It's Time for an Evolution: The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey : 870

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio.

A state of high performance.

For 10 years across a thousand episodes and a quarter billion listens. My podcast has elevated what you knew about the capabilities of your mind and body. And because we're at the 10 year anniversary, I'm evolving Bulletproof Radio even further in my plan to upgrade humanity. And I'm evolving myself as well. I invite you to expand your knowledge, explore your performance, and embrace your possibility. With the Human Upgrade, you'll meet bright thinkers and radical doers who push the boundaries of science, technology, personal development, and human performance in every way imaginable. Every guest you listen to, every topic you learn about, every new idea you discover on this podcast is there to move you forward. And join me on this next evolution to upgrade your mind, body and life. And be sure that you're subscribed to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey on your favorite podcast platform so you hear every single episode. My commitment to you is that the time you spend with me on the Human Upgrade will always return more value to you than you spent on it. Welcome to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. First time I'm officially saying that on the show, even though I might have mentioned it to you before. And this show is a solo show where it's about the state of Dave. I'll tell you why I'm changing the name of Bulletproof Radio and what's going on with the podcast. I started bulletproof more than 10 years ago. I started the blog and Bulletproof has been around to focus on the disrupting and evolving and transforming big food so that all of you and the rest of the world who you talk to will know how to eat, to feel good all the time, to live longer, and to be more. And over time, as Bulletproof grew, as the show grew, we're now pushing a thousand episodes in 10 years on the air. I mean, unbelievable. My gratitude to you for listening for all this time. And I realized that what I'm really about is it's about upgrading humanity. And that is the mission statement for my portfolio of companies that aren't Bulletproof. In fact, there's about eight of them right now. Companies you've heard me talk about, like TrueDark, that makes patented glasses for sleep that are so much different than blue blockers. And I haven't really focused as much that. Or 40 years of Zen where more than a thousand people have just transformed their lives with neurofeedback. Those are not food. They're not coffee, they're not butter, they're not MCT oil, but they matter. And where I'm focusing right now is on Upgrade Labs, where I'm CEO. Upgrade Labs is franchising, and we're bringing all the biohacking tech to the world, starting in North America and expanding globally with our franchise network. Wow. I want to do this quickly and I want to do it for you. So how do I talk about upgrading humanity or upgrading myself? Well, it's not just food, but it does start with food. What's more important, sleep or food? I don't know. When I started this 10 years ago, I would have said, you know, it's actually food. And I think I still lean in that direction because if you eat like crap, you won't sleep very well either. But I was under sleeping at the beginning of the podcast and I now get my six and a half hours a night, which is, it turns out, what the people live the longest. Get not eight hours a night. If you need eight hours, that's fine. But how do we talk about that in the context of food? Well, we don't, which is why this is the human upgrade. I also started out with a little bit of a selfish motivation. No, I did not start any of this because I wanted to make money. I started this because, well, I already had a job that paid me very well as a VP at a publicly traded company. I wanted to share information that I was having a hard time sharing at the anti aging nonprofit where I'd worked and learned from my elders for more than 10 years. So how did I put all that together and say, what's going on here? Well, I said, I can lose £100 and I'm still a little bit angry that I had to spend $300,000 before I started the company just to get my brain and body at minimum effectiveness and that I've spent substantially more than a million dollars getting to the level of performance where I am now. Frankly, it's not fair. It's not fair that I had to spend at least half of that on stuff that probably didn't work. And it's not fair that I couldn't just call someone and ask them, how do I do this? But this is where functional medicine is going. This is where biohacking is going to. And since then, there's actually a new word in the English language which is biohacking. In 2018, Merriam Websters added it and my name is there on the online dictionary, which is remarkable and something I didn't expect But I did expect to start and build a growing global movement. And there were two things I wanted to disrupt and evolve and coexist with all at the same time. One of those was the paleo movement. And the basic argument there is cavemen had a few tools available to them. They could run away from or towards things. They could pick up rocks or each other if they needed something heavy, and they could eat whatever was around, and that was what they had. Oh, and in winter or something, they could use fire. If they were a certain kind of caveman. That's it. Although fire was considered cheating by a certain number of cavemen, those ones are the ones who are not our ancestors, by the way. So we've been hacking forever, but why should we eat like them? It's a good template to start from, but they didn't have mass