or cold therapy or something like that. And rapamycin is a senolytic drug. Brian Johnson just announced that he stopped using it. And I don't use rapamycin either, except topically. Rapamycin does wonders for your skin. I'm not on it now. I haven't been in a couple years, mostly because I didn't refill my prescription. I don't like prescription drugs because they're hard to get. It just takes work to get them refilled. So sometimes I just run out unless I can just order them directly online, which, again, for a lot of them now. So rapamycin, I've gone on and off of it orally, and Brian just announced that he found he wasn't getting a big difference from it. So what do I use? I use Qualia Senolytic, which basically does the same thing, but it does it with supplements. It's very well formulated, and you take it for two days a month. And you can go to qualia.com and probably use code. Dave, I don't know. I wasn't planning on talking about that. But given that intermittent fasting and or supplemental senolytics do the same thing as rapamycin. Why spend more on a pharmaceutical than that? Probably has more side effects, including immunosuppression, which you don't want. So would I put it on my face? Yes. Would I take it regularly? No. Because I have supplements that do the same or better.

What are your thoughts on Asperger's and its treatment?

Sometimes people get upset when I say I used to have Asperger syndrome. Is it possible to heal autism? Sometimes? Yes, it is. Here's what happens. When you're young, something happens that causes autoimmune neuroinflammation. What is the something? Just like with Alzheimer's disease, there isn't one cause. If you look at my interview with Dr. Dale Bredesen, the End of Alzheimer's Disease, he identifies seven types of Alzheimer's. There are likely a corresponding number of causes or more for chronic neuroinflammation in babies. Sometimes it's toxic metals, sometimes it's toxic mold, sometimes it's other things like that, sometimes it's genetics, sometimes it's got bacteria, sometimes it's bacterial toxins like streptococcus, and other times it can be trauma that's misdiagnosed, especially pre and perinatal trauma that isn't actually Asperger syndrome. So how the heck would you go about solving this? Here's how to think about Asperger's. When the brain is developing a user interface to reality, this starts happening the moment after conception and, and especially in the first two years of life, the brain says I have all these environmental inputs and I have to sort them out. Well, a brain that has mitochondrial dysfunction, which is part of Asperger's or autism, it's going to be a low power brain. And because of this neuroinflammation, all of the input signals are staticky. So if you imagine now you're trying to process reality, but you don't have enough power in your processor. And instead of just hearing a voice or seeing a smile, you see lots of glare and static and you hear static and you only get some of the words. Is it any wonder that the brain would just throw out all sorts of useful information because it just couldn't process that information? That's what happens. This is why I was duck footed, why I had, and mostly have overcome, but still have a few weird functional movement things. Like my gait isn't exactly the way I would like it to be because my body never learned to crawl the right way when I was young. And I've attempted 90% of the way recovered from that. This is why eye contact can be different. This is why the lack of social cues and things like that. It's because the brain evolved without those being important enough, given the amount of power that was there. So how would you go about reversing this? Well, step one would be restore mitochondrial function. And this is why mitochondria at the core of biohacking. And this is why all of my books, including my cognitive enhancement book called Headstrong, which is probably the most important one to read. If you or someone you love is on the spectrum, it's all about mitochondria turn the power back up in the brain. And now all of a sudden you have a high power processor, but you probably still have static on your lines. So then you go about teaching the brain how to process reality again. So I Had to go through and relearn how to use my eyes with intense vision therapy. In fact, next week, I'm gonna go do another week of combined eye and brain training with a specialist and I'll report back on what that looks like. I did that. I went from 2080 down to 2015 in both eyes. I've talked about that on a couple episodes about vision in the podcast then reprogramming your hearing. Well, it turns out I had small gaps in each ear where I couldn't hear and they were mismatched. So what that meant was it was like I had potholes in each ear and I went through this was exhausting. And I had Mozart music made where the parts that my brain had a hard time hearing was missing, so the brain would strain to hear those. And over the course of a few months of listening to these horribly painful audio things, they were on CDs. Back when I did this, I reprogrammed my hearing and then I had to reprogram my tongue. In fact, I had a tongue tie, which is very common. So I severed the thing underneath my tongue so that I could touch my tongue to my upper palate. I did breath work every morning for five plus years. I did Art of Living and many other things. But the hardest part of overcoming something like Asperger's or autism is that everything below the neck, unless it's broken or bleeding, is worthy of ignoring. Because if you have neuroinflammation, you have chronic pain anyway, and you're never gonna notice subtle emotions. They're just not. Not present. So for me, it started out with heart rate variability training. With this, you actually learn what it feels like when your nervous system goes into sympathetic fight or flight, or when it's in parasympathetic. If you're on the spectrum, you're probably always in sympathetic, or at least most of the time. When I started doing this kind of training, listened to the episode with Roland McCready from HeartMath Institute to hear more about this. What I learned was that hundreds of times a day, my body would flip into Fight or Flight, and I didn't even know it. But once I started training with real time feedback, it changed everything because all of a sudden I knew what it felt like. And then I didn't even need the device. I said, oh, my body's going to sympathetic. Let me just flip the switch. So it turns out all humans have an unlabeled instrument cluster with buttons you can push that let you change your state. You just don't Know what the instruments mean or what the buttons are, or even that they're there. And you can learn these with feedback. I progressed from doing heart rate variability training into doing straight up neurofeedback. And this is one of the reasons that 40 years of Zen exists, which is my brain upgrade school for senior executives, entrepreneurs and professional athletes and celebrities and people like that up in Seattle. Five day intensive program. I've spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing neurofeedback. It's also why if you go into an upgrade labs Today, we have 32 locations in the process of opening. Eight locations open right now across the US and Canada. You can do 20 minute segments of neurofeedback as part of your membership. It's also why almost everything there increases mitochondrial function. So whether