spectrometers, they couldn't centrifuge things. They couldn't select the ideal ratio of certain types of fatty acids, especially saturated fats that are good for you, things that are part of the bulletproof diet. They did their best. I don't want to do my best. I want to do the best using all the tech that's here. And this is why paleo was ripe for an evolution. And if you go to any paleo event, there's always a large biohacking space there with red light therapy. Caveman didn't have red light therapy. That's because biohackers took over a lot of the paleo movement, and they have many friends in the paleo movement. I consider them friends, allies, have dinner with them, and we eat very similar things. It's just that the template of biohacking is different. Stop doing the stuff that makes you weak, even if our ancestors did it, and then do the stuff that makes you strong that works really, really well. So what was the other thing? Well, quantified self. I still have the poster from the 2011 Quantified Self where I first brought heart rate variability into the world of biohacking and said, this is a variable that's actually actionable versus just tracking and writing down data. And I had a problem with Quantified Self, even though I dearly loved it. And the problem there was that gathering data is kind of like masturbating. It might feel good to gather the data, but if you don't do something with it at the end, all it did was it felt good, but it wasn't productive. So gathering data that you're not hacking is mildly interesting at best. And it's really Interesting for population wide stuff. But if you want to improve yourself rapidly, you want to evolve, you want to transform, you really should track what you hack and you shouldn't just track everything. So I wanted that notion of track and change and real time feedback as being very, very important. That wasn't part of the movement back then. That's kind of how we got to be there. And not a lot of that was food, because it turns out that our caveman didn't know how to exercise either. Because I'm sitting here right now, I've got electrodes making my biceps exercise at, I think this is something like 500 pulses a second. So, yeah, I'm doing that. No, I'm not sweating, at least not very much. And this kind of thing you just couldn't do. So there's a new name for this. And one of the things that I'm most excited about is with Upgrade labs, taking the set of most effective biohacking technologies and using data from your body so that you can measure where you are, decide where you want to be, and then use our technology platform to get you there so you can actually condition or recover your mitochondria, your energy, your power. You can do strength, you can do cardio in a tiny fraction of the time that you think it takes and get the same or better results. This is a real science and it actually works. Multiple papers, but incredible tech that is not lifting weights the same way our caveman ancestors did. So those are some of the things I'm working on. And there's a bunch of other stuff that doesn't even have a category. It's just generalized physical recovery, which means you can handle more stress, and then you can recover from that stress more quickly than normal. All of us have a stress limit. We can push ourselves, we can lift heavy, we can run really fast, we can have a lot of emotional stress, we can get in a car accident, we can be really sick, and there's a certain amount that we can handle. And then it's time to recover. And if you want to push further, you're actually doing harm. It's called over training. So how do we make it so that even if you did over train, you can recover faster than you're supposed to? Or how do you make it so you can train hard or go right up the edge of overtraining in a lot less time so you can recover faster? I believe that we are going to be able to give you eight hours, a week of your time back and get better results across your entire life. Of health, just from the kind of things I'm working on with Upgrade Labs. And of course you're going to need your coffee, but it's not about the coffee. It's about way, way more than that. So I'm really excited that, yes, there will be a coffee bar at Upgrade Labs. And it's something that helps you to get those MCTs that you need into your body, but that's there for us to socialize and power up before we're going and do the work. And I've just got to acknowledge so many people who have contributed to what I do for you here on the Human Upgrade. I studied with. I'm going to call them the masters, the masters of anti aging. When I'm in my mid-20s, my early 30s, I had a chance to talk to the people who wrote all the big books. And at this point, with a thousand or so interviews in, it's hard to name even a certain kind of category. I wrote a whole book that was actually the highest rated of all of my books. I think that still may be true, called Game Changers based on just the wisdom that I got from these interviews. The reason I keep doing them is that I think that I learn every time. And I think you learn every time. And if you look at some of the people who have educated us, and I'm just going to say, graced us with their Wisdom, my friend. Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Perlmutter, Dr. Daniel Amen. And these are luminaries in their fields and they're medical doctors with food and brain ideas. And you say, okay, that's cool, that's maybe human upgrade. But then in the same breath I could say Arianna Huffington, Maria Shriver, Byron Katie, Gabby Bernstein. Okay, that's a different group. Where are we going? Are we going for the business success, for the spiritual sort of thing, the personal development angle? Or maybe we could go back to Dr. Steven Gundry, Andy Weil or Joe Dispenza, Simon Sinek, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Wim Hof or Rick Rubin and Nick Foles. You're like music producer, super bowl champion. What is going on with all these people? What is the common element? Well, the common element is you. What are you going to learn from these people in the domains of the your biology, your body? What are you going to learn about your mind, your thoughts, your habits, the way you show up in the world? And what are you going to learn about the spiritual side of things, the personal development side? That weird space where you wake up and there's a Dream in your mind. What does it mean? You can't just focus on one. If you want to be an upgraded human, you upgrade all of them. You start with your hardware, which is why my books are written the way they're going. Because when your body works right, you have enough electricity. When you have enough electricity, then, then you can handle the things in your life that need handling. And you can say, well, I have some energy left over. What will I do with it? You can just scroll through Instagram if that's what makes you happy. Of course, you'll just get a censored view of whatever. You might instead say, I'm going to put the energy into meditation, into exercise, into something that creates a higher return for you. And I understand listening to a thousand episodes of Bulletproof Radio. If you didn't start with me 10 years ago, it might take you a little while to do that. In fact, that there is enough video and written content to fulfill a two year college degree in terms of a thousand classroom hours, as well as all of the reading that you could do in all of the seven books I've written. Don't expect you to do all that. I expect you to only listen to and read the stuff that matters to you and that when you do that, you're going to get more energy and more time back. Which means you might want to read something else that I write or someone else writes to make it easy for you. You may not know this. I've entirely reorganized the daveasprey.com site, which has more than 3,000 articles I've written for you over the years. And these are fundamental biology things. Things that are perennially useful. They're not the sort of quick read this and throw it away things about here's how it works and the Bulletproof Diet, which I released in 2011. It has all of the big stuff we're talking about today. It has definitely stood the test of time. The first chapter has intermittent fasting. It has cyclic clean keto, which makes a big difference versus just plain old keto or dirty keto. It has lectins, it has oxalic acid, it has other nutrient blockers and vegetable toxins as well as mycotoxins, all of which have evolved to be more a part of our awareness over the past 10 years. And of course grass fed or don't eat it mindset has really spread around. Go to Whole Foods and look at the butter and yogurt section and see how often it says grass fed. Well, if you've been with me for 10 years. You're a part of making that happen because the demand for grass fed agriculture has gone through the roof, which means we're building healthy soil. It's all connected. The other things I've done for you that you might not know about are special series on the podcast. Just in this last year there was the Sexual Energy series. I put together special episodes for you, the top 10 topics focusing on the content that you asked on my site on daveasprey.com, you went there and said here's what I want to know about things like brain power, gut health, autoimmunity, hormones and sleep, where I put together interviews with multiple experts into short things that teach you what you need to know so you can go out and save time and do what you want in your life. There are combo episodes that bring different experts together, cool facts in their own separate episode because you asked me to do that. And then miniseries where I go on a deep dive with one guest and usually in multiple episodes because it's something that was too long for one episode. But I don't want to hit you with a four hour episode because frankly you probably won't listen to it. But a little bit more bite size is good for you. And a few shorter episodes where I don't want to spend a whole hour because it wasn't right. My fiduciary responsibility to you is that with 250 million downloads of the show, that's 250 million hours of human life. And you can do the math for how long you're going to be alive, about 2,000 hours a year. Let's assume you listen to this, you're going to make it to just 100 years old, not even 180 or more like me. So what's a hundred years times 2000? That's the number of working hours in a year anyway. So 2,000 times 100 years. 200,000. How many times that go into 250 million? More than a hundred. So if this show is worth your time, kudos. If this show is wasting your time, I'm pretty sure I just killed 100 people. That's my level of responsibility. I really don't want to waste your time. And if any of my shows are wasting your time, go to the next one. It's totally cool with me. Just leave a 10 star review if you would. Don't even do that. Let me know what works and what doesn't work so I can do better. Because I do this for you. I don't have to do it. I Enjoy learning. I do it because I think it matters. One of the other things that I put together for you this year is the Upgrade Collective. You may have noticed on the show that I have live guests. The Upgrade Collective is a membership and mentorship group that I run, and it's got, at this point, I think, a little bit more than a thousand members, and it's growing rapidly. These are people who join for a course based on