you're on the spectrum or not, your job is to have better mitochondria because that makes you younger, it makes you smarter, it makes you happier, it makes you perform better, and it makes you kind and more loving and improves relationships like everything is better when your mitochondria better. So turn up energy, turn down static, retrain every system in the body and learn how to feel emotions. I was doing some advanced coaching with a very intelligent, very successful entrepreneur who has Asperger's. And this was more relationship coaching. Recently in my girlfriend Christina's We Deepen Love Mastermind. And I just had to straight up say, look, you're not congruent. And this is the challenge for people with Asperger's. Congruence is different than authenticity. Authenticity is when what you're feeling and what you're saying really match, and they match all the way through. And when you are on the spectrum and you haven't learned congruence, you will believe that what you're saying matches your interstate, because you don't know your interstate. But people who have nervous systems that are perceptive will feel your nervous system and they'll say things like, you feel like you're closed off, your heart is closed, you're unapproachable. What's going on is people who have Asperger's, when they get some power back. Well, your brain, it evolved to be able to process reality with very small amounts of energy. Now that you got your energy back, you have better information processing algorithms than almost any other human. This is why I can do some of the biohacking things, why I can recognize patterns far ahead of time. Because my brain grew up in a state of lack, so that I had to learn how to just get every little drop of value from every electron my suffering mitochondria could make. And the gift of that is that a high powered brain that's also efficient is going to be able to do things that a normal brain couldn't do. I don't recommend that path. If you can avoid Asperger's, it's better. But that's the gift of it. Problem is that makes it really good for us to run human emulation mode. And I absolutely did this in my 20s. I don't know if I've ever talked about this before, but I realized that if I was going to be successful in my career, I couldn't just know how stuff worked in the Internet and in data centers and what became cloud computing and all that stuff. I was going to have to learn business. So every Thursday night I would go to something called the Stanford Barn on the Stanford campus, and there was a networking group for the very first Internet technology people out there, like when the browser was first invented and things like that. And I would go there and for the first six months I would stand in the corner and I would eat grapes and just watch people because I was learning the patterns so I could learn the behaviors of business because none of it was intrinsic to me. And at a certain point I learned how to play the game. But I was still running human emulation mode. And with enough nervous system rewiring, enough somatic therapy, enough neurofeedback, enough heart rate variability training and personal development work that includes traveling all over the world to study with gurus and things like that, it turns out that even if you have had Asperger's or autism, you can learn the subtle nuance of every single emotion where it sits in your body, how it feels, what it is, and how to change it. So that that's part and parcel to biohacking. It's control of your own biology. But how are you going to have control over anything if you don't even have awareness over it? So for me, the process of becoming aware of the subtle cues in my body also meant that once I was properly plugged in, instead of just acting plugged into my own body, that then I could sense other people, including things like empathy and compassion, and then even evolving those into equanimity, the ability to stay in my state. And one of the pieces of feedback that people will often provide for me is they'll say, you're authentic. That just comes from great suffering and from doing all of this study to understand what's going on. And this conversation started because a member of the Upgrade Collective said, dave, what can you say to someone with Asperger Syndrome to get them to want to change? Because in that person's experience, they don't want to. Here's why. When your nervous system oftentimes goes into sympathetic drive, which happens because your mitochondria are on the verge, they're not working very well. You're always going to use your brain. The brain is a defense mechanism. So you have to deal with all the crap that's below the neck. And it's chaotic, and it's actually overwhelming when you're on the spectrum. Heck, if you're not on the spectrum, it's overwhelming half the time. So the more you live in your head, the less aware you are of your body, which actually just makes sense. So how do you convince someone with Asperger's to maybe take a look at that? First of all, in a kind way? You point out that maybe they're on the spectrum because a lot of people don't know it. You say, maybe that's a thing, and if they feel judged or whatever, then you probably did it wrong. Or maybe they just aren't ready. One of the things I've learned over the years is that I could go to a restaurant and I could stand on a table and stomp my feet and I could shout at people that the seed oils and MSG and sugar and corn syrup and artificial whatevers is bad for them, and all they would do is tell me to screw off. And that would be dumb. In fact, if you ever see seen a food protester try and do that, like, try to make people be vegan or something, you can only offer help to someone who wants help. So it's not your job to tell someone who's perfectly happy as an Asperger's person that they have to change because it's their right to stay that way. My experience is that most people who are on the spectrum, deep down we know something isn't quite right, but we're doing our best. And quite often our best is really fucking good. And we're running companies and we're making everything work, but it comes at a biological and an emotional and a spiritual cost. And there is a sense of ease and frictionlessness that comes from doing all of that reconnection work. And for me, the most important thing has been the 40 years of Zen reset process, so that I'm not triggered by things in my environment or by people or anything else. To the very best of my ability. When you get into the more spiritual side of things, there are groups of people working with autistic kids right now on advanced spiritual stuff. And sometimes their brains can do things that you just wouldn't think any human's capable of. And I would just say that there's always a gift whenever there's a challenge. And this can be a gift. It just takes a lot of work. And with what we know today versus what we knew 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, it's actually not that much work. We know how to get metals out, we know how to get mold, mold toxins out. We know how to upregulate mitochondria. I mean, New York Times best selling science book about the topic. And I got to write the thing. So we know how to do it. And it takes what for me was a 20 year journey down to probably two or three years of dedicated, focused work where you don't even believe what your body can do. You don't believe what your brain can do or what your heart can do. It's all in there.

What is the benefit of labeling emotions?

One of the most powerful things. The first personal development event I ever went to, we did some really heavy duty stuff. I just jumped in with both feet, so I knew I wasn't happy. And I tried being rich and lost the money. It wasn't happy either way. I tried being in a relationship, tried being in magazines. Nothing made me happy. Got a BMW, didn't make me happy. So I went to this thing out of desperation. It was called the Star Foundation. And one of the many different things we did was there were people hitting pillows with wiffle ball bats. This is like primal therapy, anger therapy or something. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, this is the stupidest I've ever seen in my life. Okay? I'm a computer science guy. This is irrational. And like, what is wrong with these people? Like wailing and hitting pillows, except the sound of them wailing was something I could not handle. I'm like, I have to go outside. I just can't listen to these people doing all that stupid stuff. And so I went out and actually sat in my car just so I wouldn't have to listen to it. And a couple of the facilitator therapists who were volunteering the time came out and like, what's going on? I'm like, this is stupid and I can't stand being around the sound. I don't know why. And they said, well, let's go back inside and this is hilarious. I'm a 30 year old guy and probably 280 pounds at the time. You know, I could probably have beaten up anyone in the room. So there is no actual lack of safety. But I'm sitting there on a beanbag and these facilitators who are very, very kind and put up with me, they took like pillows, I'm sitting on this bean bag and they put pillows on either side of me and put pressure on my body. Weighted blankets, anyone? So it turns out just pressure on your body causes your nervous system to relax. You get a vagal response from it. This is why a lot of people on the spectrum love weighted blankets. In fact, it's why people who aren't on the spectrum when they sleep under a weighted blanket, they get better sleep because it's calming you down. It's the same thing as do you ever like pick up a puppy and it's like squirming all over the place and you just hold it to your chest and after a few seconds it just goes and it just relaxes. Your nervous system is just a puppy. It'll do the same thing. So they help me do that. And then Barbara, who was in her 80s at the time, she was the founder of the American Pre and Perinatal Psychology Association, I found out later, she's like, well, do you feel anything? I said, yeah, I feel anger because this is dumb. She says, is there anything else? I said, no. And she said, how about in your body? I'm like, oh, yeah, my stomach feels weird. She said, oh, there's a word for that. I said, really? What is it? She said, it's called fear. And I looked at her and I said, there's no reason for me to be afraid, therefore it's not fear. And she said some words that changed my life. She said, dave, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be rational. And my little computer science brain's like, oh shit, she's right. So this feeling must be fear. And it's fear for no reason. And if you've read my last few books, I talk about the meat operating system. This idea that your body has a third of a second to tell you how to feel before your brain gets any signal of reality. That's what was going on with me back then. And this is so important for understanding biohacking is that the body pre processes reality and inserts emotions into it. And the emotions don't have to make any sense at all, even though they actually do make sense from the perspective of the body. Over time. But you're not gonna see that. In fact, it's designed so you can't see that. So once I realized, oh, wow, there's all sorts of stuff going on in my body, I realized that I am simultaneously rational and irrational. And when people speak of being non dual in a spiritual context, that's part of it. And that your nervous system is seemingly irrational, but it's rational given its perspective on reality. And your rational brain, which has a much better perspective on reality, it is rational. At least it likes to think it's rational, even though it's making rational decisions based upon emotional inputs. And this is where most human suffering comes from. But that was my awakening to that.

How do you deal with negative emotional responses to flashbacks or memories?