every one of my books. A course where every week you get a little bit of content that I've custom recorded so you get the latest updates on what's happening in the book, tons of discounts, as well as my coaching staff. You get two calls a month with me where I answer questions directly and you get to be a live member of the audience during the episodes where I actually type back and forth. And you can submit questions either with your voice or just hit me up on Zoom and do it that way. So it's a lot of personalized interaction, and I'm having a great time with it. So if you want to be part of that, just go to our upgradecollective.com. the energy in that community, it makes me happy. It makes everyone happy. And we're doing good work in the world. I'd love to see you there. You're saying, dave, how do you have time for all this? Well, it turns out that when you have got the voice in your head to shut up, when you can stay focused, good things happen. And I have a lot of energy, way more energy than I have had in my life, to be perfectly honest. And it's because, yeah, I have better mitochondria than the average bear, because I manage to not eat a lot of toxins, because I do a bunch of other stuff right, and we all do our best. I'm not perfect either. But the big thing is I stopped wasting a lot of time. And one of the things that I'll tell you is not my Forte is running $100 million plus companies, because it's boring for me. It's boring. There are people who love that kind of stuff. So as I go out and I build companies that do something that you can't get anywhere el something that matters to the world, then as those things grow, it's my job to say, all right, it's my job to find the next one. Which is why I have built an incubator where I am on the advisory board for more than 25 companies. I am an active angel investor, and I'm working on Upgrade Labs and the other companies here. So you're going to see a lot more Dave Asprey companies out there. Because I'm working with entrepreneurs who are doing things that matter. And it makes me happy to do that. It does not make me happy to sit in the Wednesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, Friday afternoon financial reporting meetings with my TPS report. That's not what I'm here to do. I don't think that's what you're here to do. Unless it is. And if you're listening to this and doing TPS reports rocks your world, then you should do more of them. And that's what I'm doing with all my portfolio here. And that's why this is the human upgrade. Because when you realize, let's focus on why you're here. Let's focus on how you can make the most of every second. Not with busyness, but with intent and with focused desire, focused effort. Well, I'm learning new ways to do those things and I will teach them to you as I learn them. And I'll talk about all the hard stuff, all the icky stuff, all the uncomfortable stuff, things like choosing danger, things like saying, wow, everything I do has a risk. What's the way I can take the least risk and get the most benefit? And the list goes on. So sometimes it's uncomfortable, but I'm going to be there with you for it. I would encourage you, if you're not already following me on Telegram, go to T me Aspreeofficial and sign up. Make sure you are subscribed to the human upgrade on your favorite podcast platform, which, if my numbers are real, is probably still itunes. But if you want to do it on Spotify, thank you. That's awesome too. And if I do a really good job, please take a minute to leave a review. I actually look at those reviews. I don't really look at all of them. Say on some of the platforms like YouTube where there's a lot of angry trolls, I see some. I don't see some. I do absolutely see the podcast reviews. Cause I'm using those to guide what I do for you. Please go to daveasprey.com Uncensored, make sure you're getting my emails because a lot of the things that I put on social are now actually shadow banned. And for all I know, tomorrow these podcasts could disappear in your feed because someone somewhere decides that I'm not a nice man. It is a very odd time. And as always, your comments, your suggestions, anything that you want to hear about, please tell me. So I can get the right guest with the right topic scheduled. If you have a guest suggestion, put it up there. Daveasprey.com podcast There's a form you can also, if you'd like, just say I want to hear more about this topic and I'll find the best guests out there for you. It's my job to find some guests who are luminaries in their field and others you've never heard of who should be luminaries in their field. They just aren't well recognized. I'll go for that mix. If you look back over the last decade, the number of times someone's first podcast appearance is on Bulletproof Radio and then they make the podcast circuit. It's my job to find those for you so you know about them first. I'll keep doing that for you as well. And on that note, so many thanks for listening to formerly Bulletproof Radio, now the Human Upgrade, and thanks for your time. Thanks for your attention and also thanks for your courage and your bravery in standing up and saying that you have certain rights that are inalienable, including the right to decide what you put in your mouth, to choose your own diet, to choose your own healthcare, and to choose the other parts of your life that are actually yours that no one can take away from you unless they take it with force. I appreciate you most of all. Thank you.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of 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 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 credit page. 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.