If you're doing something and you suddenly have a flashback or a vivid memory with an associated emotional response, that's just old trauma. What's going on is the body's threat detection systems. These are things that are very, very fast. They're designed to protect you before you can think. And this is the thing that makes you jump when someone startles you. It's a thing that makes you pull your hand away from a hot surface before you even recognize it's hot. So they're running all the time. In fact, if you listen to my interview with the guy who wrote on combat and on killing, Lt. Col. Grossman, one of the most profound episodes of the human upgrade. This is a guy who studied first responders and SWAT teams and looks at what they do when they go into what they call conditioned black, which is when a combat situation happens, their conscious mind blanks out and they default to training. And you can train the nervous system on what to do. So they're loading and unloading their guns. They're doing all these things without thinking. The same way if you ever watch a professional athlete do something like table tennis or martial arts, where they're moving faster than you could ever think, it's because they're not thinking. They trained it into their nervous system. So when we're walking around and just this vivid thought pops into your head about an unpleasant thing, and you feel it, like in your gut, the hairs on the back, your neck, or like jaw tension or something like that. What that is, is something in the environment triggered you because your body, without any input from your brain whatsoever, decided it was unsafe. And it learned that that sensation or that experience equals unsafety. And as a gift, it played the original memory for you so that you could go back and you could heal it and if you have the ability to go to 40 years of Zen, this is the core of the protocol. And if you read my new book, Heavily Meditated, which publishes In April of 2025, I teach the reset process. And if you go to the biohacking conference, biohackingconference.com I will be teaching the reset process again this year on stage. Last year when I taught it, lots of people were just in tears. Profound healing in about 10 minutes. And all the reset process is, is the idea of taking one experience that triggered you that you didn't like and going back and resetting the nervous system so it's no longer responsive to that. So most people that I know experienced at least some bullying, either physical or emotional. There's. There's a reason Mean Girls is such a popular movie. There's a reason that so many entrepreneurs I've worked with at 40 years of Zen are saying, yeah, I was bullied. Heck, I was bullied too. And the first time you get in a fight, every fiber in your body says you're going to die. And it's an absolute state of terror. And after you've been in 100 fights like I have, you realize you're not going to die and you calm down. But your threat networks still remember the first time that you got in a fight. And some bullies, you know, punching you in the face or whatever, and it creates a visceral response before you can think. In other words, your thoughts don't matter. You're already in the state. So years later, you're sitting in a meeting at work and someone walks in, and their footfalls, the way they walk reminds your threat detection systems of the way the bully walked before he punched you in the face. You're not going to know that happened. It's very fast and very obvious, and it's meant to keep you alive, as if your brain isn't in there and it's going to fire your sympathetic nervous system. And maybe you have a thought of that that you haven't thought of in a while. But you won't know unless you understand how this part of the body and the brain works. And it's so profound to understand that. So anytime this weird memory pops into your head, write it down and do some meditation or some forgiveness or some emdr or run the reset process on it, and everything in your life changes. What I found was hundreds of times a day I was getting put into that sympathetic state. And step one, learn what that feels like. And for that real time feedback on your heart rate variability using the HeartMath inner balance sensor is a good way to do it. Any somatic practice is going to do that as well. Just where you learn to feel things in your body and then going, okay, I got the feeling, now what do I do about it? Before the book comes out or just for anyone listening, what do special forces people do if they feel that they just got into that fight or flight? They do a box breath and it's pretty easy. Four or more seconds in, hold for the same number of seconds, breathe out for the same number of seconds, and then hold the breath empty for the same number of seconds. And if you do that four or five times, you'll go out of sympathetic state. If you want to do it faster, make your out breath twice as long as you're in breath and then you don't have to hold as long between. So you might breathe in for four seconds and breathe out for eight seconds and hold for as long as you want at the top or the bottom. So those are very basic tricks to do it. But what you'll learn over time is that any emotion that you've ever had, whether it's the first time you held your child, playing with puppies, going for a magical walk in the forest at sunset, whatever it is, or the most visceral, painful, ugly things that have ever happened to you, you can replay any of those in the body. Notice I didn't say in your mind. You're not visualizing these things, you're embodying them. So this means if you're trying to re experience something beautiful, to put yourself in a state of awe and gratitude and wonder and magic, what would you do? Well, think of the time you felt like that most. And instead of thinking about what it looked like, which is a small amount of what it was, think about what it felt like. What did it feel like in your heart, in your gut, in your perineum? What did it smell like? What did it taste like? What were your muscles like? Were you smiling? Was there tension? Could you feel a breeze? Were you sweaty? Was it hot? Was it cold? Bring in every one of the senses, with vision being the least important of them all. And if you do that, your body will go into that state reliably. So you can trigger a sense of fear and upset and anxiety and rumination, or you can turn it off by just going to another place. And it helps to do breathing exercises while you go to the other place. And this is a fundamental thing. You can replay anything. Just like you go to Spotify and pick a Playlist. Just most people don't know they can do that. Yes, you could go to your happy place, but I would have said, I'm going to my happy place. But if you're traumatized, if you've been bullied, if you had rough parenting, by the way, this is almost all of us. Even though our parents did their very best, most parents make a lot of mistakes because their parents made mistakes and their parents made mistakes. And the world can be an ugly place over multiple generations. So your happy place may not be as happy as you think it is. When I first started doing this, one of the exercises was, go to your happy place. And my happy place was all by myself at the top of the tallest mountain with no trees and no water or anything else, because then I could see all the threats. It's amazing how much you can heal, right? So is your happy place really happy? Because what I was doing was I was thinking of a happy place instead of looking for the time when my nervous system felt most peaceful and fulfilled and happy and full of wonder and joy and kindness and juiciness. And that's the feeling. The easiest way to tap into this for a lot of people, actually, is through the. We'll call it eros energy, or through erotic energy. When people at 40 years of Zen are doing this deep reset process with electrodes on their heads, you know, for a couple hours, and going through this with the facilitator, sometimes you hit the wall and like, I just. I can't breathe anymore. My nervous system won't do this. I don't know how to go to my happy place. Like, great, take five minutes. Have a fantasy. And so they'll sit there and have whatever fantasy. I don't want to hear about it. And magically, their brainwaves go back into expansiveness and to gratitude and joy. And then they stop and they go back to doing the reset, because it literally turns your brain back on. So this is a way that a lot of people access really deep states of. Of healing, of catharsis, of spiritual healing. And there's a chapter about that in Heavily Meditated my new book as well. In fact, this is a little controversial, but if you look throughout history, there is a correlation between the cost of energy and the amount of slavery in the world. When energy is very expensive, there's a lot of slaves. When energy is very cheap, there's a lot of freedom. And this is why, as a humanist who very much cares about nature and the environment, I think we have a moral obligation to make sure that Energy is abundant and to do it in a way that is as low impact on the environment as possible. But I'm unwilling to give up human freedoms and create a place where everyone has to walk because it's too expensive to drive a car, because that isn't the kind of world that any of us thrives in. So abundant energy equals abundant freedom and abundant happiness, which is why affordability matters.

How does oxytocin affect the brain and body?

Oxytocin is the love hormone, the happiness hormone, some people will call it, although that's debatable. And it's something that comes from human touch, from an 8 second hug, from intimacy, from community. If you look at the biohacking F words that I've been teaching, it's what the nervous system does before you have a chance to think. All life on earth does this. Number one is fear. Something scary, run away from, hide or kill it. And so this is why you jump away from a tiger before you think about it. Fear. And then food. Eat everything. And then we'll say fertility, it's another F word. Make sure the species reproduces. So these are your urges that happen before your brain even gets a chance to think. And then when you get the urge, your brain will say, that's a really good idea, it'll agree with the urge. But the next one is friend or community. And it turns out, oh, and after friend is a forgiveness or evolution. But it turns out every one of those is a source of nourishment instead of fear, peace, which is the true opposite of fear. That is a place of nourishment and recovery for the body. Instead of hunger, we have nourishment for food. And then when it comes to the whole fertility side of things, there's sacred, empowering, recharging, intimacy, and then there's porn or whatever, and then community. Community is a source of nourishment as well. So if you look from an oxytocin perspective, if oxytocin creates a sense of safety and peace and nourishment for the nervous system, well, community, friends, hugs, social time and intimacy are the two things that are going to raise oxytocin the most. It also just so happens that if you're exposed to neurotoxins like toxic mold, the way I was growing up, your oxytocin levels will be measurably lower than they ought to be. So you will not get the oxytocin kick that you would normally get. So it takes you even more physical touch. If your love language, like Mine is physical touch. There's a pretty good chance you're lower in oxytocin than average because your body's craving more touch to get more oxytocin. It's why I like. I invite hugs from people that I trust. So what would you do? One thing you could do is measure your oxytocin. I believe it's either a saliva or a urinary panel. It's been a long time since I measured my oxytocin. If you look back on the podcast episodes, I interviewed Dr. Love, also known as Paul Zak, about oxytocin. And he actually was able to reduce the amount of blood tests that he did because he could use heart rate variability as a predictor of your oxytocin levels. In other words, higher oxytocin equals higher heart rate variability in humans. So if your heart rate variability when you wake up is low, that's your readiness score on Aura or Ultra Human or WHOOP or whatever you're using. Well, maybe you need some oxytocin. One thing you could do is you can get an oxytocin trochee, which is basically a lozenge, or you can get oxytocin as a nasal spray. And if you are low in it and you do that, you might find this amazing sense of wonder and connectivity that you're missing. If you're on the spectrum and you were to do this test, the odds of you being lower in oxytocin are pretty high. So what would you do? Maybe you should get some oxytocin nasal spray and see if it lowers inflammation, which it does in clinical studies. Or you could just make sure that you get more hugs, more snuggle time. Get a dog. And strangely, as far as I can tell, I don't think cats raise oxytocin in most people. But cat lovers are already triggered, by the way. I just have to say this. The two easiest to trigger groups of people are people who love kale and people who love cats. And I don't know what the correlation is, but I know there must be one.

Is kale okay to eat?

It's time for a confession. Back in 2013, when I wrote the Bulletproof Diet, this is a book that has helped people lose millions of pounds of weight over the years. It's been published in about 20 languages, and it was the first major book on intermittent fasting, the first book on cyclical clean keto. If you're taking collagen or MCT oil or putting butter in your coffee, that's all bulletproof diet that introduced those concepts to the world and why they work and why they do something different. But there was so much demand for kale that when I published the cookbook, I yielded to popular demand. And I did put kale in some recipes. I did warn that kale was higher in oxalate and that what you wanted to do was to boil the kale and pour out the water and ideally put some calcium in the water, and that if you did that, kale could be safe to eat. And there's even a couple kale salads. I'm like, well, if you don't eat very much of it where I am today, I do not eat high oxalate foods. In chapter one of the Bulletproof Diet, it introduced some other very important concepts that are now well understood or well known. I talked about five types of toxins that are likely causing problems for you. It could be one of them, it could be a combination of them, but if you don't know they exist, you're just wandering around in the wilderness and it feels random when you don't feel good. And the toxins were phytic acid, which sucks minerals outta your body. Oxalate, which also sucks minerals out of your body and forms razor sharp calcium crystals in your mitochondria, in your nerves and your muscles, on your bones, in your skin, and all sorts of other uncomfortable places. There was histamine, which comes from bacterial degradation of proteins. There was mycotoxin, which comes from fungal breakdown of proteins and carbohydrates. And the final one was off the top of my head, I believe it was omega 6 fats. That seems right. Could have been heavy metals, I don't remember right now off the top of my head, but oxalates, they're in beets, they're in raspberries, they're in almonds, they're in cashews. And it turns out even eating way too much collagen can stimulate oxalate formation. So does toxic mold exposure. So I did control for oxalate in the bulletproof diet, but I didn't control enough. And if I was to go back and redo that book, I would take out the kale recipes, because kale is gross. You might not know this, it's on my Instagram, but the Kale Marketing association was created. It's kind of a fake organization that was created by a PR firm to increase sale of kale. And until that happened, somewhere around 2012ish, the largest buyer of kale was Pizza Hut. To put it as a garnish on the salad bar and they convinced everyone to eat it. They seeded it with celebrities like Beyonce. And why, I have no idea. But kale never was a superfood. One smoothie with spinach, kale, beets, almonds, raspberries, all that kind of stuff can have a gram of oxalate. Your body can only handle 200 milligrams, so five times what your body can handle. And the beginning lethal dose of oxalate is 5 grams per day. So 20% of the beginning lethal dose now. Have people after 10 day green smoothie cleanses died? Yes. Have they been hospitalized with kidney stones? Yes. How many vegans do you know of who quit being vegan because of kidney stones and chronic pain throughout their body? I didn't get kidney stones, but I shattered three teeth because oxalate was pulling minerals out of my bones. If you ever wonder why I take vitamin Dake, why I make it vitamind a k e.com and intake minerals101, it's because having mineral sufficiency in your bones and in your mitochondria is foundational for longevity, for human consciousness, for human performance, and just for feeling good. And oxalate will steal it. And this is why kale is not food. I also should say, as I wrote in the blog post ten years ago, if you're going to eat kale, Lacey, kale is the worst. Kale and dino kale with less frilly parts has lower oxalate. And if you feel called to eat this stuff, boil it, pour out the water and add some calcium. If you're not allergic to dairy, add some raw A2 dairy, get the calcium in there so at least the razor sharp crystals form in your gut instead of in your kidneys. Or eat arugula. It doesn't have oxalate and it's better for you anyway.

How can I help teach my kids to regulate their nervous system?

When my kids were growing up, one of the coolest things I was able to do was play the magic fairy breathing game with them. And what this was I took the heartmath inner balance sensor and I clip it to a four year old's ear and say look at the phone. They love to look at phones. Make the light turn green and it teaches you how to breathe and it teaches you how to do something to your nervous system while you're breathing. And how many times have you ever told a five year old to take a deep breath if you're a parent, you know, they go, you're like, no, that's not a deep breath. Once they've played this game for a little while, take a deep breath, they go. It actually teaches them how to breathe. And I think it has done wonders for helping my kids when they're very young. Just learn how to do a little bit of a better job of regulating their nervous systems. And God knows, being a kid is hard enough, so I like to think it helped. But how would I ever know?

See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.